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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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
blog https://stuff.interfree.ca/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
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
1y
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
1y
@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
1y
@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
1y
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
1y
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
1y
@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
1y
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
1y
@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
1y
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
1y
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
1y
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
1y
So I ended up going with micro.blog. I don't love that it's American. But it stores my stuff in Europe, it's easy to export and back-up the blog if I have to move elsewhere, it does cross-posting, and it lets me centralize a bunch of other stuff (like my bookmarks formerly on tinygem and my to-read list formerly on goodreads). Hence the name: stuff.interfree.ca
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Ongoing investigation:
* looks good, but depends on firebase and versal, so doesn't let me avoid big tech
* requires mailgun, more big american tech

Can we literally not host a federated blog on our own servers without big American tech companies involved? At least micro.blog is a small American tech company, so they might be the way I have to go. Or just, you know, not do this at all.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@MostlyBlindGamer That requires both Google Firebase and something called versal that I've never heard of and can't host myself. If I'm doing business with big american tech I might as well just use micro.blog directly.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@crmsnbleyd I'd like to federate, and get replies pulled in as comments. So that won't work.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@MostlyBlindGamer It's static, so it can't federate.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@serrebi What problems did you have with it?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Never mind, I thought you could micro.blog. Apparently not. I don't do business with American companies when I could host myself. So they're out.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
If I decide to start blogging again (it's been years), what's more : ghost or micro.blog or something else? Don't even mention ; my desire to run a PHP app for any reason is zero. Plus the gutenberg stuff.
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