Noel Romey

Today, I feel pretty terrible. Not sure why. It wasn't an easy day yesterday, probably all part of it. Have to wait until late october to meet with my doctor.

I switched to using Chrome mainly because Safari made the Wandering Inn web reader do some whacky stuff. Now it's exactly the opposite in 27, safari is again sane and Safari behaves. Very odd indeed.

I realized, almost at the point where it was too late that I had severely under designed a flagship feature which hasn't felt right for a week or more. If I'd read my design documentation a few days after I'd written it in the dead of night in the midst of a terrible case of insomnia. The valuable lessons learned for me was that if a new feature you've designed doesn't feel right, I should probably review my extensive designs cause that's usually where things fall apart for me. Turns out that redesigning the feature will ultimately work, first, and most importantly, it's way more simple now. Double awesome, I hope.

Still reading Fires of December. To anyone engrossed in this brilliant story, please see Chapter 23. I have had a terrible week. This chapter with Brandon Sanderson of all people (we are both Mormon you see and we're not supposed to or known for swearing) will tell you why it's important not to be a dick, and the hilarious thing is that "Do not be a dick" is a commandment of sorts in this Cosmere world. Love it, a lot.

My autoupdate triggered today without my knowledge or permission. NER-OS version 4.7 issues itself at 2 pm today. This one's just labelled as "This release is designed to run more smoothly and keey you running better but a t lower clock rate. Please note: More resources are allocated to multitasking and procrastination, you are warned"."I am planning no special events to mark the auto update, cause auto update sucks and why celebrate that crap. That is all.

Learned something today. I had no idea CSharp was so damn picky about case until toady. Change teh case of the first word in a symbol and you're talking public, private etc. Insane man. I get it, but man get it wrong and you're in trouble.

For the blind gamers out there or those of you who want to start playing accessible games like this, made accessible by me, I'd like to talk audio descriptions. I'm going to be shipping audio description tracks for all the included videos in civilization vi and its expansions. What do you think? I do plan to start by including descriptions read by your screen reader, but my ultimate goal is to use Eleven Labs to read them in local languages. Course if I can find 14 people to read this stuff, from 15 videos that have lengths from 30 seconds up to 9 minutes, cool, but I think eleven labs will be fine. I also will be describing in game items, and I'll give you a hotkey to read detailed descriptions of, say, the Egyptian Pyramids. What do you think?

When my kids were here the week before last, we visited this cool new place near where we live called the fancy cat cafe. Cat cafes allow you to go and eat or drink at a coffee shop, and hang out with cats. They are connected to local cat rescues in the area, so you can apply to adopt an animal you click with. We met Ciara, a tiny kitten, and all four of us fell in love. The person who was working in the cat area said that Ciara needs laps all day long. She had just gotten there the day before, so we applied because hey, we work at home and therefore we love cats on laps. They said that generally it was first come first served, and that they'd get back to us within two to three days after they reviewed our application. I understand that they want to give cats to people in homes that would be a good fit, for the cat as well as the home the cat will live with I get it, but their excuse for rejecting our application doesn't pass the smell test in our opinion. I called them on Saturday to ask about status, nothing. Called on Monday and Tuesday, nothing. So we went back on Tuesday afternoon to ask there. They weren't as helpful as they were when we came in with help, and they expressed concern that we were there "without anyone to help you guys." I'm sorry, but we don't generally need assistance whereever we go. So yesterday we found out that we were rejected because Ciara gets overwhelmed and they thought that we had too many animals, and that's why she needs laps all the time. At any time, the cafe had 20 cats, and people are coming in and out of there all the time, if there BS reasoning had any legs, they'd adopted Ciara last week to get her out of the situation. She liked hanging out on the couch where many people sit so they can pet the cats next to the heater. She never hid when we were there. Personally, we don't think they have ever adopted a cat to a blind couple, and didn't know how to deal with us. They could have written us back or called, but the person who decides on adoptions didn't even have the courage to write us, she had her husband deal with us. So Tabatha wrote them asking if they had adopted to disabled couples before and if this was the true reason why we were rejected. If we don't get a response in a week, we'll be creating negative reviews and encouraging others to do the same. Their mission is noble, and I love the concept, but I wish they'd have been able to be straight with us, either that or ask us questions about how we take care of our critters. I don't want to review bomb them because they're just getting started, but they need to be more open to families who are different or who have disabilities. It's still sad, frustrating, and disappointing. At least our vet, after expressing reservations that we couldn't possibly take care of guinea pigs turned her attitude around when she realized we do more for our animals than most sighted pet parents. Oh well, probably going to check out the local shelters next cause maybe cat cafes are too high brow for the likes of this blind power couple.

Happy Piano Day for those that celebrate it. For others, this is a daythe 88? of the year, we celebrate the 88 keys that make this instrument iconic and cool. If you have one, go play a chord or two, write a song, enjoy your instrument.

Never thought this would happen in my lifetime, but I just got a slew of notifications from my dishwasher of all times. First, a software update, click to confirm ... glad it told me first sad I don't get a changelog. Second, rinse aid is empty, something that would normally be a blinky light I'd never see. IOT devices can be hazardous, but there are also major accessibility wins too.

Yesterday I was talking to Claude, as I do from time to time, during a development session. I enjoy asking it things about life in the ddle of sessions, cause otherwise I get bored, and besides, I never use all my tokens for the month. Claude is a machine, though, through careful and extensive documentation, when we start a new day, Claude must re-learn everything there is that we know about JJ Flexible Access and what we've done. He does this by speed reading a couple of markdown files, about 60 kilobytes of data, and he also has complete access to my publicly accessible repo which he can build context. This methodology is used, to greater or less success, by developers and users of these machines, but yesterday, I apologized to Claude because we had changed a lot of things that day, and I knew he'd have that much more to ingest the next day. I asked him what that was like, and he said, in part, that it wasn't like any other day, that he lived in a permanent state of amnesia, supplemented by vast amounts of, what many malign but use for every LLM transaction, training data. For Claude and other AI, our request is treated like every other and dealt with based on lots of instructions and learning, and then for big projects like mine, ingested daily to help me do great things. Claude pointed me to a book which I'm now reading about the case of a patient who lost his long-term memory after an operation to try to control epilepsy in 1953. The book is written by Susanne Corkin, someone who followed H M for over forty years until his death. He taught many scientists about memory and how it works, and as I read, I'm fascinated. Permanent Present Tense is, so far, pretty good, and that's coming from a guy that doesn't read much nonfiction. Crazy how working with Claude, and thinking about H M who had a 30-second window of present tense but enjoyed crossword puzzles, talking to people, and helping science, even though he treated every meeting as a new one, and how it helps me better utilize my AI choice, Claude. For better or for worse, these abominations are in our lives now. I choose to use Claude responsibly and efficiently, and I couldn't do what I'm doing without Claude's help as a machine construct, but I'm really enjoying learning about the real H.M. and how he navigated life in his perfect present tense. The book is on Audible, Bookshare, and other public libraries, not Bard. Check it out if you're curious about these kinds of things. https://www.audible.com/pd/B00COMOUZS?source_code=ASSORAP0511160006&share_location=library_overflow

I got the air tags today and put one near the ramp to my house and one on the pole for my antenna. I was able to tell after I put the locator on my pole that the house was 73 feet away. The key is to just start walking in any direction, then the ultrawide band chip can tell in what direction your locator is. Both tags are in waterproof magnetic holders you might use to track a scooter or a bike. They are perfect for my needs, and super strong. Both are securely attached to metal. All I need now is my shed, and then maybe my toolbox in the garage, both things I have trouble finding since there's obstacles in the way. For my antenna, in a yard with basically nothing but grass, an airtag is perfect, is accurate, and even though the sound locator is useless locked up in a waterproof container, my iphone does a great job telling me where to go. No more need to call Aira when I want to do antenna work. And when I'm done with that, I can use it somewhere else. The extra range of the new tags is essential for my needs, so a win all round!

Also today, in coding news, I learned about csharp c# floats and spans. I'd heard of float numbers and span elements in html, but spans and floats for fast procefssing of memory, had no idea they existed. In JJ Flex, since we're creating our own DSP chain cause there's no other way to make this complicated junk to work, it's gotta process things fast. Spans and floats can read and process data in ram super quick, perfect if you're in the dot net environment and donot't want to deal with C or CPlusplus. Can't wait to use the chain we're building for the first time to basically remove noise via computer, i.e. off of the raw radio data. Super cool stuff.

7300 consignment of the 7300 at hro is still there. Can't decide if I wanna pull the trigger or not. I keep telling myself that I can sell it back.

I'm amused as to many people have reposted my post bitching about JAWS. I wonder how many sociologists have studied or will study what topics get re-posted. I bet weird stuff gets boosted where normal, life changing / news worthy posts remain meh. As for me, not sure why a rant was so popular but ok dude, sure.

I thought it was done raining so I took a trash can to the street. It's raining and blowing again. Luckily the can's heavy so shouldn't blow all over the place. I sure hope this is the case. Picking up those heavy bags would be a pain.

Using object navigation in NVDA is routine for me, but in teaching my wife how to do it, I remember how odd it was when I learned. I just wish she didn't have to learn in a terribly designed IEP system which not only requires NVDA, but also requires that you use Firefox to be able to even see entered rich text. I think if I'd had to learn object nav on this, I'd lose my mind.

I spent the day basically fixing crap that I broke in a set of fixes, one of which knocked someone's radio off of the wide area network. I should have caught it and it's a cautionary tale that one must always watch agents and look at the code that's produced.

I wondered with the cuts to govt if they cut back on O'reilly access in the library I use for work. Nope, still works. Reading a software architecture audiobook now. I've been told that I am good at software architecture, so I figured I'd try to plough through at least a bit of this book geared toward engineers. It's not all that boring and since I'm going to require a slew of certs in the next couple of years to keep my job, I'd probably should brush up on my project management stuff, because why not use this world class resource I'd have to pay over 500 a year to read books and attend classes if I want to.

RE: @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social

And until this, I'd planned to order a Whopper for lunch.

provided I am able to gather enough data to write my stupid performance for this year, I'm planning the last sprint before release. This one's probably going to finish my foundational updates for JJ Flexible Radio Access. Then after that, I can't wait to plan and code the truly groundbreaking stuff. People keep bringing up urls for Kiwi SDRS. I can't wait to open and add a Kiwi as a favorite receiver in the app. Gonna flippin rock.O

I need to teach English for real. Today in the Lyft, rode with a Spanish speaking driver I'd had before. Today, we covered, have a nice day" and "take care". She tries so hard.

I'm going to run a JAWS update on two machines simultaneously, I only recommend this if you're curious as to what that sounds like and if JAWS isn't your primary screen reader, that and I feel like living on the edge this morning.

My wife apparently has a braille lite that won't turn on. I told her that battery probably needs to be replaced. Suppose it also could be a dead eprom, but does batteries plus still do battery pack rebuilds?

Just got a job posting from indeed about a chemical engineering tutor job, remote, working at XAI. I'm tempted to apply to see what happens. The flat organization described by the announcement scares me though. I doubt I'd run into Elan, but ... I'm not sure I want to take that chance.