We're pleased to announce that Codethink are sponsoring this year's Electromagnetic Field in Eastnor. Taking place 30th May - 2nd June, Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival, featuring everything from knitting and blacksmithing, to computer security, and online privacy.
I'm a neuroscientist & software developer. I lead the Neuroinformatics Unit, a research software engineering group at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and Gatsby Unit at UCL. We develop open source software for neuroscience and machine learning. We're currently working on flexible, modular and extensible pipelines for computational neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, video behavioural analysis and data management. Always happy to collaborate!
The reality is, you always take a chance when contributing to an open source development or projects. Just because you made a contribution, does not mean you own the project or can decide the path that project takes. Those of us who donated understood the risk (or at least, I hope most people did).
That said, when someone takes a proactive driving stance claiming they will deliver, you kind of hope you can take them for their word. And expecting the main website to be online is not a big ask, especially when that serves as a gateway for people to learn about and use the project you are funding. That, after all, was the reason I donated.
Just spent today at work with Linux. Fedora's Mate spin still works well generally, and Orca is much more stable. And, according to Orca, the system never even ran over about 3 of the 16 GB of RAM on that Intel NUC. I set up Emacs and Emacspeak, Firefox, Bitwarden, VS Code, and never even took my laptop out of the bag. Of course, I really miss a lot of NVDA addons, like the OpenAI one, sounds for entering browse and focus modes, and the Thunderbird addon most of all. But I was able to log into, and use, Salesforce and Google Sheets. So now when I get a good workflow with Markdown and such, I think I'll just about, maybe, be able to start using it more. Packages are all up-to-date, Orca will alwasy be current, and hopefully I can one day move to a desktop environment with a proper notification center! Oh, and I'll have to see if Pidgin still takes up more RAM the more I use it.
Note that I still wouldn't expect a regular computer user to get into Linux, as far as setting it up. But, honestly, having the #BTSpeak out on the market makes me hope that more power users and programmers will hammer Linux into more of a shape that blind people can be at home with.
Just dropped a new episode of The Self-Host Cast featuring a casual conversation with Ivan, the developer of the #vehicle maintenance tracking application #LubeLogger.
Would love some feedback on ways to improve or suggestions for future episode topics!
It took me a while, but I finally got things set up to play #HideousDestructor on Doom. I've been watching @El_Draculo for a while, and I've really wanted to give it a go myself. It was super-easy to set up thanks to #CleanDoom, so tnx a bunch for that 😍
If you're using GNU/Linux. Please use opensnitch, it's criminally underrated. It notifies you of network requests made in real time, and you can choose to allow them or not (it comes with a lot of filtering options as well): https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
i really like #flatnotes, but it's a little bit too minimalistic ... thinking about switching to another #note taking solution ... but there are so many options. #obsidian , #logseq , #joplin ?
main requirements are that its needs to be quick and easy to use; syncing the notes between desktop and android phone (not through external cloud, needs to be #selfhosted) ... preferrably 100% #foss - so i guess obsidian is already out?
#e2ee is a goal, not a promise. As far back as I can remember, forums like those supporting #Enigmail and #gpg were staffed with volunteers from the privacy community who repeatedly insisted on answering questions, like, "Is <this> (whatever this might be) totally secure?" with stock questions like, "What is it that you consider 'totally secure?" or answers such as, "Secure is a relative term, nothing is completely secure, how secure do you need your mission's communications to be?"
Phrases such as, reasonably secure should be indicators of how ridiculous it is to assume that any secure platform isEVERcompletely, and totally secure.
That begs the question, "Exactly how secure do you require your communications to be?" The answer is always, ... relative.
Which means that you should always believe Ellen Ripley when she says, "Be afraid. Be very afraid!"
"Welcome in the #commons sweat shop, my dear friend. Slave away with us until the whip of #Hypercapitalism wears you out. Here's a set of FSF quality approval labels to plaster on your work of hard labour."
"Thank you! Let's change the world then. I'll start burning myself out, right away.. 😍"
Apply for Summer of Nix 2024 to join one of four teams in making selected free and open source software (FOSS) projects work reliably on a whim using Nix and NixOS.
Deadline May 10.
Summer of Nix is a rare opportunity for students or early-career professionals with diverse technical skills and interests to practice disciplined software development with Nix while contributing to the public good and receiving some payment for it.