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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
11mo
@alexhall Yup. Mine broke when the cane was folded. The clamp hadn’t fully closed and I didn’t notice, whacking it on a chair leg as I was storing the cane under my seat at the office. Snapped the plastic right off.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@alexhall It doesn’t. I couldn’t get a replacement. Indestructible cane only lasted a year.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@alexhall Issue I had with mine is the clamp broke off. That’s just a tiny plastic thing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@silverleaf57 Yup!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
I dunno what it is, but something about Dreamy Train makes it the perfect . I wish it had an dub or official English translation from , though Google Translate works fine. Yes, it's simple (you can play the entire thing with three buttons), but...I dunno. Something about driving my train through a continent obviously based on Japan with a vaguely Cute Japanese woman giving me instructions in a language I don't speak is really Zen. Transport World Simulator and Tube Sim just stress me out. But Dreamy Train has just enough to keep my attention, without getting my adrenaline up, and enough content not to feel too repetitive or grindy. mm-galabo.com/dreamytrain/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
I at the advanced poles in in the . As a voter everything was smooth, even though I didn't get my voter card in the mail, and the Elections Ontario app requires a driver's license to look up your voter registration. It was busy; already a lineup at 10 AM. Hopefully that means high voter turnout, and hopefully people aren't buying Doug Ford's lies masquerading as patriotism.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@fluchtkapsel @ToniBarth I really don't want all that geolocation and link tracking.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@ToniBarth Thanks! Lynx has a feature to export all lynx to csv. So there’s no lock in.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@ToniBarth If you have a recommendation, I have an export of my bitly urls, so moving is still easy for me.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@ToniBarth The issue is that I couldn't find anything that's under active development and met my requirements. Those being: dockerized, quick and simple, ability for only logged-in users to create urls, ability for admin to manage created urls, ability to set custom urls rather than using random ones, no disgusting click tracking.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@FreakyFwoof My domain isn't bad. The issue is that sometimes I have to share a link to something else where I don't control the URL and it's stupidly long. So now I have go.interfree.ca. But something like go.interfree.ca/keyboard is waaaaay easier than the actual URL of the slide alt-text, even though it's not all that short.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
So now that bit.ly is showing ads, if you need a URL shortener, is decent and and easy to host. And before you tell me that we don't need URL shorteners anymore and how they're a security risk, I need them for:
1. Business cards, slides, signs, and other physical objects that need a URL. While most phones can scan QR Codes, you can't read them out loud for
folks. If you're doing a presentation, "scan the QR code on screen" isn't good enough. You need to have a URL that you can speak and another human can remember. Yes, NFC is a thing, but it doesn't solve that problem.
2. Places that still don't allow URLs (LinkedIn) or where long URLs are awkward to work with (text-only emails, the terminal, etc.)
3. Times (like a phone call) where I need to tell someone a URL using the noises that come from my face-parts

Find it here:
getlynx.dev
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin The app should just offer a download. The standard, in this instance, is too opinionated. Filetype detection is a solved problem.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin Yup, it does. If your browser can handle it, it works fine. If not, you get a download link. Advantage of that approach is that I sometimes upload media that isn't media at all. Text files, code, whatever. Everyone but Mastodon handles that gracefully.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin On one hand, yes. On the other hand, the instance should know what it can handle and what it can't, and act appropriately. If we want the fediverse to actually work, we can't restrict everyone to the lowest common denominator of some guy with a raspberry pi and a USB drive.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin Whereas Iceshrimp will just let me upload WMA, or flac, or shortin', or wav, or musepack, or whatever. Can't deal with it? That's your problem, buddy.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin Right, and videos are only 40. I couldn't find the setting for audio. But it kind of doesn't matter anyway because Mastodon is evil and recompresses everything. Even if it was already compressed in the exact format Mastodon already wants. Because compression artifacts just give everything that classic social media sound!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin Seriously though I'm just waiting for the IPFS toolchain to mature a bit. Then I'll set up IPFS across the servers, store everything on IPFS, and serve via IPFS to people that support it, and run a restricted gateway for those who don't. That way I get deduplication and replication for free, and adding pinning services is easy if I want to be more globally distributed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin Oh, dropbox! What a good idea! Why bother setting up S3 or anything complicated like that when I can just use dropbox? Wait...was that not what you meant?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
11mo
@quanin It was. I had 800 gigs of media before I changed it. I cut to like 300 megs and only cache for two days now. But I can still upload whatever the hell I want.