TheQuinbox

@TheQuinbox@dragonscave.space

Cybersecurity student by day, programmer nerd who yells at computers to do things by night. Lover of cats, books, tea, synthesizers, and programming. I'm always either hacking on something, reading, or petting a cat. Come say hi!

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TheQuinbox, to random

I hate computers.
Windows: "We'll put ads in your start menu and you'll have countless audio issues on a lot of computers. Oh also we don't know how to manage your RAM"
Mac: "Here, have our kludgy screen reader that doesn't even let you tab between focusable controls 90% of the time, because what the fuck. Oh also enjoy being locked into our ecosystem for the next 50 years."
Linux: "Haha, you wish."

Anyways...just a quick reminder that everything's broken and no one cares.

TheQuinbox, to random

I couldn't find a Markdown rendering tool that just works, so I wrote one. It pops up a basic open file dialog. Select a Markdown file, and it'll be rendered in your default browser. It doesn't get much more simple than that. https://quinbox.xyz/files/easymark.exe

TheQuinbox, to random

I hate it when blind people use the excuse of "I'm blind, so please excuse any typing/dictation errors".

Or, how about we treat you like a normal member of society, and hold you to the same standards as everyone else? If the only thing that doesn't work is your eyes, you have absolutely no excuse to not go back and edit text aside from being lazy. You're painting blind people as being unable to proofread, when a lot of society already has assumptions that we can't type, or use a phone. Stop it.

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

A very interesting conversation in a Clubhouse room got me wondering about this: if you’re blind and had the ability to get some vision restored, would you do it? Or would you only do it if you could get full (or almost full) vision back? I’ve seen loads of people falling on both sides of this, and am endlessly curious now.

Feel free to boost for reach.

TheQuinbox, to random

New favorite saying: In the not too distant never. I think I'll use this whenever describing something that'll never happen, like living on Mars, me reading minds, or speech being a good way to consume high-level math content.

TheQuinbox, to random

Me: Presses enter on a .chm file.

Windows: "Are you sure you want to open this? It could be risky."

Me: "Yeah, open it."

Windows: "Okay, what do you want to use? The only app you have installed on your computer for it, that's literally made by us and the default association so I don't even know why I'm asking you this?"

Me: "Yeah, that one, duh!"

Windows; "Are you sure you want to open this? It could be dangerous."

headdesks.

It finally did open, though.

TheQuinbox, to random

I absolutely love the Mastodon community. A friend of mine posted the link to a driver they were unable to download due to an inaccessible captcha, asking for someone with usable vision to download and send it, and someone did. I also just saw someone else post a question about what a product they found actually looks like, and they got very detailed replies. So thanks, Mastodon community, for being as welcoming and inclusive as you are! Unlike... shutters that other place...

TheQuinbox, to random

ICYMI: if your capslock toggling when you're trying to use it as an NVDA key annoys you and you want it to go away, @tspivey and I wrote a little add-on to help with this. https://github.com/TheQuinbox/capblocker/releases/download/1.0/capblocker.nvda-addon. I should actually probably submit this to the store.

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

Would there be any interest in a voiceover tutorial app? Firstly, and most importantly, for iOS, but potentially also on watchOS and tvOS, and maybe even macOS, because the current voiceover tutorial is archaic. Please boost for a larger sample size!

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

I has a kitty!!!

Sorry about the lack of alt text, I'm bad at describing myself and don't know what the cat looks like. If your sighted and can describe the photo in replies I'd love you forever.

TheQuinbox, to random

While digging through files on HumanWare's website, I managed to find some old video tutorials of the Mountbatten (a quite interesting brailler-like product). Since it's HumanWare, and they're notorious for making old files no longer available (original BrailleNote Touch changelogs much?) I've archived them here: http://storage.braillescreen.net/files/mountbatten.zip

TheQuinbox, to random

Dear people,
Software doesn't write itself, and I do have a life. As such, any questions of "When will you release this?", or "when will it be done?" Will be met with a "when it's done."
Certainly you have more important things to worry about than when a piece of software will be finished. Go outside, hug your family, hang out with your friends. Who knows, we might have another pandemic tomorrow. Then you'd actually have an excuse to sit inside all day bitching at me about not writing open source software, for free, fast enough.

TheQuinbox, to random

Holy crap, there’s so much awesome Braille keyboard functionality in talkback 14. If you hold down dot 6 and swipe up and down, you go by character. Dot five is for words, and dot four is for lines. You don’t even have to change your granularity, although like I mentioned in an earlier post you can now also do that from within the keyboard. If you hold down dots four and five, and swipe up or down, you jump to the beginning or end of the field. You can also manipulate the clipboard. To select all, hold dot 4 and swipe left with 3 fingers. to copy, hold dot 4 and swipe down with 3 fingers. To cut, hold dot 4 and swipe up with 3 fingers. And finally, to paste, hold dot 4 and swipe right with 3 fingers. The more time that goes on, the further and further BSI falls behind.

TheQuinbox, to random

The existence of SQLite implies the existence of SQHeavy.

TheQuinbox, to random

Tempted to write a library that can speak and braille through different screen readers and speech engines, similar to Tolk or Accessible_output2, just so I can call it Braille N’ Speak.

TheQuinbox, to random

Notion (http://notion.so) is the absolute worst website I’ve seen for accessibility in a long, long time. Almost every action you do pops up in a modal that doesn’t announce to your screen reader, so you have to go to the bottom of the page and press enter on it. But when you do, the contents of the modal get inserted somewhere fucking random on the page, and doesn’t move your focus, so you have to find it yourself. There also loads of unlabeled buttons, and, worst of all, when opening a document and attempting to read by line, every. Single. Character. Takes up its own line! WTF! I can excuse unlabeled buttons but how do you fail that badly?

TheQuinbox, to random

Thanks to some cool technical wizardry by yours truly and @BrailleScreen's server infrastructure, https://nvda.zip now exists. Visit the URL to get the latest version of NVDA downloaded automatically from NV Access. Append /xp to get the last version that worked on Windows XP. Enjoy!

TheQuinbox, to random

A teacher just asked me how to bypass a stupid restriction that my school puts on all Windows laptops. This amused me far more than it probably should've. Even teachers are realizing how stupid the restrictions are, and that I know how to pwn basically all of them.

TheQuinbox, to random

Somewhere out there's, there's a speech synthesizer that mispronounces its own name.

TheQuinbox, to random

In 10 years, the normalized thing won't be buggy software, it'll be AI models hallucinating.
"This software is so buggy" -> "This AI model is so hallucity".
Yes, that's a word now, deal with it.

TheQuinbox, to random

He sees you when you're sleeping,
He knows when you're awake,
He knows if you've been bad or good,
In Silicon Valley's realm, he's the CEO they admire.

TheQuinbox, to random

I'd seriously encourage anyone who's even remotely interested in programming to learn the basics of Assembly. I chose x86_64, and have personally done more with it than just learn the basics, but even if you just give it a quick look, it truly is enlightening, and actually makes you think. Under all these layers, under all the bloated Electron and Java apps, it's all the same. And it's so simple when you break it down, too.

TheQuinbox, to random

Someone was asking for this, so figured I'd allow it to resurface. A while ago, I wrote a Hammerspoon that lets you quickly switch between input and output devices on the Mac with global keys, as well as letting you do things like mute/unmute your default input device and list all the devices. https://github.com/TheQuinbox/audioswitch

TheQuinbox, (edited ) to random

Me and two sighted classmates took apart my Brailliant 40 and VarioConnect 40 during our lunch period today. We discovered many interesting things, from them both using breakout boards to braille cells taking 200 volts to move (granted at low current), to them both somehow getting USB power and showing as idle Braille devices to Mac VoiceOver, to the Vario only flashing" Braille connect 40" over and over again when powered. If/when we're able to get them working again I'll probably write up a blog post, but this spawned an interesting idea out of the three of us. A repair shop like Louis Rossmann's, except for blindness tech. I.e., you send us your device, we fix it, send it back to you. Any major movement on this definitely won't happen for a while, we're all currently high school seniors with upcoming college plans and other side projects, but would there be interest in this?

Boosts appreciated.

TheQuinbox, to random

I finally, after many months, have an official website, and a projects page! There's still work that needs done (for example I want to clean up the pages for my blog posts, make the home page actually have more info etc.), but it works now! https://quinbox.xyz/
A huge thank you goes out to my good friend Sam Tupy for messing with Cobalt for an actual website enough to inspire me to mess with it for my own site, not just the blog.

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