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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
Admin
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
1h
@nicoco @jackf723 @debacle I would love that! My primary uses would be some one to one bridges with signal and whatsapp, and joining one large Matrix space. I admin a moderately sized Lemmy server, but Lemmy only delivers support and urgent announcements via Matrix. There's nothing really private in any of my chats, just co-workers and former co-workers whining about work that we'd rather our employers not be able to read. My jid is @fastfinge@im.interfree.ca. Everyone on im.interfree.ca is either an uptime bot, me, or another blind person; public jabber servers all have inaccessible captchas, so I give out accounts on mine to fellow blind people on request.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1h
@ppatel Good luck, and keep me posted! It's really something the community needs; we have good clients for XMPP, IRC, and the deltachat and signal clients are fine. But the accessibility ecosystem around Matrix is still quite bad. I'm glad you're brave enough to tackle it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5h
@mistersql And half the feeds are behind cloudflare, blocking automated scrapers. When automation is the entire point of rss!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5h
@debacle @jackf723 @nicoco Mostly there hosting is so cheap. And I can then put xmpp bots on my machines and use snikkit as uptime monitor as well as comms for when my stuff is down. Snikkit is a cheap and cheerful solution that doesn’t involve giving money to gross enterprise cloud companies. So I could run xmpp myself, but it would defeat one of my primary purposes.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5h
@debacle @jackf723 @nicoco For various reasons I pay snikkit for server hosting. So I have to use the public bridges.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5h
@jackf723 Yup, xmpp is what I’m using. But the matrix bridges suck.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
5h
I would love a native, screenreader , fast, app for Windows. I would also like not to create it, because Matrix is even more vast, complex, and incomprehensible than and . Anyone? No? Didn't think so. Sigh.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
10h
@fastfinge @MostlyBlindGamer And now it's not. Thank goodness for AI; I have no interest in learning rust. C#, Python, and PHP are more than enough languages for me to keep in my head. github.com/trypsynth/fedra/pull/102
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11h
@MostlyBlindGamer Well, the things that once worked still work. But the thing that was broken is still broken.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11h
Quick test.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@fastfinge Nope. I spoke too soon...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
Yes! fixed the bug where refreshing didn't happen on timelines without streaming support! Woohoo!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1d
@kaleb@fedi.haugenh.us Just so you know, web finger is not working correctly with your split-domain setup. Webfinger fails on haugenh.us, but because you announce that as your domain instead of fedi.haugenh.us, your posts never end up in people's inboxes on your subscribed relays. Here's a snip of a recent failed job from my logs:
Job details
ID
019f6ca4-c753-a7e5-bc7e-87ff17ace5f5
Queue
inbox
Status
Delayed
Queued at
2026-07-16 20
​:36:​06+00
Delayed until
2026-07-17 05
​:01:​23+00
Duration
37m 23s
Queue duration
4h 10m
Retry count
8

Exception details
System.Exception: Failed to WebFinger 'acct:kaleb@haugenh.us'
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Federation.ActivityPub.UserResolver.WebFingerAsync(String query, Boolean recurse, String actorUri, Dictionary`2 responses) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Federation/ActivityPub/UserResolver.cs:line 217
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Federation.ActivityPub.UserResolver.ResolveInternalAsync(String query, ResolveFlags flags) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Federation/ActivityPub/UserResolver.cs:line 358
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Federation.ActivityPub.UserResolver.ResolveAsync(String query, ResolveFlags flags) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Federation/ActivityPub/UserResolver.cs:line 397
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Services.NoteService.ResolveNoteAsync(String uri, ASNote fetchedNote, User user, Boolean clearHistory, Boolean forceRefresh) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Services/NoteService.cs:line 1532
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Federation.ActivityPub.ActivityHandlerService.HandleAnnounceAsync(ASAnnounce activity, User resolvedActor) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Federation/ActivityPub/ActivityHandlerService.cs:line 458
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Federation.ActivityPub.ActivityHandlerService.PerformActivityAsync(ASActivity activity, String inboxUserId, String authenticatedUserId) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Federation/ActivityPub/ActivityHandlerService.cs:line 99
at Iceshrimp.Backend.Core.Queues.InboxQueue.InboxQueueProcessorDelegateAsync(Job job, InboxJobData jobData, IServiceProvider scope, CancellationToken token) in /_/Iceshrimp.Backend/Core/Queues/InboxQueue.cs:line 38

Job data
{
"authenticatedUserId": "9z3c66cxr2hfh2pp"
}

Job payload
{
"@context": "
www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
"id": "
rel.re/actor/activities/081074f7e79c4a10218df19c9f8634fd",
"type": "Announce",
"actor": "
rel.re/actor",
"attributedTo": "",
"object": "
fedi.haugenh.us/users/kaleb/statuses/01KXP9QANDD0H8TYCNH5HPCQ2X",
"to": [
"
rel.re/actor/followers"
],
"published": "2026-07-16T20
​:36:​06.033429434Z"
}
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@KaraLG84 @andrew @simon Nope. I don’t contribute there until they start giving a shit about accessibility. So never, I guess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
Today in things I didn't want to figure out: why my inbox had a giant queue of several thousand statuses, just sitting there, unprocessed. So I didn't figure it out. I just restarted the database and the server and then it processed the queue just fine. Go figure. Computers, amiright? Anyway, if you tooted me and heard nothing back, my server maybe threw it on the floor. Or maybe will process it sometime later, when it's in a better mood. Or maybe I just don't like you and am ignoring your toots. It's probably not that last one. You'd know if it was.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
My powershell aliases really confuse any AI agent that tries to work on my computer. Nano is an alias to notepad because I got tired of typing the wrong thing when I was working on the windows command line. Docker is aliased to a script that spins up a wsl distro and starts the requested container. Sudo exists and launches an admin powershell. The native windows GNU utils are installed and in the path. Apt and apt-get are aliases to winget. The prompt is completely custom, and contains the battery charge of my laptop, but not the current working directory (that goes in the window title). Sure, an AI can write an entire text to speech system from scratch. But it's the little things that confuse them, every single time. I guess the modern version of "be ungovernable" is "differ from the training data in small and non-obvious ways".
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@KaraLG84 @andrew @simon Nope. Springer Designs was what the company renamed itself to when it released the Book Courier/Book Port. It was originally Ostrich Software. Here's the installation disc for the RoadRunner transfer software for Windows: share.interfree.ca/app/open/2af6XfRBMFP-pFGJNbme7Gm-weyDc69UiDw-GpHEafHPvuG?view=1
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2d
@andrew @simon @KaraLG84 I had the road runner. The original maker was a company called Springer designs, I believe. It could only read text files, and had 1.5 mb of storage.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@Shantastic @technocounselor @lynessence Invite code if your looking for a team: QTHXZW
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1w
@mektastic Invite code if your looking for a team: QTHXZW
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