My dad has an iPhone 18 Pro Max. He's been using Apple's Braille Screen Input on it with great success. Then last night, it suddenly stopped working well for him, and he hasn't figured out what happened or how to fix it. He can type things like a full cell, dots 4-5-6, l, etc. but can't type real words on it. Anyone know what might have gone wrong? Please boost for reach. Thanks.
I wonder who other than @BorrisInABox will recognize what Claude just did based on the attached audio? I will tell you that as far as I know, one of the bits of music in this may not have been heard by anyone in over thirty-eight years.
In case anyone's interested, here's a link to a post about accessibility improvements made to the Groups.io (mailing list/forum hosting service) site. https://beta.groups.io/g/main/message/41373
My dad has Envision Ally glasses he bought last year. He received a year subscription to Ally, but now neither of us can figure out how to cancel it before it renews. Can anyone help? Please boost for reach. Thanks.
Here's a weird one. My mom had a claim denied by her health insurance. It turns out the provider billed it incorrectly. The denial is perfectly valid. No one could blame me for thinking it was an error of some kind when she received the Email notice that a claim had been denied. The Email states that the date of the service for which the claim was denied was…January 1, 1753! So I guess she had something done right at the start of a new year before the United States of America even existed, then nearly 274 years later her health insurance *finally* looked at the claim and denied it. I assume what's really going on here is that some timestamp variable used in the Email script isn't being properly initialized from the actual date of service, and a value of 0 coincides with January 1, 1753…which was a Monday, for anyone who cares. #LOL
Isn't it wonderful that we can use LLM's to code such useful things as…well…this? An Apple II program to find an Echo II speech synthesizer, then send random data to its TMS5220 chip to make weird noises. I'm sure @BorrisInABox knows what this audio sample is about to do.
If you see ads pointing you to votesafe.org to check your voter registration, read this first.
VoteSafe is run by America PAC, Elon Musk's super PAC. It is not a government site. Its own footer says "Paid for by America PAC."
It also doesn't register anyone. The flow ends by telling you to download a PDF, print it, and mail it in yourself.
Its privacy policy (updated Aug 29, 2026) lets America PAC share your info with "business partners" for targeted marketing, or sell it. That includes whether you're registered to vote and "how you submit your vote." Popular Information found your address going to Facebook and Google, a hashed email to The Trade Desk, your usage to X, and a device fingerprint that survives cookie deletion.
VoteSafe also white-labels voter sites for allied groups, including Sentinel Action Fund and Ready to Register. North Carolina's election board warned in July that Ready to Register mailings used an outdated form, went to deceased voters, and had QR codes that could pre-populate other people's data.
To check your registration, use your state's official portal, https://vote.gov, or https://vote.org. None of them sell your data.
Sources:
https://popular.info/p/the-hidden-dangers-of-musks-votesafeorg
https://votesafe.org/privacy-policy
https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00879510/
https://www.ncsbe.gov/news/press-releases/2026/07/01/bulk-voter-registration-mailings-cause-voter-confusion-additional-work-counties
Does anyone know what it means in TweeseCake when it doesn't auto-expand a quoted post and you get something like Re: https… before the actual post, where you're supposed to get the post, then the quoted post?
🦁 Camera traps in Spain captured female Iberian lynxes deliberately dunking dead rabbits in water troughs — the first documented case of a wild carnivore soaking its prey.
The behavior was first recorded in August 2020 when a lynx named Naia was seen carrying a freshly killed rabbit to a water trough and submerging it for over a minute. Since then, 5 different females have been observed doing the same thing 8 times, always during the hot summer months in central Spain.
Experiments confirmed that a soaked rabbit carcass retains water for up to 40 minutes. Scientists believe the lynxes may be using the soaked meat to hydrate their cubs or ease the transition from milk to solid food. The behavior runs in family groups, suggesting these solitary cats can learn from each other.
🕷️ A spider in Queensland hunts with a spring-loaded catapult. It builds a cone-shaped silk snare, an ant bites the trigger, and the trap flings the ant 30 cm into the air, straight into the spider's web, at about 140 g.
The ballista spider (genus Propostira, species not yet named) is 5 mm long and eats exactly one thing: green tree ants. The ants are aggressive and dangerous, so the trap lets the spider yank one away from the colony before it can call for backup.
The launch peaks at 1,367 m/s squared, roughly 140 times gravity and 15 times the g-forces jet pilots can endure. Gram for gram, the snare stores more energy and exerts more power than any known biological catapult. And the ant sets it off itself, by biting.
It's the only known web built for a single prey species, and the only trap triggered by the prey rather than the predator. Macquarie University researchers published the find in Current Biology this June.
Read more:
https://theconversation.com/this-tiny-australian-spider-uses-a-high-powered-web-catapult-to-trap-and-eat-aggressive-ants-285700
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ballista-spider-new-discovered-web-traps-green-ants-queensland/106831796
https://zenodo.org/records/14905810
New version of the EchoTalk NVDA addon which clarifies that the underlying library is BSD-3-Clause, and also fixes a bug relating to chip clock rate and output sample rate found by @Derek (thanks Derek!) Same place as the last one: https://bluegrasspals.com/echotalk.nvda-addon
Okay boys and girls, the time has come! First I have an updated version of the Say program I released a few nights ago. This has a few bug fixes. Link: https://bluegrasspals.com/echo_ii_preview.zip And now, folks, here's what you've been waiting for! Here's a very early draft version of EchoTalk, my Echo II emulator NVDA addon! Link: https://bluegrasspals.com/echotalk.nvda-addon Please let me know if you encounter any problems or have comments, suggestions, or questions. Source code for all of this is coming soon, I promise! I really need something like "Posting Stuff to GitHub from the Command Line for Dummies" if such a thing exists. As you probably know, this was coded by Claude Code. Enjoy!
Heads up for anyone using Dropbox on Windows. If you rely on right clicking the tray icon and accessing the menu of options, it seems that sometime within the last few days, at least on my Windows 10 system, they've silently changed everything. I have absolutely no idea how to access most of what I used to be able to access. One of the many reasons I wish there was a third-party, accessible, bloat-free Dropbox client for Windows.
I've made real progress with the issues in my Echo II speech synthesizer emulator. The bugs present when I stopped work on Friday morning are now fixed. As a demo, here's a recording of the emulator speaking a very long run-on sentence familiar to some of you at compressed (fast) speech. The text being spoken is in the alt text. The times where it sort of interrupts itself mid sentence are because of the chunker which breaks the text into chunks small enough to fit in Textalker's buffer. Normally it tries to split at clause boundaries, but since this sentence has none, it has no choice but to split at word boundaries.
On Thursday evening, my uncle died. We weren't very close, he was in Texas, suffering from Parkinsons. He was eighty-eight. Anyway he's going to be cremated, and the funeral home needed signatures from my dad and his sisters to authorize the cremation and disposition of his remains. Dad was reading the form and I was in the room. I was surprised to hear the following, right at the beginning:
THIS IS A LEGAL DOCUMENT. READ CAREFULLY BEFORE SIGNING. CREMATION IS FINAL AND IRREVERSIBLE.
I can only assume:
1. This is a standard disclaimer they put at the top of all such forms, and have done so since the beginning of cremation. Or possibly more likely in today's world:
2. Somebody, somewhere, at some point in time, wanted the cremated remains of their loved one reconstituted, then sued when the crematory or funeral home failed to do the impossible.
Here's another more substantial test. Actual text is in the alt text of this post. There are still some bugs to be worked out before anything usable is built, and I'm not promising when or if that will happen.
Claude and I have been working on a little something to do with what's been going on recently. After around three and a half hours, here is the very first audio that proves that it can almost certainly be done, and that we're definitely headed in the right direction.
🧵 The Salad Oil Scandal of 1963 — one of the most audacious frauds in financial history.
Anthony De Angelis ran Allied Crude Vegetable Oil Refining Co. He wanted to corner the soybean oil futures market. To fund his scheme, he needed collateral. So he did something brilliant and insane: he filled massive storage tanks in Bayonne, NJ with seawater, then poured a thin layer of real vegetable oil on top.
When inspectors came to verify the inventory, they lowered measuring tapes into the tanks. The tapes showed full tanks. The oil coating made everything look legit.
De Angelis used these fake warehouse receipts to borrow $175 million against oil that mostly didn't exist. He was supposed to have 2 billion pounds of vegetable oil — more than the entire USDA's reported national inventory.
The house of cards fell in November 1963 when the Soviet wheat deal stalled, futures prices dropped, and margin calls came due. Inspectors finally found mostly seawater. Allied filed for bankruptcy on Nov 19, 1963.
The fallout was massive:
• American Express — a major victim — lost over 50% of its stock value
• Two Wall Street brokerages (Ira Haupt & Co, J.R. Williston & Beane) went bust
• The New York Produce Exchange, the primary venue for cottonseed/soybean oil futures, eventually ceased commodities trading
• 51 financial institutions were caught holding worthless receipts
Warren Buffett saw his opening. He bought $20 million of American Express stock at 94 cents/share. By 1968 it hit $5. He made roughly $250 million from the recovery.
De Angelis got 7 years in prison. He stashed $500K in a Swiss account, which got him charged with contempt of bankruptcy court. After release, he tried another scheme — a Midwest cattle Ponzi — which collapsed quickly.
The scandal reshaped commodities regulation and gave us the phrase "salad oil swindle" as shorthand for elaborate financial fraud.