Notices by Simon Jaeger (simon@procrastodon.net)

What are people using on mobile for easy notetaking?
On iOS, I use Drafts because it opens to a text field and doesn't make you think about where you want to put the note before you write it. Its interface feels like it would be a bit overwhelming for the average person though.
I also still don't have anything that syncs between multiple operating systems. Long ago I used an app called Droptext which presented a list of text files in my Dropbox, and that was about as close to sync as I've ever gotten.

Spent about an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't log into Windows over SSH using an authorized key. I got to the point of manually running the server and watching the debug output, and still got nothing useful. Supposedly Windows was looking at my authorized_keys file, concluding that my key wasn't in it, and failing.
The problem? I used a Powershell command to grab the public key off my webserver, and that command re-wrote the file as UTF-16, which OpenSSH doesn't like.
Conclusion: When the problem isn't DNS, the problem is Powershell.

Someone claiming to be "Amazon Delivery" called me to try and "resolve delivery issues to my address". They started by asking for my name.
They have the name in front of them, but they can't verify it with me.
They can't even verify initials.
Basically, all I knew about this caller was that they had my phone number, and sounded American.
The person sounded very nice and told me she'd follow up by e-mail, which she did. It was definitely Amazon. But what kind of eaxmple does this set?
"Hello, we'd like to help you, the customer, and we need you to tell us your name and address so we can help you. We're Amazon, pinky swear!"
They could be a scammer. They could be a stalker trying to collect information. on you. They could be literally anyone. And Amazon's airtight policy forces the customer to either refuse to provide that information, or (more likely) just provide it anyway.
Seriously, why the fuck are we normalizing this?

From TweeseCake's hotkey list:

View info on your instance: control+win+alt+i
View a timeline for an instance: alt+win+control+i
... Wait, what?
@app

I applaud the efforts of whoever made the "Reddit for Blind" windows app, as it does actually provide an accessible gateway to Reddit. But I have cursed their lack of basic clarity twice in five minutes.
The first thing you get upon opening the app is an edit box that tells you--essentially--to "Open Reddit in your browser, log in, and then press enter to open a browser page where you can authenticate."
The part they don't mention is that you have to come *back* to Reddit for Blind and press enter... in a text field which I had assumed was only there for information.
Knowing what I know now about the way the app works, I understand why they did it this way, but the instructions made 0 sense in my brain, especially because you don't need to log into Reddit *before* bringing up that authentication page. if you're not logged in already; Reddit will prompt you. So the literal only thing that needed to be in that text field is, "Welcome to Reddit for Blind! Press the enter key to open your browser and authenticate."
Second, the documentation has this to say about changing sorting:
"Press the key to the left of the 1 key (1 on the number row) to change sorting (this key changes depending on your keyboard layout, see app settings > keyboard shortcuts)."
If it changes depending on my keyboard layout, why the frack are you telling me its location instead of what it is? I looked at settings and it told me the shortcut to change sorting was "OemQuotes". Not having seen this naming convention before, I had no idea what it was. So I asked Claude.
Guys, it's the apostrophe.
How hard would that have been to just ... mention in the manual?
*narrowly resists smashing head into desk before continuing to scroll BestOfRedditorUpdates*

Dear router manufacturor who decided to make default administrator passwords that are printed on a tiny label, mixed case letters and numbers, and 19 characters long:
I hope you step on a lego. Every day. At least seven times.
... Yes, I did just wish lego stepping upon a company. I'm just going to leave it here to illustrate my current mental state. (I'm still not logged in, by the way.)

Microsoft is making major updates to MIDI in Windows, including building their own loopback port solution. I definitely didn't have that on my bingo card this week. https://github.com/microsoft/MIDI/releases

Me: Siri, turn off my alarm.
Siri (paraphrased): I found two alarns. One that's turned on, and one that's turned off. Which one do you want me to turn off?
#AIIsTheFuture

I saw a some interesting videos in my YouTube recommendations so decided to save them to Watch Later,. Pretty simple, right?
Nope. As soon as I do this on iOS, VoiceOver gets stuck in the tiny "Saved to Watch Later" confirmation popup. The only controls I can read are the alert text, and another control with no role and mo label. If I double-tap either one, another video opens and the alert never goes away.
Sometimes I'm concerned about investing in an operating system made by this same company.

I had such high hopes for the Terminal app on Android. I've rarely been more disappointed. It's very clear that accessibility wasn't on a single person's mind during the entire design process, and about the only way it could get worse is if the terminal output wasn't readable at all.

I'm not shopping around for a new mini PC (I have too many computers already), but the price increase across the board is shocking.
I'm writing this on a PC that came with 24 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD. I upgraded it with a secondary 2 TB SSD, and 64 GB RAM. The price of the original PC is more than I paid last year for the PC, RAM, and SSD combined. I'm sure happy I upgraded most of my stuff before this happened, because losing my old desktop and having to pay these kinds of prices for a replacement would probably leave me with a way messier homelab with way more compromises.
All my hard drives are at least five years old and I have very little space left on them, so i'm also hoping I didn't miss all the really good Seagate sales. But I probably did. Oh well.

Me: Find my keys.
Siri: Looking for Simon's keys.
Siri: ...
Siri: ...
Siri: Looks like Simon's Keys are in Nanaimo.

Gosh, what would I do without this voice assistant to narrow down the location of my housekeys to the city where I live.
FYI, they were under something on my desk, and as soon as I actually used the Find My app, the Airtag made a sound and proximity finding worked. Siri is just useless.

@alexhall @technocounselor Kinda sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? I can't quite tell if this has its own interface or whether the visual interaction takes place through the phone. If I can interact with them accessibly, I very much want to see what I can do with them. I'm hoping the open-source OS means the live OS is a bit more open to sideloading/tinkering as well. If these are accessible, the worst we can say is that there's potential for blindness apps to come to these glasses without first needing to beg Meta to allow it.

@cachondo @jscholes There are now two versions of Mona on the app store, 6 and 7. You probably have Mona 6 right now, you might have noticed it changed names. Other than possible bug fixes, 6 won't be getting any further upgrades. Mona 7 is now just called "Mona."
Back when you upgraded to the full version of Mona 6, you either bought a single-device upgrade or the "pro max" upgrade. If it was the pro max, you've unlocked a lifetime upgrade option in Mona 7 that isn't available to other people. If you haven't bought the pro max upgrade in Mona 6, it's $10 and you might want to check whether it's still available as an in-app purchase in Mona 6, because otherwise you're locked into a subscription. The grandfathered lifetime upgrade from Mona 6 to Mona 7 is $20 USD. So you end up spending the equivalent of $30 US total, if I'm not mistaken.
Hope fatherhood 2.0 has lots of good parts to balance out the sleeplessness.

@jonathan859 That's not coincidence, by the way. It is actually the German last name. @fastfinge @Fragglemuppet

@fastfinge @Fragglemuppet I have a theory: If it's uncommon, people's brains short-circuit. If it's too common, people don't think about it at all, so they mess it up. If it's one of those names you only run across occasionally, people get it right because they're thinking about it, but it's low-effort.
That's all I've got. I mean, of course people manage to get mine wrong sometimes, but it's rare for some reason.
On the other hand, everyone tries to spell my last name with A-R at the end, not E-R. The other day I had to spell it six or seven times.

@Fragglemuppet You have A LOT of possible nicknames, which can be a good or a bad thing, I guess. Would you change yours if you could avoid the paperwork headache, or is Kate/Katie a good enough compromise?

@Fragglemuppet I actually do. It's common enough that people generally know how to spell and pronounce it. Uncommon enough that I'm often the only one in the room. People don't unintentionally shorten it because there are no well-established nicknames for it. The thought of changing it has never crossed my mind. Thanks mom.

"Your conviction that your eyeballs render you more capable of opening my bottle of juice does not override my two previous no, thank yous", and other things you shouldn't have to say to grown-ass adults.

IOS 26 is going to make it possible to add ringtones using the share sheet. Tech sites are not hyping this up enough because you still have to create the ringtone, but I know lots of us know how to do that already and just need the easy way to add it to our phone without going through iTunes. And now, approximately 14 years after Apple supposedly untethered the iPhone from the computer, we have it. So now if you go to one of those ringtone sites, or someone texts you an audio file, or you’re handy with Hokusai or some other audio editor for the iPhone, you can make your own ringtones without a billion steps. Like everything else Apple has done in recently years, it’s taken so long for such a basic feature to arrive that it’s hard for me to even be excited about it, but I sure won’t miss blundering my way through iMazing.