Thanks for this. Louder than an Orbit makes it a deal-breaker for me, since I use braille and speech simultaneously much of the time during work. I like the fast refresh. I like everything about it, actually, at least from what I've read and what you said, but that loud refresh noise is a problem. Not that I can afford one either way.
Can you use TW Recorder, turn off iOS Processing, put the mic at ear-level, and record the refreshing again? Because that was super loud, but I imagine the mic was a couple inches away from the display.
Um, that's...the pins? Holy crap, this makes the orbit reader seem like a perfect display for silent reading time in a classroom. I imagine the mic on the braille sense didn't do it any justice, especially towards the beginning the refreshing created clipping artifacts like sharp sounds used to do on iPhone microphones, but it got the idea across, and sheesh.
@TheQuinbox ahaaha. I might do a short one with my iPhone's. and at a distance. I found out this thing uses magnets. So it's kind of like a VersaSlate stylus in that way, makes sense the refresh noise too. Now I know where it sounded familiar, of course. It's like an electronic VersaSlate
@johann same price as dotPadX, around 5400. Although on DotPad you get a 20-cell display along with an area that shows graphics separately. On this one it's combined but: Unlike Monarch, there's no gap from one line to the next, so if dots 7 and 8 (like underlining) is used, the lines will squish into each other. Monarch keeps line spacing the same as well as cell spacing like regular Braille.
for some reason when I hear that sound of the braille refreshing, I'm thinking if you were at a press conference, that sound would blend in with other sounds like cameras and such. lol
this sounds fascinating, I’ve been slightly intrigued by multi line graphical brow displays but didn’t want to pay out like the Bajillion dollar price tag on the other ones. How much was this?
Also, I’m curious how this might produce a visual PDF for example. Like in my case, a LEGO friend booklet visual PDF
Over the next couple of days, this Braille display will move into my home. For almost thirty years, I've come back to Help Tech displays time and again, despite trying out other display vendors' products in the interim as well. But because of their quality and endurance, I keep returning to these displays, and am proud to add the Activator to the list of Braille displays I own, or owned.helptech.eu/braille-displays-a…
Activator Braille display with a laptop-sized QWERTY keyboard, SmartDock and iOS app. It's time for a Braille display that offers you completely new possibilities.
@JonathanMosen It definitely is. I was privileged to lay my hands on a proto type when it was still in development. I'm a friend of the Help Tech company, and supported them during the 2022 SightCity virtual conference. And I saw it at an exhibition or two recently, and now have my own Activator here. It must be the most beautiful display they've built so far. Although I was a huge fan of the BookWorm back in the late 90s, too. I know that 8 Braille cells are too few for many, but this little Braille reading device saved me and my sanity on hundreds of commutes to my computer science school back in the day. Remember, this was before even the Nokia smartphone era.
Ever wonder why the "vi" editor uses H, J, K, and L keys for cursor navigation, and why Unix shells traditionally use "~" as an alias for the home directory?
The ADM-3A terminal was a very popular and inexpensive Unix terminal in the 1970s. Notice where the arrow keys are, and where the "~" key is? It influenced a lot!
In den nächsten Tagen wird bei mir diese Braillezeile einziehen. Heute habe ich beim Tag der Offenen Tür von Helptech Hamburg ausführlich damit gespielt, sozusagen als Appetitanreger. Ich freue mich, auch von der neuesten Generation der Zeilen von Help Tech eine zu besitzen. Bin seit fast 30 Jahren zufriedener Kunde und kehre, trotz gelegentlicher Ausflüge zu anderen Herstellern, immer wieder zu Help Tech zurück. helptech.de/braillezeilen/acti…
When Liz and I created the OpenBenches website, it was just designed to be a fun way for people to record memorial benches. Since then things have got out of hand and we now have over thirty-nine thousand benches recorded!
Our plan was never to compete with something like OpenStreetMap. The OSM project is vast, complex, and…
I thought they were two separate means to similar ends. Can't see how to get from mapcomplete to the 'Bench' quest that has screenshots of Maproulette's web application. Would love to link some of the nearby benches, but can't quite work out how to get it.
They arrived. the new multiline displays. Cadence tablets. Really interesting, and I love the cells are made of metal. Refresh is somewhat loud. Only 4 keys on top surface of device. I think they could use the outer thumb keys as dots 3 and6 though, if they really wanted to. As long as it is pressed together with another key, then quick double-press to enter just dot3 or dot6 alone. Trust me it is a viable way to type on one single unit. But the units are meant to fit together. Each has an opposing ril, that docks in. There are rails on the top and side of the device, so they fit together and slide-click into place. Fascinating. Thus, each display is mirror-flipped from the other, but you have flexibility in how to orient it: Side-by-side (as one long 24-cell-by-4 line) or up-down (as an 8-line by 12-cell display.) Either way you do it, it's going to have a seam and small gap where the two come together. Some might find this a bit annoying when reading content as it won't perfectly flow together, the middle of the line will always have a noticeable gap as words get placed on the next display, or a larger gap between two lines if you choose the top-orientation for docking them. Interesting indeed.
I'm curious ...these report as a braille display to screen readers, but how would you place (moving) images onto them in that case? Is that only something the internal software allows for or can I tell , say, Windows, to see it as a screen and just show a grahpical representation that way?
@twynn @zersiax The lines themselves don't have a break in it, like a gap that is with the cells, and they show random graphics when you wait after the pairing screen and nothing pairs. very interesting and odd. But iOS itself, no Graphics with VoiceOver. I wonder if it normally does.
@twynn @zersiax hmm, can we find the manual? It really threw me off when it displayed these random symbols that were not Braille but felt like Braille just longer LOL. Then I realized I waited too long at pairing screen and it does that weird thing. I've heard of Monarch users feeling the icons on their iPhone screen though and I'm not sure if that was VoiceOver printing the icons or through another method of connecting it to the iPhone screen itself. Hmm.
@twynn the website talks a lot about being able to see graphics and even animated graphics, being able to play videogames for example, but I feel those might be capabilities that might one day exist, not so much something that is possible now. Unless there's some kind of internal thing that does that ... maybe there's like a braille Snake or something
Cool! The braille community finally has our own version of the crease in a folding phone. Some won't notice, some will notice but consider the annoyance worth it, and some will hate it. Does slotting them together automatically tell the screen reader how many lines and cells there are, or do you have to configure that somehow?
@SuspiciousDuck Aha, to mně nenapadlo. Ten problém je i na polském trhu. Celkem by to bylo nemilé, protože kdybych potřeboval nový mobil pro matku, tak bude problém.
Apparently an American using metric in his video when making things is "dumbing it down for people who can't deal with conversions".
Dumbing it down is what we do in Canada where the official units are SI (metric) but we have so much courage that we import everything from the US without forcing them to use metric (look at the building / hardware stores).
And as a European I had to learn these non metric units. At least for length. I still ignore ounces.
George Washington (Nate Bargatze) tells his soldiers (Kenan Thompson, Mikey Day, Bowen Yang, James Austin Johnson) his dream for the country.Saturday Night L...
Hi, can you help: It seems that #deltachat notification system goes to "sleep" from time to time in android (Google Pixel 6a) so that I don't receive push notifications until I open the app. I haven't yet figured out the mechanism in this problem. I have set notification priority to max. It seems that I need to activate Background Connection from notification settings for things to work. But it shouldn't be necessary nowadays since Google push notifications should do the trick..?
Hi, is this Android notification issue resolved and can I follow the development somewhere? I started to use Delta chat with my students couple of months ago. iPhone notifications seem to work well, but there seems to be some random problems with Android. In urgent messages I switched back to SMS since Delta seems slightly unreliable for now.
Otherwise truly a great app! I have tried also calls. Seems to work, but would be nice to have speaker and video off when starting or recieving a call.
Your washing machine could be sending 3.7 GB of data a day — LG washing machine owner disconnected his device from Wi-Fi after noticing excessive outgoing daily data traffic tomshardware.com/networking/yo… The owner was puzzled why a clothes washer would need so much data.
Wenn das Schulsystem nichts mehr taugt, liegt das übrigens nicht am Lockdown in der Pandemie. Können wir bitte mal mit diesem QuatschNarrativ aufhören, dass seinerzeit der Ausfall von Präsenzunterricht ganze Jahrgänge ins Höhlenzeitalter zurückgeworfen hat?
True story: I once spent an afternoon scrolling through someone's Facebook account to find out when he had acquired each of his cats because he had named successive releases of a software package he maintained after the damn things in the order in which they joined his family and I needed to know whether Pickles came before Chocolate or vice versa.
The only correct versioning scheme is year.month.day (perhaps prefixed by a "generation id" if it's a library and you really, truly need that semantic versioning).
gave Navidrome a fair shot, but it seems to make zero effort on metadata for your media library unless it's baked into the tags so it doesn't fetch album art, artist into, etc. Kinda lame really.
seems buggy as hell too, wtf? No albums or songs but if you click on the artist there it shows albums...
also these aren't even all the albums so it's drunk as hell and I KNOW my music is tagged properly as I use Beets for that. Doesn't matter how many times I tell it to re-scan, it pretends the albums don't exist.
LMS seems to have the best potential as a SubSonic-compatible server. Simple, fast, seems to work. The web player is missing gapless playback and the replaygain support it has doesn't do EBU R128, but this could potentially be done in a SubSonic compatible client.
However, my first attempt at logging in with my first test app, SubStreamer on iOS, indicates its API isn't fully compatible and it errors...
edit: it's also not filling in album/artist artwork... grrrr
@rude I don't see an option for this, only whether or not Musicbrainz and/or AudioDB are enabled. Nothing seems to indicate there's an option to exclusively use local metadata; it just seems to ignore some of the local metadata completely for some reason.
I twiddled some more settings, try to force refresh on some albums/artists, nothing happens.
I'm aware that Musicbrainz has been suffering under heavy load lately and API calls time out so I'll be patient but this is just not looking very good 🫠
ah, the constant guessing game of figuring out which batteries are dead, which aren't, which ones are rechargeable, etc. I know there are a lot of negatives to in-built batteries, but god damn this is irritating
The new #PC arrived! Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on the configuration last week. I've made a couple of changes based on it such as getting a X870E motherboard and a faster disk.
@major thanks, it's quite difficult to make a boring looking build without the RGB circus. Not that I didn't like colors, but I sometimes sleep in my study and need to run the computer over night. :)
It's funny it came with pre-installed Windows even though I specifically ordered it without OS. Windows are gone now. #Fedora #Silverblue rules the computer now.
@theron29 I don't think so, it's just pre-installed, no license purchased. At least it isn't on the invoice and I didn't pay for it. Alza tested the machine before they shipped it to me, my theory is that they needed it for the testing.
@theron29 Geekboy (a youtuber) recently visited the place where alza builds computers and they confirmed that every single computer gets preloaded with windows by default. If the consumer pays for a license, they activate it. Otherwise they leave it as it is, so no worries, no money got wasted on Microsoft there :D
@vancura Přesně! A když to znovu vidím a čtu clean... Shodou okolností jsem včera narazil na článek o PC od svérázné legendy (nejen) brněnské kávové scény, stojí za sdílení zlutyzakaznik.cz/post/79980853…
(10. 11. 2025) Jen pro geeky. Byli jste varováni! :-)
Osmé výročí blogu, jež proběhlo v pátek 7. listopadu, je potřeba reflektovat trochu jinak než ta předchozí. Od listopadu 2017 tu byl inscenovaný...
@def Ja chtel puvodne napsat “dustfree,” ale on celej ten pocitac je tak pekne uklizenej a provazanej, ze je proste mega-clean. Uplne si rikam, ze bych taky chtel takovej peknej, cistej pocitac. Jak dlouho by to asi vydrzelo :)
@vancura @def musím říct, že mě ten pohled satisfakoval. No a pak jsem nasadil zpátky bočnici a je z toho počítač jako každý jiný. Ale ten pohled na čistý vnitřek budou mít v paměti celý rok, než to zase otevřu, abych to vyprášil. 🙂
@vancura co přesně tě zajímá? Dovezl jsem to včera večer a zatím jsem se věnoval především instalaci systému a přesunu aplikací a dat, takže jsem to z pohledu provozních vlastností zatím moc nezkoumal. S monitorem si rozumí, FreeSync jede, výkon to má taky odpovídající (i když od toho nečekám zázraky, je to přece jenom midrange). Na straně softwaru jsem zatím nenarazil na žádný problém, ale můžu hodnotit jen zkušenost na Linuxu, Windows šly hned pryč.
More good coverage on crypto fraud in the NYT this morning. Note the phrase "at least $28 billion". It is undoubtedly A LOT more than $28 billion because the technology is so perfectly designed to be untraceable AND this doesn't include all kinds of fraud. nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technol…
is this a joke? Crypto is extremely traceable unless it's Monero or ZCash which almost nobody uses. There are companies that specialize in tracing and giving the Feds all the info they need to nail stupid criminals who think these blockchains are magic crime tools
Uncover the hidden layers of blockchain with unparalleled precision and speed. Transform Hours into Minutes with Our AI-Driven Investigative Suite Manual and Auto-Demixing Discover hidden tracks within major mixers at the click of a button, effortles…
1. For every problem I'm about to flag, I have introduced legislation or amendments to existing legislation to fix. In every case, they have been opposed by the Republicans and the crypto industry. Thus this paragraph. If you make crime legal, is it still crime?
2. First, to the fraud this analysis doesn't even touch. In any other financial market it would be illegal to be an exchange operator and a issuer of securities. Or to be a broker of your own securities. Brokers and dealers are separated. Crypto does none of that.
3. That creates MASSIVE conflicts of interest. If you are buying and selling crypto and you aren't conflicted, you are almost certainly being taken advantage of by someone who is.
4. Google "wash trades" to see how some of that fraud works in practice. I issue a coin, trade it between entities I control to artificially inflate price, then once the suckers get in I dump. (Industry sometimes call these "barts" bc the price history looks like Bart Simpson's haircut.)
5. Especially for some meme coins, that type of fraud and its variants gets close to 100% of the volume. And isn't included at all in this NYT analysis as far as I can tell.
6. But to the fraud they do track, Chainalysis (mentioned in the article) has testified before our committee. They do good work seeking to track all the trade history that leads to illegal use. But even with all their skills, they can only see the so-called "on-chain" trades.
> But even with all their skills, they can only see the so-called "on-chain" trades.
If it's not on-chain, this is even easier to investigate. Go get their private databases they use for their order books.
but also I wish our elected representatives cared even a fraction as much about the criminal activity happening on the stock market which is the same thing happening here, but significantly bigger. Nobody cares about dark pools, how they're front running retail trades stealing from regular Americans, ladder attacks to manipulate prices... all of Citadel... trillions of fraud over decades swept under the rug
Outside the US you get transferred to a distributor tech support who in my case told me I needed to get an Access to Work assessment as I mentioned I was using some software at work. Its pretty shocking and part of the enshitification of JFW that I think will eventually lead to its demise.
So, um, fail? I just tried getting picture smart to describe an image for me. I couldn't figure out why insert space was doing nothing to start the process of envoking the picture smart layer. Wanna know why? I was using NVDA.
People are giving the Mona developers a really hard time. Did they know they would be using AI when Mona 5 became a thing? Chances are, probably not. Are they having to pay for AI for the next upgrade, yes. Will that require funding? Yes. It's not really that hard to understand where they're coming from. #Blind
I don't know fully yet either. None of us do. But here's the thing. If the new app is the only Mona in the app store, that leaves us with two choices--either get the new app or don't use Mona. So where will that leave those who paid for Mona pro?
jumping to conclusions is what's causing this problem. they may remove the old one, they may not. No one knows, so getting worked up over it is pointless
I think the Mona people are making the same mistake the voice dream reader folks made, which is announcing the new product/payment system without a FAQ or other documents which outlines the process, how much it will cost, what things are supported, and what will happen to the old app. I'm like Lynn, I paid for Mona Pro, I have no problem paying for an app, i don't want to pay for AI, because I don't use it, I am really happy with Mona, and hope they keep supporting this current app, but frankly, if they stop supporting it, and it becomes obsolete, and my only choice is to buy new Mona and pay again, or switch to Toot which I've already paid for and which is continuing to be supported, I'm not going to pay for Mona again.
Yeah, that. I think Mona was and is well worth my money. But if my choice is to pay again simply because someone wants to shove AI down my throat without anything else useful, or switch to another app, then honestly, I'll likely switch to something else. I'm not going to dump money on something I won't even use. It's not about paying for stuff for me, if something is useful to me, I'll gladly pay for it. What I won't do is drop money on something useless to me, something I've already fairly paid for, or something I outright dislike. I don't need AI in my mastodon app, and if I have to pay to continue using Mona simply because someone decided I need more AI immediately, then I just won't do it. I have better things my money could go to.
@ratking FWIW, my issue is not with paying for a new version of Mona. I'm more than happy to do that if it's the best thing going. However, I'm much more concerned about how even more stuff will get leaked to ChatGPT as a result. That alone will probably keep me from upgrading.
Oh cool. VS Code can work with Github repos directly. I don't actually have to git clone them. Also they've changed some of the Alt Function keys around Linux, so Alt + F2 is changed to Alt + Shift + F4 or so.
Alex Chapman
in reply to Tamas G • • •Alex Hall
in reply to Tamas G • • •Timothy Wynn
in reply to Tamas G • • •Martin
in reply to Tamas G • • •Quin
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tamas G
in reply to Quin • • •johann
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tamas G
in reply to johann • • •Joy Tilton
in reply to Tamas G • • •Morgan Pimentel
in reply to Tamas G • • •this sounds fascinating, I’ve been slightly intrigued by multi line graphical brow displays but didn’t want to pay out like the Bajillion dollar price tag on the other ones.
How much was this?
Also, I’m curious how this might produce a visual PDF for example. Like in my case, a LEGO friend booklet visual PDF
Eden Linnea
in reply to Tamas G • • •