Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

❝Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE

• Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

• Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

• Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

• Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).

• Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

• Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

• Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(OP: Matthew Gardner)

Happy Birthday to the LVFS

9 years ago today I wrote 4 little PHP scripts and pushed it to OpenShift which was the beginning of the LVFS. We've since rewritten it in Python, switched the deployment from "sudo git pull" on the server under my stairs at home (literally) to deploying onto AWS with Terraform.

In 9 years we've onboarded over 140 vendors, shipped ~110 million firmware files and added support for ~85 firmware update protocols for ~1600 different devices. I'm pretty happy with that.

I left Adobe years ago, but many still use it.

In light of recent scandals, we felt it was time to make a video on Adobe's massively exploitive history and what to do against big tech companies like Adobe. Watch it now!
https://youtu.be/sOX8x5Fy6AA

Patreon screws me over, says a big Apple did it and ran away.

Patreon has two billing models, monthly (bills on the first of the month, or whenever they get around to it) and daily (charges you the moment you sign up.) For several years now, they have...
https://jwz.org/b/ykXg

BREAKING: Republicans seize on 2010 Walz video in which he admits to occasionally going to Jiffy Lube rather than changing own oil.

"The nice thing about buying food for a man is, you don't have to laugh at his jokes."

Preston Sturges’ SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941) is now streaming on Prime and nowhere else (without a VOD rental).

#FilmMastodon #TCMParty

1 year ago I ditched my Macbook, bought a Framework laptop, and moved to Linux for professional UX design work. In this article, I explain as simply as possible:
- Why I switched to Linux
- How you can do the same.

I cover design-specific concerns like:
- How to use Apple devices like the Magic Mouse in Linux
- Which design tools are available and how to install them
- How to find help if you get stuck

https://www.chris-wood.design/resources/linux-for-ux-designers
#Design #UXDesign #UIDesign #Linux #MacOS #FrameworkLaptop

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

Two-thirds of the $310 million that Kamala Harris raised last month came from first-time donors, according to the campaign.

It seemed necessary to make this.

All set up for #FOSSY24!

Come talk to us about #postmarketOS, #linuxmobile, or #systemd!

Much is being made of the fact that Philly will be Harris”s first stop on her tour with her running mate. While that may bode well for Shapiro, you know who else is from Pennsylvania?

RAIN (1932) w/ Joan Crawford and Walter Huston is now on Prime Video and Kanopy.

This is the 90th anniversary restoration, released on Blu-ray in 2022 — a vast improvement over public domain transfers streaming elsewhere.

#FilmMastodon #TCMparty #JoanCrawford

Deals on Kindles may seem attractive, but don't forget Amazon is one of the most devoted peddlers of DRM. We prefer books we can loan to our friends, free of restriction and prying eyes. Read more about how to live DRM-free: https://u.fsf.org/1aj #EndDRM #DRM #BoycottAmazon #Amazon

🥳 On this day, 10 years ago, we launched Signal on iPhone, which existed on Android as RedPhone and TextSecure 🎂

📞 Back then, Signal was only an encrypted voice calling app using the ZRTP protocol with short-authentication strings.

💬 It’s only 6 months later, that Signal Protocol-based encrypted messaging would launch.

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/free-encrypted-calling-finally-comes-to-the-iphone/

I'm reminded of a remark by the noted social theorist of gift exchange Fred Rogers: “And those handmade presents that children often bring home from school: They have so much value! The value is that the child put whatever he or she could into making them. The way we parents respond to the giving of such gifts is very important. To the child, the gift is really self”. The gift is really self, you Google AI weirdos.

WOW - online course on using crochet to make "Topologically nontrivial, visually pleasing yarn sculptures" https://momath.org/onlinecrochet/

US security firm unwittingly hired apparent “nation-state” hacker from North Korea

KnowBe4, which provides security awareness training, was fooled by stolen ID.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/us-security-firm-unwittingly-hired-apparent-nation-state-hacker-from-north-korea/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Finally, we have a date to share 🤠
#linux #vanillaos #opensource #cloudnative #releaseday