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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)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
blog https://stuff.interfree.ca/
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt I’ve actually never used webmail. When I was growing up my dad always insisted everyone use the ISP email offered by whatever dialup isp we had because “we’re paying for it!” And he’d change isps every few months for a better deal. And most of them only offered only pop3. And we had limited dialup minutes so we had to download or email and disconnect. So even today I just don’t think of a mail server as a place that will store things for me. In my head once I download the email the mail servers job is done.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt I have every email I’ve ever sent or received going back to 1996! Data hoarders unite! I just keep 90 percent of it in mbox files in cold storage that I check on either once a year or whenever I want something.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt But if your paying fastmail anyway, why not just use it? IP reputation is the exact opposite of fun. Not to mention that if someone hacks anything else I host they can annoy me and make life miserable. If someone hacks my email they can empty my bank account, steel my other accounts, mess up my taxes, get my healthcare info and worse.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt If my choice is to selfhost email, or go to prison, I’ll take prison. Okay, I’m joking. Mostly. But I ran an email server for 10 years. You can have a perfectly clean IP and Microsoft or Google or someone will just decide to drop your email. Even when their own delivery reports say everything is fine. And now there’s DKIM and SPF and reverse dns and dnsec and on it goes. I own everything else, but not email. Never again. I’ll happily pay someone for that. They’re earning every penny.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt CBC rss feeds are an example of rss behind cloudflare. I did the email thing for years. But I follow a hundred or so feeds, and even with whitelists email providers would send the emails to spam.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@feld @phnt But they all work with Miniflux’s full text extract. Especially if you selfhost Miniflux on your local connection. If you have it in a data center or use the miniflux.app paid one you have to put a cloudflare solver proxy in front of it. Though half the time you have to do that to get the RSS feed at all anyway because cloudflare, and every other WAF, is a blight on the universe.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof LOL you think it has a Russian voice? Nope! This was the 90’s. As far as developers were concerned, only the English alphabet existed. When support for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean was added, it worked by first converting everything into the English alphabet. Then reading it that way.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof That’s why the British Eloquence voice sounds so bad. It was, in fact, the US governments opening attack on Britain to provoke another war. Obviously.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@foone @FreakyFwoof My Framework laptop. Upgraded it twice with aftermarket parts and it’s going strong.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof I think the eloquence thing was probably the thing inside the arc that melted that guys face off when he looked at it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@dhamlinmusic @FreakyFwoof Some of Dr. Susan’s research work was actually funded by The National Science Foundation and DARPA. So yes, the US government does have tentacles in eloquence.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof And for extra bonus fun, ETI Eloquence was created to commercialize the PHD work of Dr. Susan Herts. So she actually wrote the code at the two different universities she worked as a researcher for. The first thing that’s recognizably eloquence-like was written in 1984. Then she continued to evolve it, using her custom tools and compilers.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof Because Eloquence was originally written by Eloquent Technologies Incorporated, hence why it’s sometimes called ETI eloquence. But Eloquent Technologies licensed the code to IBM. Then the company was purchased by Speech WOrks International. Then Speech Works International was purchased by Nuance. Then Nuance was purchased by Microsoft, but the company that owns the right to Eloquence was split off into yet another company. During all that, the original creator of eloquence retired. So now it’s not even clear where the source code is, who (if anyone) still has it, or if they have it, who owns it. Because the compiled code was licensed and sublicensed and bought and sold. But did any of those transactions include the source code? Does anyone who still works at any of those companies that still exist even know? To make things even more confusing, you sometimes hear eloquence called ECI Eloquence, not ETI Eloquence. ECI is what IBM called the Eloquence Command Interface. So the dll files for ETI eloquence are often ECI.DLL.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof For my sins I maintain eloquence64, so I have to know more about this crap than I would really like to. The code for both addons is a terrible mess. But eloquence64 is…slightly better, mostly. Just because it’s trying to do far less. But when you have to work around libraries that haven’t been updated since 2003 or so, and can never be fixed, things are always going to be a mess.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof If you’re talking about the NVDA addons, the IBMTTS addon usually uses the eloquence DLL files, so the sound is identical. The differences between the two addons are features and what comes included. If you mean the difference between Eloquence and IBMTTS/ViaVoice, Eloquence licensed there code to IBM. IBM went on to add some new features, and many new and exciting bugs. And also change the API for no particular reason. And created a new dictionary format that’s neither better or worse, just different for no explicable reason. Also, the IBMTTS dll files can be had from IBM’s FTP site. The Eloquence dlls have to be ripped out of commercial software. Also, Apple and Nokia had completely different eloquence versions that are 99 percent the same, but each have subtle differences. And as far as I can tell, all of the voice and dictionary rules were created in a custom programming language, and the source code for the rules, and the compiler that compiles them, is almost certainly lost. That’s why Apple, for example, includes the community dictionary rather than just updating eloquence to fix the bugs. Because eloquence itself can never be changed or updated anymore. When it comes to NVDA: Eloquence64 has much better indexing, but we only support the bundled DLL files. IBMTTS supports every eloquence version ever released, has parts written in rust, and less accurate indexing. But in exchange Chinese support works better, and it gets around a few Unicode and localization bugs.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof @x0 Hah it was in my list but disabled. “This extension was turned off because it requires additional permissions.” Re-enabling it worked.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof @x0 Oh, good to know. I hadn't realized it was updated.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@FreakyFwoof @x0 That won't run on modern versions of chrome anymore, sadly. Or any versions at all starting in I believe September/October.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@x0 @FreakyFwoof Also the way some of these sounds are mono and some are not is making me cringe. Pick one or the other! Either is fine! But not both. Especially when the stereo use doesn't seem to mean anything. Like the way the page loaded sound kind of seems to point from left to right but that doesn't mean anything because it's not a percent or something it's just a loaded finished sound! And the start sound is just the mono windows default thing so they don't match at all. And closing a tab is a weird stereo sound but switching tabs is mono. Although I really do like that tab switch sound. I'm not really an audio guy; it's actually quite rare for me to be so annoyed by sound design. Am I getting cranky in my middle-age, or is this especially bad?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
4mo
@x0 @FreakyFwoof Yeah, it's only 64 new sounds! Should take him hardly any time at all. LOL JK
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