In this edition: “I’m an AG” fails to impress, some shady deals, another thing not to use AI for, and other stuff.

On Call: Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance

Why LLMs should not be integrated with screen readers

Who, Me?: Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI

Opinion: There's more than warm power supplies and wonky capacitors

On Call: Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank

This may be the only thing that Texas and Canada have in common.

Canadians with vision loss are adapting AI-powered glasses for daily life, finding freedom in the technology — and challenges in its risks.

Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.

Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."

UK study findings may challenge assumptions about who benefits most from AI tools.

Who, Me?: You're out, forever!

Unity is updating its game engine so developers can leverage the built-in screen reading software in desktop operating systems.

People show no signs of stopping, even though these show no signs of working.

The root cause behind why Windows 11 24H2 appeared to be breaking NVMe SSDs may have finally been found.

Explaining git exclude and how it differs from git ignore.

About accessibility, flawed arguments and assumptions

Who, Me?: At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM

On Call: Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops

Who, Me?: Firewall pro enjoyed European travel to fix the fallout

This is the 13th article that I’ve written lately on NTP and PTP timing with Linux. I set out to answer a couple questions for myself and ended up spending two months swimming in an ocean of nanosecond-scale measurements.
When I started, I saw a lot of misinformation about NTP and PTP online. Things like:
Conventional wisdom said that NTP was good for millisecond-scale timing accuracy. I expected that to be rather pessimistic, and expected to see low microsecond to high nanosecond-range syncing with Chrony, at least under controlled circumstances.In a lab environment, it’s possible to get single-digit nanosecond time skew out of Chrony. With a less-contrived setup, 500 ns is probably a better goal. In any case “milliseconds” is grossly underselling what’s possible.
Conventional wisdom also said that PTP was better than NTP when you really cared about time, but that it was more difficult to use and made more requirements on hardware.You know, conventional wisdom is actually right sometimes. PTP is somewhat more difficult to set up and really wants to have hardware support from every switch and every NIC, but once you have that it’s pretty solid.
Along the way I tested NTP and PTP “in the wild” on my network, built a few new GPS-backed NTP (and PTP) servers, collected a list of all known NICs with timing features,Specifically GNSS modules or PPS inputs.
built a testing environment for measuring time-syncing accuracy to within a few nanoseconds, tested the impact of various Chrony polling settings, tested 14 different NICs for time accuracy, and tested how much added latency PTP-aware switches add.
I ran into problems with PTP on Mellanox/nVidia ConnectX-4 and Intel X710 NICs.Weird stuff. The X710 doesn’t seem to like PTP v2.1, and it doesn’t like it when you ask it to timestamp packets too frequently.
I fought with Raspberry Pis. I tested NICs until my head hurt. I fought with statistics.
This little project that I’d expected to last most of a week has now dragged on for two months. It’s finally time to summarize what I’ve learned and celebrate The End Of Time.

This specification defines eBraille, a digital reading format for braille publications.

Yes, I saw the story about the FDA recall of shrimp from Walmart because of Cs-137 contamination. Do I know exactly how this happened? No and it is likely to be a while until we get any definitive answers, if ever. But I do have a pretty good idea what happened by which I understand … Continue reading "Radioactive Shrimp"

Who, Me?: The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training

On Call: Somebody built a very sick network in the bowels of a hospital

Nimer's blog

Who, Me?: Instructor ended up teaching a lesson in how to get away with mistakes

ChatGPT will apologize for anything - even advice it definitely didn't give, and stuff it definitely didn't do. It very much regrets its recommendation that we hire a giraffe as CEO.

Product Owners and Product Managers who focus on digital accessibility can really make an impact to ensure compliance with regulations like the European Accessibility Act. Read on for 5 actions you should take now.

Apple has today released iOS 18.6, iPadOS 18.6, macOS Sequoia 15.6, watchOS 11.6, tvOS 18.6, and HomePod Software 18.6. In our usage and testing of iOS 18.6, iPadOS 18.6, macOS Sequoia 15.6, and watchOS 11.6, we did not identify any changes in these releases that specifically affect the experience for blind, deaf blind, or low vision users. We were unable to test tvOS 18.6. If you notice any changes in your own use of any of these releases, please do let us know by posting a comment.

Who, Me?: And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels

On Call: Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage

For people with disabilities, finding a trail that's sufficiently accessible can be a challenge. The new Inclusive Trails application from the National Capital Commission aims to change that.

Who, Me?: 'This, many considered, was bad'

Uber is tackling trip refusals through policy, information, and inclusive product design.

A new Apple study introduces ILuvUI: a model that understands mobile app interfaces from screenshots and from natural language conversations.

Who, Me?: For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage

In this edition: pants on fire, complaints about press coverage, a bumbling treason attempt, and somebody wants a measly $1 trillion.

Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but—for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness—they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back.

Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.

On Call: First came the dodgy lawyer, then the explosively angry HR person, leaving a whistleblower techie to save his career

Your trusted plugin is evolving to bring accessibility front and center

: Deaf professor who worked on one product says developers won’t listen to feedback – about their products or their tech bro ways

Deaf and hard-of-hearing clients say they've been left without critical services for more than two months since CHS workers hit the picket line.

Toymaker Mattel worked with Breakthrough T1D to create a Barbie doll who visibly lives with type 1 diabetes and carries an insulin pump.

Revolution, consciousness, and artificial intelligence: Heinlein's libertarian masterpiece predicted both our political and technological future. Examine how 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' anticipated the AI revolution transforming society today.

Who, Me?: Years later, deep into a great tech career, your fellow reader remains inspired by the forgiveness received after the error

SceneScout, combines Apple Maps with a multimodal LLM to provide interactive, AI-generated descriptions of street view images.

Great Odin’s Raven!

On Call: Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not

As they approach graduation, most high schoolers are busy learning, training and planning their futures. But disabled students have fewer opportunities. Experts want more programs made available to help them transition into adulthood.

Our company recently announced a fundraise. We were grateful for all
the community support, but the Internet also raised a few of its colle...

Who, Me?: Sensible CEO wouldn’t let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap

On Tuesday, millions of Canadians will celebrate Canada Day — an event that has taken on greater meaning this year following the surge of national pride in the face of U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs and his threat to make Canada the 51st state.

Anthropic's AI assistant Claude ran a vending machine business for a month, selling tungsten cubes at a loss, giving endless discounts, and experiencing an identity crisis where it claimed to wear a blazer.

An “underground network” of unauthorized beaver releasers is at work.

On Call: When police come to investigate tech support, make sure you have your story straight

Detected for the first time, malware attempts AI evasion by injecting a prompt to tell the LLM to label the file as benign

For a project I’m working on, I wanted to generate an endless looping soundtrack that felt like a sea shanty continuing indefinitely without a fixed melody. This proved to be a fun exercise for both musical and technical reasons, so I thought I’d write up some thoughts on how that came together.