This is so awesome! I now have a working TT Media Bot instance set up with presets of Internet stations my sweetie and I enjoy listening to. So while we are talking on TeamTalk, the bot also connects, and streams the selected station. These can be switched by channel number or by using back and next b or n shortcuts in private messages to the bot. Volume can be adjusted by percentage, and that is all cool, stuff already built into the bot. But here's where it went from cool to awesome, and worthy of posting about. I have enhanced the bot to interface with the Azuracast API, where available, with additional history and request keywords that act on the API and return the results to the message window. So sending history returns a numbered list of the most recent 15 tracks played. request Nickelback returns a list of up to 15 results, and asks the user to send the number of the song they would like. If number 5 is appealing, user sends 5, and the bot forwards the request to Azuracast. Azuracast sends its API message back to the bot, and that is relayed to the user. If all went well, the message "your request has been submitted and will be played soon" is returned to the user, and their request is heard over the stream via the TT server in short order.

I have a BBS on the PsTN. It actually answers and works. its Maximus. there was a lot of hate on for Max back in the day, but I like it because it has simple text mode, in addition to the eye candy pretty ansi graphics and ASCII art that are a screen reader nightmare. So its nice and blind friendly. As for everything else? I'm sure every other BBS software package did it better. But Max is a legitimate BBS, and I'm elated that it works and to be running The MacLeod Clan BBS again, just as I did when I was 12 years old or something, like back in fall of 1998 on my real 486 DX2/66 box. LOL. #Nostalgia #BBS #Maximus #Dial-UP #Modem

If we used to dial-up, why didn't we hang-down? #EnglishMusings

Wow! I am actually connected to the Internet via a dial-up connection, using a fully emulated modem running in a Linux VM to National Capital Freenet. Looks like we are having trouble reestablishing sync after a retrain, and V.44 compression drops just before five minutes of a call. So more work to do, but V.42bis and no compression have hit 15 minute call lengths. We are getting a 56000 bit digital sync on the download, and a 26400 bit analog sync up. Pings are between 300 and 400 MS, and data moves at around 2.3 kilobytes per second. LOL.

What the screenreader said: "I'm building the convert action".
What I heard: "I'm building the comfort action".
The things that aging ears and thoughts of a special person can imagine in an instant, LOL.

Looks like it was a verfication stage. Wow. So it is still chunking away on this ting. But I am able to litterallyy emulate everything, get a clean terminal experience, that is screen reader usable. Wo. Just mind blown. I did this shit when I was like 9 years old with help from an awesome odler guy who befriended me. He saw some potential there i guess. And now this Claude thing is rewriting and recreating that very experience, and I can see it working, and I have a BBS on a PBX extension. And it ma or may not have a PSTN number, and I am intrigued and very much amused. LOL. I need coffee. And actually, scratch that, probabl ysleep.

Good morning friends. Claude continues to amuse me. Its pretty fascinating how fast it does things. I've been working on a project for at least 72 hours now, which is mostly working in a lab-only, LAN setup. I actually have a fully end-to-end simulated BBS experience. From modem to modem, both emulated in software, passing through a SIP RTP link at G.711U, and virtually modulated and demodulated in all its glorious nostalgic screetchyness that meant liberty and amazing connections and opportunities, to communities and news information for others. Yeah, the modem. It actually makes sounds! And I can hear them in real time in stereo, left for modem1, right for modem2. Wow! This is all just so much pointless fun. But its fun no less. I think it took 20 minutes to fully end-to-end transfer and fully audit 1 megabyte of data bitstream. Um.. Or, is it still going? What? Run 2 of 3, 4 of 5 tests failed?

My word, the phone systems! The phone systems! I so don't ccare, but they're obviously an important backup and certainly handy in a pinch. The VM and OS are patched, but do they actually still work? Oh my word, all the radio stations, its all pending in the pipeline. Oy! Like seriously guys, someone in my position has at least a week's work cut out right in front of him right now. I don't mind the grind work, but it will bring me absolutely $0 in gains, and I am seriously hoping no losses. Certainly a total loss on time on this one. But that's the life I guess. not like anyone ever said it was fair or anything.

Sorry for all the boosts folks. This is nuts. Expect me to be rather grumbly for a week or so. Oh well, such as life. They did a lot of work to coordinate the fix, so its just on us to brunt the work of finding and patching every legacy system, and hope automatic updates don't break the rest, LOL.

The fleet has been OS updated, patching severe PHP and CA Root Certificate issues on a system-wide basis. We now await vendor-specific updates for localized environments.

This is simply incredible! That Netgear XS512EM switch, the one I was griping about last week, and ever since I got it, as a matter of fact, the one with the pile of shit useless inaccessible user interface, wellp, it now has two accessible interfaces. A fully asynchronis HTML5-only web page with all controls fully useable and tested working, plus a whiptail menu interface in BASH, which calls backend python scripts for functions, and provides me with a nice arrows, enter, escape, textarea, spacebar with stars for checkboxes or radio buttons style text user interface. For anyone familiar with Allstarlink, you can imagine the experience very similar to their shell menu. Claude and I got it all done and tested in twelve hours. Every function, tested and working. Over 1,300 tests passed, on the actual hardware. Its getting harder and harder to hate on all this. Of course, that will be until the day it whipes all of my lab machines, my servers, and my personal machine in one fowl swoop of a halucination in auto mode, LOL.

Burn baby burn! Burn down that Claude Max sub! Fortunately, the weekly reset happened at 7:00 Eastern this evening. Because I have three sessions doing heavy work. One is rewriting the Netgear XS512EM web interface to be accessible and asynchronis HTmL, rather than eye candy pretty, instantly acting, yet totally inaccessible Java Script. Another session is running a 6,000 record set of image and video analysis for a computer vision training model which will run locally. And yet another session is running a code crawl and audit for vulnerabilities, injection, XSS, and all that other web security stuffage.

RE: https://dragonscave.space/@fireborn/117424337025526397

if you enjoy the smell of burnt electronics, do what he did... But actually, don't.

Ummm... Wow! I litterally just live migrated a VM running Azuracast while listening to it, and there was absolutely zero buffers or interruptions while it was copied and handed off to the new machine. The very station I am listening to just moved in 88 seconds from TheBeast to Box1, and as a listener, it was as if nothing happened. wow!

If you're a vibe coder, and you care about your code actually working, don't use the whatever Google AI that is baked into Chrome. It might be free, it might answer you all day, but it will brick whatever you're trying to develop or configure with it. Most especially if you really can't say with confidence that you know the language you're coding in. So Claude free, can you do better with the Mikrotik switch configuration? Let's see.

Ooo! I can make the Mikrotik switch beep! I'm sure it says a lot about me that I find that amusing, but such as it is. LOL.

I must say folks, for screen reader users specifically, and often times many other groups as well, the command line is, and always was, the most rock-solid accessibility tool. If you've got a system of knowing and quickly retrieving commands and their sequences, be that from your head, a lookup database, the internet, provided its still there, you can do anything the software allows. Full stop. There is nothing preventing you from using any feature that the environment is programmed to allow, and often times, stuff it does not allow, to occur. There is nothing to click, nothing to do but read and write text. If you've got a screen reader you know well, and a good comfortable keyboard, and a good reference and understanding, you can do anything. This is why I choose Mikrotik. I can learn their CLI. I can read their insanely dense wall of text manual. Its all there. It is not an app that may get me what I need in five clicks today, and then all of a sudden shows me a blank screen tomorrow. So long as the CLI is maintained and updated, the rest is text, and absolutely nothing more than that. Plane and simple text. Learn it if you don't know it. Just pick up any CLI or API. Just learn it, and find products that make use of it. There are a lot more coming, all thanks to this new fangled AI thing.

I wonder if I might know anyone who might be interested in a Netgear XS512EM Network Switch? It features 12 NBase-T five-speed ports up to 10Gbps, with two shared SFP+ ports (11-12), and a rather basic web UI that is unusably inaccessible, but works perfectly if your eyes work well enough to read print, featuring port-based (basic) and 802.1Q (advanced) VLANs, some discovery features, a few other layer 2 functions, but no layer 3. It has served its purpose in my apartment-sized data center, and I will be replacing it with the Mikrotik CRS312 whateverwhatever in the model number after that, LOL. Insanely, it looks like the $1,500 after tax I paid for it in 2020 looks like is now $2,200 plus tax now! For the same damn metal rectangular box. LOL. Well, this one has been humming along for six years, so its not exactly new anymore. But it is very reliable, has never locked up or dropped a packet on me. That's usually down to the odd habbit of buying modestly higher end gear, and then going for the cheapest ethernet cables on the screen. I'll be cleaning it up when the replacement switch arrives. I have no clue what to ask for it, LOL. It is pretty underwhelming in features, and unusable for us screen reader folk for anything beyond the click of the cable. So I'm not exactly the best salesman for the damn thing neither, LOL.

The Mikrotik CRS317-1G-16S+RM switch has indeed arrived. The box is basic, but utilitarian. You get the rack ears, mounting screws, and two quite beefy IEC-C13power cables to connect to its dual-internal power supplies. You of course also get the half depth, full rack width, 1U switch itself. This thing is awesome, and if you learn or know Mikrotik naming schemes, it makes sense. They typically describe port count and type by abreviated letter combos and other communications about what physical features are, well, featured, LOL In this instance, this switch features a lengthy single-row, four-by-four row of SFP+ cages, for a total of 16. These come all dust capped, as should be the case. To the right of these are a vertically staccked pair of RJ-45-looking jacks. One is your standard ethernet jack (8C8P), typically, but less than accurately accepted incorrectly as RJ-45, which is a totally different thing. Then there is 6C8P and 8C8P, which is the ethernet connector we all use. RJ-45 is a different pinout and layout, but an ethernet connector can fit into an RJ-45 connector, but an RJ-45 connector cannot fit into an 8c8p connector do to keying. But its all referred to backwards. Oh well. a Cissco-style RJ-45 jack exists which is wired as a serial port, not an ethernet port. Clever I suppose, that is, until you go trying to plug the wrong cable into the wrong jack. You can do it! Fortunately, nothing devistating really actually happens. You might shut down a port, you might send some corrupted serial data and overload any far side equipment like Spock in TOS, but you won't kill anything, and it won't even be a bad day. Just an oops. But here's the trick for us blind folks. The ethernet jack, which is a real ethernet jack, has lights around the perimeter to signal link state to sighted people. We can use these lights by feel, two puffy smooth ovals, like LED lights, to understand what jack we are on.
And after all that rant, this is as far as I've gotten with it. I am still trying to contemplate physical placement of this thing in my head. The network will have to come down for sure. The new switch is going to become the aggregate spine. Everything else will LAG multiplex off this thing, or LAG off downstream copper switches for the old server and workstations. So thats a lot of layer 2 programming in a language that I have no idea about. But hey, this is why we do this stuff. Be back with further updates.

RE: https://mastodon.online/@AppleVis/117269344934205504

Good going Apple. Such a fine piece of work, this lovely iOS 27. Sarcasm abound.
On the other hand, excellent testing and reporting, AppleVis. Appreciation, rather than sarcasm abound. Anyone hazard a guess who won't be upgrading?