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I know I’m very late to the party after a tiny bit of research I’ve done so far. I’ve seen the same names pop up all over the place. These folks have worked very hard to get where it is now and I’m sure they know of dozens of roadblocks I couldn’t imagine today. But, I hope that, even if I’m late, there’s still room at the table.

Source: The Open Web, by Brandon Kraft

It’s never too late to join the indieweb. The more people who join, the better, and I would personally love to see all the indieweb technology become part of WordPress core and/or Jetpack. And I think the point of the indieweb is that everyone shouldn’t just rent their seat at the table, but own it.

This is the most accessible implementation of webmention and reactions I’ve seen so far. The little faces have alt text associated with them, (the names), and all the reactions are identified, with their post kind. Now I need to get this set up on my own sites. 🙂

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Screenshot of my Facebook feed with a sponsored post

Well hi there, the Facebook! Thanks for noticing that I posted something about how your efforts to become the central authentication service for everything is not a good thing, and showing your appreciation by showing me an ad for, you guessed it, an ad for passwordless secure authentication. I’ve attached a screenshot for the light slaves, but for the blinks, the relevant text is this:

Suggested Post
SecureAuth
Passwordless is possible with modern adaptive authentication defense layers. Download this guide to learn how eliminate passwords while improving security and user experience.
Remove Reliance on Passwords
info.secureauth.com
Learn More
Custom
LikeReactCommentShareLike PageFull StoryMoreSponsored

Yet another advantage to owning my own data: I can share the text of screenshots as text. 🙂

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Today’s been really productive, but I’ll be glad when it’s time to quit working. I decided to take up the National Blog Posting Month challenge, and what I intended to be a quick hot-take turned into an almost 1500-word long post. That was definitely not the plan, but it adds some good content to the other site, and you can never have enough good content.

I’m also enjoying reading everyone else’s posts. The best part about any of these writing challenges is finding new things to read. I already have a fully-stocked RSS reader, but it’s good to freshen it up with new content that’s longer than one hundred and forty characters.

And now, time for more coffee.

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The quickest way to get your web developer to hate you, and I mean really really hate you, is to send them content that you’ve copied into a Microsoft Word document from various emails and ask that that content be formatted, (properly marked up), for the web. Your newsletter also counts as “for the web”. Do not do this. Ever. Microsoft Word is not a text editor. It is not the thing you use to create content for the web, even if your gold-plated screen reader assists you in doing so with its handy “keep-all-the-formatting-from-shit-you-copy-off-webpages” feature. Why any screen reader assists in doing this is beyond me. The fact that you couldn’t just copy shit off the web and paste it into a Word document formatting intact as a screen reader user was a good thing. In fact, they should just take that feature away from everybody. It shouldn’t be allowed. Under any circumstances. While I’m at it, let’s take away the ability for people to copy things into the WordPress editor from Microsoft Word and keep the formatting too. We shouldn’t be encouraging that at all. We’re contributing to the human race circling the drain by allowing it. Every time you copy something into a Word document from the web, and opt to keep the formatting, kittens die. You may as well have kicked several puppies. You hate your country, adopted or otherwise. And you’ll probably be the ones we really need to keep an eye on when the zomby apocalypse happens, because you’ll get yourselves bitten and then not tell anybody you’ve been bitten.

I’m going to shove this bastard of a newsletter out the door. Then, I’m going to go for a long walk and try to convince myself not to go drink the beers that are left in the fridge this early in the day.

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Most of today has been completely unproductive. I spent the majority of it fighting with Instantbird, (which is not so instant), which I use for Slack, which we use for WordPress Core contributions and other WordPress bits like WordPress accessibility, and other sub-projects. I spent several hours getting conversations to appear and allow me to interact with them. This is text-based chat, so you’d think everything would just work. I finally got everything up and running just before the weekly WordPress accessibility meeting. So by 3PM, I was pretty much done.

And then, I decided I wanted to listen to some of the content that’s on my USB drive. My network attached storage is dead, and this serves as the backup for most of that content. I have music that’s not available on Spotify, or, if it is, it’s “digitally remastered,” (which in most cases actually means re-recorded by the original artist, except now they’re older and they’re showing their wear and tear), plus some audio dramas and books that aren’t on Audible.

Yay time to screw with Windows homegroup settings. Two different versions of Windows on two different PC’s, and the one with the big speakers connected to it is by my bed, as it should be. Well, Windows has never been great shakes at either networking or permissions, (See also: Windows PC versus Windows Vista), and so unless you have a crossover cable, that’s long enough, (I don’t), or you want to make things more complicated and use one computer as a pass-through for network traffic, (I don’t), it’s homegroup configuration time. This is usually straight layout tables all the way down, and will usually take up much more of your time than you’d like, and require several beers to get the entire job done.

So I set to work. Shared the drive properly, set the permissions, then went to access it on the PC by the bed. “Network path not found.” OK then, time to start digging. Make sure I have the homegroup password correct, (I didn’t), get all the names correct. In networking, names are very important. PC’s/devices are not like your hookups. Forget their names and you’re done. So I get all that correct, in less than an hour, and, we have content delivery.

And that’s Monday in the bag.

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I am primarily an NVDA user. I switched after close to twenty years of Jaws for Windows usage, (including a stint as a technical support rep, so yeah, I’m really familiar with how it works), because as a web developer NVDA meets my needs better than Jaws does when it comes to less hand-holding and more stability. But I still keep a copy of the latest Jaws for Windows around because part of my job as a web developer is ensuring as much cross-screen-reader compatibility as possible along with cross-browser compatibility. Every single time I load Jaws to test something I re-encounter a host of bugs, random crashes, the need to kill the jfw.exe process when it randomly stops speaking and reload, only to find that now the display chain is fucked so let’s kill process after process after process and load clean. And yet, the National Federation of the Blind feels it necessary to go after Apple and leave Freedom Scientific alone. I’ll be the first one to tell you as a web developer that there are times I’d like to see VoiceOver die in a healthy forest fire. But Jaws for Windows is buggier by far, and I expect that the only reason the NFB is going after Apple is because it’s not giving proper obeisance and providing a suitable offering as its act of worship. Why doesn’t the NFB just come out and say that, as long as you pay for an indulgence, you’ll be fine. The NFB will leave you alone, look the other way, ETC. Also, how can the NFB be trusted as an accessibility advocacy organization when it’s more than clearly indicated that it’s willing to jump in bed with, and snuggle up to, any organization that’s willing to fill its coffers, regardless of whether or not they’re doing anything about accessibility? That’s not an advocacy organization, it’s a shake-down organization. But yes, we should totally trust their judgment when they sue people over websites.

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There’s an article in the New York Times that attempts to stop people from lecturing other people about skipping breakfast by pointing out that basically all the research and messaging is flawed, and that we probably need to start over.

The headline tells us that breakfast is not magical, but I’m here to tell you that indeed it is magical.

If I don’t get breakfast of some kind, you get nothin’

That’s right. If I don’t get breakfast of some kind, (and as far as I’m concerned, coffee counts as breakfast), you get nothin’. No code, no support, no accessible all the things, nothin’. I stay completely unmotivated until something goes in my face hole. That something could be just coffee, or coffee with some food. But they’re both breakfast, and since this is what keeps me (a) doing all the things and (b) not murdering everyone around me, breakfast is therefore still magical!

Seriously though, read the article.

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I keep a browser open all the time. And in that browser I have any number of open tabs going at any given moment. The only thing that’s inconvenient about this by default is having to move from one tab to another single file. There are shortcut keys for the first ten, but anything past that becomes “What’s behind door number three!” This makes supporting my tab habbit cumbersome. But thanks to this little addon for Firefox, I get all my tabs in a neat little menu that I can access with alt+a, and then cycle through at will. This warms my little efficiency-driven heart. Now all I have to do is remember to close the ones I’m no longer using.

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Blindbeader wrote an excellent peace critiquing the use of privilege by blind people, which is definitely worth a read, especially if you consider yourself a part of what’s known as the disabled rights movement. I agree completely with what she’s saying, but for me, the post brings to mind a few other points. First, that we all have privilege of some kind, and second, while we should be careful about letting our own allow us to forget the lack of it by others, I think we need to look at how we encourage others to “check theirs”, as it were.

I’ve never been a fan of the phrase, “Check your privilege,” not because I don’t think all of us need to be aware of how our upbringing, the environment we were raised in and live in, or the advantages we have in life can’t influence how we perceive others’ situations, but because of what it implies. To me, it implies that the person that phrase is being directed at has never looked outside their own bubble to consider what the speaker of that phrase may be going through. In some cases, I’m sure that’s true. After all, if we were all masters of empathy, the world wouldn’t be in the shape it’s in. But sometimes when we’re advocating, our self-righteousness gets in the way, and we mistake it for righteousness instead. I think we all should take a step back from time to time and look in the mirror. None of us can be perfect, but I believe if we displayed a little more empathy when advocating for our favorite cause, whatever that is, we’d get a lot more done with a lot less rancor attached. And we might even end up with a better society in the process.

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So I got on the scale this morning like I usually do, and found that I’m only 9.9 pounds away from my overall current weight loss goal. Plus, i have a pair of jeans, “college 1.0” jeans, that now fit. College 1.0 jeans! I left college 1.0 in 2002.

These are a pair with nice, deep pockets. Useful pockets. Pockets that would probably fit an iPhone 6S, when I finally decide to bite the bullet and upgrade.

Happy Valentine’s Day to me, from me. I’ll treat myself to a beer later I think.

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It is not normal to obsess over the calories you eat and the exercise you do in a day no matter what society tells you. Yes, a balanced diet is important. Yes, getting some exercise is important. No, spending all day on an app that takes over and controls your life and makes you preoccupied with food, exercise and weight is not okay.

Source: MyFitnessPal is Not Your Pal | Mental Illness Talk

This is something to keep in mind as we all start paying more attention to our fitness goals in 2016. Yes, quantifying data using an app and other technologies can be helpful when it comes to reaching our goals, but all of us who rely on these technologies need to remember to keep a balanced view when it comes to quantifying ourselves.

We and our health are more than just data.