toastal

Nice to see open source hardware token usage in the wild.

That would be nice. Android has a wealth of phones with features, but the Pixel line is missing some I would consider “required”— not mention they aren’t available in my country.

Luckily they’re both WIP at this time. That said, the color management, just the spec, has been in the works for what feels like ever—to the point that some of the window managers are going around them in implement their own spec.

The march to Wayland hopefully doesn’t complete until color management & DisplayLink are merged. I had to go back to X11 because of missing features.

I have a goal to move my Neovim config to LunarML one of these days. I too would love better ergonomics over Lua.

We should stop indoctrinating school children into proprietary software.

So every website would ship with its own codecs? There aren’t shared caches across domains. Why would anyone choose that much latency+badwidth+compute (which new require JS enabled) to use a new codec over the native ones? Certainly not the small–medium sites.

Except no one will want to ship an encoder/decoder for performance (network & CPU) as well as requiring JS. It would take of images to break even on the cost of shipping the WASM—so these things would never get adopted.

…Which you should be using the picture element or image() to fall all the way back to PNG or JPEG in most scenarios anyhow. New & improved formats like JPEG-XL should be considered ‘enhancements’ rather than relied on.

Edge is still Blink+V8. Just test Chromium or Brave & forget about Edge.

> 2. Opening New Browser Windows

Note that this very much includes new tabs as well. Do not add target=_blank without a very good reason since this breaks the user agent defaults. One very bad reason: internal links stay in my tab, but external links open in a new tab. No they don’t, they never have, & your website is not a snowflake. What you did is remove agency as there are a myriad of ways to override how to open a link in new window/tab from the user input side, but there is no way to do this to keep it in the current tab/window because it’s expected to be the default behavior.

Not everyone lives in the West & has access to the fastest hardware or fastest networks. Some folks are living mostly off-grid using solar power & each heavy application is chewing thru their limited batteries.

Conversations & blabber.im offer free XMPP accounts. I self-host so I haven’t tested whether or not its users can create MUCs on those servers.

Libera.Chat & OFTC offer free IRC for open source—& can depending on the community be a welcome bridged platform for any alternative as IRC requires the least resources to run (tho if you need rooms with encryption, that won’t be an option).

I usually message support anyhow. Icon fonts helped webdevs support Internet Explorer with *.eot but after IE finally got SVG support, there was no reason to continue with icon fonts. The biggest general offenders are Font Awesome users (even when they offer SVG sprites) & Material Icons—with the latter being particularly broken with the icon name in plaintext (like this site) making it impossible to read versus just a broken Unicode tofu you’d expect. If the developer did the right thing & added title attributes, at least when you have a cursor you can see the name of the action.

I’ve been there. I told the project manager to buy me a burner phone+SIM or I wasn’t using it. The admin disabled the SMS requirement as a result & for a brief project I used it in locked down container not tied to any of my personal info. I also was bombarded with CAPTCHAs any time I tried to use it despite keeping the cookies in that container. It was a bad experience, & I pray I won’t have to interact with it again.

Privacy-friendly ∨ GitHub+Discord … pick one?

This is just another way to get fonts, no? It could be convenient to some, but doesn’t do much more than let you preview the a font & download it. Is a Node package manager the right tool to be downloading fonts?

Folks interested in reading more about this assertion: Public CDNs Are Useless and Dangerous <https://httptoolkit.tech/blog/public-cdn-risks/>

Most of them are available thru Nixpkgs too. You can make a small derivation to turn any font into WOFF2 with GNU Parallel + `fontforge --lang=ff -c 'Open($1); Generate($2);' {} $out/{/.}.woff2`.

CDN+Web font-related PSAs:

Users: it’s a good idea to block all third-party fonts so you’re not leaking data (filter rule: *$font,third-party). Unlike scripts/styles, fonts generally don’t hurt the UX (unless a developer is using icon font which haven’t been best practice in a decade--which is ironic considering this blog is broken).

Developers: vendor these Google Fonts (most are licensed SIL) as other have noted in this thread & host them first-party for the benefit of your users. If the cost (hosting or performance) is too much to host the fonts, consider using less fonts because users are still paying for the bandwidth. (I am still pro-web fonts, as they can be in improvement on the UX, just be smart about it).

Yeah, the lock-in will come with CI & and the pull-request model that requires an account in this case. The former Microsoft GitHub largely ate all the competition with its own ‘free’ (gratis) offering in Actions, but you could seek out a different CI or self-host. The latter could be easily circumvent by offering a mailing list or maintainer email—or mirror elsewhere—but it’s rare to see this with projects on Microsoft GitHub.

Well, and joining most discussions require an account, and if your alternative communication platform is Discord, we see all the same issues of lock-in.

Largely this isn’t possible for e-commerce. Some might say it’s just convenience, bun there are a lot of goods only reasonably available online.

Matt Lee’s quote comes from an article about why you would want to leave the walls of Microsoft GitHub. I would agree that would be ideal too, but developers are even more reluctant with that one—if you think suggesting libre coms gets you a downvote here, try suggesting not Microsoft GitHub.

And I want to be a citizen of that country. The Indian custom ROM hackers can be the ruling class with the amount of CPU it takes to build Android & their good will to release it for us.

Accessibility also refers to the hardware & network speeds of the users machine. Discord is a heavy web app (that also pings back a lot of analytics) with users actively using ‘heavy’ features like sending videos. It’s also subject to US sanctions or internal bans where entire countries can be blocked or do the blocking. Speaking of blocking, Discord could block a community member for a non-community-related reason (or by mistake) & there will be no way to resolve it since the community is not in control of the server.

Free as in gratis, sure. But as in libre? No, it’s definitely proprietary & it’s free because users are the product (data collected and upselling Nitro); not every user wants to give up their privacy freedoms to participate. Discord’s not federated so users will be required to create an account & agree to the ToS & CoC of Discord, not the community running it. Discord has also been hostile towards folks trying to make alternative clients to meet usability needs & certain kind of bots.

Without IRCV3 & bouncer it would be a difficult/unexpected experience for a new user. Luckily IRC isn’t the only libre option. If you want to keep the system requirements low XMPP MUCs are good & allow federation. If you want newer bells & whistles at the cost of system requirements federated Matrix can be considered (tho centralization concerns around Matrix.org having the most users, most used server, most used client, & controls the spec). There are bridges between all of these that you can choose as many or as few as meets the community needs such as a community-hosted XMPP main server in a neutral country with bridges to IRC & Discord.

They really should let folks skip the ‘school’ charade if the athlete wishes like the NBA’s G League (or go straight pro). Some use it for the education, & that scholarship can be great for those without the means otherwise, but a lot of college sports is just a cash grab for universities on the talent & training of its athletes (thankful NIL actually happened for those kids). The halfback market would see the greatest benefit to this too as they are seen as worn tire treads by the age of 24 wasting a lot of the positions most valuable years in college where they are not getting anywhere near the pay they’d see in the NFL as they are just used for their cheap rookie contract, franchise tagged, then often tossed in the trash (see: Jonathon Taylor, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs, et al.).

Yet we should still continue to press against proprietary chat. Developers are the kind of folks wise enough about technology to know better than to support this. There are very good reasons to at a minimum support a bridge. If we have to teach new developers raised on Discord, then that’s a great opportunity for them.

> Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

— Matt Lee

Good to know that extra 1.9999% was worth a comment. It’s pretty similar to the number of desktop Linux users even (edit: which seem to be over 3% now actually, great).

In my country, bank transfers with vendor is usually done via QR code scanning which isn’t supported on the site. The flow for the site would required adding the vendor (even for a one-time transaction) to your bank contact list, manually inputting all of the account numbers/phone/email, then going back & selecting it—something no vendor wants to wait on. If you haven’t done it in 20 minutes, you will be logged out with no cancel logout pop-up & paste has been disabled for … ‘security’?

Modern XEPs have brought XMPP to today. ActivityPub is fairly new too.

When will Bun open up to libre and/or federated chat options instead of requiring users sign up for and agree to Discord’s ToS?