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• Post #4084559

  I'm having a very strange NVDA remote problem. I use a localy-hosted relay server, and one of my machines occasionally develops a condition where NVDA remote is laggy to the point of being unusable. It seems to be taking a lot of time to receive keyboard input from the controlling machine, but speech still comes through reliably. So if I physicaly connect a keyboard to the controlled machine and listen through the controller, speech is still instant. My log file is absolutely littered with t...

• Post #4005159

  I started using a text file as a to-do list, specifically using the todo.txt format. There are mobile apps which read and understand this format, possibly PC apps as well, but for the moment I'm just editing by hand. This is by far the most productive I've ever been with a to-do list. I have a hotkey that opens it, I edit it and save it, and for now, that's it. I'm not really sure what to think of this. I'm increasingly convinced that in 50 years when everyone is controlling...

• Post #3913320

  For most of my time using Linux, I've been doing remote server administration. Even when I had a Raspberry Pi as a homeserver, I just connected over SSH. After way too many false starts involving old laptops with weird driver issues, I finally have an actual Linux desktop. It's a Beelink mini PC that came with Windows 11, but the hardware is generic enough that Debian seems to instal and run without any complaints. It has an Intel N150 and 16 GB of RAM, more than enough to run a desktop...

• Post #3883987

  I already feel like I'm on an iOS beta every time I use my phone. How bad can this iOS 27 thing really be?

• Post #3883986

  Has anyone done anything with the Bookport Classic from APH recently? I found mine in a cupboard, along with a card that had actual books on it. After taking it apart and cleaning the board underneath the rubber keypad, I seem to have a fully working unit. I wonder if anyone ever reverse-engineered the text format it used. If I recall, each document was represented by two files on the bookport, one being an index file and the other being a line-separated copy of the text file. The index file def...

• Post #3883985

  The NVME drive that held my entire Komplete library seems to be dying. Random disconnects and read failures all over the place. I had to remove it from the PC because any write operation would cause my entire machine to freeze. Not sure about the best way of re-downloading the lost content, or if I should even bother trying to copy files from the dead drive. I have a 2 TB SATA SsD I can use, but I'm fairly sure the M.2 slots on my desktop don't support SATA, so it'll have...

• Post #2948601

  WhatsApp's latest party trick is randomly changing the apparent keyboard focus from the message text field to a blank control while i'm in the middle of typing a message, so I have to regularly (every few seconds) tab and then shift+tab to make NVDA recognize that I'm still focused on the text field. The constant quest to find an efficient way of Instant messaging is, without exaggeration, one of the most exhausting and frustrating parts of my tech life.

• Post #2886935

  In September of 2020, one of the iOS 14 betas developed a bug where notifications wouldn't work when the phone was unlocked. No banner would be displayed, no sound or vibration would happen, and--since the phone was unlocked--the Apple Watch mirroring wouldn't work either. It's now almost June of 2026, and I'm on the iOS 26.5 beta. And this bug is *still* here. It goes away for long enough that I start to believe it's gone, but it always comes back. Many o...

• Post #2785833

  Does anyone still play Windows audiogames that use SAPI voices? If so, which voice do you use? I know there's a closed-source NVDA SAPI bridge that some people were able to get working some of the time. I think I have Eloquence from CodeFactory, but I lost another registration thanks to changing hardware, and they make the registration reset process even more annoying than Freedom Scientific's. Has someone managed to get a working SAPI5 Eloquence? It seems possible in theory, tho...

• Post #2455454

  Today is a good day for books. Dungeon Crawler Carl book 8 and the last full-cast Harry Potter are both happily sitting in my Audible library, clocking in at 41 hours combined. .

• Post #2399098

  @prism@infosec.exchange Unfortunately, one of the delightfully moronic things about Canada is that we don't actually seem to *have* Amber alerts. At least, not at a software level. Everything goes out as a presidential alert. Could be a notification of abducted children 900 miles away, could be a notification that I'm about to die in an earthquake. I'm currently sketching out an idea to build my own emergency alert system with filtering, redundancy, and self-tests. Because apparently...

• Post #2398814

  I was contentedly drifting off to sleep when an Amber alert came to my phone at 1 in the morning. It used the same alert level as a missile warning, broke through my do-not-disturb and came through my Airpods at full volume. At first I felt guilty for being mad about it because "Think of the children." But I've thought of the children and i'm still mad about it. The alert is from the Terrace police. Terrace is 1300 kilometers from me. Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco are cl...

• Post #2334843

  I was playing #SuperLiam when someone called me on WhatsApp. This caused me to stop ducking, right as four fireballs came along all at once. I had 10% health left and was almost done with the level. I had no chance. I'm not even mad. We both laughed about it.

• Post #2310930

  I wonder if any category of tech is as abandoned as my box of TV stuff. I have a talking Samsung TV, multiple Apple TVs, the NVIDIA shield (a much faster Android streaming box than Google's option at the time), a Fire Cube, an HDMI splitter, an infrared repeater, and too many cables and remotes. Oh, and I have a digital TV box from Rogers which is still in its original packaging, because trying to figure out how to set it up and use it just seems really daunting. I do have free cable cha...

• Post #2310929

  Dear router manufacturor who decided to make default administrator passwords that are printed on a tiny label, mixed case letters and numbers, and 19 characters long: I hope you step on a lego. Every day. At least seven times. ... Yes, I did just wish lego stepping upon a company. I'm just going to leave it here to illustrate my current mental state. (I'm still not logged in, by the way.)

• Post #2307937

  The iOS Files app has no way to show hidden files. Because iOS is Unix-based, it considers any file or folder that starts with a period to be hidden. So the next thing I'll be doing is walking over to my computer, opening up File Explorer, and renaming the .ssh folder to just "ssh", before copying it onto my phone and then immediately renaming it back to .ssh. And before anyone asks ... no, I can't just type the folder name into search. My phone is coded to insi...

• Post #1921582

  Fun fact: The carrying case for the Freedom Scientific PacMate is exactly the correct width for an Ableton Move. I think there might be just enough leftover space for a tiny MIDI controller.

• Post #1921581

  For the last few days, WhatsApp on Windows has been randomly shifting keyboard focus to a blank "pane" while I'm writing a message. Today it logged me out, and whenever I enter the verification code to log back in, WhatsApp on my phone just says "Couldn't link device. Try getting a new code." It's hard not to feel like this is the beginning of the end for cross-platform messaging with this app. I liked it specifically *because* I didn&a...

• Post #1642866

  A couple of nights ago I checked the time at 23:24:25. Today I checked the time at 09:49:49. Keep it up, universe.

• Post #1642865

  For years, I and many others used a tiny MIDI sequencer for Windows called QWS. It became more and more impractical to use this over the years as DAW accessibility improved, but I spent an absurd amount of time making MIDI files in this thing. Sometimes I just want to pull out QWS to jot down a musical idea in 2026, because after all these years, there's still something easy and familiar about it. The problem is, even if I'm just using hardware like my Roland keyboard, I still ha...

• Post #1642864

  I really should have asked this long ago but ... for those who don't want to deal with the bloatedness of Microsoft Word on Windows, what are you using for an accessible spell checker? I'm half-tempted to just use the terminal for this.

• Post #1642862

  What YouTube means to say: 90 views, posted 9 years ago. What it actually says according to a screen reader: 909y ago.

• Post #1505599

  PSA: If I have automatic app updates turned on, and your app frequently refuses to run until I've updated to the version that came out only a few days ago, you're doing something wrong.

• Post #1411527

  I think if all these streaming companies would stop calling them "Family Plans" and start calling them "Household Plans", it wouldn't feel so frustrating when the company suddenly cracks down on account sharing based on location. In related news, Spotify emailed me today to tell me that they asked "one of my family members" to confirm their address. No information about which one.

• Post #1155839

  An unexpected bonus of using Tailscale is that when I connect to my TeamTalk server using its Tailscale IP, and I switch between cellular data and wi-fi on my iPhone, the server and client don't have a disagreement that results in broken voice transmission.

• Post #1155838

  I went to renew my Costco membership today. First link on the homepage is "renew your membership now". That's convenient. I guess people go there to do that a lot. I like that UI design. The page asks me to log in. My Bitwarden vault already has a password for Costco, so I autofill it. Before I can even hit "submit", it says "Your password is incorrect" and steals keyboard focus to do so. I tried to log in anyway, and sure enough, it...

• Post #1155837

  Am I the only one who wishes that NVDA's indentation beeps could be configured to report the previous indentation position along with the new one? I feel like sometimes when i'm reading code that is not my own, I would benefit a lot just from understnainding the indentation change as it happens, rather than having to keep the current indentation in my head. This might also be one of those things that gets easier with practice; I don't have indentation reporting enabled a...

• Post #1155836

  Putting this out to Mastodon before I do my own digging: Has anyone ever used the TeamTalk SDK (or some other hack) to stream audio from a headless Linux server to a TeamTalk channel? I had a Windows desktop I was using as a sort of security system while I was away from home, and that machine has since died an unexplained death. It would be nice to just replace this with a Raspberry Pi. I'm aware I can also just stream to an Icecast server, and I'll do that if nothing else works,...

• Post #1155835

  Something in the new TeamTalk professional server's implementation of SSL is very, very broken. I just broke a few regions for about an hour by basically replacing the binary and restarting the servers. The TeamTalk app can't connect, even though I can make a raw TCP connection, so I have no idea what's going on, but I rolled back to an old version that actually works after much failed troubleshooting.

• Post #1155834

  Q: How do I open an EPUB file in VoiceDream in iOS 26? A: Share the file. Don't share the link. This is very important, so naturally we won't show any indication of which one you're doing. If VoiceDream shows up in the share sheet, tap on it. If instead we show you the reading app you haven't opened in two years, press the "View More" button and look for VoiceDream. If it's not there, press the "More" button. (Yes, this...