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• Post #4438842

  If you're a blind Claude Code user, put the following line in your settings.json: "axScreenReader": true restart Claude Code, and have your life changed forever. I can now properly review and resume old claude sessions, I don't get endless Unicode symbols spammed at me, I can review the output with my review cursor much easier... OMG this is so nice!

• Post #4438841

  My final grades for the very last college class I ever had to take have now posted. I'm done. I've graduated. Goodbye college!

• Post #4438840

  I've once again gotta hand it to HumanWare's technical support department. The USB-C end of my BrailleNote evolve's sharger snapped clean off in the port yesterday, leaving frayed wires atop a laptop charger's cable and a small metal component inside my back USB-C port. Managed to get the metal piece out and unplug the cable as to make it not a fire hazard on my carpet floor, and then I called humanware. Without asking any real probing questions, they had a new ch...

• Post #4438839

  Been testing document parsing on the evolve's hardware this afternoon. When throwing a massive file like Worm at it, Paperback parses and renders it in 2-3 seconds. Meanwhile, HumanWare's own Victor Reader application hangs for about 45 seconds trying to build out a heavy WebView2 DOM tree before completely choking and throwing a fatal null reference. Even on standard files that do load, the parsing engine in Victor Reader adds strange rendering artifacts: EPUB's and HTML...

• Post #4385310

  I've just released version 0.3.0 of Taskmon, my lightweight, no frills replacement for the modern, bloated mess that is Windows Task Manager. Changelog: Added Ctrl+Q as a shortcut to exit Taskmon completely.Added 11 new columns: Service, GPU, GPU Memory, CPU Time, Elevated, Path, Window Title, File Version, Product Version, Session Name, and Package Name.Added File > Restart as administrator to relaunch Taskmon elevated.Added a hierarchical Process Tree view (Ctrl+T) that groups processes...

• Post #4360520

  If you manufacture Braille displays, and make the only indication that the battery is completely dead an LED on the side of the device, something has gone very wrong somewhere. Like...you do realize that people who need braille...can't typically see lights very well if at all, right? I get not flashing something on the braille display, 200v even at low amperage is too much for a dead LI battery, but vibrate? Something that, uh, your primary userbase can actually detect? [sighs].

• Post #4338658

  Thoughts/feedback wanted! Working through pricing for Paperback across platforms as 0.9.0 gets ever closer. My current thinking is: * Windows & macOS direct downloads: Free as always from paperback.dev. * Mac (and maybe Windows?) Stores: ~$10 (for auto-updates & covering dev fees). * iOS and Android Stores: ~$20 one-time purchase (to support native mobile codebases & dev account costs). Paperback is very much a passion project, so asking even this for any of it feels weird/wrong some...

• Post #4304072

  Today I learned: On Windows 11 at least, Windows+Shift+Dash types an em dash (—). Have yet to find any other combo like this that does anything similar.

• Post #4283103

  I noticed some core NVDA modifications (namely unfamiliar .pyc files in library.zip) while poking around on my BrailleNote evolve, so I reached out to Andrew Flatres about GPLv2 source compliance. To my delight, HumanWare actually packaged up the source code for the community! If anyone wants to take a look under the hood at how their commands and display layers interact: https://humanware.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/braillenote/Evolv/Public/nvda.zip Huge thanks to Andrew and the team for turnin...

• Post #4142036

  Until YouTube makes it possible to boost quiet audio natively in the web player, I will not feel a single drop of guilt about using yt-dlp or watching maintainers fix whatever they broke for the third time this week. Google can throw billions at walling off their platform, but no amount of corporate money will ever out-code a bunch of nerds driven by open-source idealism and a deeply autistic need to archive everything. Just give up already.

• Post #4123388

  It's getting closer and closer to Paperback 0.9.0 release time, which of course means Paperback mobile! However, mobile app stores are mobile app stores, and in order to get the Android version into the Play Store, I'll need 12 testers to install it on their device and use it for 14 days. Not necessarily every single day for hours on end, but please don't just install it and let it sit there for two weeks, Google actually tracks if people do this unfortunately. I've got a couple...

• Post #4093063

  So... I have to eat some serious humble pie here: after throwing a huge fit on my timeline and declaring the evolve effectively dead to me, I'm actually keeping it. What turned it around was taking it to Phoenix as my only laptop for a long weekend and realizing that having a full x86 Windows rig with 32 GB of RAM that I can throw over my shoulder, compile paperback natively on, run WSL with, and do real software development on without needing a host PC running at home is just too useful for...

• Post #4044500

  If your ebook reader app can't even attempt to open a raw .txt file, in 2026, something has gone profoundly, fundamentally wrong in the development process. Plain text is literally the baseline of computing, how is this an edge case? Speaking from experience, it's moderately difficult to have a parser that handles almost all .txt files in all encodings well, but not even trying is just pethetic.

• Post #3995990

  Brought the BrailleNote evolve as my only laptop on a trip to hang out with some friends, and it worked beautifully! I was still nowhere near my 130 WPM on a qwerty keyboard typing speed, which is why I'm really looking forward to the qwerty, and the battery did need topped off a little bit more than my laptop would've, but not by as much as I expected, and it made my backpack noticeably smaller and lighter. I still see benifits to Android-based Braille notetakers, absolutely. You cannot...

• Post #3742175

  Life is too short to vibe-code features into existence when a dedicated tool literally completely solved the problem in question. If you want to read an EPUB, just use Paperback and save yourself the formatting heartbreak.

• Post #3660222

  Blind heivmind: is there a decently cheap and accurate way of preserving a physical braille document digitally? If I need to get a crappy flatbed scanner for this that's okay and honestly expected, I'm mainly wondering if someone has made something that effectively takes OBR and converts it to BRF, or if I'll have to code one.

• Post #3612885

  One thing I will say about the evolve is how unexpectedly intuitive the braille keyboard is for doing Windows things. Not every single thing, I have a tool that uses a global hotkey involving the backslash key and I just can't do that on the evolve, but doing things like windows + d, windows + r, alt + tab, etc. feel way more intuitive than I expected them to. The modifier keys are pretty well done.

• Post #3593234

  My initial impressions of the BrailleNote evolve as a product still aren't 100% glowing, but the fact that HumanWare support helped me get my braille back (by reinstalling Windows), on a weekend, especially the weekend of July 4th, says something incredibly positive about their support team. That's something you don't get many places. The evolve's going through OOBE again over there.

• Post #3567199

  Yeah...I'm afraid this evolve is almost certainly going back. I'm going to keep it for another couple weeks, see if I change my mind and how well it holds up on a trip, but this is...I'll just say that I agree with any reviewer who called this product rushed. Pressing the home button to bring up the main menu can take up to 10 seconds and focuses you on the taskbar before it does so, in most text fields, but not all, hitting an arrow key while you have a word of untranslated braille...

• Post #3558025

  So, just to summarize: I spent over two months of salary, more than many people could get a new car for, on a Windows-based braille device. I installed a .net sdk through scoop, and now HumanWare's braille translation add-on doesn't work, so not only can I not type, I can't read, either! Holy fuck guys. WTF!

• Post #3537053

  It is the year 2026, and in order to buy a BrailleNote evolve and to get my SensePlayer repaired, I have to give AT companies my credit card number over the phone. I am being told by an AT company that their system is "encrypted and secure," yet they don't have a way to send a simple payment link for a repair. My freshly minted cybersecurity degree is absolutely screaming at the thought of transmitting raw cardholder data over an unencrypted voice line, but sure, let's pretend...

• Post #3432188

  I love screen readers that treat standard Microsoft controls as something to break with Braille displays. Screen Reader Compatibility Paperback works well with all major screen readers. There is, however, one known issue for JAWS users. JAWS and Braille Displays If you use JAWS with a Braille display, you may find that long paragraphs are truncated when panning forward with your display's navigation keys. The read current paragraph command is also affected. This is a bug in JAWS's handli...

• Post #3100406

  Just found an official Bass Bootcamp set uploaded in 32k mono. Any professional audio engineer who uploads a dubstep set like that deserves to have their master fader permanently locked at -40dB while a 96 kbps MP3 of Crazy Frog loops in their headphones until the end of time.

• Post #2525701

  It feels a tad weird asking this as a moderator and sysadmin of a Mastodon instance, but fedi hivemind: what happens if I mention someone in a followers only post and they don't follow me? My assumption would be that they just wouldn't see it, but what if they then started following me? Would they just magically unlock these posts they'd been mentioned in? I'd think they would, but it wouldn't send them notifications of them.

• Post #2464309

  I needed to encode and decode a lot of Base64 strings, so I made a tiny Hammerspoon that does it. It assigns two keys, control+cmd+b to encode a string and control+cmd+shift+b to decode one. The result is then shown to you in an alert box ,with an option to copy it to the clipboard. https://github.com/thequinbox/basespoon

• Post #2434320

  Paperback version 0.7.0 is out, with a huge changelog! * Added table support for HTML and XHTML-based documents! Navigate between tables using T and Shift+T, and press Enter to view one in a webview. * Added a basic web rendering feature! Press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the current section of your document in a web-based renderer, useful for content like complex formatting or code samples. * Added a Russian translation, thanks Ruslan Gulmagomedov! * Added a Clear All button to the All Documents dialo...

• Post #2307938

  RE: https://hachyderm.io/@epage/116541231143306792 Oh this is fantastic, I've wanted this for years!

• Post #2307935

  Guided Frame in the camera app of modern Pixel phones is genuinly a life changer for using my phone camera as a blind person. I've used it to take good pictures of my cats to send to the family group chat, used it to open a QR code to activate my new credit card, and at least a couple more examples that are escaping my early Saturday morning brain. There's also a feature where you can swipe down with two fingers to get a scene description. Have yet to test scene descriptions offl...

• Post #2307934

  I've just released version 0.1.0 of txt2img, a simple program that allows you to generate images from the command line. The images are fairly basic, you can currently only draw text onto a PNG with custom colors and fonts, but it's more than good enough for me when generating app icons and other things that need an image. I do not trust or like AI image generation, so decided to make a tool that works entirely offline and uses no AI. It's also entirely statically linked,...

• Post #2307933

  I've spent the past two months or so building out and perfecting a small web-based incremental game, inspired by the old mobile game Crafting Kingdom, but more accessible and modern. It's under a hundred KB of JavaScript, but includes a fully complete game including 7 buildings and almost 100 quests. Please feel free to give any feedback, it took me a lot of balancing and tweaking to get it to this point and it's very possible and even quite likely there's still w...