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Excellent #AudioDescription of Remembrance Day on #cbc as always. Usually, I cry because we remember. This year, I cried because we have forgotten.
in reply to Samuel Proulx

be interesting to contrast described TV with the radio coverage here.





Just got an error message when attempting to go to a website that actually made me LOL: "The connection has failed success.". Well, okay then! :P


does anyone else see fedi hashtags as mostly useless if you're not on a server that federates widely? Even here on transfem.social hashtags feel so empty. I talked about this on bsky a bit
in reply to Amber

I subscribe to 100-200 and they often do populate my feed with a post I wouldn’t have seen otherwise, which is enough for me.


Nutrition

Sensitive content

in reply to Seirdy

re: Nutrition
multivaitamins pills are a lot less effective then their hype. The way to bind them into pill form effectively is way to expensive to use by many of them. Here they use blood test and if you have a deficancy then they might purscribe a specific vitamin supplement but not a multi.
in reply to Yishay Garbasz

re: Nutrition
@Yishay yeah i was recommended multis and omega-3 EPA+DHA based on bloodwork, but that was ages ago and my diet has since completely changed.


"PSOE y Sumar pactan un iVA del 21% a los pisos turísticos" es de esas cosas que según las oyes dices ESPERA ESPERA, QUE NO ERA ASÍ YA? y te dan más ganas de sacar antorchas.


One of the authors I follow, @clacksee, has made two of her #books free for today.

For some light-hearted #SciFi with plenty of hope, there's The Left Hand of Dog: whitehartfiction.co.uk/product…

If you'd rather read about old ladies getting justice by any means necessary, there's A Bit of Murder Between Friends: whitehartfiction.co.uk/product…

I can highly recommend both.

EU readers should use her Payhip shop: payhip.whitehartfiction.co.uk

#bookstodon
@bookstodon




I wrote about the need to review your icons when localizing, in order to make sure you're actually communicating what you intend to. ericwbailey.website/published/…


One of my favorite Singapore food writers / recipe developers lives in the Netherlands now.

“Having grown up in perpetual summer, living in the Netherlands with the cold as a constant companion often makes me hanker for foods that I’d never craved for in Singapore.”

That’s what I feel too: the perpetual summer.

The newsletter name is a joke because there are no Singapore noodles in Singapore:

sgpnoodles.substack.com/p/bak-…

#Food #Singapore

This entry was edited (1 week ago)



Minor tip from someone who's had to spend a lot of my life hiding said life: Learn to use a screenreader and find headphones you can use so you too can turn off your screens and work, communicate and play with less risk from dangerous elements in your vicinity.
in reply to The Gaptangle

I grew up first using hardware speech synthesizers with headphone jacks, and then when software synthesis became possible, my family told me it was unnatural to use it out loud.
I found I could absorb more with headphones anyway, and besides that, I have never lived alone, so it's always been the obvious for me to keep it in my head.
in reply to The Gaptangle

Going further with this, there are also ways which I need someone to chime in on because I don't know them these days--I'll boost you if you do--of doing some things so that no one would see them even if your screen was on with some of the screenreaders. Even stealthier.
in reply to The Gaptangle

the JAWS virtual viewer can be hidden by default, so any results of things like document OCR, AI responses, or Research It lookups are not visible.
in reply to Sean Randall

NVDA's screen curtain works with configuration profiles, so you can have it automatically applied in a private app.
It's also available on whenever the screen reader is running if you activate it with a double-tap of the hotkey or from the preferences dialog box.
in reply to The Gaptangle

Both JAWS (by default( and NVDA (with an addon), also support splitting audio. This effectively puts the screen reader into just 1 of your ears. SO there's no possibility that someone could pop in a second of your wireless earbuds and hear what you're doing, for example.
in reply to Sean Randall

Finally, the idea of the invisible interface in apps such as Tweesecake were used in older twitter clients.
The first of these was Jawter. JAWS scripting language didn't support any sort of system for making onscreen windows other than the virtual viewer I bound global hotkeys to navigate your timeline without needing a UI.

I have used similar windowless interfaces for other things in my career, such as global access to an internal telephone directory at work,
and things like global history retrieval for both speech and clipboard in the past.
When I had to use flashcards at college, they piped straight to my speech synthesizer or Braille display without a visible interface, too.

in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Global clipboard history I feel could be redone even easier now with Ditto being a thing, wonder if apps such as @app could wrap Ditto into a library and allow for global management of clipboard, clip-groups as focussible buffers, etc. And with Ditto being a stable foundation, the actual clipboard management need not be reinvented.
in reply to Sean Randall

I will just add, having thought on this a little more overnight, that software with an invisible interface is only useful in a limited set of circumstances. Obviously screen curtains are now standard with all common screen readers, and there's only so many keys on the keyboard.
If I were designing a UIless tool today I'd probably have a layer system in place, simply because of that.
in reply to x0

@x0 sorry, yes it is. I didn't even notice that. I use the feature quite rarely.
@x0


in reply to David Goldfield

You've directed this to U"S. subscribers, so perhaps you might know if there actually is a U.S. site for the Blindshell anymore? I know the primary company is in the Czech Republic, and the previous U.S. distributor is no longer in partnership.
in reply to Ricky Enger

@ricky_enger Hi, Ricky. When I go to www.blindshell.com it redirects to blindshell.com/us
I assumed this was a site for those in the U.S.
in reply to David Goldfield

Ah, thank you. I suspect they'll redesign that page to make the list of distributors more prominent. I just gave it a cursory glance after having seen the main site this morning, and they looked the same" In any case, thanks for posting.
in reply to Ricky Enger

@ricky_enger Today's @doubletap podcast has an interview with BlindShell and U.S. distribution is addressed. Whether BlindShell addressed it adequately is another story.
in reply to Ricky Enger

@ricky_enger I believe they are working on bringing the U.S. site up, but the distributor network is still in place minus Blindshell USA.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Jage

@Jage This is great to know. Is AT Guys still distributing? And what about support? This is my main concern, as I would love to keep recommending this phone for the population I work with, but there definitely needs to be a solid support system after purchase"
@Jage
in reply to Ricky Enger

@ricky_enger Yes we are still selling the 2 at the moment. We are weighing interest in the 3 and also considering the amount of support it takes. We will always support our current customers.
in reply to Jage

@Jage Speaking of distribution, while other features such as AI Assistant doesn't seem transferable, the ability to copy/paste and make conference calls do seem to be back-portable to its second gen variant. Do you know if that is going to be the case? I don't have nor want one, but I am asking to see if this is artificial feature-limiting or if they will continue to support their previous devices for as long as feasible for the sake of their customers. @ricky_enger @DavidGoldfield
in reply to Jage

@Jage @twynn @ricky_enger One thing that I can't seem to find is the version of Android on the Classic 3. Does anybody know?



Keep in mind that in many countries a felony conviction (or equivalent) would lead to immediate ineligibility in public office.

That a country that broadly remove the right to vote from convicted felon and go as far as re-jail them if they mistakenly try to exercise their right to vote (simply rejecting should be enough) allow one to run for (the highest) office with a conviction is mindboggling.

in reply to Hubert Figuière

Yeah, I know.

I meant to imply that even if being treasonous didn't disqualify him (even though it should've), that if there would be some law that said a felon couldn't be president, that hypothetical law wouldn't matter for Trump either.

in reply to Garrett LeSage

@garrett one had a verdict from the court. The other one was stalled by his cult followers.


Inherited Dad's old M1 Mac mini over the weekend, so have just set it up with @AsahiLinux

It's genuinely astonishing how easy it is to do, and well it runs straight away. Also, @mixxx appears to run in it, which makes it all the more likely that I'll be doing this with my M2 Macbook as well.

The only thing I haven't yet worked out is how to see the company's networked storage.

in reply to Darren

yes, Mixxx has Apple Silicon builds! And our new Apple developer has made incredible performance improvements as well.


In JAWS: pressing CTRL+INSERT+F12
(desktop) CTRL+CAPS LOCK+F12
(laptop) Announces the time in hours, minutes, and seconds.
Pressing that twice quickly tells you what week number that you are in.
in reply to Martin from Toronto

one of the mini irritations I have with NVDA is that it respects your system's long date format, but not time.
SO I can change Windows to show me the day of the week and when I press NVDA+f12 twice it respects that.
If I add seconds to my clock, it doesn't.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Ooo, that's weird. Have you looked at the clock add-on? You can totally configure that sort of thing.
in reply to Martin from Toronto

I haven't, I sort of considered it a basic part of the screen reader. Just odd that it would pull the one but not the other from system preferences.


All the #writers here. Are there any rules for how long to make paragraphs, the font to use, and where to put in quotes, double space, etc. I think the only thing that is stopping me from posting fiction is that I don't want someone sighted to look at it, and not be able to make heads or tails of the formatting.
in reply to ElementalEcho

just replying to your writing question from a few weeks ago.

I've given up worrying about it.

I use paragraph navigation with NVDA in Ms Office. if the paragraph sounds about right, I go with that.

If I were to publish I'd get an editor to clean things up, but writing nowadays isn't like typesetting, everything is changeable.




EPD Engineering from Greece uses Tuta Mail for their business. Here's why! 👇

"First of all, for principal reasons, we just don’t want anyone to have access to our data. This is crucial for us as a technical company working with sensitive information. 𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐛𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐜𝐞, 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐭 𝐄𝐏𝐃 𝐰𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐞𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐓𝐮𝐭𝐚 𝐌𝐚𝐢𝐥 𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭."

👉 tuta.com/blog/tuta-customer-ep…

in reply to Tuta

I love the work you guys do any how you run things so much I upgraded my plan :) keep it up


Trump said we had a call and the Kremlin said we didn’t. This will be common going forward.

We don’t do propaganda so you will believe something. We do it so you will believe nothing. Then you will do nothing


in reply to ElementalEcho

the NVRA.IO servers reduce my ping time from the official NVDARemote.com by an average of 92%.
Of course, if you're using it internally you can connect directly to a machine within your local network or VPN. If you need to host your own server you can do so very cheaply, I pay less than $2 USD a month for a small VPS.
The NVRA.IO servers are:
## US
• Los Angeles: ca.nvra.io
• Denver: co.nvra.io
• Miami: fl.nvra.io
• Atlanta: ga.nvra.io
• Chicago: il.nvra.io
• New York City: ny.nvra.io (or just nvra.io)
• Dallas: tx.nvra.io
• Seattle: wa.nvra.io
• Toronto: can.nvra.io
## Rest of the world
• Sydney, Australia: au.nvra.io
• Frankfurt, Germany: de.nvra.io
• Bangalore, India: in.nvra.io
• Tokyo, Japan: jp.nvra.io
• Singapore: sg.nvra.io
• Johannesburg, South Africa: za.nvra.io
• London, United Kingdom: uk.nvra.io
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Curious where you get your $2 VPS. I could add more locations if I find cheap reliable places to host them.


In seriousness:

I'm not sure what the advocacy to "download a menstrual tracking app and put nonsense data in it" is supposed to accomplish, exactly. What's the mental model of how this works?

Spotting _chaos_ in data is relatively easy and filtering out that kind of thing is like an extra few minutes of friction. It's not nothing, but unless you actually know what you are doing I don't see how it is supposed to accomplish much.

in reply to Hrefna (DHC)

It's also worth reflecting what _exactly_ you are trying to protect against.

Because protecting against mass surveillance is different from protecting against individual targeting. Protecting against the federal government is different than protecting against a state government. Dealing with this when you live in Colorado is different than when you live in Alabama.

I know it is hard and people are scared, and also that means some clarity in goals is really, really important.

in reply to Hrefna (DHC)

Like, let's break down a threat model here a few steps.

1. If the government is going after you personally, others doing this won't matter in the slightest even if the data looks legitimate.

2. If the government is going after a broad sweeping scan then they are going to be looking for patterns and are thus likely to have an analyst. That analyst is going to see your "men inserting chaos" and be able to identify those records in 2.3 seconds. Especially if there's something geolocated attached


in reply to Pietervdvn

@pietervdvn The GPX format was chosen because OsmAnd and Locus Map can import them. With the mobile apps we can map while walking around outside.

The data source is stolpersteine-berlin.de/. Because of it having no explicit licence, some typos and inaccurate positions we cannot import it or use it for online editing. MapRoulette and MapComplete don't have IRL mapping editors, right?

in reply to Christian Paul

I call it an 'import', but it would be a slow import where contributors check the data before actually adding this into OSM
This entry was edited (1 week ago)


I would like the "I wear a mask when I have symptoms of something" people to know that north of 50% of covid spread comes from asymptomatic carriers


Want to have a play with the new Matrix 2.0 APIs? 🎉

Check out element-docker-demo, a new super-simple way to stand up Element with Synapse, MAS and LiveKit using docker-compose.

element.io/blog/experimenting-…



Apfelschorle. Sparkling Apple nectar which for some reason you can only get in German speaking countries.
in reply to Ondřej Caletka

Probably something to do with a German preference for sparkling water. Everyone else just drinks apple juice.


well folks the day has finally come. today's the day i have to learn how to deal with quaternions


Today is #Nokia #N900 15th anniversary.

Nokia N900 was released on November 11th, 2009 and is one of the few last mobile Linux devices.

It is also the last device to be shipped with the Maemo operating system.

#mobilelinux #maemo



oh no the end is nigh, it's nearly time to upgrade my work pc to windows 11
in reply to Josh Simmons

Fair enough. Perhaps I'm more deeply invested in Windows than most; I'm attached to my Windows screen readers, and I've developed for the platform for decades now. So I guess I'm content to be a boiling frog as long as things only heat up slowly.
in reply to Matt Campbell

And some things *are* worse in 11. Maybe this is somehow specific to my system, my use of screen readers, etc., but explorer.exe is fairly crashy. It automatically restarts when it crashes, but that still disrupts keyboard input and reshuffles the alt-tab order.


Sweet puberty yall, we did it! forum.audiogames.net/topic/549…

Tamas G reshared this.

in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Of course. It's seemingly fried my Win 3.1 install, though it works in Win98. Now we play the waiting game. 15 minutes starts now.
in reply to Stu

I don't know how much of the speech generation is 16 bit versus the UI and other executive function.
I've seen demo apps for softvoice that won't run because they're 16 bit and some that will, for instance. SO by that logic the speech synthesizer itself works across 16 and 32 bit platforms, just not its interface, if you see what I mean


Don’t interrupt someone working intently on a puzzle. Chances are, you’ll hear some crosswords.


my poor pc, as much as i have been testing stardew stuff with mods and things, i hope it doesnt hate me too much. morning mastodon. :)


All the energy used, all the carbon emitted, all the e-waste created and still every chatbot has the "anything this thing says might be false, you still need to check" label all over it.
I cannot believe the resources we are spending on this bullshit instead of doing literally anything else.
mastodon.social/@dw_innovation…



We need some help: we are using hosted Weblate for the translations under a Libre plan; but they only support up to 160K strings for free. With some new languages added, we are now exceeding this limit.

What are some alternatives to do this?

Pietervdvn reshared this.

in reply to MapComplete

You'll have far more control over triggers and levers, as an added bonus! I find it often stiffling when hosted instances impose some set of rules that make translations look incomplete despite the fact they're not (but you can discuss it with admin, of course).
This entry was edited (1 week ago)


ICYMI: a few weeks ago, I put together a comprehensive guide for #blind #RetroTech people on getting a fully working Windows 3.1 installation fired up, screen reader and all. fuge.seediffusion.cc/emu-guide…
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo I think I'll do Windows 98 SE next, since it's generally the more stable of the 9x series.
in reply to Stu

was that the one with all the sound schemes? Or did that come later.
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo Those sound schemes came from Microsoft Plus! For Windows 95, though 98 and its respective Plus pack added a lot more.
in reply to Stu

ah I presume it's the increase I'm thinking of.
It's interesting how the use of audio has changed over the years
in reply to Sean Randall

@cachondo The first version of Windows to really lean into Theming including sound schemes was 95, specifically with the Microsoft Plus! pack which was sold separately, though the base installation did include a few sound schemes on its own like Utopia, Musika, Jungle and Robots. Windows 98 had its own version of plus, which included a unique set of themes different from the 95 ones, but the base installation also included the sound schemes I listed above.
in reply to Pitermach

@pitermach I think I was still using a hardware speech synthesizer with 95. I don't actually recall having speakers on my desktop, and of course the PC speaker did its beeps without them anyway. Amazing to think that the entire audio side of things was just missing in my experience.