Adrian Cochrane @alcinnz@floss.social

Can I suggest using a landscape UI, rather than a portrait, for entering an encryption passphrase when booting a mobile device? That would allow for a larger keyboard, as well as a longer area for the dots that appear as a user types each passphrase character.

#mobileGNU #PinePhone #Librem5 #DiskEncryption

@postmarketOS @PINE64 @purism
@mobian

#ProTip for new PinePhone users setting up @postmarketOS for the first time, I wouldn't bother with encrypting your internal storage, just for testing and tinkering. If you do encrypt it, you need to enter the passphrase every time you turn on or restart the device, which makes sense. But I've found the soft keyboard UI for entering the passphrase makes it really hard to enter a long enough one to be effectively secure.

@PINE64

#PinePhone #postmarketOS

I want to recognize all the amazing work that has gone into being able to run @postmarketOS on my new PinePhone. I'm privileged to be in a position to watch the capabilities and UX continue to evolve. The hardware teams at @PINE64 and a lot of software teams have contributed hours of work to make this possible. Big thanks to you all!

#PinePhone #postmarketOS

> I will however point the borderline schizophrenic way that this is applied to games (and attempted to be applied to other digital goods as well) where they want games to both be considered individual products, for the purpose of selling them to you as a package and at the same time want them to be considered services as well, for which you need to acquire a revocable license which you are not allowed to transfer to others.

> In other words, the developers want to have their cake and eat it too. They pretend that the best part of tangible and finite goods (for their bottom line) apply, while requesting laws and moralizing against that the best parts of the same types of goods, so that the consumer cannot use them.

New #gemini post is up, "a day of learning," where I talk about installing Ubuntu so that my daughter can program a NES game with me. Also: installed #9front on my ThinkPad X220. Woo!

https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/kvothe.one/gemlog/2020-09-26.gmi

gemini://kvothe.one/gemlog/2020-09-26.gmi

I just restarted Firefox, and got the message:

> It looks like you haven't started Firefox in a while. Do you want to clean it up for a fresh, like-new experience? And by the way, welcome back!

And, fair enough, I *haven't* started firefox in a while… I've left it running the whole time!

*checks* hmm, apparently that message displays if you haven't launched Firefox in the last 60 day. I might should restart my computer…

$ uptime

22:22:50 up 90 days, 4:10, 3 users

That's ok, right? :D

Imagine a world where CalDav and GroupDav was more of a thing so vendor monopolization wouldn’t have been a thing. Where I could share a calendar and give one control without them having to be using a particular service. (https://v2.jacky.wtf/post/79a114ce-6949-43e2-90e0-cd2d38fd27db)

So, Voiceover, iOS' screen reader, can basically use a Machine Learning algo to create an accessible UI, as far as possible, for iOS apps. It can also describe images, and some text within the image. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot. I've not seen any evidence that Google or even Microsoft are heading in that direction. I love the way Microsoft is going, but they're going about it very slowly. I mean, Apple, basically the Debian of software features in mobile phones, has outpaced anything the other two mainstream OS developers have done, and I'm not even going to get into Linux at this point because it might as well not even be in the race for accessibility.

Image and text recognition are out of this world levels of accurate. It describes most photos like a human would, and that's just plain amazing! Not even Facebook has gotten to this level! Now, that doesn't mean that people can stop describing images. It just means that if you don't, which quite a few people I follow do not, I have a backup, and maybe I'll be able to even understand the photo. That's what all this recognition is about, having a way to enjoy things, even if devs or content creators don't give a crap! And when I use Windows, I miss that so much. Just being able to focus on an image, and get a pretty good description of it. Yes, Narrator has a feature like that, but not everyone uses Narrator, Windows' built-in screen reader. And it requires an Internet connection, so if you don't want Microsoft getting your images, you'd better start describing! And Linux doesn't have anything like that, so describe, for FOSS' sake!

#a11y #apple #microsoft #FOSS

@cwebber @cadadr @alcinnz

I seem to remember that this podcast was an interesting source:
https://librelounge.org/episodes/episode-13-object-capabilities-with-kate-sills.html

@cadadr @alcinnz I have my problems with NPM (horrible from a reproducibility standpoint) but I actually don't think it's possible for package managers at this point to provide total safety. There's just too much to manage.

But there is an alternative option. An object capability approach to package management means that the event-stream type incident wouldn't happen https://medium.com/agoric/pola-would-have-prevented-the-event-stream-incident-45653ecbda99

Professor Zombie received a vote, breaking the tie announced above!

Defeating the titular Captain Laserbeam (John DiMaggio) and all his "laser-..." powers from The Thrilling Adventure Hour's Captain Laserbeam. That was a highly formulaic show, in much the same sense as Fineas & Ferb!

"Never fear my adventuregateers for you will be with me in spirite. And spirite is stronger than one hundred lasers! Also, I'll have my one hundred lasers."

#IDADtournament

Yesterday Captain Isabel Lovelace defeated Magus Sagari (author Kennedy Phillips) from, if you didn't guess by their shared title, Magus Elgar at 1 to nil.

Captain Clockwork defeated Amelia Earheart (Autumn Reeser) from The Thrilling Adventure Hour's "Amelia Earheart, Fearless Flyer" at 1 to nil.

Carlos defeated Dr. Hilbert (Zach Valenti) from Wolf359 also at 1 to nil.

And neither Captain Laserbeam or Professor Zombie received any votes, but there's still time.

#IDADtournament

In the next round Captain Isabel Lovelace will face off against Captain Clockwork, and I don't know who'll face off against Carlos.

Magus Sagari is a caring lizardperson who lives in a castle accidentally held aloft by the carcase of a spacewhale, and a widely respected Magus throughout Hearth.

#IDADtournament

Dr. Hilbert is a creepy, motivated, knowledgable, & secretive Russian scientist aboard the U.S.S. Haphaestus, voiced by the same person as the main protaganist. I'm very impressed by Zach Valenti's voice acting...

#IDADtournament

"The question on everyone on everyone's lips: whatever happened to Amelia Earheart?

The answer in nobody's ears: In 1938 America's soaring sweetheart facked her dissapearance at sea in order to serve in the American Victory Commission's covert division as their top-secret one-woman airforce. Now via classified chrono-technology, Amelia Earheart the fearless flyer traverses time in unlocking electra in the persuit of truth, liberty, and the American waaaay!"

#IDADtournament

#TIL: Microsoft felt threatened by Digital Research DOS (DR DOS) which had introduced superior features and was compatible with MS DOS. IBM had even begun bundling DR DOS with their PCs over MS DOS. As a result, Microsoft implemented the "AARD code" which would only trigger in the Windows 3.1 Christmas Beta when installation was attempted on non-MS DOS variants. It would simply instruct the user to contact MS DOS support. If you bypass the "AARD code", it works just as it would on MS DOS.

They disabled it by the time Windows 3.1 went retail because the tech enthusiasts and journalists who preferred DR DOS for it's better feature set had reported Windows 3.1 installation failed on DR DOS. The damage was done, sales of DR DOS plummeted, and OEMs stopped bundling DR DOS with their systems. The AARD code was still present in the retail release though, it just didn't trigger, leading to some people to reverse engineer it and figure out what Microsoft had actually done.