@fastfinge

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

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

So I’ve been sharing my Weird Dreams with the fediverse lately. Because I’m a bit of a nut, I figured: why not share my normal dreams as well? I’ll be doing that with the #fedidreams hashtag every morning. If you, too, find dreams interesting, feel free to join in! Some ground rules and background: as a teenager, I was extremely interested in #lucid dreaming. I practiced #dream recall and put a lot of work into it, as the first step to lucid dreaming. While I never achieved it, to this day I can generally remember 1 or 2 dreams a night. I don’t believe dreams are supernatural, or have any deeper meaning.I just believe they’re fun, and sometimes an interesting way to get a glimpse of your own subconscious. Also, thanks to some medication I take, my dreams have become even more vivid over the last couple years. If I’m lucky enough to have any explicit dreams, I’ll be keeping those to myself! Will sharing my dreams with the world every morning get me any closer to my long abandoned goal of lucid dreaming? Will my subconscious get performance anxiety and stop dreaming entirely? Will the focus on writing up my dreams in something more than point-form for my dream diary make them even weirder? It’s a social experiment, bro! And you get to follow along on this journey of entirely unscientific and meaningless science! Yay! Yeah…feel free to filter out the #fedidreams hashtag entirely.

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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@jaz @Kingslayer Also good to know that not all servers keep everything forever. Mine deletes anything older than 180 days. The fediverse isn’t guaranteed to be forever, either.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Tamasg lol you know you want too. An algorithm that requires more cpu must be better, right?

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@amir I hope you and your family are okay!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 Not really. You just don’t have to do all the work of using gendered vocabulary. I have no idea if the person who delivers my mail is a man, a woman, or possibly some sort of robotic drone. Postal worker means I don’t have to decide, or even think about the matter.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 I mean I prefer neutral terms in a lot of places. Actor, not actress. Flight attendant, not stewardess. But that’s more because gender doesn’t matter in these cases, and I resent having to think about the gender of the person I’m writing about, and then pick the right term for them. Especially today now that gender is more fluid. I neither no ‘nor care about the gender identity of an actor I heard in a movie once, and I am absolutely not looking it up. So on the whole gender neutral language is a win just because it saves me time. Like if you’re writing about someone’s hair, the anti-woke people want me to figure out what gender of hair it is, spell blonde accordingly, and use brunette for women and brown for men. Screw ‘em. Being politically correct is so much less effort.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@rommix0 Actually, as far as I can tell, even though “AI!” Is plastered all over the corporate website and sales pitches to businesses, it’s just a complicated set of regular expressions. It’ll complain about postwoman, fireman, or grompulatorman. It seems to know about superman and Batman, but Spider-Man is apparently not okay. I would like to stop thinking about a “spider person” now, please.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Thanks, AI diversity proofreader! Because yes of course that’s a thing that exists, sigh. Highlighting the word “Walkman” and suggesting “Consider a more gender neutral term, like walkperson” was sure helpful! Did one of the “anti-woke” boomer standup “comedians” train this thing?Because that sounds like something I’d hear on some cursed Netflix comedy special. Probably just before the “funny” rant on pronouns, and right after the jokes about hyphenated last names.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@bsg_blog @fireborn @stevenscott It would be good to know; thanks!

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@midzi @stevenscott Yeah, that makes sense to me. Although for me personally, entire radio automation software is overkill. I'm using this to trigger sounds during interactive in-person powerpoint presentations.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@fireborn @stevenscott This one is written in autoit, of all things. But as I say, it meets my particular, simple needs. I wonder how the blind Twitch streamers handle soundboards? @bsg_blog

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Seirdy Just wanted to let you know that hf.space should be listed in spammy-subdomains.txt. I'm getting a wave of spam from instances all called "Pleroma Factory" with various subdomains of hf.space. Example: ali525-q.hf.space #fediblock

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@stevenscott I messed with it, and it's exactly what I want! Unfortunately I had to read the sourcecode to figure out how it works. So to save you the effort:

When you run the soundboard.exe, no window opens. You need to press alt+control+something, and it will open a "browse for file" dialogue. Here you can find a sound (wav/mp3/whatever) you want to play on the hotkey you just pressed. If you have other hotkeys already registered, soundboard won't conflict with them; you just can't use those keys for sounds. I have alt+control+n for NVDA, and alt+control+J for jaws, so when I press those soundboard just does nothing and they do what they're supposed to.

If you press the key for a sound multiple times, that sound just restarts from the beginning. You cannot pause or stop a sound that's currently playing. So don't press the wrong key!

If you want to quit soundboard, press alt+control+q.

If you want to change the sound on a particular key, you have to open soundboard.ini (a file it makes in the folder with soundboard.exe when you run it) in notepad and change it yourself.

If you want to change the volume of soundboard, or make it use a different sound device, it doesn't matter what you want, because you can't. For simple lads like me, that's okay. But I suspect it might be a problem for all of you complicated radio professionals. LOL :-)

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@stevenscott Interesting! I just...kind of assumed that this must exist! Though admittedly my needs are much simpler than yours. I'm just trying to trigger five different bits of audio during a presentation, without taking my slides off screen. I do a history of accessibility presentation frequently for some of our customers, with multiple sound clips going from the Apple II to modern neural text to speech sprinkled throughout to demonstrate how far things have come, and get folks reflecting on how much of modern technology has come out of accessibility research. I can put the sounds directly in the powerpoint, but playing and pausing sound clips from the presenter view with a screen reader is kinda fiddley. So I thought: "Hey, the blind radio guys must have solved my exact problem!" And then you just let me down. LOL

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Showerthought: I bet AI is going to absolutely decimate simpler programming languages like autoit. The kind of people who are putting stuff together in autoit will probably just ask AI, and it'll use Python.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@JamminJerry @Jonathan He's the same guy who wrote the thing that puts exclude from defender in the context menu.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@ppatel @FreakyFwoof @kaveinthran @stevenscott Yup. Especially because not all machines run NVDA.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@kaveinthran @FreakyFwoof @stevenscott Please no. I'm using jaws at work and that's what I want it for LOL

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

@Jonathan Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

For a project I was looking for a #screenreader #accessible soundboard for Windows, where you assign hotkeys to a sound, and they play without bringing another window into focus. I'm surprised nobody has made this, with all of the radio broadcasters in our community. Surely Google is just failing me! #blind #a11y

🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca

Do you speak another language? Do you wish the #eloquence addon for 64-bit #NVDA (version 2026 and above) was available in that language? Now it can be! Thanks to the hard work of CyrilleB79:
• french translation is available (by CyrilleB79)
• support for translations was added (also by CyrilleB79)
Sadly, as a monolingual person, I'm unfamiliar with the translation workflow. But it works the same way as other NVDA addons. All translation submissions are appreciated, with priority given to the languages eloquence supports. If there are no other changes that need releasing, I will release a new version of the addon every Friday with all available translation updates. You can install the addon via the updater, or find the latest release, along with a file called Eloquence.pot that I believe translators need, here: github.com/fastfinge/eloquence_64/releases/tag/v16

It looks like you need to make a file named nvda.po, then put it in:
addon/locale/your_two_letter_language_code/LC_MESSAGES

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