Recommended read - for practical reasons it is very hard to make a TCP connection to port 0, or to run a client on port 0. Yet, when acidvegas scanned the internet on port 0, they found a lot of interesting stuff:
https://acid.vegas/blog/the-port-that-does-not-exist/

Paperback 1.1 is out! It's on the App Store now, and the Android update is rolling out on Google Play soon.

Highlights:

• A new PDF engine. It's faster, uses every CPU core, and no longer needs pdfium.
• Open a document from a link, on every platform. F5 downloads it again.
• Support for decades of older files: Word for DOS, Word for Windows 1 and 2, Word for Mac, Windows Write, PowerPoint 95, and zipped FictionBook.
• Word documents get real lists, footnotes, endnotes, comments, and picture alt text.
• OCR on Linux.
• Recognized text now follows the page's layout and is remembered, so a scanned document opens with its text.
• iOS text mode is rebuilt for VoiceOver. Read All goes through the whole book, the rotors reach all of it, and lists and tables are real lists and tables.
• A voice, rate, and pitch for each book on iOS.
• Audio books can play at up to 4x, with volume controls.
• Huge text files open with a fraction of the memory, and the 4 GB limit is gone.
• macOS is a universal app, and pb, the command-line converter, now comes with it.
• A Hungarian translation and user guide, plus Slovak and Ukrainian on iOS.
• Many fixes for PDF, RTF, Word, PowerPoint, CHM, and DAISY files.

Thanks to everyone who translated, tested, and reported bugs.

Windows, macOS, and Linux: https://paperback.dev/downloads
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6775220909
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.paperback.android

Enjoy!

I was inspired by a post from @FreakyFwoof talking about DC++, and took a brief jaunt down memory lane.
In the last 5 years, Limewire evolved into some kind of vibe coded file sharing and AI platform. (https://www.limewire.com/)
Napster is now “Visible AI agents with voice, video and memory” (https://www.napster.com)
BearShare is now an AI slop music blog.
Is some LLM out there recommending that people hoodwink old file sharing company names for completely unrelated projects as a strategy? Brand resurrection? Capitalizing on nostalgia? Just coincidence?

For those who are into 3d printing, this guy made an accessible slicer interface that works with Creality print, Orka slicer, prusa slicer, and Bambu studeo. It's designed for blind folks to be able to slice prints independently. https://github.com/Accessible3D-Edis/AccessSlice #3dprinting

I e-mailed the company who makes the Bluetooth transmitter just to say "Thanks for an accessible Windows app; this is why latency is important for screen reader users." I got a reply less than half a day later and thought it was worth sharing:

Hi Simon,
Thank you for reaching out and sharing your experience. We're very glad to hear that the FMA121 works so well for your setup and that you've had a positive experience with FlooCast's accessibility.
Yes, the accessibility support is intentional, and there's actually a bit of history behind it.
When we first developed FlooCast, we used Tkinter, Python's standard GUI library, to build the interface. In September 2024, a user contacted us about accessibility issues. We then discovered that Tkinter's UI components didn't provide proper screen reader support. This came as a surprise, as we had assumed a standard UI library would support accessibility. It was clearly something we had overlooked.
Following that feedback, we rewrote the UI using wxPython, which provides much better accessibility support, and released the updated interface in version 1.1.1. Accessibility has been a supported feature of FlooCast ever since.
We're very pleased to hear that this effort has made a real difference to your experience.
And of course, any further suggestions you have would be greatly appreciated!
Best Regards,
Ranson Sha
Flairmesh Technologies
www.flairmesh.com

May I introduce you to Aperio, my fully accessible, cross-platform calendar/task manager? You might have missed my first announcement, but if you're rather into listening to quick and dirty demos rather than reading up on things, here is one for you, its especially quick, although not quite short, and dirty one, but maybe it gives you an idea of what it does and how it works.

Unexpected Pauses in Speech and Mysterious Character Representation in Braille: My First Experience with AI Watermarking https://theideaplace.net/unexpected-pauses-in-speech-and-mysterious-character-representation-in-braille-my-first-experience-with-ai-watermarking/

iOS 27.3 developer beta 1: It is now possible to run Siri shortcuts from the VoiceOver rotor. The shortcuts item is added to the rotor, and then you choose which shortcuts will appear as options within that rotor item.

ArchiveOfOurOwn (AKA AO3, run by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW)) has been down for a few days due to a security incident. In the wake of that security incident, a site called AO3.life has cropped up. At some point, they scraped what appears to be most (if not all ... I've got no way to check that myself) of the fics on AO3 including ones that were only available to logged-in users.

In addition to providing these fics (some of which were specifically not intended for broader consumption) on their site, they're trying to get readers to pay for audio editions of the stories.

They have some dodgy and technically impossible steps if you are an AO3 author and want to take your fics down.

OTW is aware and is taking legal action but they warn that the legal system is slow. They advise that you do not attempt to use AO3.life's requested method since it may expose you to additional dangers regarding your private information.

#ao3

When you touch a sleepy cat and they make a little "prrt?" noise and then stretch their toesies and go "hhrrNNGGGHHgghhhrr"

Boost if you agree

A stealth game in which you play Sam Altman sneaking into people's homes to steal their RAM. Each time you succeed, game performance degrades a little. Eventually, the game becomes impossible to play.

Welcome to another, even bigger audiogames.net monthly digest! This month you’ll find some appropriately scary halowheen games as well as a bit of everything else. Whether you want to play cards, dice, rogue likes or perhaps combine the 3, do some cooking, sort everything imaginable on your phone, you’ll find all of that. Maybe you think all these cosy sorting games are nothing like what you used to play on your phone back in the day, or perhaps you heard from your friends about some cool games that were lost to time? Well, we got more modern ports of some cult iOS classics. Or perhaps you wanted to play the newer Pokemon games, or the old trading card game for the gameboy? How about Xcom and Fallout? Maybe you watched Star Trek voyager and thought you could have done things differently? Or maybe you’d rather have some hack n’ slash action? All of that and much, much more!

https://forum.audiogames.net/post/1001943/#p1001943

it took a while, but the bash script i wrote to find the most popular article category on wikipedia by curling every single article has finally finished. no i don't know what a "database dump" is. i can now reveal that the most popular category by far is 429 Too Many Requests

Every #blind #radio host I know prefers an analog mixer. You can feel where every button and fader is. But analog gear wears out faster and has its limits. Digital radio mixers are either not accessible, or expensive, or both.
So I built a bridge: a Midas MR18 and a Behringer X-TOUCH, with NVDA or short sounds telling you what the desk just did. Mic fader start, callers on CUE, cough button, talkback, ducking, silence alarm.
Free, open source, Polish UI for now.
https://github.com/michaldziwisz/mostek-mr18/

Does anybody by chance have any update files for the original BookPort's firmware?

Kind request for the @jaybird110127 types who like to archive streams. If you're doing it locally anyway while you listen, I highly suggest Blindradio, developed by @serrebi which, alone out of every single player that has this feature, gets it right. I've verified that it saves the stream, in its original format, *without* opening a second connection to do it. Fantastic job, Brandon.

https://projects.serrebiradio.com/apps/blindradio/

Perfect.

Rest in peace Patrick Stewart. I don't post about celebrity deaths often, but Star Trek and in particular Next Generation is what really got me into sci-fi and shaped me in so many ways, and captain Picard was a very big part of that. It took incredible acting to bring a character like this alive in a way they would be remembered by so many, and Sir Patrick nailed it.

I don't normally post about celebrity deaths, but Sir Patrick Stewart's death is such a tremendous loss. Like Peter Cullen, he portrayed leadership based on kindness, compassion, and respect for others - not exactly the norm before that - both professionally and in his personal life. He showed that strength comes from treating those around you with dignity, not from belittling them - and that power comes with responsibility to do the right thing, rather than being an entitlement to abuse others.

For those of us who, like me, only have access to Mac OS but want to mess with all the shiny new games that are being released/modded: I've just released Crosstalk, a little hack for Crossover/Wine that pretends to be NVDA just enough to catch speech sent to it via the controller client/RPC/UIA messages and forward it to a synthesizer on Mac OS.

https://github.com/guilevi/crosstalk