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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location
Ottawa
Birthday
1987-12-20
Pronouns
he/him (EN)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in dreaming. I practiced recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the hashtag entirely.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6h
@andrew @jscholes I'd say that the default SSH key workflow is fine, unless you need keys on multiple machines. Yubikey for SSH is way more convenient than a jumpbox, or making dozens of keys and keeping track of them all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6h
@andrew @jscholes NFC is a critical feature for me. I do testing across android, IOS, mac, and Windows, and need my secure accounts available in all the places.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
18h
@mcourcel @jaybird110127 @twynn I only have the framework laptop. Never seen the desktop.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
22h
@mcourcel @Jage @jpellis2008 I have two. One in my pocket, and one in the safe.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
22h
@jpellis2008 @Jage No idea, sorry.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@jpellis2008 @Jage I have the more expensive one for work. But no reason to get it unless you need the extra features.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@jpellis2008 If you search yubikey on Amazon, they're the first result. I'm Canadian, so I can't give you useful links; I just get redirected to amazon.ca. Though @Jage selling them on ATGuys might be an interesting idea.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@jscholes @andrew No. That's the TOTP setting I mentioned. Turn that off, and now they work directly with the passcode API on windows/mac/android.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@andrew You need the management tools if you want to put PGP and SSH keys on them. Or at least, that was the quickest way I could figure out of doing it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@munchkinbear In theory yes. But I haven't tested that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
YubiKey And Screen Readers: I couldn't find any real information about how Yubikeys work with screen readers. So I decided to publish some. stuff.interfree.ca/2026/05/13/yubikey-with-screenreaders.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@sclower The best thing is how it’s so much longer than it needs to be. I started laughing when I was sure it was over and it just kept going and going and going and going and going. Instead of ending it just continued to go on and on and on and on and on and on. It wouldn’t stop.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@jscholes @matt And with all the bloated markup, fonts, and so on included in modern Microsoft Word documents, I bet the picture wasn’t even that much larger a file than the original document!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@matt One thing I find is that as the general public becomes more and more removed from how computers work, accessibility gets worse. Today’s interfaces completely hide the file manager from you, never mind just hiding file extensions. And as interfaces become more polished, I’m finding people have much less understanding of the difference between text and a picture of text. Especially as stuff like AI copy text features blur the difference even more for people. When they’re not being shown file extensions, file sizes, or often the filesystem at all, how does a non-technical person easily and quickly tell if they’re dealing with text or an image of text?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
@mcourcel @rlegowski1 But for the record eloquence does not phone home. It has no home to phone lol
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
@mcourcel @rlegowski1 Because eloquence is not 64 bit, NVDA connects to a small 32 bit helper program that runs eloquence. Your machine is blocking that connection. Check your firewall or security software.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
My new Accessible Sensor Readout app for Windows @alexhall @FreakyFwoof When the API finally times out, it does print an error at that point.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
My new Accessible Sensor Readout app for Windows @FreakyFwoof @alexhall Quickest fix is just time out quickly on the API. It's just on 127.0.0.1, so if it's taking more than a few seconds you can assume it's broke.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
My new Accessible Sensor Readout app for Windows @FreakyFwoof @alexhall I verified it by shutting down the windows service it uses, and then I had the same problem. Restart the service and it's all back.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
6d
My new Accessible Sensor Readout app for Windows @alexhall @FreakyFwoof Wait about three minutes and all the readings come back. What's happening is: if it detects you're on a framework, it looks for the framework control API. It waits to display anything until it finds the API. If it finds it quickly, all good. If it can't find it or it's not there, you don't get any readings until the API times out, including the ones that don't require it.