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Paperback 0.6.1 is out, bringing with it lots of bugfixes and a few new features! Changelog:
• Added password-protected PDF support!
• Added a very basic go to previous/next position feature. If you press enter on an internal link and it moves your cursor, that position will now be remembered, and can be navigated to with alt+left/right arrows.
• Added an elements list! Currently it only shows a tree of all the headings in your document or a list of links, but there are plans to expand it in the future.
• Added an option to start Paperback in maximized mode by default.
• Fixed links in some Epub documents not working properly.
• Fixed parsing Epub TOCs containing relative paths.
• Fixed some epub documents not showing a title or author.
• Fixed the titles of some epub chapters not showing up properly in the TOC dialog.
• Fixed you not being able to use the space bar to activate the OK/cancel buttons in the TOC dialog.
• Improved the handling of headings in Word documents.
• You will now get spoken feedback if the recent documents list is empty when you try to bring up the dialog.
Download: paperback.dev/downloads/
Enjoy!

Downloads – Paperback

paperback.dev

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in reply to Andre Louis

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x0

@FreakyFwoof Yeah, alt+tabbing hard enough with enough windows can do it too. I assume that Windows itself sends some kind of 'get out of the way' event to the window which WX picks up and responds to as a minimize event, which is maybe the same thrown by the menu? I've seen apps get it right to only respond to the menu, foobar2000 for example, but am not sure how they do it.
@Andre Louis

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Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawm…

I'm gonna be honest here: banning VPNs is not the solution. People who want to find content like porn will get it one way or another. It is going to harm legitimate users who use VPNs for security reasons, like on public WiFi or for getting inside a corporate network. I can't log into any of our servers/cloud w/o a VPN. All remote employees use a VPN. We replicate data between 2 data centers using a VPN


Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They're Doing

It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians have now discovered that people are using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to protect their privacy and…
Electronic Frontier Foundation
This entry was edited (6 days ago)

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Barely inaugurated, REM employees protest at Deux-Montagnes station

ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/ba…

I was thinking the thing breaking down on the first day. Not a labour action.

(don't get me wrong, I really look forward to use it)


Barely inaugurated, REM employees protest at Deux-Montagnes station

Following the announcement of the inauguration of 14 new stations on the new Deux-Montagnes branch of the Montreal light-rail line (Réseau express métropolitain - REM), REM employees staged a small protest on Saturday against their working conditions…
The Canadian Press (CTVNews)

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Seeing the amazing compactness of the original Infocom Z-machine interpreters puts the wastefulness of modern software in stark perspective. Both the Apple II and MS-DOS Infocom interpreters were about 12 KB of machine code (for the 6502 and 8086 respectively). True, the Apple II interpreter wasn't accessible with Textalker, since it was self-booting (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy alongside the game itself). I'm guessing the MS-DOS interpreter was accessible though.

Mike Gorse reshared this.

in reply to Matt Campbell

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Elijah Massey

Also, the Z-Machine literally only had 64 KB of mutable RAM. Even in Z8 games which can be up to 512 KB, only 64 KB of that memory can be written to at runtime. It is very impressive how much functionality could be achieved with such limitations; the Z Machine even had a compressed character encoding to save space, which I think shows the extreme level of optimization that was necessary.

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So I just stumbled on Accessi Frotz by Nathan Tech. An accessible Frotz interpreter that uses Accessible_Output2 to interface with your screen reader. Works great for playing all those old Z Machine text adventures. How did I not know this was a thing?! nathantech.net/products/softwa…

Accessi Frotz - Nathan Tech

View football matches accessibly with this program if you are a screen reader suer.
www.nathantech.net
in reply to Al Puzzuoli

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Matt Campbell

The original Infocom Z-machine interpreters were amazingly compact. The Infocom interpreters for Apple II and MS-DOS were both about 12 KB of machine code. True, the Apple II interpreter didn't work with Textalker, since that interpreter was booted directly without using Apple DOS (the only way to squeeze it onto a 140 KB floppy along with the story). But, if I'm not mistaken, the MS-DOS interpreter did work with DOS screen readers.
in reply to 🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

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Matt Campbell

@fastfinge Fair point. The ideal that I aspire to, that I haven't yet been able to meet in any real product I've shipped, is to minimize both code size and dependencies, so the application is small and also doesn't depend on much beyond what's already loaded into RAM on the host platform, so it starts fast.
@🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦
in reply to Matt Campbell

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James Scholes

@matt @fastfinge There are definitely some ridiculous modern software practices that are incredibly wasteful in terms of energy, resource utilisation, state sponsored surveillance, and the like.

then again, constantly maxing out your storage medium and memory capacity isn't a great recipe for innovation either. You said it yourself; they literally had to leave out the assistive technology because it wouldn't fit. A state of affairs that people would quite rightly find astonishing if it happened today (outside of embedded hardware where the resource constraints are serving to make the tech more exclusionary).

@Matt Campbell @🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦

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Ich war immer darauf bedacht, daß männliche Ego zu schmeicheln. Wenn nötig hab ich mich dafür verstellt, mich naiv gegeben oder unwissend. Das hab ich nicht bewusst gemacht. Es hatte sich einfach als meine Aufgabe angefühlt. Wenn sich ein Mann durch meine Existenz, Witz, Wissen oder Intelligenz in seinem Ego gekränkt sah, dann hatte ich was falsch gemacht.
In den letzten Jahren habe ich mit Therapeutinnen und Psychiater daran gearbeitet und konnte dieses Schema in diesem Jahr endlich ablegen
1/3

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November 16 will be the 85th anniversary of the National Federation of the Blind. To spark thoughtful conversation about the future, we are releasing the book Walking Alone and Marching Together in podcast form. This book provides insights into the organized blind movement during its first 50 years. Check out the podcast starting on November 16 coming to you every week! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/…

Walking Alone and Marching Together Podcast

History Podcast · Updated Weekly · A history podcast of the National Federation of the Blind Explore the victories, setbacks, and defining moments of the National Federation of the Blind. Through these episodes, we hope to not only sh…
Apple Podcasts
in reply to Debian

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Entité terrestre auto-critique

$ sudo apt upgrade
... reboot
$ uname -r
6.12.57+deb13-amd64
- okay
"no space left on /boot"
$ sudo apt remove linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64
-> installing linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned 👀
??😶 ??
$ ls -l /vmlinuz
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 16 nov. 06:57 /vmlinuz -> boot/vmlinuz-6.12.48+deb13-amd64
$ dpkg -l linux-image* | grep ^ii
ii linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned 6.12.48-1 ...
ii linux-image-6.12.57+deb13-amd64 6.12.57-1 ... (signed)
ii linux-image-amd64 6.12.57-1 amd64 ...

needed to :
$ sudo apt remove linux-image-6.12.48+deb13-amd64-unsigned
🤔 ??
#debian #TakeCare

#debian #takecare
This entry was edited (5 days ago)

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hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/11555…

This sounds like plugging a service to an LLM is a way of doing away with UX people. Just hope that the word salad will somehow match what the service's (invariably badly written) human-readable descriptions of its API, because if you don't have to pay an UX and front-end team to ADD A BUTTON TO TURN THE LIGHTS OFF then it must be a win.

(I am not criticizing this person's experiments, which are fine, but the larger scheme of things.)

J. B. Crawford

2025-11-15 01:05:50

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my husband made it so the home assistant voice assistant can use full-on ollama to interpret instructions. then he told it to turn the lights on. it's been explaining its thought process for over five minutes now and the lights are still off.

mastodon - Link to source
My friend @TheQuinbox has been working on an ebook reader for blind people called Paperback (github.com/trypsynth/paperback). So far it's all written in C++, using wxWidgets as the GUI toolkit. Now Quin is working on making it a Rust/C++ hybrid, with the UI still in C++ using wx. As far as we know, the Rust GUI ecosystem isn't nearly ready to support a desktop app like this, with perfect screen reader accessibility and native-feeling keyboard behavior.

GitHub - trypsynth/paperback: An accessible, light-weight, cross-platform ebook and document reader.

An accessible, light-weight, cross-platform ebook and document reader. - trypsynth/paperback
GitHub
@Quin

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Auf LinkedIn verteilt ein Sehender ein KI-Tool, mit dem man Braille-Schilder für den 3D-Drucker generieren kann.

Dazu hab ich eine Frage: Wie?

Kein LLM dieser Welt kann auch nur einfachste Dinge fehlerfrei in Braille-Basisschrift übersetzen.

Sehr wohl aber kann man Schriftpunktmuster einfach mappen. Wofür muss so Scheiß dann also aus einer KI rauspurzeln, wo niemand der das anwendet auch nur die Chance hat, das zu prüfen?

Ich hab’s so satt.

⇧