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An old tired-looking dog wanders into a guy's yard. The dog does look like he has a home, but he soon follows the man into the house, goes down the hall, jumps on the couch and falls asleep. The man thinks it's odd but lets him sleep. After about an hour, the dog wakes up, walks to the door, and the guy lets him out. The dog wags its tail and leaves.

The next day, the dog comes back and scratches at the door. The guy opens the door, and the dog comes in, goes down the hall, jumps on the couch and falls asleep again. The man lets him sleep. After about an hour, the dog wakes up, walks to the door, and the guy lets him out. The dog wags its tail and leaves.

This goes on for days. The guy grows really curious, so he pins a note on the dog's collar: "Your dog has been taking a nap at my house every day."

The next day the dog arrives with another note pinned to his collar: "He lives in a home with four children -- he's trying to catch up on his sleep. Can I come with him tomorrow?”

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I should have thought of it, but I didn't... There is an app for remotely controlling Pihole. And the app looks to be accessible. Try it out! apps.apple.com/app/id151544555…

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iOS 26 and VoiceOver/Braille Access/live listen had a good run yesterday. I was at a workshop and I was able to use live listening on my BI40XB Braille display 2for hours solidly reading in Braille what the various speakers were talking about. I could go back to the beginning of the whole workshop, jump anywhere in the text/Braille, and then zip back to the current words that were being spoken/translated. I would say the transcription of voice to text/Braille was about 98% accurate. This will make it a lot more accessible for people who are Blind deaf with no useful vision at all living, working/playing in a cited worldspoken without having to have someone there all the time , interpreter. After all this is what we all strive for, complete independence and not relying on other people to get things done. I spoke to a friend of mine overseas early this morning he is completely deaf and completely blind, and he has been using iOS 26 with this function extremely effectively when he goes out in the community and needs to chat to people. Pretty incredible stuff when you think about it. You can also get a transcript coppied to/paste, and get a AI summary of the captured information.

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I am announcing zubr v0.3 public beta 🦬

instance-based decentralized federated chat. (like mastodon, but for discord-like platforms) browse without an account.

open source and free, as always.

try it: zubr.chat/#/

come break it. and hopefully tell me whats wrong, and maybe help me develop it haha jk... unless?

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iOS 26 and Braille Access to the rescue.
I was working with a student today who found navigating through stuff on the screen with VoiceOver/Braille quite challenging for her, when all she needed to do was to take down answers for the classroom teacher.
I could not find any simple apps that just had an edit field, and a save button or a shortcut key to save, and then of course, go back in to that file and read/edit.
Enter Braille Access/Braille Notes: just an edit field, jump to bottom of screen for Back button, to save, first line of Braille Note is the file title, so all student needed to do was to go down the list of files, and press key 8 (Enter) to go back in to that file.Of course, both Braille and print is displayed on the screen if visuals are turned on in Braille Access.
This is truly using the iPad as a Braille Note Taker: nothing fancy: just focusing on content.

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Let‘s Encrypt has made new Root and Intermediate Certs and will start using them now in staging (test) and soon in production, submitting them to root programs (OS and browsers) for inclusion.

If you ship a „CA bundle“ somewhere, you should update that once the new roots are added.

letsencrypt.org/2025/11/24/gen…

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Yesterday an open-source developer Christian has released life changing update to the privacy respecting #android app called #MakeACopy. The app now features so called #accessibility mode that is enabling #screenReader users to take pictures of the paper documents independently.
Accessibility guide is available on github.
The latest prerelease version provides clear Accessibility guidance phrases with screen readers such as Talkback, Corvus, Jieshuo and others that can handle announcement accessibility event.

I am verry happy about this. We are now getting privacy respecting open-source based screen reader accessible solution that performs very well and is easy to use.

The prerelease version can be downloaded at
github.com/egdels/makeacopy/re…

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OK. Some of y'all wanted a stereo recording of Cadence. Here's my recording on: How it works with NVDA, how images work, how connecting two of them works. You'll also hear the pins more accurately. Enjoy.
This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)

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🚨 BREAKING #Google just activated #Gemini on #Gmail - without asking you.

Turn it off now; here's how!
tuta.com/blog/how-to-disable-g…

✊️ Fight AI & fight Google

You have to manually turn off Smart Features in the Setting menu in TWO locations.

Share so everyone is aware. ❤️

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I can't believe I didn't share with you all about the hard slap I received few days ago.

arnel.bearblog.dev/reaper-slap…

#Reaper #ReaperFM #Daw #Audio #Blogging #Learning

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No, there was no leaked database of 3.5B #WhatsApp users. Researchers from Vienna simply used the contact discovery method with all possible phone numbers to get contact data of 3.5B users. They informed WhatsApp who kinda fixed it by setting rate limits for contact discovery and the researchers deleted their collected data. Read the paper instead of clickbait :)

github.com/sbaresearch/whatsap…

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Should I have gone with DotPad X over Cadence? For me, I don't think so. Your trade-offs may vary but:
Both devices have a refresh noise. There's no way around it. I wish I could hear the DotPad X in action, but very few or practically nobody has posted a demo of this. I would expect it to sound like a Monarch, if the cell tech is the same or similar. Even if we consider Cadence louder, the refresh is near-instant. Not as instant as a classic piezoelectric 40-cell, but let me say, itt's no more than .5 to 1 seconds for the entire 4 lines to refresh. This doesn't get longer when you connect more than one because they refresh together, but you do get slightly louder clicks. So refresh rate itself? Cadence still wins.
Then for me the battery is what sealed the deal. Weeks on a charge? DotPad X looks to be 8 hours. A workday's worth, sure, but not much more.
And for sure, this is Cadence gen 1. Can you imagine what this little company from Indiana could do with it if more people saw things this way? How the tech could improve, maybe dampening over time the clicks?
Joe and the rest of their team have been incredible. For repairs, they told me they send you a new unit and you then send yours back. Very prompt at responses too during the day, you're not left waiting on hold.
So if anyoone again asks: "Do you regret Cadence despite its press conference-like noise when refreshing?" My answer is still a resounding no. I love 48-cells in my pocket, sized like an 18-cell.

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Today, November 19, is World Toilet Day.

In honor of this, in 2018, when November 19 fell on a Monday, I recorded an introduction to week 47 of 2018 using a couple of toilets flushing, a vocoder, and my own voice, such that the toilets are speaking.

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Another notable feature merged in the GNOME Calendar live coding session today: the ability to export an entire calendar as an .ics file.

This was originally added to the wishlist 10 years ago: gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

Thanks to @FineFindus's dedication towards implementing this (alongside the individual event .ics export feature) this year, you will be able to use this feature in #GNOME 50 (or the nightly flatpak version of Calendar today): gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-c…

#GNOMECalendar #calendaring

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We're building something for the Fediverse. #Holos

ActivityPub running on your phone. Your own server, your data stored locally. A relay handles your stable identity when you're offline.

One account, all formats. Short text, long articles, photos, videos. The UI adapts to your mood. Switch between text mode, photo grid, video feed, article editor based on what you feel like sharing.

Same network, same followers.

Early stages, but the foundation is solid. We wanted to share the progress.

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I'm proud to release the first early version of the high-level audio engine I've been working on for the past months!
GraphAudio.Kit is a high level 3d audio game engine for your dotnet, using SteamAudio for great hrtf! Very understandable and hackable. It's built on top of GraphAudio, which is a set of libraries I made that let you create your own audio engines by giving you a graph-based audio framework, webaudio for your dotnet basically! Please take a look, and tell your friends.

nuget.org/packages/GraphAudio.…

#game-audio #gamedev

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Paperback 0.6.1 is out, bringing with it lots of bugfixes and a few new features! Changelog:
• Added password-protected PDF support!
• Added a very basic go to previous/next position feature. If you press enter on an internal link and it moves your cursor, that position will now be remembered, and can be navigated to with alt+left/right arrows.
• Added an elements list! Currently it only shows a tree of all the headings in your document or a list of links, but there are plans to expand it in the future.
• Added an option to start Paperback in maximized mode by default.
• Fixed links in some Epub documents not working properly.
• Fixed parsing Epub TOCs containing relative paths.
• Fixed some epub documents not showing a title or author.
• Fixed the titles of some epub chapters not showing up properly in the TOC dialog.
• Fixed you not being able to use the space bar to activate the OK/cancel buttons in the TOC dialog.
• Improved the handling of headings in Word documents.
• You will now get spoken feedback if the recent documents list is empty when you try to bring up the dialog.
Download: paperback.dev/downloads/
Enjoy!

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in reply to Andre Louis

@FreakyFwoof Yeah, alt+tabbing hard enough with enough windows can do it too. I assume that Windows itself sends some kind of 'get out of the way' event to the window which WX picks up and responds to as a minimize event, which is maybe the same thrown by the menu? I've seen apps get it right to only respond to the menu, foobar2000 for example, but am not sure how they do it.
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After a few intense days with GPT Codex, it’s finally time to officially introduce Sara. #SARA or Simple Accessible Radio Automation, is a program primarily designed for radio presenters who host live shows.

Some notable features that are currently missing from other broadcast solutions accessible to blind users include:

a loop function – especially useful for intros,
a flexible number of playlists and players,
and a news editor module with the ability to embed audio clips that can be played while reading the news.

The application is 100% vibe-coded, and it’s definitely not recommended to test it during a live broadcast. It requires several sound cards to operate, and for now, I’m not planning to add any virtual audio routing like the one found in Radioboss or SPL. The program is and will remain open source, and perhaps someone interested in contributing will join the project.

In terms of screen reader compatibility, the main focus is on NVDA.

Happy testing: gitrls.com/michaldziwisz/sara/

#sara

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My friend @TheQuinbox has been working on an ebook reader for blind people called Paperback (github.com/trypsynth/paperback). So far it's all written in C++, using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Now Quin is working on making it a Rust/C++ hybrid, with the UI still in C++ using wx. As far as we know, the Rust GUI ecosystem isn't nearly ready to support a desktop app like this, with perfect screen reader accessibility and native-feeling keyboard behavior.
@Quin

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The latest Zoom firmware for the H1 Essential has this so-called 'AI Noise Reduction' thing going on, so I thought I'd test it in a noisy environment which I call 'The Cupboard Of Doom!'
It's where all the water, heating and electricity comes into the house, so it's of course ideal for lovely, high-quality recordings.

In the first clip, noise reduction is off, then in the next clip which is back-to-back, it's on.
My scepticism about this whole thing is on full display here...
You be the judge. Useful or useless?

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Do you have 2 minutes?

Please consider nominating GrapheneOS and Accrescent (submit the form once for each) for the 2025 Proton Lifetime Fundraiser.

Direct link to form: form.typeform.com/to/XixQrG8Q

Learn more about the fundraiser: proton.me/blog/lifetime-fundra…

#grapheneOS #opensource #accrescent #android

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In 2021, I’ve tabled amendments to the @EUCommission’s proposal of the Digital Markets Act, one of which introduced mandatory messaging interoperability for the gatekeepers. Now, more than 4 years later, real effects on the market are starting to appear. about.fb.com/news/2025/11/mess…

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in reply to Jiří Eischmann

@Jiří Eischmann @Marcel Kolaja @European Commission This is a joke isn't it?
First third party supported chat services are BirdyChat and Haiket. Does anyone have friends over there?
This sounds similar to how apple has opened their apps ecosystem that no meaningfull competion is viable.
Meta is not seeing their users seriously. Why we can't bridge whatsapp chats with FB messenger chats? These are running on similar if not the same backends.
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A thought that broke my heart a little bit: Imagine if all of this AI nonsense money would have been spent on building, repairing and maintaining railways and building new trains? The billions! Instead of all this harm, there could be continent spanning rail and people could stop fucking flying, too. 😶

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I finally got some time to reconfigure my network. From now on #Turris #OmniaNG is my main gateway to the internet.
Well, the software needs a lot of polish:
🪲 It has a wifi7 card, but I have to run it only in AC mode, or any connected client causes restart of all radios. I hope this will be fixed soon.
🪲 The display only worked on first boot, since than it only shows scrambled image or nothing. I don't mind it, as it's just a novelty for me. One day I would like to try render my own stuff maybe.
❓ It has two SFP+ ports, so I also bought 2×Turris metallic 1/2.5/5/10G SFP+ modules. One for older Omnia, one for Omnia NG. It makes the connection, but it runs 2.5G in one direction (that's ok, it's the maximum older omnia can handle) and 0.2G in the other direction.
I don't understand why. Is it a hardware failure? Or software bug? Or technolohy incompatibilty of some kind? 🤷‍♂️
🪲 Some LEDs are resetting brightness to max often. That's a bit annoying.

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# Let SSH retry connecting for you

I didn't know this!

Via @sin

sindastra.de/p/2786/let-ssh-re…

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This is TERRIBLE! Mozilla people who used to follow me here... Talk some sense into your coworkers/management!

People don't use Firefox because it's loaded with crap and AI, they use it because it's not corporate owned and not feeding all your browsing data into the data machine. AI is not of any benefit to add to your browser, no matter the hype.

blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai…

#firefox #ai #mozilla

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Today's discovery: The Victor Reader Stream (second generation) has a micro SD card under the battery. It acts as internal storage but also has the operating system on it. And that operating system is ... Linux, from 2010, with Busybox.
I'm very interested to try and get SSH running, but I don't think the binaries are there. It looks like there is support for serial of some kind. The OS partition is 100% full. I'll reimage a second micro SD card at some point and find out how much I can tinker with it before it breaks. If anyone wants a dd dump of the entire card, let me know.

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Wrt what I posted yesterday, I downloaded the GNOME OS live ISO, started it in a vm, and pressed alt+super+S. Orca started. So far, so good. But now I have to get through gnome-initial-setup, and I have to select a time zone, and, for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get a selection to stick so that the Next button is no longer grayed out. Fml.
Edit: I think I'm hitting gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-i…
This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)

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Here's an excellent write-up summing up the state of #GameAccessibility in the last 5 years by Grant Stoner. To say it was a rollercoaster of emotions is an understatement. We had incredible innovation and progress in games like The Last of Us or Forza, but for all of those we also had many disappointments that either came tantalizingly close but weren't accessible to some groups of people like totally blind gamers, or just straight up didn't really offer any accessibility features but still got a lot of praise and awards. We also lost some very good people. The industry is also undergoing some difficult times with way too many layoffs. And yet, I'm optimistic we’ll still see some wonderful things in the future. If this year is anything to go by, even if there won't be as many accessible Tripple-A releases, we're also seeing a rise in accessibility mods becoming more frequent. Ultimately what sums up these last 5 years, and probably the future as well is the last paragraph Grant wrote: "

> How do you explain the past five years of accessibility? Both Xbox and PlayStation are fixtures within the disabled community. They uplift us, highlight our work, and give us opportunities to be better advocates. And in equal measure they frustrate us, casting us aside in perplexing moments of grief and frustration. If anything, these five years are a testament to disabled perseverance in an industry that still struggles to fully welcome us."

polygon.com/ps5-xbox-series-x-…

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At 13, I joined a Wolfenstein 3d modding forum. 22 years later, my posts are still there - and still searchable.

The discussion I had in Discord 2 years ago?

Not so much.

We chose this. We can choose better.

blog.discourse.org/2025/11/the…

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Hey, did you know that you can join Matrix chatrooms using Movim and #matridge (a Slidge XMPP - Matrix bridge) ? 😮

You can then access your Matrix rooms (and soon Matrix servers 😚) and integrate them seamlessly in your Movim interface ✨

…and it seems that Movim is much faster than Element at accessing and displaying the content of Matrix chat rooms 🚀 Fun 😸

Checkout the Slidge project slidge.im/ !

#feature #matrix #xmpp #movim

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

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Libervia CLI Tip 15:

When publishing a blog or other pubsub based feature, the item ID is often used in the URL when it is rendered for the web (e.g.; Libervia or Movim use something like `https://…/blog/<user>/<item_id>`).

It is then important to have a user-friendly item ID (e.g.; `title-of-my-publication-abc123`), which is usually done by the software from the title.

If you want to change it, you can use `li pubsub rename`.

libervia.org/__b/doc/backend/l…

#Libervia #CLI #li #tips #xmpp #pubsub

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Wednesday's episode of the @doubletap podcast featured an excellent interview with @glenrgordon58 following Glen's resignation from Vispero. This brought back so many good memories! I first met Glen at the very first European dealer workshop in the Black Forest in Germany in July 1996. We connected immediately over the fact that we're both computer nerds. I had got my first JAWS licence four months earlier and was already heads down into the scripting language, which back then was still called macro language. It was a fantastic couple of days, in which I volunteered to head up the macro beginner group and helped them create their first macros in JAWS. Later, this got me my job at the European distributor, which started an eleven year tenure at Freedom Scientific and me influencing Braille support in JAWS, helping design the Focus line of Braille displys, and others. One anecdote which I also still remember was the time in March of 1999 when Eloquence suddenly stopped working all across Europe for JAWS users, including me. That led to me sending an email to Glen on a Sunday morning, which I uusually would not do. Debugging the problem led to a hot fix that Glen sent me later that day and which I then distributed via email to the dealer network the next day. If you're interested, the problem had to do with Europe and the U.S. moving to daylight savings at different times, Europe last Sunday in March, and the U.S. and Canada, back then, on the first Sunday in April. BUT most collaborations Glen and I had were much more fun than that. Anyway, I encourage you to listen to this episode of Doubletap, and while you're at it, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. It's fun, entertaining, informative, and quite often makes me smile or nod in agreement. Thanks to Shaun and Steven and Glen for this excellent interview!

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in reply to Marco Zehe

Long post

Sensitive content

This entry was edited (4 weeks ago)
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📣 Sei #A11y und unterstütze unsere Do-It-Blind (DIB) Exkursion zum Hackerspace Base48 in Brno für Menschen mit Sehbehinderung oder Blindheit, am Samstag, 22. November. Nähere Informationen bekommst du auf Nachfrage per Direktnachricht oder von dib@lists.metalab.at base48.cz/ #make #blind #inklusion

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