Remote

Quin

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

mastodon 4.7.2+glitch

Software engineer @pneumasolutions, prolific open-source contributor, wannabe musician, and huge bookworm.
Blind, but I’ve seen more than most. Snarky and strongly opinionated, but friendly by default and always willing to help. Open to disagreement; closed to MAGA.
Views my own.
Antifascist, feminist, pro-choice, etc. Abolish ICE, decentralize power.

1023 Followers

76 Following

50 Posts

Joined October 30, 2022

Pronouns:

they/them

GitHub:

https://github.com/trypsynth

Paperback: accessible, free, and open source ebook and document reader:

https://paperback.dev

Fedra: accessible, blazing fast, customizable mastodon client::

https://github.com/trypsynth/fedra

Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 4d ago

Boosted by @trending@homestead.social

It's finally here: Paperback 1.0! My fast, fully accessible ebook and document reader is now out on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, with iOS following the second Apple decides to actually look at it. The changelog is once again way too big for any post, so here are the highlights: New platform: Linux! As an AppImage or a tarball, with desktop integration so documents open straight from your file manager. New formats: Comic book archives (.cbz).M4B and MP3 audiobooks, split into their chapters.Man pages, both man and BSD mdoc, gzipped or not.reStructuredText.Windows Write (.wri) files. Thanks, Mastodon.WinHelp (.hlp) files. Yes, really.Word 6 and Word 95 documents. Big new stuff: OCR for scanned PDFs, using the engine built into Windows and macOS. Press Enter on a scanned page, or batch OCR a whole range of pages with Ctrl+Shift+O.MathML in EPUB and HTML is now rendered as AsciiMath via MathCAT. Jump between formulas with M and Shift+M, and open the original MathML in a formula view with enter or space.Find All, listing every matching line so you can jump right to the one you want.Tables, Lists, and Pages views in the elements dialog.Mark a spot with Alt+F9 and copy everything from there to where you are with Alt+F10, no more shift-arrowing through 40 pages.Audio book playback speed, from half speed to 3x.Any document can now be opened in the web view.Headings are drawn at a size matching their level.Relative Go To: +n and -n in Go to Line, Page, and Percent.Heading navigation from the table of contents for EPUB, MOBI, and CHM books with no headings of their own.A Ukrainian translation. Plus a mountain of fixes, especially to PDF (I still hate PDF), MOBI/AZW3 books, which are now much faster and no longer cut off at 20 MB, FictionBook, and large books in general. And of course, the mobile apps. They open every format the desktop does, with seamless read aloud using your choice of voice, background audio book playback, navigation by headings, pages, links, tables and more, a sleep timer, export, and keyboard shortcuts that match the desktop. They're $19.99, once, per platform, and buying them is what pays for the work on Paperback. The desktop versions stay free. Desktop downloads: https://paperback.dev/downloads Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.paperback.android Full changelog: https://paperback.dev/readme.html Huge thanks to everyone who tested, filed bugs, translated, and put up with me during this development cycle. Enjoy! #Paperback #accessibility #blind

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2w ago

Okay, time for me to be that person. I know I've got people who follow me and who I follow who disagree with me on this, and I am interested in hearing differing viewpoints on it as I am for all topics minus joining the MAGA movement. That said, I likely won't argue or engage here for very long, I'm just getting thoughts out and do find dialog around this interesting. Say what you will about large language models, and I do. But they can literally function as eyeballs as a service. I've currently got Claude verifying the lookk of screenshots and views in an iOS app without need for a sighted person. And this extends to meta glasses, it's eyeballs as a service, in a device you can put on your face. Do I wish it wasn't meta, or for that matter, any large tech company? Yes of course I do! But do I wish Waymo wasn't owned by Google? Yes! That's not going to stop me from using technology; all a boycott does is show the company you don't need them. They do not need you. They have investors and venture capital and governments willing to protect them and tons of corruption, they'll be just fine if a random blind person boycotts them. We are very very tiny specs in a giant machine, and IMO the way to deal with it is to use the tech while actively speaking out about its flaws and pushing for local AI, like I do. Could someone use meta glasses to be a pervert? Yes, absolutely! But I've heard stories about people being pervs with their phone cameras over 10 years ago, this isn't new. In the same way I could use a car to go kill a bunch of civilians, and I could use it to bring food to tons of starving homeless people, tools have positive and negative uses. Also, to the people paranoid about wearable cameras to the point of confronting folks: I promise you, I'm using these to avoid walking into a pillar and read my mail, not to spy on your unremarkable life. Don't be weird.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 6d ago

Boosted by @trending@homestead.social

Alphabet spent $44.9 billion on capex in a single quarter and guided up to $200B this year to build AI datacenters. Meanwhile, stock TalkBack has been rebuilding the entire screen traversal tree three times per swipe for half a decade or more. In just one week of off-hours hacking between dayjobs and other responsibilities, a few blind hackers made Backtalk, a fork of TalkBack cutting swipe lag by 300ms, fixing the braille keyboard rotation, adding raw touch passthrough for games and on-device vision models, bringing back power user features from old TalkBack days, adding a ton of customization, such as per-sound and per-haptic toggles and more ways to flip the braille keyboard, and much more. Two blind engineers on industry-standard salaries could completely turn this platform around in six months if they paid us. I know what I'm doing, Google engineer gods/universe. But until they decide that's worth 0.0002% of a single quarter's capex, Backtalk exists.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

And finally, the release you've all been waiting for: Paperback 0.9.0! The changelog is so large it had to be completely restructured, and wouldn't fit in even two full-length posts at over 6300 characters, but here are some highlights: native macOS support has arrived, alongside ARM64 Windows builds! Documents are now paginated, so even multi-million-word books load in seconds flat. You can customize every single keyboard shortcut through a simple dialog; a new readability tab lets you control fonts, background color, line/paragraph/letter spacing, and text alignment. Audio books are now supported, including DAISY audio and folders of audio files, with play/pause, seeking, and syncing the caret to playback. DAISY 2.0 and 2.02 books are now supported too! There's a brand new pb command-line tool for converting any supported format to HTML, Markdown, or plain text. It also adds temporary bookmarks, a full screen toggle, and a locate button for missing books, dozens of bug fixes across RTF, PDF, Mobi/AZW3, DAISY, and much more. This release covers Windows and macOS; Android and iOS test builds are coming soon via TestFlight and Play testing, ahead of a unified 1.0. Grab it now at https://paperback.dev/downloads full changelog in the readme at https://paperback.dev/readme.html

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3w ago

Version 0.3.2 of Taskmon, my super light-weight and keyboard friendly Task Manager replacement for Windows, just got released. Changelog: Added column reordering. The Settings dialog is now split into a General tab and a Columns tab, and on the Columns tab you can reorder columns with Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down or with the Move up and Move down buttons. Taskmon saves the order between runs.Fixed column header drag and drop being forgotten on restart, and leaving the accessible sort buttons in the old order.Fixed the Ctrl+Shift+~ hotkey doing nothing after using File > Restart as administrator.Fixed the installer not reflecting your earlier choices. Its checkboxes now show what is actually installed, and clearing one removes it.Fixed the installer not remembering a custom install location. ARM64 installer: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.2/taskmon-setup-arm64.exe ARM64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.2/taskmon-arm64.zip X64 installer: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.2/taskmon-setup-x64.exe X64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.2/taskmon-x64.zip Enjoy!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

Boosted by @trending@homestead.social

And Paperback for iOS is now in public Test Flight! My original plan was to publish both Android and iOS at the same time, but Google is unexpectedly dragging their feet, and when I heard this email come in I literally stopped my work for a minute to come post this. It's still not perfect, there's one bug I've found so far if your book contains < or >, but that's easily fixable and now this way many more actual iOS users can throw rocks at it. https://testflight.apple.com/join/e5622MJK

testflight.apple.com

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 under the parent that launched them, with an End process tree action that terminates a process and all of its descendants.Added an option to start Taskmon already minimized to the tray.Added a Windows installer alongside the existing portable version, with an option to replace the system Task Manager with Taskmon.Fixed a stack overflow that could occur when sorting by CPU usage.Fixed Ctrl+A not selecting all text in the Run dialog's edit box. Download links: ARM64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-arm64.zip ARM64 setup: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-setup-arm64.exe X64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-x64.zip X64 setup: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-setup-x64.exe Cheers, enjoy, and may you be free of a 5+MB application to manage your computer being unresponsive!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

RE: @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

It's honestly depressing how bad stock TTS APIs are across the board. Paperback on mobile has truly shown me this; I outline how the iOS side of this works in the quoted post, and Android is its own flavor of hacky: we synthesize ahead to temporary WAV files and chain MediaPlayer instances with setNextMediaPlayer() to kill the inter-paragraph silence put there with the stock player. On both platforms, getting a seamless reading experience means treating the system TTS purely as a text-to-speech renderer and building the player yourself.

dragonscave.space

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 documents get bloated with excess blank lines/indents and collapsed code blocks, while DOCX files drop text nodes entirely, rendering HumanWare's own user manuals as blank lines and empty bullet points. I guess Paperback must be doing something right.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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].

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

Replying to

@simon@procrastodon.net Spot on! Instead of letting iOS handle playback directly, I use AVSpeechSynthesizer purely as a speech renderer writing raw PCM audio buffers into memory, which then feed into a custom AVAudioEngine pipeline, which aggressively prefetches multiple paragraphs ahead (and behind for instant rewinds) to survive iOS throttling background synthesis when the screen is locked, resamples them to the hardware rate, and pre-arms the next buffer directly onto the audio node while the current one is still playing. That last one is also why transport controls like pausing and resuming mid-word feel instant. Say what you will about Voice Dream, but at least prior to it getting bought, have hardly used it since, it was the only app I ever saw get this right, and I wanted Paperback to as well. Android testing on your part would definitely be nice, but both of the primary Paperback developers use android as our daily devices, so that one has gotten more testing by nature of us relying on it.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 my workflow to pass up. I still stand by every single critique I made: KeySoft is clunky as hell, the fan/heat is real, and the software layer was undeniably rushed. Plus, The BrailleSense 7 still looks crazy tempting on paper with its fanless ARM build, swappable battery, smaller form factor, swappable keyboards, and instant on for casual couch use, but the dealbreakers on the BS7 are just way too big for me I think: losing physical cursor routing buttons for capacitive double-taps on the display overlay sounds like an absolute nightmare for editing code, I'm willing to wager I could be wrong about this but the BI14 made me hate anything touch capacitive on or near my display. If anyone could get it right it would be HIMS and they tend to have pretty annoying clicky cursor buttons anyway, but I still prefer having them. Also, despite this one not really being their fault I imagine due to trademarks, missing physical thumb keys sucks for a braille-first device, and you're completely locked into HIMS's custom screen reader which doesn't even support custom accessibility actions in third-party Android apps. The Evolve is a weird, warm, imperfect little x86 dev rig, but being able to file actual Liblouis stack traces and bug reports directly to their team means I can actively help fix it, and for what I actually do every day, it turned out to be the right machine.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 friends with Android phones and I think I myself will count as one of the 12, but would anyone be interested in helping me out here? Please send over a google play email in a DM if so. Cheers!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3w ago

You’ve used ~261972× more tokens than The Great Gatsby.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 turning that around so quickly, this makes my nerdy heart happy.

humanware.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

The Second Coming looks a lot more practical than the prophecies suggested. From Uber Eats, no less.
"JESUS is in a Chrysler Town and Country"

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

Holy crap, turns out there is actually a very big difference between Claude Opus on Pro and Claude Opus on Max. Hot damn, I am actually impressed with Opus on Max, but on Pro it just wasted time. I guess that makes sense from a business perspective, but I wrote off Opus way too quick. I doubt I'll end up keeping Claude Max, I really do not need the 5x usage limits, but figured I'd try it for a month, see how well it works and what Fable's all about etc.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 charger sent out to me within like 10 minutes. Of course, they asked my serial number, confirmed my address etc., but I expected them to ask me more questions than to just confirm that the top metal bit snapped off before sending me a new cable for free. Great support, not so great joints on the charger, it seems.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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 handling of the RICHEDIT50W text control, not something in Paperback itself, and one that took quite a while to surface a fix for given Vispero's enthusiasm for responding to issues with open source software. The workaround, eventually surfaced through the JAWS discussion group after months of waiting, is to edit paperback.jcf and set "Braille Presentation and Panning" to "Always use DOM if available". You'll also want to enable "Pan Text by Paragraph", otherwise your display will stay on the active paragraph rather than advancing. With both settings in place, panning should work correctly.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 1mo ago

Paperback can now load a 70 MB, 34 million word epub that used to crash it. It still takes it around 20 seconds to do so and I'm now working on fixing that, but this just made spending most of my morning on this worth it, not to mention the fact that it now loads 16.5 million epubs in around a second. Weeee!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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 dots written will *delete* the untranslated word entirely! Multiple times during the Windows setup it told me that it lost wi-fi connection and that I had to retry, despite me sitting less than 10 feat from my gateway it likes to sometimes drop packets, pressing on the edges of the arrow keys doesn't actually register as a press, making you think your buttons are broken when in fact you just didn't press in the middle of them, the input handling seems very laggy, I have to hold down space with e for at least 300 ms or it won't register as alt+f4, whether or not you have to include the space bar with NVDA braille commands is inconsistent: in input help and browse mode, enter with t, for example, requires the spacebar, but out of those modes it doesn't. This feels incredibly counterintuitive, especially for an input help mode! Like I mentioned on my timeline earlier I installed a single development dependency and then tried to install an acapella voice and now my brailleNote won't start the add-on to drive my braille display and keyboard. Even worse is, if I disable the add-on, they keep working without many issues, so the failure mode of this add-on could be much cleaner for the end user. I've also literally never gotten their BrailleIME to do anything different, at all. That's not to say there aren't good things. I love having a windows laptop literally around my neck with hardware that feels like it was built for me. The braille display is super chrisp and all the buttons feel nice, HumanWare always makes nice displays. The speakres are actually way better than I expected, it has one of my favorite keyboards of any BrailleNote, and I did most of my paid software development work on it today. That is undeniably impressive. But is it what I want out of my notetaker? I think not. I want my notetaker to be a device I pull out at the end of the workday, throw onto my lap, and casually scroll around on YouTube with, or check and respond to emails when I'm not at my computer. I basically want my notetaker to be my phone, but with a braille display and buttons. I absolutely see the value in having your notetaker be your computer, but I don't think that's what I want, and that experience definitely has a long way to go if that's what HumanWare is going for here. Most of it is software, though, so here's hoping it'll get there.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 somehow to me, even if I will be signing the Windows version, have already paid for Apple/Google dev accounts, etc., so want to get community thoughts before going further.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jscholes@dragonscave.space Yeah, from the look of it they put a bunch of braille shortcuts into a bunch of different apps with appModules, they have a named pipe running for the options menu thing I think, humanwareCommands.py, which was the .pyc file that originally tipped me off, is a bunch of braille gestures too, like the time checking command etc.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@SorenApplicati1@dragonscave.space @jonathan859@someplace.social Or the Accessible TeamTalk client. Using QT. The same UI framework as the already pretty accessible TeamTalk app, and the cases where its not are mostly QT's fault.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 4mo ago

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.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 4mo ago

Replying to

@amir@dragonscave.space @Aryan@dragonscave.space You can now get APKs from the /downloads page under the master build heading.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 3mo ago

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 oral tradition is a valid compliance framework. And, because they don't support a standard and accessible online payment portal that I could just use independently with a screen reader, I now have to spend the next few days arranging for a sighted person to help me read my non-brailled physical credit card details just so I can call a rep and read them out loud. Nothing says "we specialize in independence for the blind" quite like forcing a blind customer to compromise both their financial security and their autonomy just to pay for an essential hardware repair.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonathan859@someplace.social I was super interested by that thing, but it has no headphone jack!

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@bluewinds@tech.lgbt I actually got bored while waiting for people to get ready and coded up some fixes for your reports, gonna play and test them out now but they're pushed to the site :)

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonathan859@someplace.social I got that from walking into my local apple store and feeling one. It's possible I missed it, but not likely. There were two USB-C's on the left, and a small speaker grill towards the front of either side. Nothing else.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fireborn@dragonscave.space @jonathan859@someplace.social Hmm, interesting! Can't believe I missed it. Where? It wasn't in the same spot as it was on the Air I have.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@matt@toot.cafe @ricky_enger@mindly.social @alpuzz@mastodon.social This was only ever fixed by IBM in IBMTTS, never ETI with Eloquence, after the two codebases split.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@fireborn@dragonscave.space @jonathan859@someplace.social oh what the fuck, okay that's...awful. But at least it exists haha.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@bscross32@tweesecake.social @LeonianUniverse@leonianplace.masto.host @jonathan859@someplace.social Sorry y'all, I started a feature and pushed the code this morning before work but didn't test all the edgecases. Will fix soon.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@prism@infosec.exchange Apparently there is, but not for all videos, and it's good at making a generally quiet video louder, not good at normalizing a video with a large dynamic range.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@jscholes@dragonscave.space I'm possibly relying a bit more on claude than I do on a qwerty keyboard, I'm not sure, but it's also possible it goes the other way. To be clear I would love to and plan to get the qwerty model if there's a good upgrade path later this year, because I am still faster on qwerty. The braille keyboard is much more intuitive than I expected it to be, but I don't think I'll ever get to 130 wpm on a perkins keyboard like I am on qwerty. When I think about code though I do see it in braille in my head, in my own weird invented braille code that uses dropped numbers and EBAE contractions but UEB parens/braces/etc., so my thoughts about code actually map surprisingly nicely to a device with a braille keyboard and display. I think having a qwerty keyboard and display would maximize it, though.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@prism@infosec.exchange I didn't like the feel of the body / build quality when I felt it at CSUN, desktop Linux is simply not an environment I think I can be productive in, and the BT Speak lacks a headphone jack, making me unlikely to even try to enter their ecosystem. If it did I may have gotten one instead of my orbit speak and been sold, but I'm not sure, the keyboard was interestingly angled and I couldn't type well on it for the admittedly 20-30 seconds I tried.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 5mo ago

Replying to

@jonathan859@someplace.social Yeah man I seriously hope I'm wrong because it is totally thick enough for one.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

Replying to

@twynn@mas.to @Tamasg@mindly.social @Jage@mas.to I love the little catch at the end there:

If Magnifier is running, Windows logo key + hyphen (-) will zoom out Magnifier instead of inserting an en dash.

how about:

We vibe code features in a vacuum and don't ever bother to consider accessibility most of the time, despite even having a new narrator and magnifier feature on this page.

FTFY.

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Quin @TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

· 2mo ago

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 achieve that kind of integration on Windows. But what you can achieve is a little powerhouse in a teeny form factor that feels nice on your lap, is easy to throw over your shoulder, and includes a braille display, and none of the hardware I don't need as a blind person. The software is still super far from perfect, but the hardware is pretty well executed, I'd say. It is noticeably narrower and less deep than my ultrabook laptop, and about the same thickness as it with the lid closed. Pretty impressive that can compile paperback, run TeamTalk and WSL, and do literally anything else I do on a daily basis.

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