Today I fixed a couple edge cases in Godot's text edit widgets, set an initial focus for screen reader users in the editor (because otherwise focus is completely unset and you have to route to a control first) and labelled a few unlabelled buttons. Going to have to slow down on this project for a bit, but if I can maintain this pace and the quality is good, we could have a very accessible Godot 4.7.

Really felt great to see the text edit bugs fixed. Having written a screen reader myself, I know those are a particularly salty PITA. So easy to off-by-one in at least half a dozen different locations with those.

• At home (56%, 38 votes)
• Out walking (17%, 12 votes)
• Whendriving (20%, 14 votes)
• With family/friends (listen together) (4%, 3 votes)
• Any time I have a spare moment (19%, 13 votes)
• I can never find the right time (4%, 3 votes)
• Never really thought about it (1%, 1 vote)
• I haven't found a podcast I'm interested in (11%, 8 votes)
• I don't have time for podcasts (11%, 8 votes)
• What's a podcast? (4%, 3 votes)

🚨Starting Dec 16th, Meta AI will read your private messages - unless you opt out now! 🚨

Opting out is hilariously complex, but we've got you covered:

1. Go to Meta Privacy Center on DESKTOP
2. Privacy Policy
3. Other Policies and articles
4. How Meta uses information for generative AI model and features
5. Your right to object
6. Learn more and submit requests here
7. Tick: I want to object to or restrict...

Oh, and @noybeu is already on it: tuta.com/blog/noyb-meta-ai-is-… 🍿

I finally started to use #NextCloud #CookBook app together with the android companion app.
Up until now I always searched internet for recepies, picked one, coocked one, done.
But using this app improves the workflow a lot.
1️⃣ You search the recipe once, and then you past the url to the app to download it.
2️⃣ You build a catalogue of favourite recipes which simplyfies decisions on what to cook. No idea what to cook? Just browse favourite recipes and pick something.
3️⃣ You can share recipes among family members
4️⃣ Your recipe is always with you. For example when you're shopping.
5️⃣ No ADS. Recipe pages are cluttered with banners and popups so much, that you can barely read the recipe on the phone. Cookbook just fetches the information from the web and leaves all ads behind.

Thanks for recommending it to me @tomteo

Nexus Client

Hi, around two weeks ago I started making Nexus, a Matrix client.

In these two weeks, I've made great progress, as you can see in the progress list.

However, I'd love some help implementing some features, or help with UI design, as it takes me quite a while to design a UI.

If you're interested, please reply!
Boosts appreciated! ❤️

#Flutter #FOSS #Help #OpenSource #Matrix #Design

Was surprised to learn that there are apparently no command line tools for poking around the Linux accessibility tree, so I made Acsh, the Accessibility Shell. With Acsh you have both a CLI and REPL, in which you can do things like:

/> ls # Lists all top-level apps
/> cd firefox-1.26 # cd into Firefox, with tab completion. REPL only
/firefox-1.26> cat 0 # Get more information on the first child by index, if you're fine with the possibility that index might change before the command is processed--not likely at this level. Paths are referenced by name or index
/firefox-1.26> watch 0 # Get stream of events for the first child
/firefox-1.26> search -r button ok # Find all OK buttons in this Firefox instance
... # and more

Thoughts? I'm sure it has bugs, but what doesn't? dev.thewordnerd.info/nolan/acs…

acsh

The Accessibility Shell

^{Nolan's Projects}

Well, it's December 01, which means it's time to drag Sammy out of his box again.

This silly little song, which was probably someone's throw-away recording for a morning show in the 70s, has a story behind it, at least for me.

On Christmas Eve 1992, Brad Krantz played a song on Asheboro, NorthCarolina's WKRR, called Sammy the Christmas Snake, on his morning talk show.
It just so happened that my brother had a few boomboxes recording local radio stations to capture the essence of a Carolina Christmas that morning, when Sammy the Christmas snake played on Brad's show.
As I was 8 years old at the time, and my brother and I liked this silly little song so much, we decided to make it tradition to play it every Christmas morning before going upstairs for the "good stuff".
Unfortunately, however, in 1994, my brother went off to college, and the tape was lost somewhere. Naturally, it was the only copy we had.

A few years after that, Brad was fired from WKRR, and I lost track of him. I emailed one of the guys at the station around 2001 or so, to see if they knew where Sammy the Christmas Snake might be, or at least knew who recorded it. I was told that Brad took their only copy with him when he went to Charlotte, and they had no idea who actually wrote or recorded the song, only that Brad got it from someone in Boston.

In the summer of 2004, WZTK, a new FM talk station owned and operated by Curtis Media was launched. And, guess what? Brad Krantz is back with the Brad and Brit show.

I emailed him in August of 2004 just to politely ask if he still had Sammy the Christmas Snake, and asked if he would play it on his show over the holiday season. He said he would, that it was apparently widely requested, and said "thank you for remembering Sammy".

So, I started my audio recorder on December first to try and record Sammy the Christmas Snake for my own personal amusement, seeing as how I have been looking for it for 12 years on and off at this point. Apparently, Brad had expected this, and made sure to talk or play IDs at every possible opening in the song, which, as you can imagine, infuriated me. Yep, this was war!

I kept the recorder going every weekday morning through December 21, 2004, to see if he would slip and forget to play an ID in the same places.

Finally, on December 21, 2004, I had enough pieces to reconstruct it!

I ended up running seven different copies of the song as played on the Brad and Brit Show through my favorite audio editor, taking the best parts from each, to get the relatively unmutilated version of Sammy the Christmas Snake, albeit with a few compromises. The song came from a slightly scratchy record, dubbed to who knows what media, played over an FM radio station. After editing, there were differences in equalization in some parts of the song, most likely due to Brad playing the track back through a different player or channel on the station's console, but considering it was the only version of the song I could find anywhere, and, as of December 2025, I still have no idea who recorded it, my edit was good enough.

I wanted to share the song as widely as possible, thanks to my beef with Brad, and this was before the existence of Youtube, so I put it on a webpage with links to contact Brad and Brit, and thank them for allowing us to have access to such a wonderful song. This, of course, was in response to Brad's claim that he had exclusive rites to it, which I thought was completely unfair. There's no need to keep Sammy in a box like that!

Several years went by, and someone uploaded my edit of Sammy to Youtube. It has now been featured in several different videos, but it's obvious that it's my edit, and I've yet to find another version of it anywhere, online or offline.

There were some things that bugged me about my original 2004 edit, which I could now fix with tools and skills I didn't have at the time, so, on December 1, 2018, I fixed some small timing issues that existed between splices, reduced crackles, pops and rumble, made the equalization a little more consistent, got rid of some noise, and performed a few other touch-ups. This is the result. It's still not perfect, but it's better than it was, and certainly cleaner than any other version on Youtube as of December 1, 2018.

I'm still looking for a real copy of this song, or, at the very least, an idea of who recorded it. There is some speculation on the comments of this Youtube video.

I was told that this song also featured on a morning show on WNAP in Indianapolis, Indiana, around 1978-1982.

A few years ago, my edit was played on WKRR again, where it all started for me. Go figure.

As of May 2025, Brad Krantz has passed away, so if he actually knew anything about the origins of this song, we can't ask him now.

youtube.com/watch?v=o0eWo6qvZO…

Lyrics, sung by a guy with a New England accent sped up and singing with himself to the backing of a Fender Rhodes, some flutes, drums, bass and a glockenspiel are as follows:

There are such cute little Christmas galoots...
Little angels, and reindeer, and snowflakes that fly.
But from all those yule underdogs fondling my memory logs,
one multiple vertebrae kind of a guy.

Sammy the Christmas Snake
hid in the corner of Santa's workshop.
Sammy the Christmas Snake
bit all the elves and made all the work stop.
Hid in the stockings, he hid up the flue,
bit on Rudolph 'til his nose turned blue,
ain't no tellin' what a Christmas snake'll do...
*hiss, hiss, hiss*
Merry Christmas

Sammy the Christmas Snake
had peppermint stripes and pointy ol' fangs.
Sammy the Christmas snake
he hides in the holly where the mistletoe hangs.
Hid in the stockings, he hid up the flue,
he bit on old Santa and Misses Santa Too! OH!
Sammy the Christmas Snake
*hiss, hiss, hiss*
Merry Christmas.

Come on kids, sing with me!

Now, Santa lived with Herb the Christmas Dwarf at Santa's house,
and no one liked him much since he bit Sid, the Christmas Mouse.
'Til Rick the Christmas Mongoose went berserk and tried to wreck,
the sleigh and Sammy saved the day when he broke Rick's Christmas neck.
HEY!

Sammy the Christmas Snake
Now there ain't a ban on anacondas in the arctic.
Sammy that ol' Christmas Snake
Now those elves don't chase him with that forked stick.

What a merry mood he has all the girls and boys in,
givin' out the cheer and holdin' back the poison...

Sammy the Christmas Snake
Hey! Hey!
*Hiss, hiss, hiss*
MERRY CHRISTMASSSSS!

Sammy the Christmas Snake

On Christmas Eve 1992, Brad Krantz played a song on Asheboro, NorthCarolina's WKRR called Sammy the Christmas Snake, on his morning talk show.It just so happ...

^YouTube

Speech-to-text right from your terminal?? 🎤

⚡ **ostt** — A terminal-based recorder & speech-to-text transcription tool.

💯 Real-time waveform visualization with dBFS volume metering & clipping detection.

⬇️ Demo by the author below

🦀 Written in Rust & built with @ratatui_rs

⭐ GitHub: github.com/kristoferlund/ostt

#rustlang #ratatui #tui #audiotech #tts #transcription #terminal

Anyone interested in #Pixel6a with #GrapheneOS pre-installed? I'm selling mine for 2500 CZK (€100) + shipping.

If you'd like to try GrapheneOS on something cheaper before committing to it with a more expensive phone, this is a great option. It's what I did and happily used the phone for almost a year. It has a surprisingly good camera for the price.

nechces.cz/~sesivany/019ccbe7-…