#open source

Open Printer is an open-source, repairable inkjet printer designed for makers, artists, and anyone tired of throwaway hardware. Built with standard mechanical components and modular parts, it’s easy to assemble, modify, and repair. You can print on standard sheets or paper rolls and choose between black or color cartridges, refillable at your convenience.

This is fucking terrifying: Google is implementing Android Developer Verification, a program that would require all developers to register with Google before distributing apps on Android starting September 2026. There is a widely-circulated narrative that Google already backed down from this. They didn't, and that misunderstanding may be the most dangerous part of the story right now.

This will kill open source. This will make it easier for governments to ban apps. This will mean apps will have to abide by what Google deems acceptable.

Also, deleting Google Play Store does NOT mean you're safe from this. YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD AN UNVERIFIED APP ON YOUR ANDROID PHONE, PERIOD. To use an example from the video: it's the equivalent of preventing you from installing a .exe on your computer.

Google is controlling more and more. This is censorship. Fuck this shit.

More info here: keepandroidopen.org. They have a list of worldwide national regulators you can contact to lodge a complaint.

Hi! This is the official blog for The Sims Mod Manager, a free and open source app that handles mods for The Sims 1, The Sims 2, The Sims 3, The Sims Medieval and The Sims 4 in one place. Windows, Mac and Linux.

Install, enable, disable and sort your mods without ever opening the game folders yourself. It finds your Mods folder on its own, including when the game sits somewhere the launcher never put it and when the folder name is in your language rather than English. Drop a zip, a rar, a 7z or a .sims3pack on the window and it unpacks everything to where that game reads it. Disabling just renames the file so the game skips it, so nothing you own ever gets deleted.

It pulls the artwork out of your .package files too, so the library looks like your mods instead of a wall of file names. And it'll tell you when two mods are overwriting the same thing, when a folder is buried too deep for the game to load it, and when something you have installed is known to be broken.

It reads your saves as well. Every save the game wrote, backups included, opened without opening the game: each household with its funds and its house, who lives there and how they feel about each other, the photos your Sims took, and the numbers for the whole world, from population and net worth down to the highest skill anybody in it has. It only ever reads. Nothing in a save gets written, renamed or moved.

It handles your packs now as well, the ones EA sold you rather than the ones you downloaded. Every expansion, game pack, stuff pack and kit you own on one screen with its own artwork, and in The Sims 4 the names come out of the installer in whatever language you play in.

You can switch them off from there. In The Sims 4 the app writes the same setting the game's own pack screen writes, so the two agree with each other; in The Sims 3 it goes through the registry, Windows only, and it needs administrator rights, which it tells you rather than letting a switch snap back. Nothing on disk moves and nothing gets deleted either way, so turning one back on puts it back. The game only reads its pack list when it starts, so whatever you change is waiting for you at the next launch.

The Sims 2 Legacy Collection can do it too, sitting behind a toggle in Settings because a neighbourhood opened without a pack it was played with is the quickest way to lose a Sims 2 save, so back yours up first. The Sims 1 lists what you have and leaves it there, since its expansions installed straight into the base game.

Ten languages, dark mode, and the Sims 1 UI sounds if you want them.

There's also a shop in the app, The Exchange, and it exists for the people making the mods. Upload from the portal on the site, write your page the way you want it (bold, italics, links, the formatting you'd get anywhere else), pick your own screenshots, call your version whatever you call it. Push an update and everyone who installed it hears about it. Your name is on the card and so is the number of people who have actually downloaded it, counted properly, one machine once a day, nothing estimated. Releasing the same thing in eight shades no longer means eight cards on the shelf either: give the set a name and the colours gather under one, each still its own page and its own link. Every mod gets a link that opens straight to it inside the app, so you can post it wherever you already post. No queue to sit in, nobody taking a cut, no feed deciding who deserves to be seen. It's your page.

Download now for Mac, Windows and Linux. It's free!