Notices by Simon Jaeger (simon@dragonscave.space)

Weirdest Telegram conversation I've had in a while, for sure.

Alejandra: What are you eating?
Simon: [In reply to Alejandra] Pizza!
Alejandra: Nice one
Alejandra: Nice to meet you Simon
Alejandra: Actually, We are promoting our brands to boots its visibility and popularity
Alejandra: Now our company need a lot of Instagram follower
Alejandra: If you help us to follow our 2 pages we will give you 15 USDT as a welcome bonus and you can get 200 to 500 USDT per day
Simon: Have you thought about starting with shoes instead of boots? If you're having trouble getting brand recognition you might have better luck starting small.
Alejandra: <deafening silence>

Any Linux / Orca / Voxin users out here? I realize how many levels deep in minorityville I just went, but also this is Mastodon. I just set up Voxin on my new Arch install, and every so often, it will start speaking at the default (very slow) speech rate. I have to change the rate to make it start speaking quickly again. Is there any way to get either Orca or Speech Dispatcher to send the rate more often? #Linux #Accessibility

On the bright side, Uber Eats seems to have done away with tips altogether. They may have slightly increased fees, but the total amount for an order has gone down. I'm glad I can now decide to tip drivers afterward instead of adding one before the driver even got assigned, which never made sense and left me feeling like I had no idea what a fair tip actually looked like.

I've been ordering a lot of Uber Eats recently because I'm able to combine BOGO offers with 40 or 50% off promos, so I could get a $80 order for $20 plus fees, on a good day. And fees here are pretty reasonable compared to some big cities. Unfortunately, Uber seems to have caught onto this, and now items that have a promotional discount already are not counted toward the promo at all. Probably means I'll be ordering much less, so at least there's that. It was fun while it lasted.

@jwildeboer I think a lot about the fact that we all have pocket communicators with many different radios in them, but if disaster ever strikes, none of them can communicate with each other. The more I think about it, the more it feels like a sign of a world gone mad.

A lot of the Apple Intelligence features that are being talked about for iPhone 16 are actually going to be available on the 15 pro line, so if you want to upgrade last year's phone because of what you're hearing, hold off until a tech article unwravels the features that are *actually* new to the 16 and then go from there.

This Ars Technica article discusses just how much the rushed release of the new Sonos app will hurt their revenue, but I'm particularly impressed that their first example of its failures was "accessibility features", and that text links straight to @JonathanMosen’s blog post. I'm trying, but I just can't make myself feel too bad for them. And they still have to show they can actually get back on track.

Sonos’ $30M app fail is cautionary tale against rushing unnecessary updates | Ars Technica https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/app-redesign-blowback-will-cost-sonos-up-to-30-million-ceo-says/

Was quite surprised to find that the cycle count on this Surface Laptop's battery is a whopping ... 7! That means this $280 laptop seems to have come with a brand new battery in it.
On another note, Windows 11 is starting to feel faster than Windows 10 after Explorer Patcher and some other debloating. I might actually put it back on my main laptop and give it another try. It's been about a year since I rolled back.

Joe Biden just announced on Twitter that he would not be seeking reelection.
"Why am I posting about this", you didn't ask? Well, he announced it in a letter, contained in an image, with the alt text of "A letter from president Biden". So for anyone curious what that letter actually said, here's a transcription. I had GPT transcribe it since Windows OCR was mangling parts of it, and OneStep Reader was even worse, but Aira verified the accuracy of it.
https://slj.io/biden.txt

With iOS 18, the Phone app has been upgraded in a few different ways.
T9 dialling is the most obvious new feature, and its addition will please many iPhone users are have been accustomed to having that feature on their previous Android handsets.
To use T9 dialling on iOS 18, simply go to the Keypad in the Phone app. Dial in the numbers corresponding to the first few letters of the person’s name you wish to call. Each number button represents three or four letters, so just press the relevant number.
iOS will automatically filter the address book to find possible matches. The matching person’s name and number will appear at the top of the screen. Tap on the name to confirm and initiate the call.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/10/ios-18-adds-t9-dialling-iphone/

This works for me. It sounds awkward at first, until I realize I can turn my phone first and then tap twice with both pointer fingers. Thanks @NikJov https://mastodon.social/@NikJov/112595460257490463

New Braille screen input is certainly interesting in iOS 18. There are sounds and haptics now, which is long overdue. You invoke Braille screen input with a gesture now, rather than using the rotor. The default gesture is a two-finger double-tap near the edges of the screen. I had trouble with the left and right edges, and didn't realize at first that the fingers needed to be separated, rather than tapping on one particular edge. I've found the top and bottom is most reliable, which basically means I turn the phone to BSI orientation and type cc. However, as with everything else, the gesture can be reassigned.
You can now activate it anywhere on the system and use it like a quick item chooser, jumping straight to something by typing part of its name. There are new gestures for editing and selecting text, and I'm using them to clean up this post.
There's an entire new mode called "command mode", and you can switch between command and typing mode with a three-finger swipe left or right. In command mode, the phone invokes Braille display commands as though you added a space. So, dots 1 or 4 will move between items, h will go home, and b will go back. It seems Apple is trying to provide us with an entirely new way to navigate the OS, and it already seems pretty powerful for a dev beta 1. I'm going to send this post by going into command mode, pressing l to jump to the top of the screen, pressing dot 4 to get to the send button, and pressing dots 3-6. The two-finger flick right would also work. I'm not sure which feels more natural yet.

@jscholes This is actually super clever. I wrote to them about an API issue last year and got "please clear your browser cookies and try again" as a response...maybe they should put their own AI model in charge of support. I think it'd do a better job. But in the meantime, this is a really good DIY solution and something that would never occur to me. It could probably also write a whatsitmonkey script to fix the various issues permanently, but I haven't tried this.

@menelion iOS seems eventually throttle its notifications if it's repeating the same thing over and over, but if you set the snooze time to 10-15 minutes it should still nag you for several hours before being rate limited. And as soon as you open it or another reminder comes through it'll start nagging you about the overdue reminders.

For several months now, I've been using an app called Due for reminders, and I think it is helping me more than any other app I've tried. It has interactive notifications that let you reschedule or complete reminders from the lock screen; Siri support; a set of really nice sounds that can be chosen per-reminder; all the usual recurring features; and best of all, customizable auto-snoowhze, which causes the reminder to repeat until you either reschedule or complete it. Its tagline is "never forget anything again", and I'm not sure the developer could have done a better job making that happen. https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/due-reminders-timers/id390017969

@NVAccess Congrats, both for being selected this year and for possibly being the only project to get funding twice. It also shows there aren't just a tiny scattering of people who are onboard with accessibility at Microsoft, which is a useful reminder sometimes.

@FreakyFwoof @bryansmart If someone at @NVAccess wants to do this before I get done with work, feel free. otherwise, I will.

@tspivey @FreakyFwoof @bryansmart @NVAccess Why amI not surprised this is ancient?

Pro tip: If Uber Eats or any other delivery service gives you the wrong item, just report the item as missing. Especially if you are completely blind and can't necessarily guarantee the quality of the photos you take.
Brought to you by someone who calmly explained why taking photos was impractical, and was then told "You need to take the photos". I'm pretty sure they didn't even read the message.
They're going to refund the item anyway, so save yourself the trouble of having to use Aira or similar.

@KaraLG84 Profile fucking picture