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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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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)
matrix @fastfinge:interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Okay, here's a list of the games I have:
* Alcyone: The Last City: fully playable, but only with annoying SAPI text to speech
* Alt-Frequencies: fully playable
* Arcade Spirits: fully playable, outputs text to the clipboard, so you need autoclip
* Arcade Spirits: The New Challengers: same
* As Dusk Falls: fully playable
* Balatro: you need a mod but installation is easy
* BROK the InvestiGator: fully playable
* Citizen of Rome - Dynasty Ascendant: fully playable
* Conjury: fully playable
* cyberpunkdreams: fully playable
* Dark Passenger: fully playable
* Diablo: mostly playable
* Doki Doki Literature Club: you need a mod and installing it is irritating
* Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!: this is a remastered version of the above game and the mod is much easier to install and better in every way
* Escape from Norwood: fully playable
* Factorio: fully playable with mods
* Firebird: fully playable
* Forza Motorsport: fully playable
* Hearthstone: fully playable with mods
* Heroes Rise: The Prodigy: fully playable
* Kilta: fully playable
* The Last of Us™ Part I: fully playable
* The Last of Us™ Part II: fully playable
* Lost and Hound: fully playable
* Luck be a Landlord: fully playable
* Magic Research: fully playable
* Magic Research 2: fully playable
* Microsoft Flight Simulator: only playable if you devote your entire life to it and pay a monthly subscription for the mod and make the correct pagan sacrifices
* Night of the Full Moon: fully playable
* Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain: fully playable
* Periphery Synthetic: fully playable
* Pizza Game: fully playable
* Sanctuary in Time: fully playable
* The Secret of Darkwoods: fully playable
* SEQUENCE STORM: fully playable
* Shining Song Starnova: fully playable with autoclip
* Skullgirls: fully playable if you own a controller
* Slay the Spire: fully playable with a mod called say the spire
* Smugglers 5: Invasion: playable if you like using object navigation and OCR
* soundStrider: fully playable
* Stardew Valley: playable with mods
* Thaumistry: In Charm's Way: fully playable
* Trawel: fully playable
* Warsim: The Realm of Aslona: fully playable
* World Empire 2027: fully playable

I would recommend sequence storm as your first place to start. Good fun, finishable in a few days, requires no modding. Then maybe move on to Slay The Spire and Balatro to get used to modding stuff and how that feels. Both excellent games that take months to master. There are many more mainstream accessible games, these are just the ones I've personally played.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel You can also find other completely blind folks on steam, and follow them. Someone's steam profile shows every game they've played, how long they've played it, and the achievements they have (if the game supports achievements). However, some games may have accessibility mods, so once you find a blind person who plays something, you then need to do a quick internet search for game+accessible mod or whatever.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel They...uh...sort of have? But a game can have all of the accessibility features and still not be fully playable without vision. But if you've played a game for less than two hours, Steam will issue an automatic refund, no questions asked. partner.steamgames.com/doc/accessibility_features
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel The nice thing about Steam is your saves are stored to the cloud. So assuming you have lots of Internet, you could get away with a 500 gig drive and only install the game you're currently playing. If you uninstall it, you can generally just reinstall and pick back up again and all your saves will be there. Also there are smaller games like Stardew Valley that's only like 500 megs or slay the spire that I think is under a gig. It's just the AAA titles that are huge.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Heck, even hearthstone, a turn based card game, is five gigs! Stuff like The Last of Us is a 100 gig download, but then it decompresses itself and caches all of its shaders and so on and so on.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Just the two The Last of Us Games are close to 500 gigs all by themselves. Then Forza is like another hundred, AS Dusk Falls is multiple gigs, etc. A terabyte of games is surprisingly few games, these days.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel The only things on the drive are steam games, and files synced to it from iCloud and Dropbox. So it's pretty much impossible for me to lose any data. Downloading almost 1 TB of steam games and another TB of synced files would be annoying, but not the end of the world.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel I'm also keeping a close eye on the Framework Community forums, and I haven't seen anyone else reporting this type of issue. So...yeah. Once I get the new motherboard I'll have a lot more testing options, and almost none of them will involve opening the laptop multiple times. And if the motherboard is failing, it's still under warranty, so I can go through the replacement process on the media PC while still having a working laptop. If the drive is failing, it's mine and I'll be sad and replace it. If the BIOS is failing, I'll at least have more proof of that.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel If it wasn't a third party drive that I'd installed myself, I would be. But I hate to be "that guy": I opened the laptop and did things to it and now I want you to fix my problems!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Normally they do allow BIOS downgrades actually. Just this one is special because the keys needed changing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel I could, but Framework doesn't allow downgrading to older BIOS versions because they changed the CA and key for secure boot and code signing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel The problem is...I...don't know? I don't always leave the laptop on all the time, obviously. And sometimes, of course, Windows just crashes for one reason or another. Or it installs an update overnight or whatever. And then the first few times I noticed it I went "Huh." and rebooted before I noticed the pattern. And of course it's my secondary drive, so I only notice it's gone when I go to play a game (it's where Steam installs all the games); if I'm just browsing the web or whatever it could be gone without me even noticing. October is when I noticed the pattern, started leaving the laptop on 24/7, and checking the drive frequently.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Well, why would a connection on the board die after 24 hours? And then be fine the minute I shut down the machine and power it back on? Neither make sense to me. But if I run Forza at the max settings, I can watch the battery discharge even while the laptop is plugged in. It's fun! It makes me wonder about some kind of power management thing in the BIOS? Framework did release a BIOS update recently, that lets the laptop charge to a max of 80 percent for battery protection if it hasn't been unplugged in over a week.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel I don't even have another 180w USBC adapter to test with. And these things run super hot! So...I'm also giving this adapter a side-eye. I don't have a meter handy. But if I did...I wonder...
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel I'm also starting to wonder about something being underpowered. The USBC adapter is 180w, but at full load the machine pulls 240w. In theory, it should pull from the battery to make up the difference until the load goes back down. But, well, you know. Theory. I'm also grabbing myself a 240w USBC adapter, and I'm interested to see if that changes anything.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Yup, and that would be annoying. But the motherboard has two drive slots, so it wouldn't be the end of the world. Somehow, though, I doubt it. I installed the drive in January and it worked perfectly until October. That kind of connection doesn't usually just die. Or if it does, other things on the board usually die alongside it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel I've had the laptop for a year. I don't actually need to upgrade the motherboard; I'm only doing it because I was otherwise going to build a media PC anyway, and this way I get two for the price of one. I wouldn't recommend any other blind Framework 16 owner to upgrade unless they have some use for the old motherboard. The second hard drive that is having issues is one I installed in January myself. So if I wasn't upgrading the laptop, I would just replace it and things would be fine. Nothing else is wrong with the machine. And if it was, all of the ports are expansion cards that I can replace for between $5 and $15 depending on the port in question.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel See, I have that with my macs. But every Windows laptop I've ever had, even though the CPU etc are still fine, something always goes wrong by between three and five years. Sometimes it's the fans, or the keyboard, or the screen hinge, or the USB plugs get wonky, or the headphone jack stops working, or...something. And then it's out of warranty so it'd cost so much to fix it I might as well just get a new one. I've tossed so many perfectly good components for that reason over the years that it makes me cry.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel The Framework is...not bad to work on, for a laptop. So still bad and horrible obviously. But it's worth it to have a laptop I can actually upgrade; I'm sick and tired of a new laptop every three years. And I wanted a media PC anyway, so reusing the old parts fits perfectly into my life.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@quanin @mcourcel Yeah, that's the next step. I got myself the upgraded motherboard and graphics module, so once they arrive I'll be opening up the machine again anyway, so I'll do more drive testing at that point. I intend to reuse the old motherboard to build a little media PC, so I might just put a new drive in the laptop, and put this drive in there and see what it does. That way if it is the drive it'll be easier for me to access, and I need a drive for the media PC anyway.