It is #DisabilityPrideMonth! I used this occasion to write a bit about accessibility in GNOME, ableism, and share some ideas about what we can use this pride month for.
I'm looking forward to learning about the perspectives of other disabled people #AccessibilityInFreeSoftware
https://blogs.gnome.org/sophieh/2026/07/07/accessibility-in-gnome/
I recently found that iOS allows adding a ☀️ icon to the control center. It's called "Reduce White Point" which is a bit technical. What it actually does is make the screen darker than the brightness setting allows.
When I have a migraine attack, I sometimes still can and want to use a screen. But even the lowest brightness setting can be too much. So it would be great to see a feature like this in GNOME!
6 years of research: "The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism—the tendency to be self-centered & entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status—& the more they favored return-to-office mandates."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597826000300
RE: https://mastodon.social/@hbons/116869094337126884
#Meshy finally has a proper SVG icon and a new visual identity thanks to Hylke!
We don't collect contributions, but if you'd like to donate to our cause, please consider sponsoring Hylke, so that he can continue to provide free design services to open source projects like he did for Meshy:
https://planetpeanut.studio/sponsors
You can't grow a forest without nurturing individual trees along with the supporting ecosystem. The trees make the forest.
It's easiest to start on fertile soil with all the necessary resources, but it's not impossible to start with very little.
Pruning helps a little, and you have to be extremely decisive early on with aggressive invasive species.
This post is about people and communities.
They also have a lot of questions that are cultural too. Like what happens in school, which are some things that happened decades ago for me, and they're completely different in the US than in Germany (and not relevant to day to day life whatsoever, especially as I don't have kids).
And other cultural differences too.
Whoever writes language learning material certainly isn't doing a good job.
German class keeps having questions where it's like, "well, the answer depends on details that aren't given in the thing you're asking me about" every week.
This was the most blatant one.
Others were asking about a large crane or not (how large? some are larger and some are smaller than others), how "soon" a building would open (do they mean today, this week, in a month, or sometime in the future), etc.
So I'm wondering about clarifying details to poorly worded things every week and guessing.
In German class, they had a question about mixing all colors together, and what color do they make:
a) brown
b) black
c) gold
d) white
As a artist and designer, I can tell you that it's definitely not gold.
They were looking for black of course; I guessed that's what they wanted.
However, everything but gold is technically correct, in different circumstances (which they did not specify).
Paint: A shade of brown
Print: Black (technically, sorta; this is why there's K in CMYK)
Screen: White
Today, youtuber dzuma made a video about my age verification bypass browser extension.
And since then, I've got a nonstop influx of people downloading the add-on, and it became the mosr starred one on my GitHub in just a matter of hours!
So, thanks a lot!! Glad I'm not the only one who's annoyed by this!
The video :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBL76_0jD8k
The extension :
https://github.com/helloyanis/age-verification-bypass
Screen reader users using a free and open-source calendar app on Linux, what do you use? I'd like to use one as a reference to make GNOME Calendar more screen reader friendly.
(Boost appreciated)
#a11y #accessibility #accessible #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #Linux
Spending a few minutes this 4th of July browsing Walmart, looking at absurd things…
Ah, yes the US Constitution famously started with the phrase:
"We tße Poople"
(it's really being sold, at https://www.walmart.com/ip/250th-Anniversary-Backdrop-1776-2026-American-Independence-Day-Decorations-Banner-Statue-Liberty-American-Flag-Patriotic-Photography-Background-4th-J/19502473542 )
This uniform of USA flag overalls in 100+ people's carts.
Celebrate by shredding the flag, using it as pillowcases, and throwing it on the ground?
More @ https://www.walmart.com/search?q=250th%2Banniversary%2Bdecorations
Walmart basically violates the flag code in every way.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/4/8
What I saw VS what I drew 🪷
When I saw this baby moorhen standing on a sunny lily pad, I knew I had to draw them. This is a quick study drawn on a single layer and with a single brush!
#Art #ArtVsReference #Study #Bird #Illustration #DigitalArt #Artist #FirstFridayArtWalk #MastoArt #BirdsOfMastodon #FediArt
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.
That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.
Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
Within the first few months of life, every bottlenose dolphin invents a unique whistle that becomes its name for the rest of its life — and other dolphins learn that whistle, remember it, and use it to call out to that specific individual, making bottlenose dolphins the first non-human species ever discovered to use personal names
I think the biggest blind spot in FOSS is that for most people most of the time, computers aren't liberating or empowering at all, they're just in the way. They're an unwanted layer of complexity that's been forced into the gap between them and whatever they're trying to get done.
We've had a chance to microdose on that experience with the proliferation of silly IoT widgets - wtf is this, why is there a computer here I'm trying to make toast - but IMO haven't really absorbed the core lesson.
Demanding command line interface use from people who are not sysadmins
is not reasonable, realistic, or kind.
Make your free libre open source alternative usable for the intended end users. Write documentation that isn’t “sudo the glorble fleegeller, but first make sure you were installing sketchy gitblob three hours ago”
Incredible moment where Fox News puts up a graphic with all the reasons it opposes the Democratic Socialists of America and why people should be afraid of them ...
It’s disability pride! This month let’s reflect on how we can better serve and destigmatize the marginalized group that we will all be a part of at some time. Whether it’s something we’re born with, something we experience temporarily due to a situation, illness, or injury, or something we grow into as we age, we all experience times when we need extra accommodation. It’s our responsibility to consider and build an inclusive environment while we’re able
Each time people stress Mastodon’s UX issues (very real and worth improving), I remind myself that if you want to open a link to a website from an Instagram post you have to open the poster’s profile where the single latest clickable post link is included in the bio 🤌 Corporate social media have turned user-hostile UX design into an art form.
ok! it was a fever dream week of rushed readme-driven #Rust development, but finally I have something for you all to test out. :)
the new #SparkleShare CLI codenamed Twinkle: