Peter Vágner reshared this.

Ever since I switched to #GNU #Linux in my private life, using #Windows at work gives me near-daily headaches. I have full admin rights, yet I constantly fight the system: forced updates, inconsistent behavior, sluggish UI, weird errors buried in the registry.

I used to think this was just how #computers worked. But after experiencing the #freedom and clarity of #FOSS, Windows feels more like an obstacle than a tool.

Going back feels wrong.

#os #opensource #free #arch

This entry was edited (3 days ago)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to TECC

@esoteric_programmer Having come from a Linux background, I was rather surprised to discover upon using a Windows machine seriously for the first time that some of the error messages were displayed as 32-bit hex error codes. Searching the Web for help often leads to interminable forum threads in which people who don’t know what’s causing the error try to help others who don’t know either. Diagnosing such errors would be a good task for a specialized LLM.
Peter Vágner reshared this.

Me and @alexchapman have just been screwing around with this thing called Omni Describer, a Windows program that uses AI to make audio descriptions out of videos. It uses Google Gemini for the actual describing part, and it can either use OpenAI or SAPI 5 for TTS. It has some issues, like the TTS interrupting itself during descriptions, but other than that, it's pretty cool. forum.audiogames.net/topic/568…
This entry was edited (2 days ago)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Thank you @notnotrachit for sharing your experience of implementing notifications "the FOSS way" in this blog post!

dev.to/dilutewater/implementin…

reshared this

in reply to UnifiedPush

Even as a non-developer, I found this well written article of great interest. It explained a few things about #UnifiedPush I wasn't aware of, and has given me better insight into how it functions.

It's clear now that there simply isn't any excuse for developers to use #FCM for notifications. I sincerely hope UnifiedPush will gain traction, not only amongst #FOSS developers, but the Android developer community at large.

It's perhaps worth noting that users of #Conversations (and its forks) already have a distributor included in their client, thus further lowering the bar of entry.

@notnotrachit @daniel @snikket_im

This entry was edited (4 days ago)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Boosts appreciated: I am working on an #accessibility wiki, because info on accessibility for #blind people is fragmented. It is not ready for public release, but I would like to invite volunteers to help me improve the site. I need to get web devs, server maintainers, moderators, writers, and whoever else would be able to contribute. Please send me a DM if you're interested.

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

there's a lot to like about Tiddlywiki but not if you want to use it in a way where you aren't just using some background html file sync between devices. If you want to access it *via a website*, every time you load it you're downloading a minimum of 2MB, much larger depending on how much data you have in there and possibly even file embeds (unless you use the File upload plugin thing and have it dump the files into S3/WebDav)

This sucks big time. If you have spotty data service you won't be able to open your "notes" reliably.

This is a huge red flag for me. If I only cared about using Tiddlywiki from one device it would be a pretty amazing solution though

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

> WireGuard uses the system time as a reliable monotonic counter. If this jumps forward, a user might DoS their own keys, by making it impossible to later have a value larger, or an adversary controlling system time could store a handshake initiation for use later. If it jumps backwards, handshakes will similarly be impossible. Thus, the system time should not be under the control of a hostile adversary.

oh good i'll make sure to remind the adversaries to not touch my time source

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

If you've ever seen a minidisk, you know how reasonably small it is. The Crucial X10 8TB drive I picked up recently is not the size of a minidisk, it's actually smaller than it.
I just find that incredibly impressive. I know technology is advancing so quickly, but I'm used to the size of standard NVME drives, which are long and ram-stick-like. The internals fascinate me but not enough to crack the thing open for well, reasons...
I wonder if they stacked the nand in some interesting config inside the casing to get it so small? Is it even NVME at all? I know they come in multiple sizes, so maybe it's a few of the smaller sized chips instead. Anyway, sometimes I can still be impressed by today's tech. It's not just all stinky AI slop, you know?

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Andre Louis

@Brynify @pixelate yeah, a lot of audio folks I know like to keep the raw uncompressed audio of each channel recording on the podcast, add those together for 2-3 people and you're counting around 4-6 GB per hour easily. Just 2-3 months of that and you've probably filled up close to a terabyte, poof. Not wrong though, having that raw copy is really good for going back or if ever needing to make a part more clear in edit or (less ideally) later.
Peter Vágner reshared this.

Does anyone know of any #FreeSoftware implementations of the #RCS encrypted messaging protocol? There is the nine year old
github.com/android-rcs/rcsjta I wonder if that is usable?

#E2EE #Android #messaging

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

100K. One hundred thousand. That's a lot of #Catima users! And happy users, it seems, looking at that 4.5 star rating ❤️

Just, wow, I never expected my little hobby app to reach 100K active users, and that's just on #GooglePlay, still excluding other app stores like #IzzyOnDroid, #FDroid, direct downloads from #GitHub and sketchy app piracy sites (please don't use that last one, for your own safety 😅)!

Very cool :)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Last month, I spent about a week working on Plasma Bigscreen, hoping to get it back in Plasma releases again!

Read about it on my blog: espi.dev/posts/2025/07/plasma-…

#kde

#KDE

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Hey everyone, #Linux Access appears to be live! This is a really fantastic resource for beginning Blind Linux users! linuxaccess.org/ #Accessibility #A11y

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Tohle jsou pro Linux důležité milníky. Opravdu populární gaming youtubeři začínají zkoušet Bazzite (gaming Linux distro). Tenhle má přes 4M odběratelů.

Zrovna Bazzite má potenciál se stát standardem pro hraní. Už jen kvůli tomu, že člověk jde na jeho web, vybere výrobce GPU, vybere si GNOME nebo KDE a po instalaci hraje. Zkuste tohle s Windows.

youtu.be/Sa8nMiEoti0

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Jiří Eischmann

@sesivany @jorge Já jsem z dění kolem Universal Blue nadšen. Myslím, že perfektně Fedoru doplňuje. Jsou tam inovace, na které ve Fedoře nezbývá prostor. Každý den se mi honí hlavou, zda neudělat rebase na Bluefin, ale drží mě zpátky, že to mám jako pracovní stroj a vyladit čistou instalaci Silverblue mi naposled zabralo 4 dny.
Peter Vágner reshared this.

Úvod do Fediverse: Moderní podoby sociální sítě


Toto video je barvitým úvodem do sociální sítě Fediverse, natočené režisérkou a propagátorkou Fediverse Elenou Rossini. Objevte nový svět sociálních médií, kde je respektováno Vaše soukromí, klíčoví jsou uživatelé a velké technologické společnosti nemají žádný vliv.

Autor videa: Elena Rossini a tým
Produkce: Jan
Dabing: Zloběna
Časování audia: Schmaker
Skript: Jann

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

As part of our volunteer-driven accessibility initiative in GNOME Calendar, and for the first time in the 10+ years of Calendar's existence, we finally completed and merged the first step needed to have a working calendar app for people who rely on keyboard navigation. This merge request in particular makes the event widgets focusable with navigation keys (arrow left/up/right/down) and activatable with space/enter. This will be available in GNOME 49.

Most of GNOME Calendar's layout and widgets consist of custom widgets and complex calculations, both independently and according to other factors (window size, height and width of each cell, number of events, positioning, etc.), so these widgets need to be minimal to have as little overhead as possible. This means that these widgets also need to have the necessary accessibility features reimplemented or even rethought, including and starting with the event widgets.

We also hope to get other parts of GNOME Calendar accessible before GNOME 49, but I can't promise anything at the moment. We did start working with making the month view accessible: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

#GNOME #Calendar #GNOMECalendar #GTK4 #GTK #Libadwaita #Accessibility #a11y #Linux

reshared this

in reply to TheEvilSkeleton

Happy Disability Pride Month everybody :)

During the past few weeks, there's been an overwhelming amount of progress with accessibility on GNOME Calendar:

Event widgets/popovers will convey to screen readers that they are toggle buttons. They will also convey of their states (whether they're pressed or not) and that they have a popover.

Calendar rows will convey to screen readers that they are check boxes, along with their states (whether they're checked or not). Additionally, they will no longer require a second press of a tab to get to the next row; one tab will be sufficient.

Month and year spin buttons are now capable of being interacted with using arrow up/down buttons. They will also convey to screen readers that they are spin buttons, along with their properties (current, minimum, and maximum values). The month spin button will also wrap, where going back a month from January will jump to December, and going to the next month from December will jump to January.

Events in the agenda view will convey to screen readers of their respective titles and descriptions.

Accessibility on Calendar has progressed to the point where I believe it's safe to say that, as of GNOME 49, Calendar will be usable exclusively with a keyboard, without significant usability friction!

There's still a lot of work to be done in regards to screen readers, for example conveying time appropriately and event descriptions. But really, just 6 months ago, we went from having absolutely no idea where to even begin with accessibility in Calendar — which has been an ongoing issue for literally a decade — to having something workable exclusively with a keyboard and screen reader! :3

Huge thanks to @nekohayo for coordinating the accessibility initiative, especially with keeping the accessibility meta issue updated; Georges Stavracas for single-handedly maintaining GNOME Calendar and reviewing all my merge requests; and @tyrylu for sharing feedback in regards to usability.

All my work so far has been unpaid and voluntary; hundreds of hours were put into developing and testing all the accessibility-related merge requests. I would really appreciate if you could spare a little bit of money to support my work, thank you 🩷

ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton
github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSke…

#Accessibility #a11y #DisabilityPrideMonth #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #GTK #GTK4 #Libadwaita #FreeSoftware #FOSS #OpenSource

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

In case anybody needs to configure ASCII Braille support on their Mac for some reason, here's how:

1. Go to Voice Over Utility -> menu -> File -> Export Preferences

2. A save dialog will appear, pick a location on disk somewhere and save the file.

3. Open the file you just saved in any text editor. TextEdit should be good enough.

4. Find the following line:

<key>SCRCUserDefaultsBrailleTableGuideItems</key>

Use your editor's find feature (usually command + f) to do this.

5. Below this line, you should have a line containing <array>, followed by a few lines beginning with <string>, followed by </array>

6. Somewhere inbetween the <array> and </array>, make a new blank line and insert the following text:

<string>com.apple.scrod.braille.table.liblouis.ascii</string>

7. Save the file.

8. In VO Utility, go to Menu -> File -> Import preferences.

9. Pick the file you just edited, agree to replace preferences.

10. Congratulations, ASCII Braille should now be in your Braille table list.

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Hey folks. I've noticed #DeltaChat hasn't got a page in #Wikipedia. Do you know sources which would prove its notability so we could create a page for it?

Boosts appreciated. If you don't know sources, someone else might.

#AskFedi #Email #IM #Messenger #chatmail #chatmailrelay #FOSS #opensource #tech #technology #software

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

New post: Able Player version 4.6.0 joedolson.com/2025/06/able-pla…

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

#Gnome #Files (#Nautilus) has a bulk rename tool for some time now, but literally every single time I try to use it I fail. Really, everytime I need to rename batch of files, I try it first in this tool, I recognize that my task is not possible done in it and than start totalcmd in wine just for this simple operation.
Are my needs so advanced? I don't think so.
For example now I want to add xml extension to all badly named log files. Impossible.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to Štěpán Škorpil

Actually when you open rename tool, it prefills it with pattern [Original file name] and extension is completely omitted from renaming.

We need to not omit extensions, add them as separate place holder [Originial file extension] and just prefill them when rename dialog opens as [Original file name][Originial file extension]

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)
Peter Vágner reshared this.

@gnome I just noticed the disability pride flag in the profile picture, I didn't expect it but I love it! Especially as I know it's important for many members of our community, like myself.

Despite the accessibility issues of our project and despite misinformed critics (I have no issue with informed critics), I know we are actively working on better accessibility, and that it's particularly implemented by disabled members of the GNOME community.

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Just started using #MailPit for dev environments. It's an SMTP testing tool that basically simulates receiving emails sent by your app via SMTP so your app has no idea it's not production. It has some little accessibility quirks like unlabeled buttons here and there, but in general it's quite a thing. Again, I've only started, maybe my opinion will change.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

#AudioMo 28:

When times were better, my partner and her family used to go to the Bronx zoo almost every weekend. I only did this a few times.

One such time, October 5, 2013, I recorded this from just outside the sea lion pool. ?Captured with a pair of Sound Professionals MS-BMC3 microphones on glasses and an Olympus LS14 recorder. The image is what I would consider quasi-binaural, best heard with headphones.

Peter Vágner reshared this.

I've just noticed piped.video can still be used for playing videos. It's just that the public instance at piped.video and some other instances require registration.
@Archos and friends, please have you explored ways to eventually host it at @Oscloud ?
I'd host it my-self but I don't have a spare machine at the location with suitable ipv6 range for being somewhat resilient to youtube throttling attempts.

Thanks for considering

Peter Vágner reshared this.

"ai"-generated image captions are fucking shit

masto.ai/@HourlyPornhubbedHeat…

this one hallucinates a cat, says the dog is standing, mistakes the pink blobs for balloons and hallucinates a yellow balloon, makes up trees that aren't there, and doesn't mention the main focus of the comic, which is the two animals flying through the air thanks to the bubble gum bubbles they're making!

but yeah no cool, really really great technology for disabled people: just lie to blind folks about what's in a picture! what could go wrong!

garbage garbage garbage, if you're pushing this shit technology instead of advocating for people to take a minute to write a decent alt text then fuck you

:smh:

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to tobi is writing bugs

It's unreliable, but it's better than the alternative which in most cases is nothing. Descriptions of unusual images are iffy, but for example finding out what a screen says, which lights are on on a router, what sort of liquid is in a jar... Lots of blind people are benefiting from this routinely. And there are no good alternatives. There's no reasonable world where we can count on a sighted person being always there to describe anything.
in reply to Robert Kingett

Oh, that's definitely viable for images posted on the fedi. But image description of things around us for example is a lot harder. If I need to know what's around me, or what things are on a shelf or such, there's not much way around it. Projects with human volunteers are fine, but, for me at least, I'm pretty inhibited about letting some stranger see my living environment and such.
in reply to modulux

as someone who ran a heathcliff edit account on twitter for years, hand-wrote alt text for four comics posts every day, and convinced several of the other folks in that community to do the same, the alternative is this. it is doing the work, writing the text.

and while i might agree with you that it’s better than nothing on a silly social media post, it’s real bad in my professional life where it just lies about financial numbers in a chart &c.

in reply to bri

Right, where alt text can be provided, a human should provide it. But the world doesn't come with alt text, and can't. There are lots of things that can be done in tech to mitigate it, for example a device might beep in order to give feedback instead of just having lights. But there's tons of visual information in the world that's not really subject to this sort of solution.
in reply to modulux

i get it, i just really worry about the ‘better than nothing’ argument when like… even the op we were talking about… sure it’s low-stakes, but that alt text has zero bearing on the actual image. is having a fundamentally different experience really what we want to be pushing? and again, it trickles down and is getting harder and harder to push back on stuff in my professional life where it’s like… actually important. it worries me.
Peter Vágner reshared this.

Hi, I will be one week in #Prague to learn #CzechLanguage in a language school. Does anybody like to meet and speak with me in Czech, so I can practise? In #Praha or later, when I travel for another week through #CzechRepublic.

I can offer Tandem in German or Farsi.

Please share, if you know peoble in Czech. #FediHelp

#čeština #czech_language #tandem #czech

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Just so you know, #OsmAnd is celebrating its 15th anniversary with 50% off its plans, which you can now pay for directly without paying the 'app tax' to Google or Apple.

I highly recommend OsmAnd — it's a Swiss army knife for maps! Open source. Based on #OpenStreetMap.

osmand.net/blog/15-years

#OSM #map #maps

This entry was edited (2 weeks ago)

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

#AudioMo day23:

Did you know that there is hidden morse code all throughout Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells' album?

Somehow, probably during the two-track mix-down stage of the album, the CW from a powerful, very low frequency transmitter about 37 miles north of the studio in which this album was recorded found it's way to tape. It's centered at 16 kHz, and so low in the mix that you can't actually hear it... at least, not without some help.

This is a very short, not particularly comprehensive demo using two different methods -- a pair of stock Reaper plugins and an SDR package to mostly isolate this morse transmission, which is heard throughout the entire album.

References:
Hidden Morse Code in Tubular Bells madpsy.uk/link-between-the-sou…

The Hidden Signal Inside A Platinum Selling Album - Tubular Bells youtube.com/watch?v=o3UJAfuvni…

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Buongiorno amici del Fediverso! Hello Fedi friends!

I hope you had a nice weekend.

I'm currently doing the sound mix of the Italian voice-over of my Fedi promo video.

I used to hate listening to recordings of my voice, but after endless hours of rewatching the English version and the French one, I'm now totally ok with that 😅

Routine reminder that on Friday I published the French VO of the Fedi video. It's here: news.elenarossini.com/fedivers…

Italian version coming shortly 🇮🇹

#EleFediVideos

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Are you a GitHub user who would like to support the great work NV Access does?

You can become a GitHub Sponsor!

Today, we'd like to give a shoutout to Nael-Accessvision, one of our GitHub sponsors.

You can sponsor NV Access here: github.com/sponsors/nvaccess

(Or through PayPal or bank transfer via the "Donate" link on our website)

*Donations in Australia are tax deductible*

#FOSS #FLOSS #Accessibility #NonProfit #NotForProfit #GoodCause #Donate #Donation

reshared this

in reply to Simon Jaeger

@simon Good question - no, for someone who is already a donor via PayPal etc, there is no real reason to change. It was really just another option and when we first joined GitHub sponsors, I believe they had a promotions where they waived the fees for a year from memory. And, since we use GitHub for our code and issues ete, a lot of people who know and support us do already use that platform. We'll have to share the love around and post about a PayPal donor next time :)
in reply to Mikołaj Hołysz

@miki @vick21 Be curious what you find. The tutorials gave me trouble as well and while there are apps on iOS/Android that sorta kinda work, I've found nothing thus far that works all that well. One might argue that having the spatiality of a touch screen might actually be helpful in "visualizing" the board, but I'm not sure how fiddly that would get
Peter Vágner reshared this.

#AudioMo day 19: Sorry for my absence, we were on vacation but unfortunately didn't get the chance to really record anything to put here. So now I'm pulling things up from the archives. This here is a ringtone I made in 2020 called Unify, inspired by a patch from Soundspot's Union called "Big Pants Lead," which I'm using as the chord patch here. For how simple it is, just the chords, a bass and some drums, all pretty basic, this thing is ridiculously catchy IMO. My mom still uses this as her phone's ringtone to this day.
You can get this ringtone for yourself, in iPhone or Android format, at x0box.xyz/uploads/ringtones
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

Peter Vágner reshared this.

in reply to x0

#AudioMo day 20: More ringtones! This one was made in March of 2021 and is called On The Move. It was also inspired by a sound, namely the bass patch, which is a modified version of the Phat Funk patch from the Korg Arp Odyssey plug-in. I was playing with it and came up with this bassline. This one has two versions. The original version of it had no arp stabs and no lead. When I was later advised to add those, I made a lite version, which includes the arp stabs but mutes the lead, which you hear first. Then you hear the regular version. Both of these can be found for iOS and Android at x0box.xyz/uploads/ringtones
Peter Vágner reshared this.

Just before the #TactileReading conference, @ChanceyFleet and I took a little stroll through the lively streets of #Amsterdam. I recorded with my Meta glasses while she guided us and captured our commentary, interactions, me almost getting nailed by a bike, and just the overall #Blind travel experience. I cut the whole thing together with Terminal/ffmpeg, added captions, and hosted it. If you have 6 minutes to spare, pop on some headphones and enjoy our adventure! marconius.com/amsterdam/

reshared this

in reply to André Polykanine

@menelion I played the clips back in VLC and took note of the times where I wanted to trim the clips, then just used ffmpeg commands in Terminal to output the trimmed sections as their own video files. I write out a list of the order I wanted the clips to be put together, then run another command to turn them all into one final cut based on that text file. I can also add effects, potentially add audio, filters, and more, just need to keep playing with it. works great with TDSR.
Peter Vágner reshared this.

How a humanities background shaped the technical decisions behind the multilingual journey of Raccoon apps. Check out my blog post and stay tuned for updates!

livefasteattrashraccoon.github…

reshared this

Peter Vágner reshared this.

Dangerous #Accessibility Assumptions That Put Everyone at Risk
buttondown.com/access-ability/…
#a11y #productmgmt #webdev #webdesign

reshared this