New Year new #Wikipedia list. Reebee Garofalo was one of the original people who put together Rock Against Racism Massachusetts but you may know him as the snare player for the Good Trouble Brass Band playing in the HONK! Festival of Activist Street Bands. He was cited in a ton of other Wikipedia articles and made that Genealogy of Pop/Rock Music chart you may have seen in an Edward Tufte book. A good guy to get to know, deserves a longer article but this is good for now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reebee_Garofalo
Was reading a talk about the 200th anniversary of Braille (thanks @JonathanMosen) and he noted the passing of David Holladay who wrote early Braille translator software to help support his wife, Caryn Navy, a blind math professor when they were students at MIT.
He had a newsletter (about accessible computing) which was also published on cassette.
He continued to write and work on Braille software for his entire life, now with Wikipedia page!
My usual rule of thumb is only articles about under-represented folks on Wikipedia but I made an exception for Bill Harris without actually knowing he was a gay journalist so Happy Pride Month and please enjoy the wide array of things this man did in his journalism career.
This guy's name is Bum Farto and the categories on his Wikipedia article are: 1919 births, Missing people, People declared dead in absentia, 20th-century American criminals, and Firefighters. I don't think I have anything more to add except amazement no one had written this article before.
I just went to the Virginia DMV to renew my driver’s license and my vehicle registration. That could not have been an easier or more efficient process. I think every interaction I have ever had with the local DMV office has been easy, friendly, and successful.
@waldoj@StephanieMoore Same in Vermont. I registered my truck and got custom plates (ordered) all within a very short not-wasting-my-time window. The woman who helped me was friendly and efficient. I did have to drive to the state capital (there are like five DMVs in this state) but that was a small price to pay.
@markwyner Turns out I was misreading Wikipedia edits and my apologies to ImYourTurboLover (which is possibly an even better username) who actually made that edit.
I'm writing an article that deals in part with the career of MIT civil engineering prof John B. "Bud" Wilbur, class of '26. Did you or any of your mentors/elders know him? Please get in touch! #mit#engineering
NB: A USGSA survey of 11,000+ filers found 90% ranked the UX as “Excellent” or “Above Average,” after a successful pilot with 140,000 Americans that saved an estimated $5.6M in costs.
Next steps: invest more to pre-populate returns, test, iterate, & scale.
@joeo10@digiphile ID.me is definitely a stumbling block. I've had people in the public library who needed to do a video chat just to verify their identity and... that won't scale (and yes, also privacy issues). I hope they have some creative solutions.
@emilymbender Oh gosh Emily, and this is so timely since Seattle Public is dealing with a ransomware attack this week, on top of all the other attacks on libraries. Thanks for writing it.
I do some work that involves one-time emailing people from my domain about a service they applied for. I use a lot of form letters. I am continually battling with my email hosting provider about the content of these emails, they reject them to b/c they look too spammy.
I get that spam is a scourge and I sympathize, but it's wild how much of a dark art spam fighting is. So far I've had to remove my "hello" greeting and add a fake unsub link (they're not subscribed) just to send outgoing emails.
I have DKIM and SPF set up. My domain is not on any blacklists. There is a black box of machine learning between me and being able to do this simple volunteer job which sometimes goes fine and sometimes winds up with dozens of emails returned in my inbox.
The support page for my email host has a huge page of "things to look out for" that I have bookmarked and read often but also states "content guidelines for spam are always changing, much like our world." :ohno:
More to the point--and I swear I am not being a grumpy "I hate change and learning technology" person, I love a challenge--all the time I take trying to learn the shifting spam rules and testing new variants of my email, is time being taken away from my work helping folks.
So either the volunteer work takes more of my time, or I have less overall time available for helping people. As I've said in the past, economies of scale for corporations easily become "economies of hassle" for individuals.
I had given up on pleading for more alt-text but I'll try again!
Please add alt-text to your photos/pictures it only takes a minute and does not have to be fancy. My policy is not to boost images without alt-text and I am not the only one.
This is one of the cultural things I like about Mastodon, the inclusiveness. Please don't ruin it.
@SuitedUpDev@Dianora I've found this page from Perkins School for the Blind has some good basic tips. The graphic at the bottom lives rent free in my head.