I've been thinking about how this hacker News comment applies to the way we feel about tech, regardless of our positions on broader political issues: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4539... I'm politically a progressive, but prone to being a tech reactionary. But I know the past wasn't all better.

Hot take about the fediverse: Maybe the solution to the oft-mentioned problem where we don't always see all replies to a post is that we shouldn't be _able_ to see arbitrary replies, except for posts from people that we follow (including boosts), and of course, specific profiles that we view. A […]

Now playing with Bluesky / #ATProto. Not sure how much I'll post there versus here. My profile is accessible via the Bluesky app at: https://bsky.app/profile/mwcampbell.us I've also got it bridged to the fediverse via @mwcampbell.us#atprotoUnfortunately, I made the mistake of doing my first Bluesky […]

Is Bluesky gaining any significant popularity among #blind people yet? I know a lot of us flocked to the fediverse when Musk canned the old Twitter accessibility team. Now that Bluesky has gained momentum in the mainstream, and even among some techies who weren't happy with the fediverse, I […]

I ordered an Adafruit Fruit Jam RP2350-based single-board computer (https://www.adafruit.com/products/6200) last weekend, and it arrived yesterday. Unlike most microcontroller boards, this one includes HDMI, USB, and analog audio output, so it can be used as a stand-alone personal computer. At […]

Proposal: Let's revive "centigrade" rather than "Celsius" as the English term for the 100-degree temperature scale that most of the world uses. "Centigrade" is descriptive, as opposed to just enshrining some random surname.

@mntmn Prompted by the release of the Raspberry Pi 500+, I wonder if you've ever considered doing a Reform variant in that retro desktop form factor, i.e. the computer inside a keyboard with no pointing device or display. If it were battery-powered like the Reform laptops, that would even be a […]

The more confident you are that you would never fall for a con or a scam, the more juicy of a target you are.

Recently came across a 1984 quote about "agents" by Steve Jobs featured on @simon's blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/steve-jobs/ I, for one, don't want an imitation of a "little person" inside my computer, anticipating what I want, or steering me toward what its developers want me to […]

Thoughts on Drew DeVault's take on the latest npm malware? https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/17/2025-09-17-An-impossible-future-for-JS.html I use npm some, and cargo a lot more. I'm eager to learn my lesson and change course. But I'm not in a position to make any significant change alone.

I have an idea for immutable desktop-focused Linux distro/OS projects, like the various immutable versions of Fedora. The OS consists of multiple root filesystem layers (like the layers in an OCI container image): an irreducible core, plus layers for drivers, localization packs, assistive […]

All right, time for me to put up or shut up. Before the year is over, I will switch to Linux as my primary desktop OS, Firefox on Linux as my primary browser, and Orca as my primary screen reader. Then I'll see what I need to fix to make that combo pleasant for me. I'll run Windows in a VM only […]

On corporate social media, using euphemism and indirect phrasing (maybe) evades censorship. On the fediverse, doing so evades the filters that other fedizens have set up. If you want to talk about a current distressing topic in the news, if you're not going to CW, *use unredacted, specific keywords*

There was a toot that went around a few years ago that I wish I had bookmarked. It said something like, and I'm badly paraphrasing from memory, "When you consider the usability of your software, think about what it will be like for an elderly person, like Margaret Hamilton, who worked on the […]

Re: last boost (https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/115195863764383592), I wonder if Windows is also becoming less popular with blind kids. My immediate reaction was that they're an exception, because Windows still has the best screen readers. But my sample size of younger generations of […]

The NPM phishing attack would get you too and you're a liar if you say it wouldn't.

Thinking about the attack on certain popular npm packages that made news today, it occurs to me that my favorite language's package manager (Rust's Cargo) is far too much like npm for comfort. Proponents and creators of languages with no standard language package manager (especially C and the […]

For anyone who thinks Wayland compositors are being overly restrictive by not allowing applications to set absolute positions for their windows, as I did, there are good reasons for this restriction. https://canonical-mir.readthedocs-hosted.com/stable/explanation/window-positions-under-wayland/

Question for my #blind followers: Would you be interested in buying, and if so, how much would you be willing to pay, for a screenless Linux-based computer with Braille keyboard and TTS output, like the BT Speak (https://www.blazietech.com/bt-speak-pro), but with these distinguishing features […]

Re: last boost (https://mindly.social/@Tamasg/115159709611517867), yes, it's a rant, but I'm amplifying it because if desktop Linux is going to be reliably accessible to blind people, there needs to be a solution to the kinds of problems reported in this post. To all of my followers from the […]

I wonder how many different computing projects and companies have been named after Berkeley, California, or its namesake university, over the decades. The most well-known is probably the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix variant. Then there's its commercial offshoot, Berkeley Software […]

Fascinating article by #alankay from 1992, "The Early History Of Smalltalk": https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

Is there any ARM64 SoC that can boot to Linux without either requiring a DRAM controller initialization/training blob or punting the whole boot process to a second processor running wholly closed firmware? That second one rules out Raspberry Pi (for personal projects). I'd grudgingly accept ARM […]

Congratulations to @YaLTeR and @DataTriny for getting screen reader accessibility implemented in the latest release of the niri Wayland compositor, using #accesskit. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/releases/tag/v25.08

Last night at karaoke, one of the regulars did one of her usual songs, "Wonder" by Natalie Merchant. Am I wrong to find this song offensive? Here's what Wikipedia says about its origin: > In a BBC Mastertapes interview, Merchant said the song "... was about a child born with a congenital […]

Random thought: What if multitrack recording and stereo hadn't been developed concurrently? What if stereo, and even binaural micing, had come long before multitrack? Would it have become normal to produce music recordings in the studio by setting up binaural mics in a room where a band […]

Re: last boost (https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/115106054965696673), this whole thread is worth a read. I have used an LLM as a validation machine before, and it has led me to do a few things that I mildly regret, even within the past month. Yes, despite my earlier critical posts on LLMs, I […]

You may have seen this tragic story about a teenager who committed suicide and used chat GPT to plan and work up the nerve to go through with it. If you are skeptical that an LLM could really be responsible the details of this case will challenge you. With LLMs "the user is always right" they […]

"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware. #android #google

Please stop using summer and winter as time reference @villares https://ciberlandia.pt/@villares/115090678058315825

Does anyone still have the raw tracks that Kevin Reeves once released for his album "It's About Time"? I stupidly didn't hold onto them, then they disappeared. It's not clear to me if he meant to take them down because he didn't like how they were being used, or if that was just a casualty of […]

Does anyone have experience with any of the recent RP2040 or RP2350-based boards that have DVI/HDMI output, a USB host port or ports, SD card slot, and audio? These boards are often used to run retro computer emulators. I'm particularly interested in the quality of the audio output, and whether […]

What's the best modern Python library for generating a valid HTML5 document programmatically from scratch, with proper document structure and a consistent approach to escaping? lxml? BeautifulSoup4? Something else? I specifically don't want to do string interpolation into a template. See […]

PSA for anyone else who uses Thunderbird with the Owl add-on to access Exchange or Microsoft 365: If you restart Thunderbird and find that your Exchange account is suddenly gone, it's probably because you were auto-updated to Thunderbird 142. The Owl update that supports Thunderbird 142 is still […]

You have not experienced a proper embedded Linux system until you've booted a board with a serial connection to your PC for debugging. Better still if the board has an open boot-loader (e.g. u-boot), not the Raspberry Pi closed boot firmware. I recently bought such a board, which also has a USB […]

Hot take: I wish the Raspberry Pi project had chosen one of the BSDs as its primary OS rather than Linux. It's not as if there was a huge base of proprietary software that had already been compiled for ARMv6 Linux. And design decisions in Linux, particularly the kernel, have largely been driven […]

I scored 17/21 on https://e-mail.wtf and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

Who does your assistant serve? https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/who-assistant-serve/?utm_campaign=mi_irl&utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon

Question for #blind people who work with tactile graphics, such as @ChanceyFleet: If you're reading a PDF that has an illustration in it, and that illustration is already a vector graphic (not a raster/bitmap image, like a JPEG or PNG), do you have an easy way of pulling out that vector graphic […]

Hey, Linux people: a LOT of folks are screaming off Windows right now. Be. Kind. To. Them. They don't know much yet, so they are going to ask really basic questions. If you're KIND, you might get some to give it a try and stick to it bc they know they can ask for help. If you're unkind, you're […]

There was recently a popular article about why someone chose OCaml as their primary programming language, which prompted this response about why someone else chose Lean: https://kirancodes.me/posts/log-ocaml-to-lean.html I haven't tried Lean yet, but the article makes a point about OCaml that I […]

TIL: Pressing NumPad Enter in a Win32 dialog always activates the default button even if the focus is on another button. Pressing the main Enter key activates the focused button if the focus is on a button. Had a bit of confusion because my student pressed NumPad Enter while focused on a button […]

@NVAccess What's the best way to report issues with the NVDA training products? These aren't FOSS, so I don't suppose opening GitHub issues makes sense. I'm working with a student whose parent bought the training bundle. We don't need tech support per se; I just want to suggest an improvement.

Among currently available ARM64 single-board computers, which one has the simplest and most fully open boot process? The Raspberry Pi family has boot handled by the VideoCore, a whole other processor running its own RTOS during and after boot. Other ARM64 boards, like the Rockchip RK3566-based […]

My eldest niece (late elementary-school age) wants an iPad. I don't know yet if someone is planning to give her one, or if she'll need to save up to buy it; the conversation among the other adults at her birthday party yesterday seemed to lean toward the latter. I, of course, would rather she […]

Question for #blind people who have to work with PDF documents: Is Adobe Reader still the only Windows PDF reader with full tagged PDF support? Is there any good PDF reader with tagged PDF support on other platforms?

Is there a pure, safe Rust PDF library that has support for both reading and writing PDFs as comprehensive as that in PDFBox for Java, including tagged PDF support? Or at least multiple libraries with shared types?

Someday I want to implement a different kind of Rust UI toolkit. Rather than implement the whole stack, including widgets, text rendering, and 2D graphics rendering in pure, mostly cross-platform Rust, this would be a wrapper over classic platform-native widgets (yes, including Win32), like […]