@fastfinge

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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

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 #fedidreams 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 #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream 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 #fedidreams hashtag entirely.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 So I do actually talk in my sleep, even when not recording. Yeah, sometimes it makes sleepovers interesting. Like the time as a teenager I shouted in my sleep "Your fuzzy socks are disturbing me!" while in a camp cabin full of guys. They wouldn't let me live it down for the entire week at camp, and I spent the entire week finding random socks left in my space where I would be sure and find them.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@nick Nah, that Uncle Poser probably doesn't even have a stomach. Loser.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

The only phrase I recorded in my dream journal last night: "My band! It's mr. Meatboy and the beef huggers! Yeah. We all have stomachs." I have no memory of recording this, and that was the only context I gave myself. Although: what more could you possibly want to know? #fedidreams

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

I got tired of how mudlet constantly skips things with the built-in screen reader output, because they're using UIA or something. So I made a thing so mudlet can do direct screen reader output the way mushclient does, probably to the horror of @matt and others: github.com/fastfinge/sral-mudlet

But it works. #NVDA and #jaws and probably other things (though I didn't test zdsr and narrator). It builds on Linux, but it doesn't work on Linux because I don't have a Linux machine with speech dispatcher.

Note: the C code in sral_bridge.dll is AI generated by perplexity computer, because I'm not comfortable enough with C to do it myself from scratch.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@bsg_blog @fireborn @stevenscott Thanks! If it's this, it does look interesting if accessible: github.com/Kalejin/DCSB

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@hongminhee @clv1 @patricus I actually did seriously consider some sort of genetic problem. My grandmother (on my father's side) was a French speaker who had the exact same problems learning English. She took dozens of courses over her life, but never actually learned anything. And yet, both me and my grandmother have won awards for writing in our native languages, and had our writing published. My aunts and uncles are all bilingual, but none of my cousins on that side of the family are: they either speak only French or only English, just like me. So that's a strong pattern. On the other hand, the idea of a genetic inability to learn a second language just seems silly. Why wouldn't it make it harder to learn a first language?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@clv1 @hongminhee @patricus Yup! With French, I tried:
* in-person classroom instruction (both in school and extra-curricular): material is often inaccessible, teachers are mixed quality, I eventually lag behind everyone else in the room and get left behind
* total emersion (I live in Canada and have extended family that doesn't speak English): I never manage to take anything in, and just freeze up when addressed directly
* independent correspondence courses: materials are more accessible and I can go at my own pace, but no matter how I study, I can't pass the tests or use what I've tried to learn in real life
* apps (duolingo): accessibility varies. I eventually get pretty good at doing the exercises offered in the app, but that never generalizes in a way that lets me pass any formal tests or use the language

My measures of success are:
* able to have basic conversations in the language
* able to pass Canadian government tests to be certified in the language for career purposes

I have never achieved either of the above. And after eight years of failures, I've pretty much given up.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@patricus @hongminhee @clv1 It also doesn't solve any of the problems of "just learn English": can you afford the lessons? Do you have the cognitive ability to learn two languages? Do you have the time for the lessons? Are teachers and materials available? Are they accessible? Do you have a place to practice outside of the classroom? Also, "let's erase everyone's culture" doesn't sound, to me, like any better of an answer than "let's make one culture king".

I speak as someone who studied French for eight years straight, an hour a day, and never managed to pass a single course. There are people who just literally can't, when it comes to language learning. I'm one of them. Though to be fair, it's almost certainly a combination of the environment, the instruction, and other factors, rather than some flaw innate to me. But either way, I've never found a method that works.

I actually toyed with learning Korean, thinking that maybe it was the gendered nature of French, as well as the spelling, that was the problem. Plus I thought a more regular alphabet might help me. But after eight years of bashing my head against the French wall, I just...couldn't. Picking up a new language course felt like going back to hell, and I couldn't make myself stick with it for more than a week.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jaz @Kingslayer Also good to know that not all servers keep everything forever. Mine deletes anything older than 180 days. The fediverse isn’t guaranteed to be forever, either.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg lol you know you want too. An algorithm that requires more cpu must be better, right?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@amir I hope you and your family are okay!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 Not really. You just don’t have to do all the work of using gendered vocabulary. I have no idea if the person who delivers my mail is a man, a woman, or possibly some sort of robotic drone. Postal worker means I don’t have to decide, or even think about the matter.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 I mean I prefer neutral terms in a lot of places. Actor, not actress. Flight attendant, not stewardess. But that’s more because gender doesn’t matter in these cases, and I resent having to think about the gender of the person I’m writing about, and then pick the right term for them. Especially today now that gender is more fluid. I neither no ‘nor care about the gender identity of an actor I heard in a movie once, and I am absolutely not looking it up. So on the whole gender neutral language is a win just because it saves me time. Like if you’re writing about someone’s hair, the anti-woke people want me to figure out what gender of hair it is, spell blonde accordingly, and use brunette for women and brown for men. Screw ‘em. Being politically correct is so much less effort.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 Actually, as far as I can tell, even though “AI!” Is plastered all over the corporate website and sales pitches to businesses, it’s just a complicated set of regular expressions. It’ll complain about postwoman, fireman, or grompulatorman. It seems to know about superman and Batman, but Spider-Man is apparently not okay. I would like to stop thinking about a “spider person” now, please.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Thanks, AI diversity proofreader! Because yes of course that’s a thing that exists, sigh. Highlighting the word “Walkman” and suggesting “Consider a more gender neutral term, like walkperson” was sure helpful! Did one of the “anti-woke” boomer standup “comedians” train this thing?Because that sounds like something I’d hear on some cursed Netflix comedy special. Probably just before the “funny” rant on pronouns, and right after the jokes about hyphenated last names.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@bsg_blog @fireborn @stevenscott It would be good to know; thanks!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@midzi @stevenscott Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@fireborn @stevenscott This one is written in autoit, of all things. But as I say, it meets my particular, simple needs. I wonder how the blind Twitch streamers handle soundboards? @bsg_blog

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Seirdy Just wanted to let you know that hf.space should be listed in spammy-subdomains.txt. I'm getting a wave of spam from instances all called "Pleroma Factory" with various subdomains of hf.space. Example: ali525-q.hf.space #fediblock

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@stevenscott I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort:

When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict with them; you just can't use those keys for sounds. I have alt+control+n for NVDA, and alt+control+J for jaws, so when I press those soundboard just does nothing and they do what they're supposed to.

If you press the key for a sound multiple times, that sound just restarts from the beginning. You cannot pause or stop a sound that's currently playing. So don't press the wrong key!

If you want to quit soundboard, press alt+control+q.

If you want to change the sound on a particular key, you have to open soundboard.ini (a file it makes in the folder with soundboard.exe when you run it) in notepad and change it yourself.

If you want to change the volume of soundboard, or make it use a different sound device, it doesn't matter what you want, because you can't. For simple lads like me, that's okay. But I suspect it might be a problem for all of you complicated radio professionals. LOL :-)

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