On my AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS mini PC, NVDA is a bit sluggish in some cases in Firefox; e.g. cursoring through messages in Gmail folders. For reasons I don't fully understand, setting the processor affinity to a single CPU core and setting the process priority to "above normal" helps significantly, even when the CPU is nearly idle. I don't currently have the time/energy to debug the root cause for this or write a proper add-on, but I wrote an NVDA global plugin to make the change for me automatically when NVDA starts. If it breaks something, you get to keep all the pieces. ``` import ctypes
import globalPluginHandler
class GlobalPlugin(globalPluginHandler.GlobalPlugin): def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs): super().__init__(*args, **kwargs) p = ctypes.c_void_p(ctypes.windll.kernel32.GetCurrentProcess()) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetProcessAffinityMask(p, ctypes.c_void_p(1)) ctypes.windll.kernel32.SetPriorityClass(p, ctypes.wintypes.DWORD(0x00008000)) ``` #nvdasr
As if today couldn't get any worse, the bill for the server that runs this instance came out today and it was £1.60 more than expected. I never got any emails saying I'd gone over any limits or anything, but anyway, I'm now £0.02 negative. Some support to help keep this server going and help my other services grow, as well as covering personal costs, would be greatly appreciated.
At a critical moment, the tech press are failing to connect the dots between Apple and Google's craven capitulations and the authoritarianism they have nurtured within their own ecosystems. Apple is now corrosive to democracy itself, and we have to get smarter about the way these forces interact:
Apple bent the knee for months, leaving many commentators to ask why. But the reasons are not mysterious: Apple wants things that only the government can provide, things that will defend and extend its power to extract rents, rather than innovate.
The majority of people hate rich people because it's been proven that many show narcissistic/psychopathic tendencies. You only have to look at the various big tech CEOs and many in the current administration to see this play out in real time.
@ZBennoui Yet I've met rich people and they are interesting people who don't even discuss money, of course, most were not billionaires, but millionaires, for sure.
Oh don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to imply that all wealthy people are narcissistic jerks who deserve nothing, but the fact of the matter is that many are. It also depends on how you got rich in the first place. If you were born into wealth, you will simply not relate to people who either don't have the extraordinary amount of money you do, or who have come into it honestly by doing good work. There's a lot of nuance here, as with everything.
@ZBennoui Most of the milionaires I've met, including even some blind ones, made businesses. I only met 1 person born into it, and he's british royalty.
When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.
In the late 1980's there was an MS-DOS program called PIANOMAN. Yup, in the docs, it's written in all caps like that. This program would let you compose, play, edit, and save tunes, and even compile them into self-contained executables to give to others who didn't have a copy of PIANOMAN themselves. This program's claim to fame was that it could create pseudo-polyphonic music through the monophonic PC speaker by playing different notes extremely rapidly. This was a shareware program (try it for a while, if you like it, send in a registration fee to get the latest version and another disk of sample songs). I just found the shareware distribution of version 4 on Archive.org. One of the included tunes, which exists here only as a compiled, self-contained executable, is a version of a Tom Lehrer classic. Naturally, I figured some folks might be interested in this. It's set up to play repeatedly until a key is pressed, so I've only included three playings in this recording, and the last one fades out. Enjoy! #TomLehrer
Ah, the memories! PIANOMAN was one of the programs I used to play with when my brother got his first PC back in the 80s. I never figured out how to record songs like those demos, but it was fun to play the keyboard like a monophonic piano. Drove everybody crazy when I played it during Computer class at school, but I didn't care.
Hubert Figuière
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