I recently discussed the topic of Autism on IRC, and clarified that I consider autism to be the default state, at least from my own perspective; I am autistic. I once had a good laugh with two other fellow autists. We were sitting at a table, eating our dinner, and a group of so-called "neurotypicals" were wining and dining near us; they were speaking Dutch, but it didn't matter. We knew what they were saying: nothing. We tried to emulate smalltalk amongst ourselves and couldn't stop laughing.

anyway. i submitted/proposed a libreboot talk for fosdem 2026:

Libreboot: Free Your BIOS Today! FOSDEM 2026

Libreboot is a coreboot distribution — just as Debian is a Linux distribution — providing fully free (libre) boot firmware for x86 and ARM syst...

no idea if they'll accept. but i hope they do. i've got a big new release planned for december, lots of chromebooks and more thinkpads and more - and lots more work planned in the new year too. no worries if they don't though, they rejected my 2025 talk too, i'm still going to brussels :) i really enjoyed fosdem 2025. i'm sure 2026 will be excellent as well.

this is how i'm learning german btw. pretty much doing this all day.

i heard a sentence in german today that i understood, without having to look up any words: "dass sie lachen, das ist voellig klar" - literally translated, it is "it's obvious that they are laughing" (that they laugh, is fully clear". the speaker/context is irrelevant. i laughed too. i wrote it down and stuck it on my monitor. i'm still learning german - at unhuman speed. native germans who wish to help me practise, would be greatly appreciated. talk to me about whatever you want (in german).

If there are any German speakers following me, and I know that there are German speakers following me: I would like to speak to real German people. Any topic. I'm learning German. I'm still passively listening to German, reading German, and teaching myself words, but to really learn quickly, I need to speak it. I'm also using ChatGPT (yes, I know it's non-free). Come to #librespeech on libera IRC. I'm "leah" there. i'll make a german chatroom on jitsi. Looking forward to meeting you all!

I'd like to mention a *really amazing* browser plugin, namely: libredirect. See:

libredirect.github.io

LibRedirect - Privacy-friendly Redirector

A web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc. requests to alternative privacy-friendly frontends

It redirects various sites e.g. youtube, to more privacy-friendly frontend sites/alternatives. I configured mine in LibreWolf, to automatically redirect all YouTube videos to my own Invidious instance. The two other screenshots show what youtube.com looks like for me. I don't want to run YouTube's probably malicious javascript. My Invidious server, not my workstation, handles streaming.

*Fun fact*: I'm re-learning German. I still remember a good number of words from when I learned it at school. I still remember grammar / conjugations. I'm practising an hour or two - or three - speaking it daily while reading it too. I'm also watching nothing but NTV between now and December 25th, to immerse myself. It's on constantly, while I work (Minifree orders, Libreboot, whatever). Today, thieves stole Napoleon's jewels from the louvre. I heard it in German and understood it perfectly.

reddit is proprietary garbage, and full of spam. i've shut down r/libreboot on reddit. nothing but endless silly there. irc is all you need. we have an irc chat. the best thing about the irc chat is it's much easier to moderate, and the inherently daunting nature of merely using irc, for the normies, means that the person coming there must really need/want to be there, and isn't going there to post things so frivolously. that and our mailing list. we have that too. no more reddit. good day.

Remember when I published a giant, comically long article about how to configure Nginx Web Server on Debian Linux, complete with Certbot/LetsEncrypt HTTPS and... stuff?

Fedfree – NGINX web server on Arch Linux with LetsEncrypt HTTPS and Certbot

Fedfree – NGINX web server on Arch Linux with LetsEncrypt HTTPS and Certbot

Fedfree – NGINX web server on Arch Linux with LetsEncrypt HTTPS and Certbot

Now I have an *even longer* one, for Arch Linux. This one also has *HTTP/3*. And this is being done as a pre-requisite for an Nginx Reverse Proxy guide I'm working on for a self-hosted Invidious guide. Also on Arch Linux. Invidious is insane if not using docker. I built that stuff from the source code.

I feel like randomly promoting a really amazing Free Software project:

Invidious

Invidious

Invidious is an open source alternative front-end to YouTube.

Yes. Invidious is a self-hosted YouTube frontend. It provides a web interface for you to search/watch YouTube videos. You can run it yourself, or use a public instance. I installed *my own* private instance, on my network. It's working great. Your browser won't run all the YouTube bloat. Invidious still has to run Youtube's challenge. Really, really great project. Way better than YouTube Premium.