@fastfinge

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

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

@humanhorseshoes @FreakyFwoof It's hard to be frightening when you have to start off by saying sorry for being angry.

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

@FreakyFwoof Depends. Canadians who were raised here and grew up rural are actually way more sheltered than Amerricans. Because Canada! Is! Huge! If you live in a town of a thousand, that's hundreds of KM away from anywhere, you can live your entire life never leaving Canada and never encountering someone who isn't Canadian, until you go to Toronto or some other Canadian city. I think the difference is Canadians don't think of ourselves the way Americans do, and don't proudly try to be sheltered the way they do; it just happens. But it does mean that oddly, people who weren't born and raised in Canada are more likely to go for the British/commonwealth way of saying things because they're aware that it's the "correct" way in Canada, whereas people born and raised in rural Canada are likely to say things the American way because it's what they've heard on TV and they aren't even aware of any other way to say it.

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

@FreakyFwoof One of the Canadian announcers during the world cup did, in fact, say full-ham when talking about the history of a player.

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

@dumpsterqueer At least in the blindness community, because the "mainstream" options are inaccessible, and we still want and need to communicate with our family and co-workers. If that happened on fedi, it would be a lot better for us.

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

AI Musings

@tristan My hope is that more and more bespoke software forces open protocols to stay open, and closed protocols to become more open. Because it's not just blindness where this is happening. For a while over on reddit, there were three to five new RSS clients announced daily. And the flood of productivity/calendar/to-do apps seems endless. We're probably heading for a world where any particular software is used by hundreds or thousands of people, not millions of people. The same way YouTube made audiences for any particular video smaller, and Spotify made the audience for any particular song smaller, the audience for any particular bit of software will begin to shrink. The thing we need to make sure is that the protocols and data stay open, so you don't have to use Bob's Random Calendar 7.3.6, because that's the one your boss likes. I doubt Bob made his particular calendaring application accessible. I think destroying the software monoculture is one of the key ways AI will improve the world. Previously, who cared if Twitter or Gmail or Facebook closed an API? Nobody's writing there own email client or social media viewer or social media browser anyway! The vast majority of people just used the default app. Now, however, everyone is having AI write solutions for them. When those solutions break, they'll scream.

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

An Accessible Theme for Oh My Posh

Oh My Posh is a set of configurations and themes for powershell, that allows dynamic modification of the prompt depending on what you're doing. This is the theme I use as my daily driver, and how I have powershell set up as a screen reader user.

stuff.interfree.ca/2026/08/19/accessible-oh-my-posh.html

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

@FreakyFwoof Oh, I was just looking for another fic to read. Yay!

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

@lerven @munchkinbear Oh good. I really didn't want to have to fix it in my addon. I'm so glad it's not my problem. I just have to deal with the "make questionmarks sound like jaws" guy, who can't describe how questionmarks sound different with jaws (I don't own jaws) but wants me to do it anyway.

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

@quanin @munchkinbear I can afford to downgrade quite a lot when the time comes. Or just move again. I was with accuris for years before they decided to screw me. So I'm used to the "getting a good price and moving all your stuff when the good prices go good bye" dance.

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

@quanin @munchkinbear Huh. All their dedicated servers are out of stock. In otherwords if I ever give mine up, I'm never ever getting a deal this good again. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, hardware prices being what they are. I'm more surprised they haven't raised my price or started messing me around to try and get rid of me.

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

@quanin @munchkinbear I'm on a dedicated server at ServaRica. But if you're willing to put up with a lot of Disc IO lag from the swarms of assholes running seedboxes there, they have some cheap VPS plans that are okay. servarica.com

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

@quanin @munchkinbear TierNet looks okay for the price. I just refuse to do business with Americans or have my data on American servers, controlled by American companies. I pay more for less, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

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

@munchkinbear @quanin Eh, sometimes physical hardware has to be moved from a building in one city to a building in another city. With the current price of disc and ram, I don't wanna pay for two machines to fix that kind of rare downtime.

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

@plzupgrademe The guys at the data center were picking up the server and moving it from a building in one city to a building in another city.

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

@quanin No, it was hammering the number of open TCPIP connections allowed by Linux. And that, thus, hammers load when you have hundreds of thousands of open sockets.

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

@quanin Oh, no, the postgresql database is fine. Connections are capped at 200 and reused. But in order to clear queues faster, we accept posts from everyone and just hold on to them until a database connection frees up, so we're not the bottleneck and everyone can clear their queues quicker.

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

@quanin Nope. I run iceshrimp (iceshrimp.dev). It has its own, capped at 250000 connections.

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

@quanin Load is only 4.6. I thought it'd be way worse. It was up to 18.4 and exhausted the connections pool for the first ten minutes or so.

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

@quanin But my poor activity pub processor that's now trying to catch up with 60 billion posts from everyone everywhere all at once does not. LOL

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

Is our long international nightmare finally over? Is my server back up after scheduled maintenance? If your reading this, yes it is! All of our collective problems are solved!

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