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  Still reading Fires of December. To anyone engrossed in this brilliant story, please see Chapter 23. I have had a terrible week. This chapter with Brandon Sanderson of all people (we are both Mormon you see and we're not supposed to or known for swearing) will tell you why it's important not to be a dick, and the hilarious thing is that "Do not be a dick" is a commandment of sorts in this Cosmere world. Love it, a lot.

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  I'm amused as to many people have reposted my post bitching about JAWS. I wonder how many sociologists have studied or will study what topics get re-posted. I bet weird stuff gets boosted where normal, life changing / news worthy posts remain meh. As for me, not sure why a rant was so popular but ok dude, sure.

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  I realized, almost at the point where it was too late that I had severely under designed a flagship feature which hasn't felt right for a week or more. If I'd read my design documentation a few days after I'd written it in the dead of night in the midst of a terrible case of insomnia. The valuable lessons learned for me was that if a new feature you've designed doesn't feel right, I should probably review my extensive designs cause that's usually w...

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  Using object navigation in NVDA is routine for me, but in teaching my wife how to do it, I remember how odd it was when I learned. I just wish she didn't have to learn in a terribly designed IEP system which not only requires NVDA, but also requires that you use Firefox to be able to even see entered rich text. I think if I'd had to learn object nav on this, I'd lose my mind.

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  I switched to using Chrome mainly because Safari made the Wandering Inn web reader do some whacky stuff. Now it's exactly the opposite in 27, safari is again sane and Safari behaves. Very odd indeed.

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  Today, I feel pretty terrible. Not sure why. It wasn't an easy day yesterday, probably all part of it. Have to wait until late october to meet with my doctor.

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  My wife apparently has a braille lite that won't turn on. I told her that battery probably needs to be replaced. Suppose it also could be a dead eprom, but does batteries plus still do battery pack rebuilds?

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  I can now say, I really hate JAWS. I installed some zoom scripts which I had previously purchased. In the middle of the meeting, for some reason, scripts kept asking me to activate. I manually deleted the scripts because I couldn't uninstall them. My issue isn't with the script author, its with the JAWS installer. After deleting the stupid scripts, it caused a problem with loading JAWS because of a missing file. Keep in mind, I was in an important meeting throughout. I thought, hey, I&#3...

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  Learned something today. I had no idea CSharp was so damn picky about case until toady. Change teh case of the first word in a symbol and you're talking public, private etc. Insane man. I get it, but man get it wrong and you're in trouble.

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  I need to teach English for real. Today in the Lyft, rode with a Spanish speaking driver I'd had before. Today, we covered, have a nice day" and "take care". She tries so hard.

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  My autoupdate triggered today without my knowledge or permission. NER-OS version 4.7 issues itself at 2 pm today. This one's just labelled as "This release is designed to run more smoothly and keey you running better but a t lower clock rate. Please note: More resources are allocated to multitasking and procrastination, you are warned"."I am planning no special events to mark the auto update, cause auto update sucks and why celebrate that crap. That is all.

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  I'm going to run a JAWS update on two machines simultaneously, I only recommend this if you're curious as to what that sounds like and if JAWS isn't your primary screen reader, that and I feel like living on the edge this morning.

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  I spent the day basically fixing crap that I broke in a set of fixes, one of which knocked someone's radio off of the wide area network. I should have caught it and it's a cautionary tale that one must always watch agents and look at the code that's produced.

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  I jsut upgraded Claude to Max 20X to take advantage of Fable availability via sub for this month. I'm about halfway through the month now and Fable will, for now be available for four more days. I got a note that said I was at 88% oiof my Fable usage until the 19th. Upgraded, and the biling gods smiled. Now all my usages have been reset to 0, and I was charged on a prorated basis. Anthropic allows you to change billing at any time, so perhaps my projects can hit it hard now. Can't wait.

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  I've been using Fable today and really getting things done. I actually asked Claude what I can do to keep costs down, Here are the basics. 1. For Fable, current prices are $50 per 1 million tokens, this is like 750000 words, it's a lot. I worked on a task that built like six features and spend 172000 tokens, about $10 or so ($8 actually). Read tokens, when Claude reads files, does things with input, are $10 for 1 million tokens. What kills you /. me is cached read/write, the thing that...

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  After being repeatedly accused of using AI to write posts on a forum, I have decided to stop using (a) spell checkers, (B) grammar checkers, or (C) sense, y'all better watch out, ner has been unlocked. P.s. my Mom was an English teacher. what you don't know is that my Mom edits everything that I write. ... and she's not human. So I guess I am using AI to write posts. Thanks for helping me realize these things, ya bastards lol.

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  Apparently, Fable 5 is coming back today, to be used up ato 50% of subscription for pro and max Claude plans. After that, gotta use usage if we want to use that model.

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  For the blind gamers out there or those of you who want to start playing accessible games like this, made accessible by me, I'd like to talk audio descriptions. I'm going to be shipping audio description tracks for all the included videos in civilization vi and its expansions. What do you think? I do plan to start by including descriptions read by your screen reader, but my ultimate goal is to use Eleven Labs to read them in local languages. Course if I can find 14 people to r...

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  I wondered with the cuts to govt if they cut back on O'reilly access in the library I use for work. Nope, still works. Reading a software architecture audiobook now. I've been told that I am good at software architecture, so I figured I'd try to plough through at least a bit of this book geared toward engineers. It's not all that boring and since I'm going to require a slew of certs in the next couple of years to keep my job, I'd probably should b...

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  Just got a job posting from indeed about a chemical engineering tutor job, remote, working at XAI. I'm tempted to apply to see what happens. The flat organization described by the announcement scares me though. I doubt I'd run into Elan, but ... I'm not sure I want to take that chance.

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  Far out my dude, I just heard all of my the accessibility variables I've coded for the game so far prior to launch. Lucky for me it's not the thousands that will exist ... Civ Vi's footprint is many orders of mangnitude greater than that of Civ V. It's all going to be accessible but ... wow dude doing an accessibility text dump of everything say ... in two weeks ... now that would be wild. As of now though, we have a Civ Vi main menu that works, and I can exit the game. I can eve...

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  Yesterday I was talking to Claude, as I do from time to time, during a development session. I enjoy asking it things about life in the ddle of sessions, cause otherwise I get bored, and besides, I never use all my tokens for the month. Claude is a machine, though, through careful and extensive documentation, when we start a new day, Claude must re-learn everything there is that we know about JJ Flexible Access and what we've done. He does this by speed reading a couple of markdown files,...

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  When my kids were here the week before last, we visited this cool new place near where we live called the fancy cat cafe. Cat cafes allow you to go and eat or drink at a coffee shop, and hang out with cats. They are connected to local cat rescues in the area, so you can apply to adopt an animal you click with. We met Ciara, a tiny kitten, and all four of us fell in love. The person who was working in the cat area said that Ciara needs laps all day long. She had just gotten there the day before...

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  I got the air tags today and put one near the ramp to my house and one on the pole for my antenna. I was able to tell after I put the locator on my pole that the house was 73 feet away. The key is to just start walking in any direction, then the ultrawide band chip can tell in what direction your locator is. Both tags are in waterproof magnetic holders you might use to track a scooter or a bike. They are perfect for my needs, and super strong. Both are securely attached to metal. All I need now...

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  Happy Piano Day for those that celebrate it. For others, this is a daythe 88? of the year, we celebrate the 88 keys that make this instrument iconic and cool. If you have one, go play a chord or two, write a song, enjoy your instrument.

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  Never thought this would happen in my lifetime, but I just got a slew of notifications from my dishwasher of all times. First, a software update, click to confirm ... glad it told me first sad I don't get a changelog. Second, rinse aid is empty, something that would normally be a blinky light I'd never see. IOT devices can be hazardous, but there are also major accessibility wins too.

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  Also today, in coding news, I learned about csharp c# floats and spans. I'd heard of float numbers and span elements in html, but spans and floats for fast procefssing of memory, had no idea they existed. In JJ Flex, since we're creating our own DSP chain cause there's no other way to make this complicated junk to work, it's gotta process things fast. Spans and floats can read and process data in ram super quick, perfect if you're in the dot net environmen...

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  Gusts of wind spinning up. I don't have a weather station here yet. Heavy rain, frequent lightning, no rotation. East Memphis. #tnwx

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  The closest to me base for work is in central Virginia. They've just alerted us that the base will be closed for severe weather. We're pretty much through it here, but I don't doubt that it's gonna be rough in central va tomorrow. #tnwx #vawx K

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  I thought it was done raining so I took a trash can to the street. It's raining and blowing again. Luckily the can's heavy so shouldn't blow all over the place. I sure hope this is the case. Picking up those heavy bags would be a pain.