Friends, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen and you should see it too. A guitar amp labelled entirely in braille. #accessibility #blind #blindness #braille
Not sure what's worse: arguing and being annoyed that the wife threw out Christmas dessert on New Year's Eve, that she didn't look up from her phone and notice that I was eating handfuls of it out of the bin, or that it was nestling against a still warm sanitary pad.
For those interested in my text cleaner, here is another version. It grew a better readme file, and a cli! dropbox.com/scl/fi/qtqwcj036uh… I still strongly suggest that if anyone were doing serious programming though, who wanted to be efficiant with resources, humans all the way!
Greetings, retro computing folks. I was just telling @Bri about the horrible noise that Apple 5.25 inch floppy drives used to make when encountering bad sectors. I still have nightmares about that from when I was a kid.
Surprisingly, that sound is stupidly hard to find on Youtube.
Can one of you help a fwoof out? They need to experience the bad.
I don't have any of my Apple equipment set up, it's all in a storage pod, or I'd set up some scenarios wherein a disk is deliberately damaged, then mic up the drive attempting to read those damaged segments.
Well here's a recording of a disk being formatted, from the perspective of leakage from the cassette output jack. As the drive is running, you hear a really low noise which is almost certainly derived from the motor, then sounds an octave higher than they should be derived from the head being moved. Also since I assume what you're really hearing are the impulses controlling the stepper motor and not the actual head movement, you don't hear the loud buzz once it reaches track zero. Also at the end, once the format is complete, it goes to track 17 to write the Volume Table of Contents, then to track 2, then 1, then 0 to write DOS, but then I hit Ctrl+Reset to interrupt it before it can finish going back to track 17 to write the Hello program.
@jaybird110127 Apparently the C64 disk drive can make some interesting sounds, there is a video by a guy on Youtube called 8-bit show and tell. Our BBC micro disk drive made similar noises, but when we upgraded to a Master 128 we got a more expensive disk drive and it didn't make those kind of noises at all.
Support me on Patreon! - http://www.patreon.com/MrSolidSnake745Three years ago today, I uploaded my first FDD cover video. I had absolutely no idea that a sm...
@jaybird110127 So what is that, the stepper forcing it to go to track 0 by stepping the total number of tracks, and every time it does the head smacks into the side?
@x0 Exactly. One of the components Steve Wozniak eliminated to reduce costs was a track zero sensor. So whenever it needs to recalibrate, it just seeks back forty tracks so it can know for certain that it's on track zero.
@jaybird110127 @x0 So, theoretically, if you had a way to do that, you could just manually move the head to track 40, and it would just smoothly widge all the way back when you start the format, and not go "ack?"
@x0 Yup, except IIRC the format actually seeks back as though it's on I think it's track 64, which is waaaaaaaay beyond what is physically possible. I actually have a modified DOS that only seeks back from track 40.
In my quest to keep all my possibilities open in the world where all of the operating systems seem to get worse in different ways in accessibility, usability and privacy, I decided to also set up my mac as secondary system, complementing my main Windows setup. So last night, I nuked my mac drive and reinstalled macos. its definitely running way smoother than before, when it was running a setup from 2015, most likely riddled with gunk from the intel era. On boot, VoiceOver was stuttering, virtual machines failed to run properly and in general the m1 system wasn't as snappy as it should've been. The current goal is to set up parallels with windows 11, as we all know, VoiceOver can't be used seriously for many text processing or web tasks, things which I do a lot. There are definitely oddities. Don't know if its because apple is vibecoding MacOs now, but for example, the option to disable function row and return it to f1 f2 f3, is only findable via the system settings search, nowhere in the settings itself. You will have to search for "function keys" which is when the option pops up in results. And I am not envying first time macos users. I mean most of the time it fails to focus the setup screens properly, so you have to use the VO F1 command to find the window. A command I bet most first time users have no idea about. I had to set up dropbox 5 times, because the first 4 times, dropbox decided to crash when a system permissions dialog showed up. still, windows does equally stupid things, so its not like there's something better around.
@FreakyFwoof As soon as someone convinces me that Linux is better than the MacOs and Windows hybrid setup I am trying to create in terms of accessibility usability and productivity across all the different areas I need, I am game.
I have a decent VM running Fedora that comes up speaking, and it's nice and usable, but I haven't tried being productive in it yet. It at least hasn't crashed, burnt and died on me though.
I'm annoyed that Apple can make a processor that scores 23000 On Geekbench, far above Core I9 or the fastest X86 chips, it's just bundled with such a subpar screen reader that the M4 Pro sits in the bin not getting its muscles used. Sigh. @jstark @FreakyFwoof
@FreakyFwoof I'm not saying any of this with any intent to knock what you do there man, but I've got to chip in from a perspective of making music in the same DAW across two platforms. VO shows itself to be a bottleneck every time, it doesn't seem to matter how powerful the Mac is. There are plenty of cases where I've spent a lot of time making absolutely sure it's not a gap in knowledge slowing me down, optimised VO config as much as I could and made certain that I'm navigating in the most efficient ways I can find, yet navigating the DAW is noticeably, consistently faster than I'm able to do it on Mac. Have also verified multiple times that this isn't the application itself being slower, it's VO every time, on every Mac I've used/observed. I don't know what else to try at this point. It's a massive bummer because in just as many sessions where I see VO shitting the bed, I see Apple Silicon making heavy workloads look trivial. If I didn't need VO, a Mac would definitely be the daily driver here, but with VO in the equation, as things stand, that'll have to be a nope. @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark Absolutely fair. It's a very subjective thing, and maybe I'm just easy to please, but VO does not slow me down. Categorically not. I'm still faster than most sighted people using Logic by their own say-so, not mine. Not a brag. Both teachers and some quite shall we say, well-known studio engineers have seen me work and agreed this. Doesn't mean my experience is the same for everyone because of course it isn't, but I do not feel slowed by VO, for whatever reason. I don't know if I'm just lucky, or as I say, just easy to please. Really don't have a metric here.
@FreakyFwoof I've seen you using Logic enough to agree that you're fast. Also know someone on Mac who's consistently faster than me in REAPER. I guess what I'm saying is that if you and that person were using your DAWs with a different screen reader, I'm certain you'd be faster than you are now and they'd be leaving me even further in the dust lol. @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark It's so weird because, and you probably won't believe me when I say this, I don't feel slow in Logic. Maybe I am and 9 years has just acclimatised me to the fact, but yeah I'd love to see how that works out. Now though, I can use Logic with the sound of Orpheus and it's more responsive than VO natively so maybe I'll be faster just by that fact alone. This requires testing.
@FreakyFwoof Shall we organise the daw and screen reader skills competitions? Who can configure a compressor faster, set up a sidechain or step sequence a pregiven melody. Don''t ask me whats the point of this all, but it sounds intriguing @Scott @Tamasg @jstark
There was something like that at one of the American conventions. Let's just say the users weren't chosen based on their speed, or knowledge, or... well... I don't know how they got chosen lol. Listening to it nearly made me chew my own legs off. @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark
@Scott @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark Oh I remember that. I think it was a competition between JFW and WindowEyes, possibly Mac or Linux as well. I ended up ducking out for the reasons you said.
@FreakyFwoof I believe you. I mean, you're super familiar with the software so you probably don't need any more than a few sylabols from VO along the way. The fact that you're already noticing Orpheus feels faster when Bri's already pointed out the method for obtaining VO speech is kinda hacky tells me something though, no? @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark For sure. It did the thing it does in the apps folder yesterday, where it starts expanding rows and the only way to stop it is to mute speech or restart VO. Even over NVDA Remote however, the other side interrupted itself and got on with it in short order. That was my first clue as to the latency issue.
@FreakyFwoof @Scott @Tamasg @jstark VO does have some very specific features that work well in apps like Logic and others that have a lot of "grouped" things on screen, I think. There's apps I use for cybersecurity that make me wish I had item chooser, fastSearch and window spots in NVDA because they'd make things so much faster
@zersiax There's an add-on with something kinda like item chooser, think it's called Enhanced Object Navigation. It felt a bit crunchy building in cluttered hierarchies to me, so I didn't keep it around, might be worth a try though. @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark Yeah I've been monitoring it. Unfortunately the things I run into this with Java apps which aren't supported yet :)
There's also the fat that with @Bri's new NVDA Remote app, using VoiceOver via NVDA is now more responsive than VO natively. That could help productivity.
I haven't tested this app yet,, but does it allow you to lkike send all keyboard input to the controlled computer? Or if not how do you press keys that require the NVDA modifier.
@Tamasg @FreakyFwoof that's the case on all OS'es though... the screen reader is rarely efficient... or taking advantage of the hardware... in some significant way....
@Tamasg @jstark @FreakyFwoof Yeah. I know. I keep wanting to learn it but keep hearing horror stories. Starting to think I just don't have time for it. becI want to spend my time making music. I thought it would be easier but even sitting through the group Mac class I was so confused. AndI was not impressed by how much it messes up. And I'm a Braille first user. I've been told it's quite laggy on Mac and while I use a screenreader, I prefer when doing audio to use Braille.
FWIW, I was able to find the FN toggle thing under system settings without explicitly searching for it, under ... hmm, was it general > keyboard? Anyway, I know I didn't search for it. But yeah, Dropbox has done weird stuff. They changed how the file provider thing works.
IMO, the Mac OS cloud files API thingy is a regression from the good old days. In the Mac OS 11 era (which is the first version I used), I could comfortably stream audio from Google Drive, including e.g. via QuickLook, and it worked like a charm. Now? The folder won't even open if there are too many files in it, forget streaming. I basically switched fully to Cyberduck for cloud storage.
Thank you for sharing your experience. You are very valid for your observations and I have always thought the same. Software even up to this day does not adequately meet a good standard to meet accessibility. The fact that this is still a problem is abysmal and it drives me mad. It will only get worse and we all have capitalism to thank for that.
I was today years old when I figured out that the Windows 9x SB16 OPL3 MIDI driver is tuned to 437.5 Hz. In the replica source code that is part of the user mode Windows OPL3 drivers, there are two notable constants in opl3midi.h. These are opl_samplerate = 50000.0 and opl_tune = 440.0. As the actual OPL3 sample rate is 49716 Hz, setting this value as a constant results in 440 Hz tuning. I gradually reduced the tuning constant by .5 until I got null tests with the original code to result in total silence.
Updated eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…: number processing added. Say-all should no longer have gaps. Pause factor set below 100 will now trim silences between indexed chunks. Enjoy.
new: SoftVoice NVDA Driver (softvoice-2025.nvda-addon) version 2025.3.3: Adds "use abreviations" checkbox. Since SoftVoice itself does not have a way to toggle or control this, we hack around it by splitting all-capital letters to have spaces for the engine. It's a crude hack, not ellegant, but I'll call it for "it works." eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…
Man stabs woman with knife. Knife manufacturer committed wrongthink in the past. Knife manufacturer is now guilty of murder. theguardian.com/technology/202…
What a great conversation with Dominic Miller. I agree with so many things, including not changing the strings too often! :) youtube.com/watch?v=R91NQgD7M-…
▶TAB of intro playing available on Patreon!◀ A conversation with Dominic Miller exploring the origins, differences, and modern role of the Nylon guitar!▶PATR...
There was this tree when I was a kid, I could climb up right to the top. I loved that tree. My dad cut it down because its leaves would go into the pool. Turns out, when he cut it down, the leaves didn't stop. Turned out it was our neighbor's tree and the wind blowing it into our yard. Still love my dad, mist the tree.
The key figures behind SoftVoice were Joseph Katz and Mark Barton. They originally created the famous MacinTalk for the first Apple Macintosh and S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore 64/Atari before forming SoftVoice, Inc.
SoftVoice (mostly) modernized for NVDA 2025 versions. The only pesky problem I can't get rid of is pauses during say-all, but "pause factor" does improve pauses mid-utterance, which is nice. Pitch, variants all work. Slight speed boost with wrapper as we now capture Wave output ourselves and pipe to NVDA. eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…
@jaybird110127 oooh I wonder. See I'm not sure how safe it is to distribute the tibase32 and tieng32 / tispan32 libraries. Isn't the distributor for SoftVoice still alive and well? Might still be able to make one, just not bundle the libs in it, would be very simple to create.
Thanks Hetzner, another todo entry resolved. Your request was automatically validated by our system. All outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 will be unblocked on all your Cloud Servers within the next few minutes.
raise declared patch level to 2026-01-05 which has been provided since we moved to Android 16 QPR2 in December due to Pixels shipping CVE-2025-54957 in December
re-enable the system keyboard at boot if it's disabled
switch to the system keyboard when device boots to the Safe Mode
add "Reboot to Safe Mode" power menu button in Before First Unlock state to make Safe Mode much more discoverable for working around app issues such as a broken third party keyboard
add workaround for upstream UsageStatsDatabase OOM system_server crash
add workaround for upstream WindowContext.finalize() system_server crash
disable buggy upstream disable_frozen_process_wakelocks feature causing system_server crashes for some users
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: fix phenotype flags not working in Play services clients
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add MEDIA_CONTENT_CONTROL as a requested permission for Android Auto as part of our toggles for it to avoid needing to grant the far more invasive notification access permission
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: extend opt-in Android Auto Bluetooth support to allow A2dpService.setConnectionPolicy() to fix Bluetooth functionality (previously worked around with a GmsCompatConfig update avoiding a crash)
switch to new upstream PackageInstallerUI implementation added in Android 16 QPR2 and port our changes to it
update SQLite to 3.50.6 LTS release
add an extra layer of USB port protection on 10th gen Pixels based on upstream functionality to replace our USB gadget control which was causing compatibility issues with the Pixel 10 USB drivers
allow SystemUI to access NFC service on 10th gen Pixels to fix the NFC quick tile
disable the upstream Android USB data protection feature since it conflicts with our more advanced approach and causes issues
issue CHARGING_ONLY_IMMEDIATE port control command in more cases
fix an issue in our infrastructure for spoofing permission self-checks breaking automatically reading SMS one-time codes for certain apps
add workaround for upstream KeySetManagerService system_server crash causing a user to be stuck on an old OS version due to it causing a boot failure when booting a the new OS version after updating
wipe DPM partition on 10th gen Pixels as part of installation as we do on earlier Pixels since it's always meant to be zeroed on production devices
Settings: disable indexing of the unsupported "Parental controls" setting which is not currently available in AOSP
Settings: disable redundant indexing of widgets on lockscreen contents which is already indexed another way
skip all pseudo kernel crash reports caused by device reboot to avoid various false positive crash reports
All of the Android 16 security patches from the current January 2026, February 2026, March 2026, April 2026, May 2026 and June 2026 Android Security Bulletins are included in the 2026010801 security preview release. List of additional fixed CVEs:
Apple and Google have left X in their app stores, despite its AI-generated images that violate their own rules. There are no principles left in Silicon Valley.
Minnesota state says the FBI is blocking it from investigating the killing of Renee Good.
& while Vance said Good had aimed her car at the officer, "the NYT published a slow-motion analysis showing how her vehicle was turning away from the officer" when he shot her.
Mayor Jacob Frey said “Kristi Noem watched the videos & doesn’t want an impartial investigation, because she knows her narrative about domestic terrorism is bullshit.”
Protests continue across the country over the killing of Renee Good, the mother of three shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday. Good was shot inside her car after she dropped her 6-year-old son off at school.
Motif folks, got a question about the John Mellos or however his name is spelled, motif editors. I have a Rack XS module and a 3I3 midi interface. I assume the module needs to be plugged in to an in and an out to take care of rreading data from the user banks so I can browse/play sounds. But I need one of those ins on the midi interface for my wind controller. Can the librarian or whatever program you use to browse/play sounds let you select more than 1 midi in?
@BorrisInABox Maybe it is the voice editor. Whatever program lets you get a list of presets, choose a bank and can arrow through them, hear each name and play each one. I want to do a live stream about the wind controller sounds that can be loaded in to the user banks.
You can just use a sequencer, like QWS for that, but whatever you use needs an instrument definition for your user bank if you want it to display patch names. It's been a very long time since I've used the editors, so I don't remember if you can use them like that.
@BorrisInABox Actually, when I loaded the sounds in the user banks, they loaded with their own names. I know one of the programs can retrieve data from the rack and let you browse/play each patch, which is all I want to do.
I was registering for an account on my new health plan. one of the questions asked me what agency I worked for. I had to pull down a to find fmy agency and for some reason mine wasn't listed. Ice and CBP were listed though, and my body had a physical feeling of nausea when I read just their names. They are needed agencies, and in the past, I would still be proud to work near there little umbrella. Now, it sickens me that I work within the huge governmental system that includes them. I do good work for my customers, war fighters and those who support them who need assistive technology. I have pride in what I do. Maybe I should lean into my feelings that I do good for some and that I don't work for the tiny percent that do not help others or treat them like we are distant brothers and sisters. I pledged that I would protect and support the constitution, and that I would reject enemies and wrong both foreign and domestic. I am proud of that oath and what it means to me. Still sad we're where we are at these days, dealing with polarization, politicization at all levels, and untruths that tell us not to believe what oour eyes and ears are sensing. Deep down, I know that I do right in all that I do at work and at home. My integrity is core to what and who I am. That is all. Thank you for your attention to these matters.
Excuse me while I be 12 for a second. My parents are watching the Indiana Origon game and one of the announcers just said "He didn't have a sack until tonight." Oh really now, and how would you know about his sack, sir? I'm done now. Hope everyone's night is going well.
Hot take: good riddance. I dislike the middle click thing. Trips me up all the time as someone who accidentally clicks it when scrolling.
I think the right move is to make this (undoubtedly useful to some) behavior opt-in, not opt-out.
A lot of the gripes I see are just people being mad because GNOME makes choices they don't like. I don't understand why people write like this about GNOME, if you don't like it don't use it, your emotions make you look petty, etc etc.
Middle-click paste is one of those "weird Unix" interaction things that really requires other "weird Unix" things to work well, namely focus-follows-mouse and the concept of an X11-like selection mechanism.
It broke when scrollwheels took over the middle button.
It broke when you slipped while bringing a window to the front, thus causing a selection in *that* other window, and thus losing the selection from the first one that you intended to middle-paste.
The way the article is written. The way the comments talk about it.
Why do people make it sound like GNOME is some sort of secret cabal of Linux haters?
It's a freaking desktop environment, they have every right to build it however they want, and you have every right to use something different. There's zero reason to get emotionally charged about it.
This is unfortunately expected from Liam Proven, same guy who gave us an "amazing" article lying that KDE/GNOME/Wayland developers, as a whole, do not care about accessibility, whos whole output to the Linux community has been shitty ignorant article after shitty ignorant article
He is, in the nicest way possible, a hack writer and one of those "anti-DEI" assholes, But what do I know, im just one of those evil GNOME devs making linux evil and woke for my own profit
@zoeyTheWitch don't forget about the blatant ageism
> As we have said before, we suspect this disconnect between younger, keener developers who don't know or care about late 20th century user interface standards or accessibility concerns, but who strongly want to junk what they perceive as legacy baggage, are behind the moves to deprecate and remove X11
Apple and Google have left X in their app stores, despite its AI-generated images that violate their own rules. There are no principles left in Silicon Valley.
Apple and Google have left X in their app stores, despite its AI-generated images that violate their own rules. There are no principles left in Silicon Valley.
To anybody who is offended by the governor of Minneapolis telling ICE “get the fuck out of our city,” but not offended by ICE ethnic cleansing secret police summarily executing a local mom, a message: Go fuck yourself. Learn the difference between a swear word and an obscenity.
Renting continued to be unaffordable for tenants in the Greater Montreal area in 2025, even as the vacancy rate here increased, says the latest report from the Canada Mortgage and
.ICE Brutally Arresting Native Americans in MinneapolisBy Brenda Norrell, Censored News, Jan. 9, 2026MINNEAPOLIS -- In a horrifying arrest, ICE punched Jose 'Beto' Roberto Ramirez, Red Lake Chippewa, and dragged him from his vehicle. As Ramirez was…
On the one year anniversary of Trump taking office for the second time, millions of people across the country will walk out of work and school in opposition to the Trump administration's racist, billionaire program. Trump has employed ICE and the military as his personal army against the working class at home and abroad in places like Venezuela. We refuse to allow Trump, ICE and the racist deportation machine to operate with impunity!
We are outraged. Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE — we demand accountability! This weekend, we demand: ✅ Immediate investigation ✅ Transparency ✅ Justice This is not a moment — it’s a movement.#ICEOutForGood
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