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• Post #3933700

  In case anyone's interested, now that #NVDASR has moved to 64 bit, we can use py-spy (a sampling profiler) to get performance profiles of NVDA while it's running. I wrote this (admittedly rather crappy) profile viewer web app to make analysing those profiles easier. It lets you switch threads, it sorts the samples by count (highest to lowest), it shows percentages of the total count and it lets you see the inverted stack for each sample (collapsed by default). There's a demo profile...

• Post #3849452

  A few days ago, I enabled tagged PDF generation in #Firefox Nightly! So, whenever you create a PDF from a web page using the Save to PDF option in the Firefox Print dialog, it will now be (mostly) accessible with assistive technology, assuming the original page was accessible of course. I say "mostly" accessible because this isn't perfect yet, but it's a massive step forward from producing completely inaccessible PDF documents. It also generates a document outline (table of con...

• Post #1892907

  Ah. The joys of emailing yourself links like it's 1995 because your personal and work accounts are entirely separated on different machines due to work policies, but you still end up having a bunch of work related correspondence on your personal GitHub and social media accounts.

• Post #1769705

  Last year, I moved all of my personal stuff to a mini PC, which has been working really well for the most part. It has no monitor. On the few occasions I've needed sighted help, I just connected via VNC from a laptop with a screen. But I needed to change a BIOS setting, so VNC wasn't an option and I didn't want to cart it somewhere else to connect it to a TV or whatever. It turns out that contrary to my expectations, USB HDMI video capture devices are quite cheap these da...

• Post #1739391

  I've recently jumped on the Tailscale bandwagon and am loving it. What's astounding to me is that in several days of using it as a screen reader user, I've encountered only a single minor accessibility issue across web, Windows and iOS. It is an absolute dream to use from an #accessibility standpoint, even its "visual" access controls editor. In a world where most tech products (*especially* those from high value tech companies and startups) are riddled...

• Post #1505601

  In last week's episode of exasperating but fascinating nerdy discovery, my son dropped his iPhone SE 2nd generation. Thereafter, it hard crashed and rebooted very frequently. We ended up getting him a second hand replacement. But I still had the challenge of getting the data off the old phone, since he doesn't have enough iCloud storage to have a recent cloud backup. Neither a transfer or computer backup was an option. Neither of those can be resumed and they never finished befor...

• Post #968902

  I didn't bring a laptop with me on my holiday. Using only an iPhone for more than a week (with a bit under a week to go) is really grinding my gears. While some of it is just general efficiency differences that everyone experiences regarcless of disability, most of it is a myriad of seemingly trivial but unbelievably painful accessibility papercuts experienced all over the place, like focus not being restored correctly when you switch apps; or focus bouncing away from where you put it an...

• Post #968758

  I've been on holiday in Japan for a bit over a week with my family. I really like it here. Some noteworthy things: 1. Everyone talks about this, but the variety and quality of food available in convenience stores - 7 11, etc. - is truly astounding. I wondered if perhaps it was highly processed, low quality, etc., but it really isn't. I hate cooking enough that if I lived here, I reckon I'd never cook again. 😂 2. Overall, people are much quieter and more considerate here....

• Post #962897

  For a school project, my son wants to do a live looping performance involving keyboard, vocals and maybe violin. Looping pedals that support vocals and another instrument are surprisingly expensive; several hundred dollars at least. So, I looked into software options and couldn't find anything that quite did what I want. He wants to be able to quickly toggle overdubbing of loops. He also wants to be able to mute parts of the loop - e.g. mute a set of instruments and bring them back later...

• Post #784527

  The thing that's great about being a coder is that when you're looking for a particular tool and you can't find anything that works exactly the way you want it to, you just write your own. The thing that sucks about being a coder is that when you're looking for a particular tool and you can't find anything that works exactly the way you want it to, you just write your own.

• Post #752981

  Like... who would have thought that "moving fast", mindlessly shoving AI into everything whether it served a real user need or not, and not caring a Zarq about quality in the process would irritate users? Surely no one could have predicted that. Surely not. But hey, this is just how tech companies roll these days, so they didn't really make a mistake that needs an apology. This is just a slight "pivot" and them being "agile" in their...

• Post #734209

  So after months of zero musical inspiration, I started writing a song about how utterly fed up I am of enshitification and hypercapitalism. Here's the intro, first verse, first chorus and interlude. The bad news: I have no idea where this is going from here, especially lyrically, so who knows when I'll finish it. The good news: it's far enough along now that it shouldn't die completely. Hopefully. https://files.jantrid.net/music/NthDegree/DidntHaveToBeThisWay17Mar...

• Post #718487

  Atlassian's CEO says: “The bar for what ‘great’ looks like for software companies – on growth, on profitability, on speed, on value creation – has gone up.” I love how "quality" doesn't come into that at all. It's very demonstrative of the tech industry across the board these days. Atlassian to shed ten percent of staff, because AI https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/atlassian_layoffs/

• Post #673344

  I've just spent far too long writing the beginnings of a ridiculous music game for web browsers. You use either a MIDI keyboard or the computer keyboard (a s d f g h j k). The game plays a bar of random notes and you have to play it back, correct notes and correct timing. As you level up, the patterns get more rhythmically complicated. If you make 5 mistakes, game over; you have to start again. Still probably a lot more to do to make this more interesting, but I'm curious as to w...

• Post #355059

  I landed a couple major features in ReaKontrol in the last week: 1. You can now adjust parameters for non-NKS FX on S-series MK2, A-series and M-series. These keyboards don't officially support this, but ReaKontrol supports it by abusing the mixer/track view. 2. For all keyboards, by default, all parameters for the selected FX are mapped. It's now possible to create map files which specify which parameters are mapped to which knobs, section names, friendly parameter names, etc. S...

• Post #36978

  Of all the questionable things about AI, I'm starting to think its biggest crime is simply the staggering amount of resources it has pointlessly drawn away from other, more important work and the way it has corrupted even organisations that were previously doing great work in some misguided, race-to-the-bottom belief that this is actually the most important thing for humankind.