Notices by Quin (thequinbox@dragonscave.space)

My current desk setup is kind of absurd:
HP probook, sitting directly in front of me with wired headphones connected to it.
MacBook Air, sitting directly behind it, with the screen facing the wall, acting purely as an SSH and Xcode machine.
BrailleNote evolve to my left, primarily for use as a RIM target or controller.
Pixel 9A, my main phone, sitting directly to the right of my laptop.
iPad mini 6 and iPhone SE 2020 sitting all the way on the right side by the mac, working as iOS test devices.
And my Linux mini PC that I do most of my actual dev work on, sitting in the middle of the right edge of the desk.
TL;DR, I need a lot of devices to get my work done effectively, and my desk is very crowded.

This post is nearly two years old, so it wouldn't surprise me if it already made the rounds, but I just discovered it today and I think it it a fantastic bit of writing. Rewriting Rust, by Seph Gentle (josephg): https://josephg.com/blog/rewriting-rust/

Some gems:
"The Rust programming language is lovely. But the rust macro languages are horrible."
"Rust's ergonomics for raw pointers are also uniquely horrible. When I work with unsafe code, my code should be as easy to read & write as humanly possible. But the rust compiler seems intent on punishing me for my sins. For example, if I have a reference to a struct in rust, I can write myref.x. But if I have a pointer, rust insists that I write (*myptr).x or, worse: (*(*myptr).p).y. Horrible. Horrible and entirely counterproductive. Unsafe code should be clear."
And finally:
"I swear, it took more effort to learn pinning in rust than it took me to learn the entire Go programming language. And I'm still not convinced I'm totally across it. And I'm not alone."
This makes it sound like I hate Rust. I don't, to the point that there's even a running joke among me and my friends about how long it'll be until Rust gets brought up sometimes. But it's standing on the shoulders of absolute giants, and it shows in a lot of different and sometimes very weird ways.

If I took a shot every time GitHub broke in the middle of my workday, I'd have taken more than seven shots while on the clock.

SO there's that.

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].

Writing Rust for work at 12:30 AM: because who needs a functional circadian rhythm when your nervous system decides midnight is prime debugging time?

@prism 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.

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.

Am I the only one who finds the nylon strap the BNEvolve comes with to be utterly pointless? Not only does it get tangled up with my headphone cable constantly for some reason, but it doesn't even have a shoulder pad, like the touch did. So having it across my body for more than a few minutes leads to this amazingly comfortable nylon digging into skin feeling.

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.

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.

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.

I love screen readers that treat standard Microsoft controls as something to break with Braille displays.

Paperback works well with all major screen readers. There is, however, one known issue for JAWS users.

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.

New little tool from me: gitkeep! High performance Rust tool to let you manage a local archive of GitHub repositories. It lets you track either individual users or organizations, skip forks, ignore certain repos, have certain users be "frozen" if their GitHub is no longer active but you'd like to preserve it, and smartly pulls new content without running git pull for every single repo (this was how it used to work and the amount of fan noise it generated made me cringe, so I had to fix it). There are prebuilt binaries for all major platforms and architectures on the releases page, or if you have cargo, you can grab it with cargo install gitkeep. https://github.com/trypsynth/gitkeep/releases/tag/v0.1.0

I fucking hate Codeberg. Yet another perfect example of the world at large realizing that a company is evil and switching off their platform but completely forgetting about screen reader users. And yes, before anyone asks: I have tried. I created a Codeberg account and filed issues against Forgejo and Codeberg. One of the lowest hanging fruits is the way the only headings that show up on that whole site read, e.g. in readme's. You hear a bunch of gibberish such as the project name and a slug of the link text before you actually hear the link text, every, single, time, you navigate by heading. People have commented on it, but has it been fixed? Nope nope! And yes, I could go fix it myself, maybe with the help of Claude, submit a PR, maybe watch it get reviewed, and then move onto the next blocker. But I don't fucking want to, nor should I have to! I'm absolutely fucking exhausted with making the world adapt to me. Even more so when it's because the platform that everyone's been using and that is at least decently accessible has turned evil, so now we're switching to something better! Oh accept...blind people can't use it, but it's open source so go fix it yourself! Yeah I know, blind in a world made for sighted people and all that bullshit, I'm just hating it htis morning.

I've just released version 0.1.0 of txt2img, a simple program that allows you to generate images from the command line. The images are fairly basic, you can currently only draw text onto a PNG with custom colors and fonts, but it's more than good enough for me when generating app icons and other things that need an image. I do not trust or like AI image generation, so decided to make a tool that works entirely offline and uses no AI. It's also entirely statically linked, so should be able to run on pretty much any supported system, even one without libc.
Downloads:
ARM64 Linux: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-aarch64-linux-musl.tar.gz
ARM64 macOS: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-aarch64-macos.tar.gz
ARM64 Windows: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-aarch64-windows-gnu.zip
X64 Linux: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz
X64 macOS: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-x86_64-macos.tar.gz
X64 Windows: https://github.com/trypsynth/txt2img/releases/download/v0.1.0/txt2img-x86_64-windows-gnu.zip
Enjoy!

I've just put out a new build of Fastwin, my small Windows utility to apply various registry tweaks to make your system run better. This version adds new options for things such as explorer customization, allowing you to get rid of the new right click context menu in Windows 11, turning off Bing in the start menu, etc. and also now allows you to toggle settings between states instead of just setting them in one state. For example, now I can turn back on bing in the start menu, if I ever want to do that for some reason. Download for x86_64: https://github.com/trypsynth/fastwin/releases/download/v2/fastwin-x64.exe Download for ARM64: https://github.com/trypsynth/fastwin/releases/download/v2/fastwin-arm64.exe enjoy!

If you pay $800 for a piece of hardware, you should own the code running on it. Period. I've spent the last few weeks reverse engineering some specialized blindness hardware, and the security and architecture I've found is... heartbreaking to say the least. We're talking unencrypted update paths and IO patterns that are basically slow-motion suicide for the NAND.
The worst part? I literally offered to write the fix for them! I offered to sign an NDA. I offered a high-performance streaming parser for free just to save the hardware from its own code. The answer? "No resources. No NDA. Can't talk about it."
This is why the software on Assistive Tech needs to be open. If I get a Windows laptop and hate the stock install, I nuke it and install IoT LTSC. You can't do that with a specialized blindy ebook reader or notetaker.
Unless something majorly changes, full audit and write-up coming June 30th.

It's April 20th and my work has me spending the whole day in the clouds.

Unfortunately for me, it's just the AWS cloud.

Tax season win: If you're a student or doing contract work (or both, like me), hiring a professional is a total game-changer. I almost handed over an extra $1,100 to the government because I didn't know which credits to claim. Having someone who actually knows the code cut my bill so much it basically paid for my new laptop. Best investment I've made in a while, and my final payment was a little less than double what I paid the pro.

If I had a nickle for every time in the past month I've bought a laptop on Amazon and the shipping has fucked up, I'd have two nickles. The first one shipped and then I got a refund because the seller claimed they didn't have any of the item despite it showing 13 available, and then the second one just showed "package left the shipper's facility" on March 30th, and then that it was delayed on the day that it was supposed to arive, nothing else. And this ends the story of why I just bought a new laptop off Ebay.