User avatar
🇨🇦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
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
7mo
Lying here with a Godawful flu on new years eve, realizing this will be the first year in my adult life where I won't be staying up until midnight, and having that thing. You know, the grumpy thing. Where you go "I want a good book to ! Right now! That will make me happy and not sick!" But you're grumpy and sick and cranky, so every book on your TBR pile isn't good enough and you throw them out of the pram in a tantrum. Then you go through your Goodreads recommendations for a while, sniffling snot and muttering "Does nobody write any good books anymore? I just want a good book! I must have read all the good books already. All of these books are stupid. Why do they let stupid people write stupid books." So you look through your list of comfort books for a re-read, but it turns out all of those books are also either bad or boring and you hate them, and this must, somehow, be somebody else's fault. I guess I'll just put on some stupid YouTube videos if I can get the stupid app on my stupid phone to work and probably fall asleep between coughing and shivering with a fever. All because nobody writes any good books, anymore. I'd like you all to know that this is your fault.
2
1
5
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@clv1 Lenovo and Toshiba used to. I don’t know if they still do.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@neurrone I upgraded the motherboard and video card. You can find an accessible description of the framework here:
community.frame.work/t/framework-16-visually-impaired-owners-case-mid-plate-and-mainboard-orientation-guide/51168

And step by step instructions are here:
guides.frame.work/Guide/Mainboard/283?lang=en

Between these two things, you have enough to get the job done.

When you have to re-enter your bitlocker key, it boots into a recovery version of Windows, where you can load narrator, enter your key, and restart.
2
0
2
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@clv1 I haven't written any review. But to quickly answer your questions:
* no critical keys are missing, at least on the North American keyboard layout, and I also have the number pad module. The only missing keys from a full keyboard are the six pack (home/end, page up/down, etc.)
* the keys are fine, though there is no gap between the function keys, and no dot on f4, f8, etc.
* However, the laptop runs hot enough that I prefer to leave it on a table and use a wireless keyboard, instead of holding the laptop on my lap
* Audio quality is fair, once you enable the NVDA or jaws feature that stops the sound system from falling asleep. It's just the standard real tech audio chip that's on pretty much all laptops these days
* Framework updates the driver bundle regularly, and the driver and bios updaters are fully accessible
* The only problems come if you allow Windows Update to install driver updates. Sometimes it installs incorrect drivers and you have to use system restore to roll back an update
* If you live with others: the fans are extremely! loud when the laptop is busy. If someone was trying to, for example, watch TV or listen to music while you were gaming on the laptop, they would get quite annoyed
2
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Upgrading my Framework 16 took about three hours, but was otherwise painless. Windows did need me to re-set-up my fingerprint and pin after changing the entire motherboard, and I had to re-enter my bitlocker recovery key. But that process was accessible.
3
3
6
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@TomGrant91 @alexchapman How it is is slow lol
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@alexchapman @TomGrant91 So long as thrive is smart enough to display the plain text version of the note, it’ll be fine. Tweesecake displays the formatted version, but strips all formatting, so links don’t work.
2
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@TomGrant91 It’s a bug in tweesecake. Use any other client and the url works fine.
1
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
0
0
3
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
So in today's edition of problems: reading a book with a character named Mami is deeply disconcerting, because my screen reader pronounces it "mommy". I just thought...the character was weirdly being called mom by everyone until I finally stopped to check the spelling. Screen readers of the time are also why I thought "anime" rimed with "time" until I was like 14. Uselessly, looking it up online gives me four different examples of how to pronounce Mami, all with different emphasis and "a" sounds. Including one joker who really is pronouncing it exactly like "mommy". So I dunno.
2
11
10
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@menelion That was my first thought. But I wonder if places like this measure the performance of the support staff by number of tickets closed. So if they fix a big issue, maybe letting them close a bunch of the related tickets would give them a boost to whatever nonsense corporate performance metrics there managers force on them?
0
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Hey guys who work in a or or provide support for hosting: if I open a support ticket about an issue, and the issue is resolved an hour later without a response to my ticket, what's the Etiquette here? Should I close the ticket as resolved without waiting for an answer? Or does that mess up your quotas or workflows or whatever? Is it impolite to close my own ticket when I notice the problem is fixed without waiting for your response? Am I taking away the satisfaction you get from closing a ticket? Or am I just making your life easier by saving you from dealing with yet one more customer.
6
4
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
AI Showerthought: Suno is The Sims for music. You can have a lot of fun with Suno, and even share some cool stuff. But nobody would share a livestream of The Sims and call it a movie. In the same way, creations made by Suno are neat, but they're an entirely different genre of thing than human music. Also, some of us have fun torturing our creations in both Suno and The Sims. Because Suno is incapable of saying "No, a modern pop version of that would not work and should not exist". As someone entirely nonmusical, it really does feel like having a musician trapped in my basement that I can torture with all of my impossible bad ideas.
1
2
2
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@J3317 Nope. It works in every client but tweesecake because tweesecake is a buggy mess.
1
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Today I learned why Sonata created a framework to run AI voices outside of . First, NVDA doesn't come with all of the standard libraries. Second, there's no good way of updating dependencies in a bundled addon. Third, NVDA really, really hates it if you include several hundred dependencies in your addon. Anyway, here's kitten TTS, the other synthesizer I wanted to try with NVDA. Unfortunately, the model doesn't support streaming output, so even though it's actually faster than Supertonic, it feels slower when used with NVDA. Also, it takes several minutes to install, makes NVDA startup 30 seconds slower, and freezes the change synthesizer dialogue for about 45 seconds when you open it. It does miss words less frequently, though, and pronounces text better. The ultimate result of my two-day investigation is that even the highly optimized open-source AI imbedded models are not yet ready for screen reader use. Some tree-shaking could fix some of these issues, but it still won't allow for streaming, so it's not worth it. I'd really like to know what Microsoft and Narrator are doing to get the natural voices so snappy. github.com/fastfinge/kittentts-nvda/
1
9
2
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
It’s in alpha.
0
0
2
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@amir I think these are problems with supertonic itself. So I don’t know if I can fix them. I experience the same issues on the official Android app.
0
0
1
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
@amir It's out. Unfortunately, while they sound really good, they sometimes skip words. Not okay for a screen reader haha.
2
0
0
0
User avatar
🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
8mo
Okay! If you're running 64-bit , and you want to play with a new engine that sort of works most of the time, here's the first release. The engine only supports English. github.com/fastfinge/supertonic-nvda/releases/tag/v1
6
12
4
0