@petersuber
Re "greater equity" as shown by more downloads than non-OA models in low-income countries.

Springer and Nature could just... remove the paywalls for IPs in LMICs. Or at least for IPs of Research4Life registered institutions, instead of requiring credentials.

white guys with bad takes

Oh dear. This bodes ill: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-space-force-uniforms-star-wars-b3045658.html

Today, I'm releasing a new website for blind gamers, built for 2026 and beyond.
So much of the information about blind-accessible PC and console games is scattered across the AudioGames.net forum, GitHub pages, Discord servers, and websites that haven't kept up with how quickly blind gaming has been evolving since the advent of AI. Unless you're embedded in Discord or the Audiogames.net Forum, you're probably not aware that over 70 games have been made accessible for the blind via modding this year alone.
What we've really needed is a website that tracks accessible mainstream games, with descriptions, direct links to their mods, and the information you need to get playing. "But that's a wiki," you exclaim. "But there are already lists like this," you plead. Well...
BlindGaming.net, aka The Blind Gaming Database, automatically tracks mod releases through GitHub and Nexus Mods. It also tracks game prices across Steam, GOG, Humble, and many key shops, with a genre filter and a page for ongoing sales. And for the nerds among us, each game has its own RSS feed and supports web push notifications. There are a lot of other small features, like cross-region price history, and an upcoming API for mod ratings and game access information. I also want to do a better job of raising up mod creators so people know how to support them!
All of this said, there's still much work to be done. If you'd like to help, consider writing a guide in Markdown or improving the existing Steam guide. I'd especially appreciate help from anyone familiar with console or Linux setup, so we can give people instructions they can actually follow. Finally, if you're interested in helping maintain the registry of games and have a track record in doing this kind of work, please shoot me a DM.
This is not intended as a replacement for places like the Accessible Gaming wiki, although I do my best to integrate with it and point people there when I can.
I'd love to hear what you think!

https://www.blindgaming.net/

#accessibility #gaming #blind #games #steam #a11y

meanwhile, over on the blue butterfly web site, I think maybe they're starting to get nervous. remember when the blue bird web site started doing this?

@adrienne @zzt prolly shoulda done it a while ago but I'm anti-social sometimes - particularly when surrounded by nazis, as we all are right now. Fixed and followed.

The `ls`, `zfsinfo`, `blocklist`, `testload`, & (with more argument-reformatting) `xnu_uuid` commands invokes corresponding builtin GRUB commands. The `cp` command carefully opens a target file, & invokes a 2-codepath helper to carefully read the given file or stdin in chunks passing each to a callback which in this case writes each chunk to the target file. `cat` invokes the same helper writing each chunk to stdout.

2/3?

seeing all these indie small fediverse projects reminds me of the feeling I had when I first got into programming with the early PCs

Studying the other `grub-*` commands one at a time...

`grub-fstest` performs some OS-specific initialization, allocates some memory, parses commandline flags, inits various GRUB subsystems, possibly sets $debug envvar, sets $root in one of 2 ways, invokes a core routine, & cleans up. Which in turn iterates over all known disks running `loopback` to each, possibly runs `cryptomount`, (de)inits various subsystems, branches over the given subcommand, & invokes `loopback` again for all disks.

1/2?

The `cmp` subcommand applied to directories recurses over the contained files filtering special ones (such as "." or ".."). Or it opens a destination file & invokes the shared util that reads from a 2nd file & outputs where the 2 files differ.

The `hex` subcommand invokes the shared helper with a callback that wraps a `hexdump()` utility from GRUB.

And CRC invokes the `GRUB_MD_CRC32` APIs combined with that shared helper.

3/3 Fin for today! Tomorrow: `grub-install`!

@libreoffice Oh whew! Good to know, thanks!

Papyrix includes a support library for detecting which Unicode "scripts" are present in some text, including routines to:

* Util to check for Chinese/Japanese/Korean character-ranges, with wrapper that iterates over some text.
* Iterate over text invoking another routine to check for Thai characters, or same for Arabic.
* Routine that returns other, Thai, Arabic, C/J/K, or Latin.
* Inlined routines checking if a codepoint's Thai or Arabic.

1/1! Tomorrow: Thai "shaping".

@kim That bulge around two years is likely the Great Twitter Migration circa October 2022.

Republicans don’t give a shit about Americans. They PROVE IT every day.

Wisconsin cheese, Maine seafood, Kentucky appliances: Trump’s Canada tariffs punch swing states just before the midterms
https://fortune.com/2026/09/07/canada-retaliatory-tariffs-swing-states-midterms/

#TrumpMustGo #KingOfTreason #RepublicansDidThis #NoRepublicansEverAgain #USPol

I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend the novel "The Mathematician's Shiva" by Stuart Rojstaczer about a famous fictional mathematician Rachela Karnokovitch who was rumored to have solved the Navier-Stokes problem.

As a bonus, the novel is set in Madison, Wisconsin!

By Jim Benton

"Meta took days to remove ads containing AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on Facebook and Instagram. Some ads featured photos of real kids, including a press photo of a young member of a European royal family and images swiped from a popular Instagram profile of a preteen girl deemed an influencer."

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/real-photos-of-young-girls-were-in-nudify-app-ads-on-facebook-instagram/

#MetaPlatforms #CSAM

Do the math

@urlyman I hate Space Nazis

Synology BeeStation Plus review: An easy-to-use NAS place. https://www.zdnet.com/tech/synology-beestation-plus-8-tb-review-2/ via @ZDNet & @sjvn

If you want a full-fledged NAS device, the Synology BeeStation Plus 8 TB is not for you. But if all you want is simple storage, boy, have you come to the right place.