Notices by Kara Goldfinch (karalg84@dragonscave.space), page 5

In case anyone else wondered what pfp means, it's profile picture.

Have any of you using Eloquence on iOS figured out how to stop it saying apostrophe while reading text in single quotes? Setting it to ignore in punctuation settings does nothing.

Another Rachel Flowers track:
Her cover of Sowing the Seeds of Love. She plays and sings everything on it, and it sounds pretty much like the original record.
https://soundcloud.com/rachelflowers-1/sowing-the-seeds-of-love-tears-for-fears-cover

I love braille even though for me it's not practical because of how slow I am at reading it.
Also I think it's ridiculous that things like braille displays, embossers and the Perkins Brailler are still prohibitively expensive for a lot of people.
You can buy a decent printer for less than 200 quid. For an embosser you're looking at well over 2000.

Just for the hell of it I had a quick look at Microsoft's bullshit generator I mean Copilot.
I asked it what is it like to live in my town. It said that rent and property prices are low, which is completely wrong.

One thing I will cary on not being is a "social media professional" or "content creator". I really can't stand those terms. To me they just sound like synonyms for algorithm feeder.

I just love that for the last 10 years I've felt able to do things like openly squeee (for want of a better word) in front of my parents over how cute and soft the plushy bunny is that they bought me for my birthday.
Before I transitioned, all that would've been masked when talking to people that didn't know yet because I considered it to be a girly thing to do, and I thought they'd suspect something.
It was also wonderful to hear my mum calling me her birthday girl like she had been doing that since I was born, rather than just for the last few years.

I'm glad that my parents didn't get me a birthday helium balloon this year. Even though I've always been fascinated by how helium makes things float, using it like that is an absolute waist when we don't have a lot of it on the planet as it is.

My wife wrote in Braille in my birthday card, saying that I'm her everything. Aww
She's been Brailleing them for a couple of years now using a slate and stylus, and she's got pretty good at it. Far better than I could do with one of those. I'm useless at using them.

It's my birthday. Yay! Also it's the last year of my 30s. Booh.
But anyway, karaOS has been successfully upgraded to version 3.9.
Release notes: bugs, bugfixes and improvements. Just as vague as usual.
Btw who was it in the blind community that started the thing of using version numbers for your age.? I think it's quite cute, which is why I do it.

Wikipedia's article on Santa Claus is a fascinating read. I originally went looking because I wondered where the name Chris Kringle comes from, then I ended up reading about all the other traditions that shaped the modern Santa.
Since I'm a Brit, I grew up calling him Father Christmas,. That name these days is synonymous with Santa Claus, but it originally referred to St Nicholas. I wonder how many kids in the UK still call him Father Christmas.
The only differences I think between Father Christmas and Santa Claus is that the tradition (at least in England) is that kids leave out mince pies and sherry or brandy for Father Christmas, rather than cookies and milk .When you think about it for more than a second that is problematic on so many levels.

@BorrisInABox @Kaliah @gtbray I didn't realise this at first but the toggle for it it is in the settings on the website, not the desktop or mobile clients.

I think Alexa's on its last legs. I told it to skip a song on Apple Music and it just said "What do you want to play?" It also won't stop what's playing on command as it clearly thinks it's not playing anything.
It could also be something to do with my Sonos One.
I don't have the patience or skills needed to mess around with the foss needed to do all of that without using big tech.

Ended up falling down our stairs. Luckily I managed to stop myself and wasn't badly hurt but it still shocked me. They're ridiculously steep and go straight down onto the kitchen tiles.

Nice to see that Out Of Print Audiobooks has uploaded the dramatisation of Roald Dahl's Matilda Done by Edward Kelsey. I absolutely loved it when I was a girl. It's already on YouTube but more channels having it can't hurt.
Peggy Mount is amazing as Mis Trunchbull. Scarlet Strallen's performance as Matilda just sounds like she's reading the script but she was only a kid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04VRzhuYtS4

Just for the record I know what an absolute twat Roald Dahl was.
Also why am I happily sharing a Roald Dahl thing when seeing someone posting about a JK Rowling thing would make me feel uncomfortable? I think I have stuff to unpack there as they say.

I've got 69 YouTube notifications. Time to clear them now it's got to that number...
I can be very childish sometimes.

@cachondo Oh yeah course it is.

Most YouTube tutorials for anything technical if you're blind:
To set this up, place these here, there, and over there. Set that to this, press that, then turn this knob but only if you have stepped on that first. Type the code shown on screen and hit that hard, and you're done. It's that simple.

Frozen's 10 years old.