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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)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@serrebi The item I ordered is a replacement filter for a model of air purifier that's no longer manufactured. If I could've easily gotten the item off Amazon Canada, I would have. So if I actually get the item, and it's the right thing, it'll be a huge win for innosearch. And a justification for why I should use them for all my orders. Honestly, if I get an item, and it's incorrect, I'll still give them a second chance and order something slightly easier. It's just if I never get anything at all that I'd jump to not recommending them based on this first experience.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
So emailed me today to let me know they found another seller for the item, and asked if I wanted them to order it from there instead. I suspect I know what seller they're talking about, but that seller only ships to the United States. I said sure anyway, so let's see if they can get it to me. This feels more like having a personal shopper than an AI; I'm not complaining!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@RegGuy That's the other advantage of apps. They usually let you add a feed, and set all items to read. Then you just get the new stuff. Some websites have every single article they ever published in the feed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
AI and the Sound of Disability: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/04/11/ai-and-the-sound-of.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@adam @admin Lemme send out some emails and see if anyone other than me wants this
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
We should have a relay for all the blind owned and operated instances to join. @adam it feels like you could maybe make this happen? Could we get @admin and @admin@caneandable.social interested in joining? It'd be a way to make sure everyone's accessibility related timelines are as complete as possible. Happy to kick in a few bucks if there's interest.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@RegGuy Techdirt is good, and offers full text RSS. But I think I'm subscribed to 250 feeds or something at this point. Canadian stuff like the CBC, the BBC for international news, Bleeping Computer and The Verge for tech...those might be good places to start.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@RegGuy Yeah, your email client probably does offer RSS. However, the advantage of a specialized RSS reader is that it can grab the full article text, even if the publication doesn't put full article text in the RSS feed, strip out the ads and distractions, and put it in a clean interface for you to read. As 99 percent of websites offer RSS, I've found I only need to check my RSS reader for the headlines. If you're on Mac or IOS, I recommend Lire for this purpose. Otherwise, Miniflux is also excellent. In fact, Lire can sync what you've read with Miniflux; I read my RSS both on my phone and my Windows desktop, and this works perfectly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
The best thing about : my feedreader generally grabs the article close to publication, so I get the headline the journalist actually wanted to put on it, rather than what performed best in A/B testing or what upper management demanded.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@jaybird110127 They actually do. But they’re formatted as html and tweesecake grabs the text instead of the url.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@MostlyBlindGamer I don't mind well documented instability. But Hugo is written in go, a language I'm entirely ignorant of, so I can't even consult the code. Also, it's dealing with my least favourite part of development: the user interface. When something in the backend goes wrong, consulting the logs and figuring it out can be kind of fun. But for front-end stuff, it's just frustration.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
My Accessible Self-hosting Tech Stack: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/04/10/my-accessible-selfhosting-tech-stack.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
continue to follow up. Apparently the seller is back ordered. However, it seems innosearch is doing AI right: lots of qualified human oversight when needed. If I had ordered directly on the seller’s inaccessible website, the product would still be back ordered. Worse, I might not even be able to contact the seller and figure out what’s happening, depending on how accessible the contact form is. It’s worth using innosearch just for the time savings of having them deal with it, so I don’t have to.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@MostlyBlindGamer Oh my God I'm so glad I didn't try to build an entire thing in hugo by myself. I find hugo utterly, utterly baffling and incomprehensible. I've spent like four hours trying to figure out how to get this shortcode to paginate...or at least only display 50 books or something...and not dump 500 book links on the page where I put it. It might actually be impossible. Google Gemini fixed the bookmarks shortcode, but I just copied the magic letters. I have no idea why that worked. Or why it won't work for this shortcode. github.com/kottkrig/microdotblog-bookshelf-shortcode/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
Open Protocols and APIs: The Overlooked Key to Accessibility: stuff.interfree.ca/2025/04/09/open-protocols-and-apis-the.html
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@citro Hah. I did mine in ogg. Then I discovered lossless so redid it all in .shn shortin audio, a format nobody has ever heard of.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
Death, graphic images @mcourcel New Nicole spam has an image of the same girl in the previous profile pics, but this picture is of her badly beaten dead body.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
Death, graphic images Yikes! It Seems the Nicole spam that’s been all over the fediverse recently is taking a dark turn. The end of Nicole - RBlind rblind.com/post/4866629
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
So another advantage of : it has its own browser extension, so it can actually bookmark the version of the page I'm seeing. While has a nice reader interface, it gets blocked by a lot of places, so it's not as useful as it could be.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
9mo
@phillycodehound But requires mailgun, needs an account to comment (comments don't seem federated), and has a bunch of other annoying issues. I'll use until it inevitably enshitifies.