Today's crazy idea:

I've always wanted to play Elite, the old procedurally-generated spaceflight sim for the BBC Micro. It, of course, is not and will never be accessible.

However the source code is available, very small, and highly annotated. There's a whole nerdy website with bunches and bunches of details, right down to guesses on and commentaries about the relative sizes of celestial objects, ships, etc.

Tempted to hand all of that to an LLM and have it try modernizing the game in Godot, adding audio cues, speech feedback, and whatever else would be needed to make it accessible.

May not be fully faithful to the original, least of all because of 3-D audio, but I almost don't care if it captures the feel.

We'll see if I actually do this, but now the bug is lodged in my brain.

FOSDEM 2026 (Brussels): Sun Feb 1, 09:35 CET, UB5.230 (my last talk)

Accessible Sovereignty: Why the Four Freedoms Depend on Inclusion (Community devroom)

Thesis: the Four Freedoms are not real if people with disabilities cannot use the tools, study them, share them, and improve them in practice. Accessibility is the operational layer that makes software freedom exercisable.

Event: fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event…

#FOSDEM #Accessibility #FOSS #Community

FOSDEM 2026 - Accessible Sovereignty: Why the Four Freedoms Depend on Inclusion

^fosdem.org

Rebuilding the indieweb one tendril at a time.

This is what we need to do. Rebuild the internet, reclaim the word social in social media and put people before platforms.

We must uncouple our attention from the tech-bro, elitist, narrative-controlling monopolies¹ and get back to building individual, independant website presences. The indieweb.

Sites that are shared and aggregated by RSS feeds, collected into like-minded groups by webrings, boosted with decentralised social media platforms such as Mastodon, and cross-pollinated with interlinks and cross site conversations from individual posts.

Subvert, bypass, and starve the big platforms of their attention oxygen. Let them suffocate in a circle-jerk of AI generated slop.

There is now a growing movement of people dumping the scroll-gatekeepers, and building their own cheap, simple (often retro looking) independant websites.

Here is an example: Daryl Sun has a simple site that is packed with information and interesting links for anyone spending a little time to click rather than scroll (just like here).

In the spirit of re-wilding the web and creating interesting tendrils, I have updated my own ABOUT PAGE to let you know far more about me than you ever knew you wanted to know. It is a work in progress and will grow over time.

Another great example is Brennan, who writes some really interesting stuff and has recently begun moving his focus from posting on Medium to growing his independent site.

He always has tons of interesting outgoing links, is a member of a heap of webrings, as well as including a slash page of all his interests and projects.

I am gaining a lot of inspiration from this movement and urge you to consider dropping out of the shittosphere of big social media and spending that newfound scroll time creating your own independent online presence.

Let us tear the whole thing down and rebuild it fit for purpose.

If you already have a indie website drop me a link in the comments….I would love to follow and share.

1. Facebook. Twitter X. Bluesky. Youtube. Tiktok. and the rest… ↩︎

#blackAndWhite #indieweb #photography #socialmedia

Okay y'all, first public, alpha, version of Elmud! Basically, the install script should handle everything for you, if you're on Termux for Android, Linux, or Mac. Hopefully. If not, just load-file elmud.el and it'll load emacspeak-elmud.el too. If you need a screen reader, set up and use Emacspeak. For soundpacks, we have one automatically load for Erion MUD and Cosmic Rage. Those are the two I've found easily downloadable. So the client just downloads the sounds for you when you choose those two MUD's. You can also make your own gag or sound triggers. I'll put it up on Github soon but for now:

dropbox.com/scl/fi/6cqp28s6zqp…

3elmud #emacs #emacspeak #foss #mud

Native Instruments did a 14-minute video on the accessibility features of their MK3 keyboards, barely enough time to even cover what the thing does, let alone the keyboard functions, not to mention it wasn't done by a blind user, the target audience.
I wasn't a fan, so I made my own video and I *still* didn't get through everything to do with it.
Anyway, here's a more than three times longer video at 48 minutes instead.

#InspiredBySound - Native Instruments Kontrol MK3 Accessibility Demonstration youtu.be/cMkm51Utijs

Audio download: onj.me/media/%23InspiredBySoun…

#InspiredBySound - Native Instruments Kontrol MK3 Accessibility Demonstration

In this video we take a tour of the Native Instruments Komplete MK3 keyboard.It's packed full of features and functions that were never accessible to blind u...

^YouTube

RE: gultsch.social/@daniel/1135490…

#Signal isn’t just AWS. It also has a hard dependency on Google’s push notification system (FCM) if you don’t want your battery to catch fire.

Signal’s attitude towards #UnifiedPush and #FDroid speaks volumes.

Daniel Gultsch

2024-11-26 11:29:14

I installed #Signal and #Conversations_im on a clean install of #GrapheneOS on my Pixel 4a and measured the battery impact. The results are shocking!

Both messengers had only one contact: my regular phone.

I used my regular phone to send messages to the Pixel 4a (which was not used for anything else over the course of the experiment).

I always sent the same message via Signal and #XMPP (mixing up which app went first). In total I sent ~32 messages in intervals of 10mins to a few hours.

I've just open-sourced a native macOS @matrix client that I've been working on! github.com/viktorstrate/mactri…

It is built with #swiftui and #MatrixRustSDK