I owe @TheQuinbox an apology. When I posted my skepticism about Backtalk, I hadn't actually looked at the project — I didn't realize Quin was behind it. Having now gone through the repo, I'm genuinely impressed. The analytics are stripped out, network calls are all opt-in, the scripting engine has a proper permission model, and downloads are hash-verified. This is careful, disciplined engineering.

Unlike TalkForward or other efforts with questionable origins and no public repo to inspect, Backtalk is fully open source and built on a solid TalkBack fork with real security considerations baked in. It's refreshing to see Android screen reader development back in the hands of the community with this level of quality behind it.

I haven't been this excited about accessibility on Android since @nolan released Spiel. Looking forward to where this goes honestly. It's refreshing to see so many of the new stuff be opt-in and nothing shoved in your face unless you yourself enable it.

I got my ass kicked!

And this is why we can't have nice things. 4 developers reporting the exact same, nearly month-long delay I'm seeing with Apple and Paperback on iOS in a forum topic that Apple hasn't replied to. I think I'm going to just call Apple and hopefully not just get directed to talk to an AI agent. This is absurd. I submitted my first build on September 26th. It is now October 21st. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/849540

When Stephen Baum retired several years ago, and I'm sure many of you know the name, Kurzweil 1000, a program I absolutely loved and probably used even more than JAWS or NVDA, was no longer updated. It was effectively discontinued, much like OpenBook. I was pretty much convinced I'd never see another Windows program that could fill the K1000-shaped hole in my life. My experiences with QRead, Bookworm, and a couple of other applications taught me not to expect anything to be Kurzweil 1000. Then Paperback came along. At first, I thought it was just another short-lived project fueled by a developer's initial enthusiasm. But I'm genuinely happy to say that Paperback has brought together the best parts of Kurzweil 1000 in a modern, compact package that feels right at home today. Just like K1000, Paperback lets you create bookmarks and notes, and even transfer them to another computer. You can now also export them as HTML or TXT files in the latest development release. It supports a wide range of formats, and when it comes to navigating through books, it actually goes well beyond what K1000 offered. Its ability to recognize scanned PDFs is surprisingly accurate and useful, too, especially for a feature that's still relatively new. Sure, it doesn't connect directly to a scanner. But these days, far fewer people need a dedicated scanner to digitize physical books than they once did. It doesn't have a built-in dictionary or Wikipedia access like K1000 did, either, but in this day and age, those aren't necessarily features you can't get from other tools. And here's another thing I really appreciate: unlike K1000 and pretty much all its competitors, Paperback doesn't insist on converting every book into its own proprietary format. It reads the original book and cleverly stores your bookmarks and notes separately in its own format. After all these years, it's quite something to find a Windows reading application playing such an important role in my life again. I honestly didn't think I'd feel that way about another program after Kurzweil 1000. Welcome to my reading life, Paperback. You've got some pretty big shoes to fill, and you're doing a damn good job.
@TheQuinbox

The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores.

An attacker with the private key of any of the compromised intermediate CAs could impersonate any website or service.

Translation - breaking encryption.

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

Set up this little page on my website last night as a place to host all the useful little Windows utilities I've made, although it doesn't yet have every single one of them. It currently has Micstate, Taskmon, and uphide, with more to be added. https://quin.fyi/win/

I'm happy to officially announce ship-shape, an auto-updater library for wxDragon desktop apps on Windows, macOS and Linux. It's what keeps Paperback and Fedra up-to-date, and I think it's finally in good enough shape for other people to use for their own apps.

What it does:
- Checks GitHub Releases for stable versions, or for new commits on a development channel.
- Verifies every download against a minisign signature before touching anything.
- Installs the update and relaunches your app. On macOS it only swaps in a bundle signed by the same Apple team, and never asks for an admin password.
- Shows the release notes in a plain read-only text field, so you can easily copy and review them.

MIT licensed, and on crates.io.
https://github.com/trypsynth/ship-shape
#Rust #Rustlang #wxWidgets #wxDragon

hello, I am vague nondescript given name or initialism, and I am *long list of sobstories that I think a lot of people have a good chance of relating with*

and I need money. just a little bit, an amount that you wouldn't be able to buy a week of groceries with, but will some how solve all of my problems this week.

how can you be sure I'm a real person? you just have to have a little faith that your money isn't going into the accounts of a scammer running a bot farm in Pittsburg or something.

The date Jesus died can be proven based on the solar eclipse described in both the bible and historical texts, but the church rejects that date because it doesn't align with Easter. I'm not saying religion is a scam but that's definitely not the actions of a credible org.

Tesla’s flying car looks like a techbro is gonna kill themselves in it trying to do a stunt like jump over traffic.

If you use your AI to submit a pull request to a repository without actually testing your changes, you are disrespecting the maintainer's time. I've seen this multiple times this weekend alone and it annoys me to no end. Passing unit tests is not a substitute for actually testing the behavior you've changed. If you're changing how a screen reader, add-on, application, etc behaves, you, need, to test it as much as you can. Leaving me to slog through a PR, including testing it myself when you couldn't even be fucked to do that, makes me just not want your contributions. Why should I take your pull request seriously when you didn't take it seriously enough to test it and confirm it fixes what presumably annoyed you into fixing it in the first place?

To this day, not a single one of Mom's super religious friends has done anything to help our family; even after being informed she almost died & is living with cancer now. You know who has actually helped Mom/our family, offline?
People who don't go to churches at all. People whom super religious folks would deem as heathens/sinners against God.
Yet, those so called heathens showed the most humanity & zero hypocrisy, during my family's time of serious needs. They just called/came by to help/support us. There's not many but we're grateful for those golden, kindhearted souls.

#KindnessNeedsNoChurch #HumanityNeedsNoHypocrisy

Tag your Suno generated stuff as such so I can filter it out.

“France’s schools were not built for the hotter world the students have inherited after generations of fossil fuel use have warped the climate. Many buildings were designed to hold onto heat; air conditioning is rare. As classrooms recorded temperature peaks above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38°C) this spring, schools reported incidents from fainting to nosebleeds.”
https://mas.to/@therightarticle/117461195252271904

I never really thought about this much until just now, but pb, Paperback's command-line based document converter, is a super useful tool for AI agents. Got an ancient .doc or .chm manual you need to reference? No problem! Pb will give you text, markdown, or HTML in seconds.

Something I occasionally think about, and then proceed to be horrified to my core, is this:

A Raspberry Pi 4 *vastly* outperforms an Amiga 4000. Or a Symbolics XL1200. Or an SGI Octane. A typical microSD card is *much* faster than a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI HDD you might have found in a high-end Unix workstation back in the day.

But the Pi 4 is barely able to run modern-day office software or browse the mainstream web. The microSD card is mostly considered a slow piece of junk (which it very likely is, though for other reasons than its performance).

What the fuck are we even doing here?

@alexhall You're right that distributing the bin would probably be a bad idea (you can just have people get it themselves like other projects do), but I wouldn't put any significance to Claude breaking the encryption, except that this kind of DRM is in the long run utterly self-defeating. On a real BrailleSense, the software from that file must run on the device, meaning that the device has a way of decrypting it without the user entering a password, and I doubt that it would get the password from a server that long ago. So the device itself contains the decryption key and can access it, and every single device contains the exact same key, which means it cannot be considered secret; you could literally probably write an application for the U2 that gets the key and then run it. I had a U2 a long time ago in school, and you could modify the menu file and put your own executable in there. So its basically just like writing the key on the bottom of the device next to the serial number and calling it secret; yes its more difficult to access, but its just security by obscurity, because as soon as someone finds out how, they could tell everyone else and everyone would know how to access it quickly and easily. All DRM is effectively security by obscurity, because it is attempting to execute code, or display media to the user, while also keeping that thing encrypted with a key secret to the user, who is the same party as the one accessing it. This is impossible to do in the long run, because if the user can inspect the code that is executing, then they can get the key. Even if the hardware and OS completely block such inspection, if you can monitor the hardware itself, perhaps with an advanced microscope, you could still figure out what code is executing. And the user has the right to do anything they like with their own possessions, including analyzing them and taking them apart. So DRM is always in an arms race that it will inevitably lose, and rightfully so I think, since its goal is to restrict what people can do with their own possessions.

Did anyone here use a Braille Sense U2? Did it always take a long time to load a webpage or load the Google search utility? It did on my emulated unit, and Claude says it's because there's a 15-second timeout which it changed to 2 seconds. The emulated U2 now loads web things faster, but I don't know if this delay is present on real units. I have never used a Braille Sense.