Notices by chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Monday, 19-Feb-2024 20:26:48 JST 
chris
@jookia @xogium The h in hcaptcha stands for hell.
I thought it was no secret? -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Dec-2023 16:36:37 JST
chris
@lanodan @coolboymew Years ago, a friend
of mine had an insanely great idea, replacing voice menus with Gopher. So if you
called some company on the phone, you could deal with their Gopher menu
instead of the voice one. There's your BBS style interface. We have a
technology for making and displaying them easily. Maybe replace Gopher
with Gemini. Or maybe not; Gopher was made for this kind of thing.
Perhaps Gopher requests and responses exchanged over SMS?
Voice and touch-tone menus could stay around for people who want them.
Implementing them would be much simpler, too, because they could just be
thin Gopher clients with a voice and touch-tone interface. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Monday, 23-Oct-2023 14:46:17 JST
chris
@albinanigans @SteveBellovin @lanodan
I've been known to feel around for braille signs on bathrooms and the like.
Braille signs on building doors? Sure, makes sense.
But street signs? Half the time I'm not even aware of their physical
existence. When I'm out walking, if something isn't directly in front of me,
or right next to me, or producing sound, I'm not even aware of it.
With my cane, I effectively have about 1.5 m (5 feet) of "visibility" in front
of me, with a bit of clearance on either side. And even if I'm aware that
a street sign exists, I'm not likely to go feel it up. It's probably just
a thoroughly uninteresting sheet of metal on a pole.
I'd be far more likely to check out the bushes and foliage
near the sidewalk. Note I have no sight at all.
For someone with more sight than I have, maybe braille street signs make
sense, though I'm still kind of doubtful. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Monday, 02-Oct-2023 04:47:19 JST
chris
@lanodan @matt
Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I saw the mention of non-GUI
audio chat.
There are a few non-GUI VOIP and audio chat solutions.
There's the Mumble client barnard, https://github.com/bmmcginty/barnard.
This has bit-rotted to a certain degree. It has become wildly unstable,
either due to changes to Go or to libraries that it is using. And I know
of at least one memory leak. I'm too sick nowadays and don't know Go well
enough, or I'd try and fix it. Funnily enough, it is far more stable on
FreeBSD than on Linux. And yet, there are a few blind people (me included)
who use it all the time.
SIP from the terminal has been around in some form for a while: pjsua,
baresip, and the linphone command-line client linphonec.
I use baresip in daemon mode, where it accepts commands over TCP. Commands
and responses are sent as netstrings. So this is pretty easy to work with.
I wrote a little command line program, bscmd, for sending commands to it.
So I can make and receive calls directly from my shell.
`bscmd dial sip:+18004444444` will dial a landline phone number through my
VOIP provider, and `bscmd accept` will answer an incoming call.
`bscmd hangup` to end a call, `bscmd mute` to mute. I've used this plus
a land-line dial-in number to participate in Zoom calls (without video of course).
All from the comfort of a Unix shell. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Sep-2023 15:35:14 JST
chris
@lanodan I saw the surveillance issues coming 20 years
ago, when the bank remotely repossessed my girlfriend's car because she
had missed some payments. They literally locked her out of it using
a satellite transponder. We can't trust capitalists and authoritarians
of any stripe with digital tech.
Bikes are cool and we need more of them on the streets. But not all
of us can ride. Walkable cities FTW. Though I don't see why
bike-friendly cities wouldn't be foot friendly. And for the people
who say, "not everyone can walk", a city without cars is also friendly
to personal mobility devices of all sorts. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:44 JST
chris
@aral I loved this: https://ar.al/notes/islam-is-privilege/.
It needs to be screamed from the rooftops.
Islam is not a race. Islam is an ideology that can be (and is) adopted as dogma by anyone regardless of age, sex, or race.
What’s ironic is how Western liberals have jumped on the same bandwagon of false conflation as conservatives. I (white American) have on at least one occasion needed to explain to white American friends that Islam is not a race. That there are majority white countries, Bosnia, Albania, where Islam is the national religion. I had to explain to the same idiot that the Qur’an doesn’t say “kill all the white people”, because the idea of white people wasn’t even a thing in the 7th century. And I’ve actually read it.
Western liberals make the same mistake as the racists who attack and harass Sikhs, Hindus, whatever, because they “look Muslim”.
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Saturday, 19-Aug-2023 23:44:36 JST
chris
@Sandra @aral Trump's Muslim ban,
Paludan, and Harris et al wanting to nuke the Middle East: these things
are clearly and obviously racist.
Drawing a caricature, that one's a lot more nuanced. If someone spray
painted it on a mosque, that's a hate crime. If they published it
in a paper: that's unkind, maybe it's even unacceptable. I can
agree with that. But it doesn't warrant death. It shouldn't be against the
law. We've fought hard to rid ourselves of blasphemy laws.
Where do you draw the line? Because clearly there are lines to be drawn here.
I'm the guy who calls the Christian god an abuser. If I could draw,
I'd love to draw some caricatures of Christianity, because that well runs deep
and I can imagine some really creative ones. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Friday, 18-Aug-2023 06:56:15 JST
chris
@strypey @Illuminatus @Wiswell
But there was no nuance! None at all! Just a plain, simple tailor, like he
told us every chance he got.
Loved that guy. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 16-Aug-2023 05:05:47 JST
chris
@lanodan @hannah Wouldn't be surprised
if there are some fairly old phonograph records with audio books on them.
Or magnetic wire spools. Open tape reels. Etc.
But probably no or few full-length books from before the 1930s or so.
I stumbled on some ancient 78-RPM records as a kid in the 1980s. These were
thick and heavy. Like, the size of a standard 33 and 1/3 RPM record,
but the thickness and weight of a glass dinner plate. One was from 1901,
and it had a few minutes of comedy recorded on it.
Assuming the media are properly preserved, you still need the technology
to play them.
In the late 20th century, audiobooks for the blind were typically made
in special formats. In the US: 4-track cassette at 15/16 inches per
second (half of standard speed), phonograph records at 8 RPM. The 4-track
meant separate recording on each of the two stereo tracks of a side of a tape.
One track would be recorded forward and the other reversed. With a computer,
a standard tape deck, and the sox utility, anyone can decode these things.
After the rise of Audible, all bets are off. Unless someone pirates an
audiobook and strips the DRM, no way will anyone be able to decode those
at some unspecified point in the future. One good reason to pirate all the
things. DRM is an attack against culture akin to book burning. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Tuesday, 15-Aug-2023 23:51:15 JST
chris
@hannah @lanodan Well, you probably
can't if you're blind. The oldest braille book I've seen was a copy of
the Gospel of Matthew from the early 1930s. It wasn't in good shape
circa 1990 when I found it. Braille on thermoform has even less of a
lifespan.
OTOH I can download a book from Project Gutenberg produced 40 years ago
and read it with `less`. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 26-Jul-2023 13:48:26 JST
chris
@technomancy @guites What's daft about it?
The concept (Go black-box extensible with Lua) sure sounds solid to me.
As solid as extending my webserver (C black-box) with Lua. Is it the
implementation? -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Jul-2023 01:36:48 JST
chris
@lanodan
That is an absolutely terrible error message. Go go OpenSSL!
In fairness to it, I might be able to decipher it with effort.
It's a little better than "Error: success", maybe, and a vast improvement
over the sort of error messages a lot of apps and webapps give. "There
was an error. Try again later." Those kind are all too common and just
inculcate learned helplessness. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 05-Jul-2023 01:36:46 JST
chris
@lanodan Yeah I've been on Unix for most of the last
25 years. Longer if you count dialup shell accounts. Used Windows 95 back
in the day some, and DOS some. In the last decade or so, I started noticing
just how terrible error messages were on smartphone apps and webapps. I
hadn't realized Windows started the trend. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:19:29 JST
chris
@Sandra @clacke
All I remember is that it was 4DOS running under Win 95, and it handled
long filenames just fine.
This was a long time ago and a lot of the details are fuzzy. I wish
I still had that code. -
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chris (chris@s.the-brannons.com)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Mar-2023 22:18:43 JST
chris
@Sandra @clacke
So did BASIC and some forms of batch file.
I used 4DOS batch language to write the first program I ever made for
others to use. I was at a center for the blind. The program took a CD-ROM
full of ebooks that were zip files each containing a single .txt file.
Using a catalog, it organized that collection into directories named for
authors, with the extracted .txt files renamed to contain the title. Yeah,
the input was 8.3-style DOS filenames, and the output used Win 9x long
filenames.
I was doing most of this in my spare time, writing code on a PDA-like device
with a Z80 microprocessor, no 4DOS interpreter in sight. Essentially I was
coding by reading the 4DOS documentation.
When I did have access to a PC with 4DOS, I'd test pieces of the thing.
I had it make little beeps to indicate progress. Wanna guess how exciting
it was to watch that thing run and hear those silly beeps?
I was no programmer at the time; just a person with a brain and great reading
comprehension.
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