glitchsoc - Link to source

They were just sitting looking at each other.

A little #Caturday story about Ping.

Picture this:

Two or three days a week, I have a video chat of about an hour with my father-in-law 3000 miles away in England, who is soon 95, unable to move from his chair or wheelchair without assistance and with no friends or relatives to speak to. His only real contact is us, and his carers who come in four times a day to look after his needs. Sometimes I arrange his grocery shopping for him, sometimes I order him other things he needs, but mostly we just sit and talk and he reminisces. He struggles a little with the technology, but somehow we manage.

When it's my days to talk to him, I sit on a sofa with my tea and it's become a habit for Ping Pong to sit on my lap while I chat and stroke her. When I finish talking, she goes off. On the days when I don't speak to him, and Steven has taken the call somewhere else, she'll come meowing and meowing after me to get me to go and sit there with her. In the end, usually I have to give in, and take my tea and we sit on the sofa together. She doesn't often ask for cuddles, so this is a special time for her.

On Thursday this week, I was talking to my father-in-law when I realized that my bed cover that I had washed was ready to be hung up to dry in front of the fire, to be put back on the bed that night. As this was rather urgent, I asked him to wait and said I'd be right back after I'd hung the cover up. I lifted Ping up and went and got that sorted. After a few minutes when I came back, I was met with the scene of Ping, sitting upright, very proper, in my place on the sofa, just as you see her in this photo unblinking, looking at the phone screen at my father-in-law who was looking back at her. Neither was saying a word. They were just looking at each other. The two of them looked so funny.

It was as if she felt she was taking over from me. My father-in-law said "she's been looking after me". And that's just what it seemed like. She wouldn't move on her own to give me my place, so I had to lift her aside so I could sit down. My father-in-law is not a cat person, so obviously he didn't know what to say to her. And she didn't feel the need to say anything either.

Cats. Who can fathom them?

Have a happy Caturday, everyone! If you don't celebrate, have a great day!

#EllieKPosts #catsOfMastodon #PingPong #Pangolin #CornishRexCats
#catstodon #cornishRex

A cat with tortie Siamese colouring is facing us. It's hard to tell, but she has short wavy fur, as she is a Cornish Rex cat. She has very big ears and her sky blue eyes are open wide looking straight at us.
#caturday #catsofmastodon #catstodon #elliekposts #pingpong #pangolin #cornishrexcats #cornishrex

mastodon - Link to source

Wow. Finally, after 21 years, #Firefox 147 will support the #FreeDesktop XDG basedir specification to store the config/data/etc. in the standard locations in your home directory on #Linux, for fresh installations: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.…

Unfortunately this only applies to clean installs, existing configs are kept in place and not automatically migrated.

259356 - (xdg-basedir) Support for the Freedesktop.org XDG Base Directory Specification

RESOLVED (lissyx+mozillians) in Core - XPCOM. Last updated 2025-11-21.
bugzilla.mozilla.org
#linux #firefox #freedesktop

mastodon - Link to source

📰 "For years, the EU has taken a leading role in creating standards that protect our rights online. But the winds have now shifted. […] A corporate-backed wave of weakening digital rules is underway that threatens all of our rights - on and offline."

👉 techpolicy.press/why-civil-soc…


Why Civil Society Is Sounding the Alarm on the EU’s Omnibus Rollback

Under the guise of “simplification,” a corporate-backed wave of weakening digital rules is underway that threatens all of our rights, writes Joshua Franco.
Joshua Franco (Tech Policy Press)
in reply to Tuta

mastodon - Link to source

Erwin Rossen 🔸

I am trying to contact you to solve a technical issue where my Premium account is not activated, even though I have paid already. Can you help me out, or let me know how I can reach support?

mas.to/@erwinrossen/1155928330…

Erwin Rossen 🔸 (@erwinrossen@mas.to)

@Tutanota@mastodon.social : I have just selected and paid for the Premium deal, but I don't see anything changing in my Free account, it didn't upgrade yet. I also didn't receive any email with a confirmation that my payment went through.
Erwin Rossen 🔸 (mas.to)

mastodon - Link to source

'Andrew Tate loses everything on Hyperliquid: Inside his leveraged crypto liquidation meltdown

Arkham’s ledger shows $727k in Hyperliquid deposits, $0 withdrawals, and even $75K in referral rewards churned.'
cryptoslate.com/inside-andrew-…

I ❤️ crypto. The worst people on earth are losing money. 🥰


Andrew Tate loses everything on Hyperliquid: Inside his leveraged crypto liquidation meltdown

Arkham’s ledger shows $727k in deposits, $0 withdrawals, and even $75K in referral rewards churned.
Gino Matos (CryptoSlate)

mastodon - Link to source

Stores trying to sell "Tech essentials" on Black Friday, when thanks to #enshittification, the real tech essentials are:

- Slop blocker
- Ad blocker
- Distraction/dark-pattern filter
- Tracker blocker
- Malware/phishing detection
- Spam filter
- OS debloat/jailbreak
- Encryption
- FOSS alternative frontend
- DRM remover

#tech #blackfriday

#tech #blackfriday #enshittification
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Rethinking where language comes from: Framework reveals complex interplay of biology and culture

by Max Planck Society

phys.org/news/2025-11-rethinki…

#books #culture #biology #language

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Oil on board, 1563. Humans have speculated about the origins of language throughout history. The Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel is one such account; other cultures have different stories of how language arose. The painting shows Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Tower of Babel (1563), depicting a colossal, spiraling tower under construction. The structure dominates the landscape, its arches and stacked tiers resembling a monumental, half-finished coliseum. Workers and scaffolding cling to the tower’s surface, emphasizing the scale and ambition of the project. In the foreground, a gathering of figures appear to be overseeing the construction. The surrounding landscape shows a bustling port city, with ships, houses, and fields extending toward the horizon. The sky is partly cloudy, contrasting the monumental tower with the smallness of human activity below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language#/media/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg

Rethinking where language comes from: Framework reveals complex interplay of biology and culture

A new study challenges the idea that language stems from a single evolutionary root. Instead, it proposes that our ability to communicate evolved through the interaction of biology and culture, and involves multiple capacities, each with different ev…
Max Planck Society (Phys.org)
#books #language #culture #biology

glitchsoc - Link to source

Finally, after some months of refining, the "Incremental System Rethought" RFC is out!

This RFC has been through 6 full drafts, 1 conference, 5 months of design and a closed project goal. Go roast it.

github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull…

#rust #foss #programming #opensource


Target Stages, an improvement of the incremental system by blyxyas · Pull Request #3881 · rust-lang/rfcs

The current model for incremental recompilations doesn't share progress between compiler activities, leading to unnecessary rebuilds. This PR introduces two concepts (target stages and stage de...
GitHub
#foss #opensource #programming #rust

mastodon - Link to source
Sometimes the Best Accessibility Fix is a Usability Fix: "Accessibility gains often come from fixing ordinary UX friction points that already frustrate people who don’t have disabilities (yet)." #a11y buttondown.com/access-ability/…

Sometimes the Best Accessibility Fix is a Usability Fix

AI cartoon of woman with long dark hair struggling to open a bottle, a common form of usability failure. Teams often arbitrarily divide work into two piles:...
Access * Ability
#a11y
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

mastodon - Link to source

GradientDescent

I love it. Succinct, and yet still complete. It's like a crash course to the slightly less-informed about what not to do whenever you're connecting two computers or dabbling with command line.

Explaining stuff like this takes a lot of patience, which you undoubtedly have in ample supply, and were all better off for it. Thank you!

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Kia, you're kidding yourselves if you think this makes any difference.

Also quite disappointing apps can just read USB debugging state without any permission :/

Not like it matters, it's one tap to turn it off temporarily. But this does nothing except feed my idea that the official Kia app (play.google.com/store/apps/det…) is made by people who have no clue what they're doing.

Kia App - Apps on Google Play

All Kia services in single app
play.google.com

mastodon - Link to source
Dictionary and word aficionados out there:
Do you think buying the Kindle version of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition, which was released a few days ago, is worth it? Has anyone seen the Kindle version? For example, are all the headwords accessible through the Table of Contents? I’m thinking about buying it, converting it to EPUB, and using it in the Paperback reading app. But the Kindle version costs about 30 dollars, and if the Table of Contents and the headings for the entries aren’t well structured, it might not be worth it.
amazon.com/Merriam-Websters-Co…

mastodon - Link to source
For those in my bubble that don't have it yet: store.steampowered.com/app/552… Vermintide 2 is currently available for free (to keep) on Steam for 2 more days, it's a rather neat co-op multiplayer FPS hack-and slay, and it has hundreds of cute little rattos in it. Enjoy.

Save 100% on Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on Steam

The critically acclaimed Vermintide 2 is a visually stunning and groundbreaking melee action game pushing the boundaries of the first person co-op genre. Join the fight now!
store.steampowered.com

mastodon - Link to source
Some initial thoughts about Dramatized Dungeon Crawler Carl: Ellie sounds too young. If you read the book and even in the drama, Carl points out that she's 99, and she sure doesn't sound it. Honestly Agatha sounds like Ellie should, but that's just me. Cascadia doesn't sound anything like I thought, I'm interested in how they show how her character develops in later seasons. I'm glad they allowed Jeff hayes to voice Doughnut, but why did they have an actress meow? They could have gotten cat sounds from any library they had access to, but it adds a touch of something, I suppose. Some of the female leads are played by the same person and you can tell, as well as some of the male roles. Overall the sound design is awesome, and extremely detailed in places where you wouldn't think, particularly when it comes to Princess Doughnut and how she moves. I love the little musical backing tracks under the achievements. I also enjoy the commercials in between scenes, as if we're watching as a viewer of the crawl, plus there's some content that you don't see in the book which is cool. I'm glad I gave this another chance. The preview on the website doesn't do this thing justice and makes it sound like a low-budget graphic audio knockoff. When I first heard the sample, it kind of gave me Katniss Chronicles vibes. I've still got a lot to go but will report back once I'm done.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to MariahL

mastodon - Link to source

Talon

the mixing is absolutely awful on those. I have no idea what happened there. They had a Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon immersive audio and that one was excellent, so I had really high hopes for the DCC one. Sadly, I never finished the DCC audio because comparatively it was just so bad. The voices sound super thin and extremely compressed, no idea what happened with the constant weird inconsistent panning, it's just a mess. :(

mastodon - Link to source

Random pointless memory time:

In the very early morning hours of Christmas eve 1998, I was tuning around the dial of an old Panasonic shortwave radio, and stopped on the BBC. At the end of a program, a continuity announcer showed up to give a website URL.

Two things struck me about this.

1: I hadn't really heard that on shortwave radio before at this point. To me, shortwave and the Internet were these two totally different worlds that couldn't, and shouldn't intercept. How dare someone give out a URL on shortwave... or something like that, with the appropriate amount of sarcasm attached.

2: The continuity guy's accent wasn't the typical RP English so heavily favored by the BBC, not that I really knew anything about that, being an uneducated American. Notice how I spell the word "favored"?
Anyway, his accent was very much Yorkshire, and quite obvious about it, which really made him stand out. I figured the regular guy was probably on holiday, and the janitor took the job for a couple of hours, because nobody else was around.
I also doubt there is any actual truth to that.

Because of my very odd form of synesthesia, completely at random, that BBC continuity announcer from 1998 will show up just to very slowly say "dot c o, dot u k" at me. Nothing else. And then he'll go away again for a week or five, or maybe a few years. Maybe he'll be back in twelve minutes and thirteen seconds. You never know when "dot c o dot u k" guy will show up, and that's the only thing he ever says.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
⇧