Notices by Simon Jaeger (simon@procrastodon.net)

this week I found out that when you start the Debian Linux instaler with speech, and it detects multiple soundcards, it cycles between them and you can press enter to choose the one that actually works. Most installers just pick a random soundcard and send speech through it. Maybe it picks the internal speakers, maybe it picks the digital output that has nothing hooked up to it. If you can't hear your machine, you'll have no idea the installer started, and good luck switching soundcards after that. As far as I know, the Windows installer certainly doesn't have a soundcard selection for narrator.
This would never be a problem with Debian installations because it will just keep cycling through the soundcards until the speech becomes audible. I know we all love to hate on Linux accessibility, but sometimes the thought that goes into the design of the simplest things is really quite impressive. This is also very on-brand for Linux and I'm definitely here for it.
At the time when this happened, I was on a call with Aira and had forgotten to turn up my speakers, so I know the machine displays a "Press enter to select device 1", "Press enter to select device 2..." prommpt, but I can't 100% confirm that the speech follows along. It seems like a safe assumption though, and at some point I'll do a proper test with multiple outputs and make a recording.

I just found a setting in my iPhone's *Security and Privacy* settings, and I cannot believe I didn't know about it but I'm genuinely impressed, and have turned it on now. I'm going to just paste the paragraph from settings:

*App Privacy Report* shows how often apps use the permission you’ve granted to access your data, like your location or microphone. It also includes a breakdown of each app’s network activity, website network activity, and the most frequently contacted domains.

Almost exactly a year ago, I found a subreddit called r/TimeTravel. The first post was someone asking a very simple question: How can I go back to the past and change things? I thought this was a troll subreddit, to be honest. So, I wrote a troll comment, which I'll paste below. But I'm writing this post a year later because I just got a private message from someone, asking if my time travel trick really worked. This is not even close to the first message I've received in response to this comment. Someone even bought the laptop I referenced.

---

Look for a used IBM Thinkpad 700. Install the earliest beta build of Windows 95 (March 1993, when it was still just codenamed Chicago). Open two instances of the date/time settings. Change one of them to 11:11 AM on April 1, 1948. Change the other to 11:11 AM on January 4, 1984. Press okay on both as quickly as possible.

Then, disconnect the laptop from the power source (although you might want to bring the charger with you, to return to other timelines). Go back into date/time settings and change the date and time to whenever you want to travel.

If you don't disconnect the laptop from the power source, it will try and transport as much of the connecting wall as it can, which usually leads to some truly fucked up shit. DO NOT FORGET TO UNPLUG YOUR THINKPAD.

Every time you reboot you have to redo the simultaneous date setting. If you're going back before electricity, for goodness sake bring a solar charger.

These days when I set up a computer and want to create a local user account, I just invoke that screen from the command prompt. You can do this with an internet connection, but it needs to be one of the first things you do.
1. In the Windows first-run setup (after it has been installed), press shift f10 to open command prompt.
2. Type this: start ms-cxh:localonly

This should pull up the old "Who's going to use this PC?" screen. Seems to work in Windows 11 24H2. When you get done answering security questions, the computer (or at least the out-of-box experience) will restart.
I also use this cmd trick to launch a portable copy of NVDA sometimes.
A lesser-known shortcut in Windows setup is ctrl-shift-f3. This puts you into audit mode, where you're logged into the desktop of the administrator account even though you haven't completed Windows setup yet. A dialog will automatically start, giving options to restart into the out-of-box experience or restart normally. In this mode, you can install drivers and make any other changes that need to be made before the setup process completes.
Example: When giving someone a Surface tablet with an attached Bluetooth keyboard cover, you might want to go into audit mode so you can pair the keyboard, but still retain the setup process for the recipient.
You can, of course, also use this trick to completely bypass Windows setup in order to reinstall Windows on a brand new system.

'I lost my legal right to vote': Booths closed early — or didn't open at all — in some Nunavik villages https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/planes-leave-nunavik-no-vote-1.7521042?cmp=rss

Finally getting into the habit of using a ridesharing app instead of local taxis. Somehow, in 2025, Nanaimo still doesn’t have Uber or Lyft, but we do have something called Uride, and it’s not the most accessible thing on the planet but I can still use it. it means I get way friendlier and more competent drivers, I can text or call them, and I can pay through the app instead of dealing with inaccessible credit card machines. I feel like I had a choice today: I could be discouraged by the fact that the app is hilariously inaccessible, or I could be happy that I can still use it independently and get where I need to go. I’m a little annoyed because it seems like every door-to-door transportation option has downsides, but mostly I’m channeling that energy into making a good screen recording of all the issues i’m having, sending it to the very friendly support who appear to actually want to fix the app, and being glad the day went so smoothly. I wonder if this is the more subtle effect of #ADHD medication. The thing about executive function is that when it actually—well—functions, it does so without making a fuss. Things just happen. And that’s how I’m starting to feel, at least some of the time. I didn’t just make a screen recording—I made a two-part screen recording, made a video edit, figured out how to convert it to email-friendly format using ffmpeg, and am going to talk to Aira to make sure it looks okay. Then I thought to myself, “Hey, I don’t usually have the motivation or energy to do something like this. That’s kinda nice.”
The problem with the subtlety is that I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like certain things were hard, and I’m still learning exactly how it feels for them to be easier, so I need to un-learn the habit of putting things off because I *think* they’ll be more difficult. That takes time—but more importantly, it takes dedication, which is not something I’m known for having in high quantities. The best indicators of success are still these accidental ones, where I suddenly realize I’ve been hyperfocusing on something relatively important and complex, and then I have to translate that into “Hey, maybe this other thing that used to be hard until a couple of months ago is not so hard now, let’s give my brain a chance to prove itself.”

What Dropbox says: "There was an error adding this folder. Please try again."
What I expect to hear from Dropbox support: "Please send screenshots, uninstall the beta from the computer you haven't used in seven years, and make the following 57 easy changes to your registry."
Actual problem: "You have a folder with the same name as the one you're trying to add to your Dropbox."
I have a lot of ideas for things to selfhost but Seafile/Nextcloud is really close to the top right now.

@skinnylatte This is so strange! How often do you shop there? This isn't surprising if it only happens a few times, but this feels like a very specific interaction that should be memorable.

With a bit of input from Gemini about its own API, I wrote two shell scripts to:
1. Provide a text-only alternative to an audio or video file.
2. Create a timestamped description of the visuals in a video file, not including audio-only information.

Gemini definitely has some flaws when working with video, and I've only tried it on a few files. Interestingly, it gained enough context clues from a one-minute clip of The Big Bang Theory to successfully identify a character who is never named in that clip. It also doesn't know how to hold off on giving names to characters within its descriptions until those characters are given a name within the clip. If I give it permission to use context clues from the audio, it uses later ones to describe earlier parts of the file.
And it's not perfect at separating audio from video--for instance, my visual-only description had sentences like, "Sheldon walks into the kitchen and makes a request." and "Sheldon begins to sing." I could always mute the audio when sending the video, but I was hoping I could get Gemini to understand the difference and produce reasonably useful video descriptions.
I'm mostly using 2.0 Flash because I *think* it's still free for now, but I'll compare 1.5 Pro at some point and keep tweaking the prompts.
For audio, it's great. I tell it to add paragraphs for readability and line breaks to singing, and it does this quite well. It can't always identify sounds, but it tries pretty hard.

For some reason, in Thunderbird 128, NVDA is no longer reading the bottom list item, or counting it as part of the list. So whenever a new email arrives, I just have to open it and see what it is. Anyone else experiencing this? Do I have to fake an email from the future now?

@fastfinge Are we really marking anything remotely related to harry Potter as transphobic? That feels like going a bit far. I welcome disagreement from someone who has more skin in the game but I feel like it promotes the idea that supporting anything related to Harry Potter is also supporting the author as a person. Nothing about this post is transphobic, unless the fanfic is, which is something we'd probably want to know.

Apple seems to have discontinued the lightning to headphone adapter. They're still selling the iPhone SE and 14 on the online store, but if you want to use headphones with them, I guess you're shit out of luck. Every day, I enjoy being an Apple user a bit less.

@greengaybles Go to a URL like this one, and if you're on the phone, patiently read through it. https://kind.social/api/v1/instance

I feel like all I can do is laugh at the last week of insanity.
I had a few work demos due at the end of the week. I've already been putting these off because recording demos caused me an unreasonable amount of stress due to having no easy way to edit them and thinking myself into a hole. Thanks to mastodon, I discovered LosslessCut, and I have to first say that this little tool has been amazing and has saved me immeasurable time and stress. I can finally do basic edits to my videos instead of just sending in a fumbling mess.
So I got a few demos done on my iPhone and was able to cut out the fumbling bits and submit them. Great!
Then, as I was gearing up to record the remaining demos on Wednesday, my mother's car broke down and she needed to come to my apartment so she could stay in a place where you can actually function without a car. That's my private recording space gone.
I should have had them done on Friday. But my mother decided to stay until Saturday. Then Sunday. I got plenty of recording done, but it just wasn't enough.
Today she left, and I tried to do the final recordings on Windows.
Game Bar (which is the default screen recorder for Windows) absolutely refused to work on either of my machines. On my Windows 10 laptop it recorded incredibly choppy audio. On my Windows 11 Surface, it gave me a cryptic error.
So I thought, "Why don't I just join Zoom and record myself? That should work, right?"
It did work, but it kept popping up alerts telling me I was muted, and those would steal keyboard focus. Because I wasn't recording my own microphone audio, I didn't want to be unmuted, so I just dealt with the obnoxious popups and edited them out with LosslessCut.
Then I did a few demos where I actually did need to be unmuted, and after hunting for the "Original Sound" option, I realized I couldn't turn it on while sharing my screen, so had to un-share it, turn it on, and re-share. Annoying, but fine.
Finally, I got done with all the rest of my Windows demos, looked at the file size, and realized they were all under 10 MB.
So I called Aira. Sure enough, blank video. Absolutely nothing there. MP4 files with only audio on them.
At this point, I just want to collapse on the floor, but I did something I should've done years ago and installed OBS. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to make it record my microphone and system audio simultaneously, another 5 minutes to set up some hotkeys, and then I was finally, finally able to record my demos. Bonus: They were in MKV, so even though they do have video, they're still tiny.
I am so many kinds of done with today. Which is timely, because it's tomorrow.

Happy fucking Monday, world.

@Fragglemuppet I'd say go into ctrl+nvda+v, shift+tab past the OK button, and you'll land on the modes selector. uncheck "Off" and "Beeps", so your only modes are "On" and "On-demand". Now if you press nvda+s, you'll change speech so it responds to keyboard commands like nvda+t and nvda+f12, but doesn't randomly talk unless you specifically request information.

@Fragglemuppet Hmm. That makes me wonder if some other window is popping up just long enough to affect NVDA's focus. Do you ever read books or long webpages on the computer, and does it happen there too?

@Fragglemuppet Does this only happen in a particular app or a particular type of control? I don't usually have this problem. I also usually turn speech off when i'm not using it. You can remove the speech modes you don't use now, so it's just an on/off toggle instead of cycling through all the modes.

You're a taxi driver. You're sent to pick up someone named Simon. You drive up and there's a person with a cane standing on the curb, apparently doing nothing and facing toward the parking lot. Do you:
1. Call out to the person.
2. Honk at the person.
3. Sit in your car doing nothing until a random stranger comes up to the blind person and tells him there's a taxi 3 car-lengths away, sitting there, doing nothing.
I feel sometimes like all of humanity is being enshittified.

@Fragglemuppet @Bruce @techsinger @FreakyFwoof In a technical sense it's better because anyone can have their own spot in the fediverse, and either invite people or keep it to themselves.
In a cultural sense it seems better because people actually recognize the existence of others unlike themselves, whether that's people who might appreciate content warnings or alt text.
The user experience is very Twitter-like, and the blind community basically migrated off of one and onto the other, so that's going to feel very similar. But I used to look at mainstream Twitter sometimes and while there was good content there too, it was a lot more full of low-effort garbage. If I tried to advocate for alt text, I'd get replies from people who either didn't understand why I was asking for it (even though I specified in the post) or didn't care. If I replied to people asking questions about blindness, I'd get shorthand disbelief. Twitter used to only allow 140 characters and I think it trained people to stop caring about what someone had to say after the 141th character.
So I feel like it's more accurate to say Mastodon is like the best of Twitter. And a lot of people who were in specific interest-based bubbles or the disability space didn't experience the worst Twitter had to offer.

@Fragglemuppet @FreakyFwoof ... You could have an account on every individual forum and that was fine. Now that's still fine, but all the forums talk to each other.