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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
@jscholes I mean I was one of those people until the start of October! I got the Framework 16 the day it came out, and installed the hard drive a couple months later. So I had a long time of perfect service.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@mcourcel I did! I'm on the latest Windows update available, and my understanding is that this was fixed at some point? I installed the second drive back in January, and this only started at the beginning of October. So...I'm baffled. I'm also bothered, bewildered, bamboozled, and buffaloed.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@mcourcel Yup. I thought that might be the issue, so I set it to always on for the hard discs. But there was no change. I also turned off sleep and hibernate, in case those were causing problems.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
I also don't love that I had to install two firmware updates on my 16: one for the number pad, and one for the keyboard. But I was able to do so without an admin prompt! What firmware does this thing run? What can it do? How does it communicate with the system? Can someone just install a keylogger directly into my keyboard firmware without me even having to grant any kind of permission or be admin? This is...worrying. github.com/FrameworkComputer/qmk_firmware/releases/tag/v0.3.1
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
The bug where after being on for 24-36 hours, the second hard drive on my 16 laptop just...disappears...is getting really, really old. I thought it was temperature, so I started logging that. But nope. It's not an issue with the flash, because the data always comes back just fine, and there are no read errors or anything. It just gets tired after a day and decides to go for a nap. This is the problem with a fully repairable laptop: I installed it, so whatever's wrong, it's now my problem. I can't just go bother Del or whomever. It's running 11 because screen readers on Linux are still terrible, so anyone suggesting "install Linux" as the answer gets blocked. But I really don't think it's a Windows thing; it's not in device manager, or anywhere. Only fully powering down the machine and turning it back on again helps. A restart isn't enough. So it has to be a hardware thing!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@fionasboots It would; thanks for the good info!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
re: Christmas @feld @JamminJerry The big ones are mushroomfm.com, hkcradio.com, the plague, and radio free dish nuts. I don’t know any sighted folks who listen to any of them though.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
Question for the fediverse tech folk: work has asked me to learn Google’s Big Query. Does anyone know how it is with a ? And where is the best place to start for someone mostly familiar with small scale postgresql deployment?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
Christmas @JamminJerry Yeah, I am the only blind person on the internet without my own radio station.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
Christmas Every year around this time, I start tuning into the various Music options I have access to. This year, at least for background listening, it seems like Apple Music's Holiday Hits wins Christmas. Decent variety of styles and artists, the promos and transitions are good, and it's ad free. Then, of course, for more intentional listening, my playlist of tens of thousands of rarely played Christmas songs. Other options: iHeart has too many ads and not enough variety, sky.fm hasn't updated the Christmas offering in like 15 years, YouTube Music is just AI generated playlist slop, and all of the public streams I know of are either low sound quality, full of ads, or low variety. LiveOne, as every year, is a close second; good variety, few ads, and that radio sound I enjoy at Christmas. CBC Music and Stingray Music are also good, but unfortunately they have way too many different Christmas channels, resulting in not enough variety on each one, and too many choices for all day work day listening. Where are you getting your Christmas this year?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@chris They well might. I’ve never asked because I can’t go anyway.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@chris To be fair I don’t know if they offer audio description on location. So in my unique circumstance as a blind person tv might be better. But I’ve never had the opportunity to find out.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@chris Yup, I live in Ottawa but am watching on tv because I have to work. Even though I’m like 20 minutes away.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
I spend more time fiddling with my TV than I do watching it. This mornings adventure was realising that somehow /dev/dri/card0 and /dev/dri/renderD128 had gotten removed from my channels docker-compose, so transcoding wouldn't work. I have the oldest HDHomerun, so it can't transcode there. And we wonder why normal people don't do this stuff. Anyway, remembrance day has audio description on CBC, but not CTV.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
Okay, so I encountered my first ever annoying issue with Joplin today. Annoying to troubleshoot, and annoying to fix. If you're having a weird problem where on crashes a minute after launch, you need to go to Joplin's github and download the latest release. This is a problem with the auto-updater. Downloading from the website won't actually work, because the download link on the website leads to an older version. You need: github.com/laurent22/joplin/releases/download/v3.5.6/Joplin-Setup-3.5.6.exe
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@matt @jscholes @tunmi13 If you want an easy and predictable game to test the differences, proceduralrealms.com is a good example. It works in both clients, it tends to dump multiple lines of text to the client at once, some of those lines have special characters, and within 20-30 minutes of playing with each client you'll notice the differences and the bits mudlet is missing.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@jscholes @matt @tunmi13 And if you want to get a sense for how unsatisfactory live regions are, compare mudlet, that uses live regions to read new text with mushclient with mushreader, that uses the screen reader API. Notice how mudlet misses some text if it comes in too fast, doesn't always read text, and can't control if the text interrupts the previous text it sent or is added to the end of the queue. Mushreader has none of these problems.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@jscholes @matt @tunmi13 As an example, the person I'm currently in a meeting with has three monitors. One for the meeting, one for social media and dashboards, and one for what she's working on. Invisible interfaces and alerts from non-foreground apps are the only way I have to be even slightly as fast as her. And I'm already slower at a lot of things, because of the nature of inaccessible GUIs, so further friction and speed decreases would not be acceptable at all. If I didn't have these features I guess I'd have to have three laptops and a mixer? I don't know.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@jscholes @matt @tunmi13 Apple kind of does with its allow script control checkbox. But it should be on a per app basis. I agree that more control is needed. But I am strongly convinced this isn't a feature I could live without.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
2w
@matt @jscholes @tunmi13 Yup, you would be in the minority. Sighted people can have multiple windows on screen, and quickly glance at them. We can't. Getting alerts from non-focused windows is the only way to replace this experience.