Ray Dog

I just stumbled across a Youtube video that was literally posted over 20 years ago. not a recent reupload either, it's a genuine 20-year-old video. That's cool and all, but what's not so cool is that when I first discovered Youtube and started surfing through videos, that 20-year-old video would have practically been new. Damn I feel old now.

I wish Youtube would start showing videos as links again instead of just headings. But it's been this way for a while now, so I guess I should soon quit hoping. Lol

I realize that AI is a very serious thing and needs to be responsibly used and discussed at length. But damn I am getting so very sick of hearing everyone's opinions on AI every time something new comes out. If AI was used, the haters will hate. If AI is not used, people praise the thing for being such a genuine product, made in the spirit of the good old days. If AI use is not disclosed, suspicions run rampant about whether it was used or not. I honestly feel sorry for people who dare to touch AI these days because they're put in a damned if you're honest and damned if you're not kind of situation. Yes I know not everyone is annoying about this, but certain circles definitely are, and they just happened to be circles I used to follow religiously, which I may now have to back off from to save my sanity. I wish we could just figure this AI thing out already! I know it's wishful thinking, but the sooner it happens the better. Lol

Nothing makes me save my work faster than remembering the last time I forgot to save my work. I swear, if there was a contest for reflexively hitting control s the millisecond I am prompted, I think I might have a serious shot at being a winner, or at least runner-up. Lol

Windows is just weird sometimes. A particular program, on the rare occasion, will decide not to launch after I reboot, and instead will throw a cryptic error that Google can't help me fix. It always fixes itself after a restart or two.

I have my theories as to possible triggers, but honestly if my hunches were actually correct, I should be having this issue a lot more often. So yeah I'm just going to leave it at Windows being weird.

I'm not that fussed about it, that's why I'm not making a big deal of asking for assistance. God knows I don't need even more excuses to stop using this thing. But still. I thought stuff like this was only supposed to happen in the 20th century. Hehehe, I wish. Lol

Well dang. I just learned something stupid but useful. So tubes of oitment, paste etc. often have caps that have a little pointy thing on top. Ever since I was a kid I wondered what that point was for, and now I know. If the tube came with a seal, that point on the cap can break it, no external tools needed.

Okay so I got an e-mail question for you all.

For literally over a decade now, I've been using GMail's web interface as my main E-Mail driver. But recently it has crossed an annoyance threshold with me and I am seriously done with it. It is high time I set up an actual E-mail client. That way I can potentially use my secondary e-mail without having to fight with another web interface.

So I'm on the hunt for good, simple and accessible Windows E-mail clients. I decided to go with Thunderbird since I've generally heard good things about it. I got the big stuff figured out, but there is one thing that is lowkey bothering me.

From what I remember from my old days using Outlook Express with Jaws, it would tell me if a message was unread, but it would not tell me if a message was read. I really liked this, so I'm trying to replicate it in thunderbird with NVDA, but have only been partially successful. The closest I can do is use the read status column, but this will tell me if a message is read, which I don't really need to know. I only want to know if it is unread. I can live with it, but it's a little annoying. It would really inflate my nostalgia/comfort bubble if I could somehow change this. Lol. There is an unread column in Thunderbird which I thought might be of use, but either I don't understand what it does, or it isn't reporting to NVDA.

So yeah, any recommendations?

Ugh, what has Youtube gone and done now? On some pages videos are just headings, not links. You can still press enter on them to watch, but link-specific actions of course don't work. But if I go to youtube.com and search, the search results are links. For now anyway.

Omg I am such a freaking nerd. I almost wrote bytes with a y instead of bites with an i. Yes I totally did. And this isn't the first time that has happened to me. The really dumb part is, I of course learned bite with an i in elementary school, but learned byte with a y much later, when I started getting curious about computers. I guess I expected the earlier one to stick more, but it clearly hasn't.

After some stupidity, I finally got my IPhone 17E. It'll take some getting used to, since there were a bunch of minor surprises I wasn't expecting. The case I got for it has a large slit on the right side, a few inches below the lock/power button. At first I thought this was where the new action button is, but I don't actually feel a button there. Also I'm not a big fan of how much they tried to bring out the bass on these speakers. Maybe I'm just used to the slightly worn speakers on my xs, but I find these speakers a little fatiguing to listen to. Maybe they have to break in or I'll get used to it after a few days. On the plus side, the battery life is insane compared to what I was used to on my dying xs, and the microphone seems to be pretty good too. It sounds less tinny, which I like. It of course goes without saying that the phone is quite responsive. It feels a bit snappier than my xs did in certain situations, and it seems to run less hot as well.

So, decided to sign in on ITunes on my PC, just in case it would make it easier to transfer data to my new phone for what ever reason. Couldn't sign in, got error 301. Went to the authorize this computer option and got error 1001. The solution? Remove the device from my account on the phone. Then authorizing the PC and signing in just magically worked. *sigh* You'd think that Apple, one of the biggest companies around, would be above the unhelpful error codes and would not spaz out and require me to do stuff like this to fix things. Oh well, at least it was an easy fix this time. Lol

For context on why I did the defrag in the first place. I've been noticing that Gold Wave, which stores its temp files on that drive, starts becoming really sluggish if I haven't restarted it or my PC in a while. Operations such as copying, deleting etc. that would require a temp file to be written makes it freeze for a moment, and audio playback will stutter and glitch during that time, so my theory is it's taking a while ot write the temp file. The only resolution I can think of is to try defragging the drive, since that's not something I habitually do. Especially since Windows has always said it's 0 percent fragmented. Still decided to try it anyway. Not expecting much but yeah we'll see.

Lol, so apparently if something on your computer is taking too long or appears stuck, the sollution is to quit looking at it. As soon as you do, it will magically fly and be done in a few seconds/minutes. This just happened to me when defragging one of my huge spinning drives. I was looking at it for a few minutes and it was stuck at pass 2 0 percent. 10 seconds later it was at pass 4, yes 4, and a few seconds after that it was done.

Well, it's pretty much official. Getting a new phone on Sunday, as my current phone (IPhone XS) has really crappy battery life now. It can't even hold charge for a day, and battery health is at 75 percent. Not to mention it tops out at IOS 18. So, I plan to upgrade to the IPhone 17e. I know I will totally be wowed by the battery life alone, and probably the better speaker too. Lol.

I don't expect much day-to-day stuff to change, but it'll be interesting to see what I do notice, and if I'll find something fun to do with the new features I'll be able to use. I plan to have a play with personal voice, for instance. Also I suspect the microphones on the newer IPhones are slightly less noisy? I guess we'll see.

This will be hands down the biggest phone upgrade I've ever done. Unless you count going from a track phone to the IPhone 5. Lol

I was running on like 3 hours of sleep yesterday. Somehow powered through the morning, then took an hour nap and powered through the afternoon, but by 7:00 PM I was beat and decided to turn in. Couldn't actuallly fall asleep though because my brain was still pretty active (a frequent issue of mine). Just as I was starting to doze, my dad calls me and talks my ear off for a half hour, even though I told him I was sleep deprived, so yeah I was pretty annoyed. I was thinking, damn it, will I ever get the slepe I know I need? After getting off the phone with him, the stars mercifully aligned, and I slept for like a solid 10-11 hours and here we are. Thank God for that, I feel sooo much better now lol

Idle scrolling through Masto timelines can be... Entertaining? Or at least it kills time. But do yourself a favor, and don't scroll through your own post history. If you're anything like me, you'll see what an emotional pile of bagggage your thoughts are. It just doesn't feel nice. Makes me wonder how the hell my friends put up with me sometimes. Lol

Update on my Youtube issues: Youtube seems to have fixed something on their end. I haven't experienced freezes today, even on videos that used to give me trouble. So yeah, I'm cautiously celebrating, or something. Lol

Ugh, I know for some, this is going to come off as petty and ranty, but it really is starting to irritate me when people use the term 'sound font' to refer to the set of instrument sounds that early video games use for their music. That is not what a sound font is. A sound font is a very specific file format, with its own history and usage, not a general-purpose term that applies to all music.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here's an analogy that might explain. Let's say I started referring to Wikipedia articles as Word documents, because I picked up the term Word document to mean a big block of text I can read. That's pretty much what I'm getting at.

People have this tendency to use terms that sound fancy, that they have guessed the meaning of. The desire to be in the know takes over, so Googling that new term they just heard and are about to use, to make sure they're using it correctly... Who has time for that? Lol

Wellp, I'm half switching from Brave to Firefox. Youtube is being really annoying with Brave. Some videos don't play and will outright freeze the page. Firefox with UBlock Origin works perfectly. Also... I am skeptical that this is purely an ad-blocking issue, since the same thing is also happening with Microsoft Edge, which has no ad blocks in place. In fact, it has more than once played an ad, then tried to play the video and frozen.

*sigh* What ever happened to the world I grew up in, when shit was generally stable and breakage was not a normal part of daily life? Yes I know I'm being stupid about this, we never lived in that world. But still. My point is, that as much as I love technology and wouldn't choose to live without it most days, I am finding it increasingly more frustrating how many ways things can break and how often they do so. At best we can just fight an ever-steeper uphill battle to hold things together. It just gets really old sometimes.

@structuredsucc I was literally just thinking about this, and how I tend to info dump and be way too formal and write walls of text all the time. The funny thing is, not many people have really hated on me for that, but I am deeply self-conscious about it sometimes.

Okay so, I know a lot of people hate apps that are basically web pages. I have my reasons for not liking them too. I am not intending to criticize people's opinions here, nor am I out to convince people to change their minds. But. Let me tell you, when shit hits the fan and your primary PC dies, things can change quickly. In my case, I'm stuck using an ancient dinosaur that's running Windows 7, at least short term. Said machine cannot run Discord natively, and even with workarounds like VXKex in place, I'm still stuck on an old version that is already feature limited and will no doubt quit working entirely at some point. That being the case, running it from a web browser is suddenly a pretty good option, and is actually offering me a better experience. And since the web style interface seems to have translated beautifully to the web browser, I don't have to figure anything out, I can just use it like normal. The win is very, very much appreciated. I am too exhausted and anxious to continue trying to make things work today, so I am thanking my lucky stars that someone, or something, has managed to make my life easy for once.

If all goes well, in 2 weeks I'll be getting a new laptop. Well, it's probably over 5 years old now, but it'll be way better than the dinosaur of a laptop I currently have.

I have no idea on the hardware specs. All I know about it, is it has some version of Win10, and NVDA is installed. Won't be surprised if a bunch of other junk is on it too, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

I'm kind of excited to see what it's like, but I'm not expecting too much. Since I'm not paying a cent for this though, I won't complain. All I hope is that nothing is broken, and that the internal mic is decent on it, so I can comfortably use it to voice chat when I'm not home.

Sometimes, when I am typing about how I use a thing, I accidentally end up typing that I sue it instead. Sure. I'll get right on that law suit. Rofl

@Bri@fwoof.space Lol, so basically a hot dog eating contest?

So, a nerdy observation about the robo guards in Super Liam. A number of people want to know what are they saying? Well, the mystery is about to be solved!

As it turns out, the roboguards actually speak English. But backwards. To understand it, you have to play the audio in reverse. If you do, you will hear the phrase: fascinating eating plants.

Here's another nerdy fact about that sound. That short clip Super Liam uses is taken from the Science Fiction Sound Effects library by John M. Peters. Said library is now being distributed by Sound Ideas. If you reverse the whole sound effect, you'll hear a paragraph (read in a very amusing way imho) about venus fly traps.

Because I'm sure everyone wants to hear this, I've attached a quick sample of it. Enjoy, and don't let L AI M get you!

I'm not much of a coder, but I dabble enough in coding to know the good feeling of designing a system, implementing it, and watching it come together and do what I want. It's even more amazing to have some confidence that I got the fundamentals down and hopefully won't have to touch them ever again, so now I can concentrate on higher level stuff that is easier for me to understand. When bugs come up (and they will), I'll have an easier time telling what I goofed up.

That said. Knowing my luck, something is going to break in a spectacular fassion sooner or later, so I'm not jumping for joy or anything yet. But oh well. Careful thought and rigorous testing at every step should hopefully see me through.

Probably an unpopular opinion, but if someone is asking for help, the last thing anyone should be telling them is "Quit being lazy and figure it out!" Or "Google it for heaven's sake, it's right there!" If that is all you feel like saying, do everyone a favor and say nothing.

Yes, I know there are times when we wanna just tell a particularly whiny, overly dependent person that they need to carry their own weight and learn to help themselves at some point. It feels good to vent that annoyance and frustration right at the person who deserves it, right? But here's the thing. If a parent, family member, guardian, teacher or close friend is unwilling or unable to get the message through their head, then I'm afraid the deck is already stacked against you. Especially if you are just a stranger on the Internet. So imo it's better to just leave well enough alone. Don't let them ruin your day, and don't be an asshole and ruin theirs. The world will be a better place.

@simon At one point I had the exact resolution threshold that would cause the crash, but I have to look back through old messages to find those details. Perhaps it was also related to my display driver, since I since found out that Windows Update was, without my knowledge, installing an old display driver that was giving me blue screens. So I had to disable some update policies and install the correct driver. No idea if that was related at all to my QWS crashing.

@simon Yeah I need to keep a better eye on my screen resolution lol. I actually had the opposite problem once, where my resolution wasn't too small, but too big instead, and was making a few programs crash. One such program was QWS, of all things.

@stevo399@dragonscave.space I am always bored and into incrementals, though I'm not that good at them. Only a few minutes into playing this game and I'm loving it so far. I especially like the use of headings to group things together, giving me the flexibility to control how much I see at once, instead of making me switch between different tabs. I also like that the game makes it very clear if you can purchase something, and if not, how long you have to wait. Some of the incrementals I've tried don't make this clear to a screen reader, which especially makes it tricky when you're prestiging, and don't know which upgrades you have to purchase again after reset.

@MutedTrampet@dragonscave.space Thanks so much!

So a couple days ago, a few people were messing with this MacinTalk speak window thing for Windows. But it doesn't seem to be public yet. My curiosity is peaked though. So if possible, can someone please send me a link to download it? Thanks!