I recently had need to replace my VarioUltra 40 braille display, and I chose to purchase the QBraille XL from Hims. If the blindness organizations had conventions in person this year, vendors would be there with displays and show them to people who wanted to see them before buying one. There are no in-person conventions, […]
Posts in the technology category:
Fix: Dropbox will not connect or link to a PC
Numerous forums on the Web contain questions concerning how to solve the following problem: Dropbox will not connect and will not link to my computer. It says “unable to establish a secure connection” and keeps popping up a dialogue box for me to change proxy settings. I don’t use a proxy, so this is useless. […]
Evernote accessibility with Voiceover on the Iphone 6S with IOS 9
Lately I have been hearing a lot about an app called Evernote. According to the testimony of friends and acquaintances, as well as information I have read online, Evernote can help me organize my life. And there is a free version. Well, who can say no to a free app and better organization? So I […]
thinking critically about FB messenger
I have become very disturbed reading several recent articles expressing extreme concern about the Facebook messenger app and how much control it gains over mobile devices. After reading the list of concerns in these articles, one might go away thinking that Facebook staff are just hanging out in their offices picking through our emails, call […]
Tech tip: saving attachments in Windows Live Mail
For several years, I have been trying to figure out how to save attachments in Windows Live mail without opening them first. Back in the “good old days,” I used Outlook Express, and there was a nice “save attachments” option in the menus. This is “grayed out” in Windows Live mail. I pride myself in […]
biblical languages and scholars who are blind: state of technology
Yesterday, I announced on Facebook that the Bartimaeus Alliance of the Blind has released a digital braille format version of Jacob Weingreen’s A Practical Grammar for Classical Hebrew. This, along with other digital braille files available on their site, may be an important breakthrough for people who are blind and who want to study Hebrew. […]
IPhone Schmiphone?
Last week, Kevin and I helped a friend set up her account on ITunes. I needed his help because while our friend and I are both users of Voiceover )the feature that makes the IPhone speak), we don’t use it in the same way. He uses it in much the same way that she does. […]
marriage tip for rough days
I am writing this afternoon while sitting in the kitchen, where I am watching two pots of food on the stove, Isn’t it interesting to note how life is full of paradoxes? A watched pot never boils, but you should never leave food unattended on the stove. Think on that for a while–but not too […]
new adventures
/I join a number of people this weekend in bidding a very fond farewell to 2012. Fortunately, we did not experience the end of the world, and I look ahead to new adventures! I began my adventures a little early by upgrading from my five-year-old smart phone to an IPhone. I was a bit frightened […]
installing Fine Reader Pro 11
I have been using FineReader Pro for several years. The install interface for FineReader 11 is different from what I recall, so I thought I would write this out in case it might help other people who use it with screen readers. I don’t know how this would compare using Window Eyes.It runs the self-extract […]
thoughts on buying a Netbook
I ended up not upgrading the computer so fast. That turned out to be a good thing. I hope to keep both the te chies and the non-techies on board here–it is a challenge to talk to both groups in one post, but we will see how I do. People often ask me for recommendations […]
dual core Netbooks
If you use a Netbook and have been thinking of upgrading it, or if you think they’re so cute but don’t know that they would really do all the things you want to do on your laptop, it is finally here: the dual core Netbook. This is the upgrade to the Netbook I am using, […]
more on the power of choice
When I first began using computers seriously, I was a college student in the early 1990s. At that time, there were four competing products providing access to the IBM-compatible PC. This was before Windows; and it took some time for anything to be developed for the Mac at all. When Windows was introduced, some of […]
How much technology do we need?
As I listen to the buzz in the blind community about new technology, I find myself in an interesting position. I am old enough to remember when I did without most of this stuff; and I am young enough to think that this stuff is fascinating. … And I wonder just what we really need […]
external hardware news
Since I do a lot of work with audio, I use external hard drives as storage solutions. I have a 500GB My Passport drive from Western Digital that has served me well for about 18 months. I don’t use the back-up and sync software on it–I’m not certain that it is accessible, and if I’m […]
reflections on scanners and optical character recognition
Optical character recognition software is some of the most amazing stuff I’ve ever seen! It is also one of the technologies that has come the farthest in my lifetime. I first put my hands on a reading machine in the mid-1980s. The public library in my town got a “Kurzweil reading machine”–the hope was probably […]
technology and change
I have been hearing a lot of general discontent lately about the changing state of technology. It ranges from the impact of changes in the Windows operating system on accessibility issues to the advent of touch screens to the fact that a person can no longer go into a cell phone store and buy a […]
disconnected
I seem to be innundated lately with posts here, there, and everywhere about the IPhone, IPad, etc. It sometimes feels as if no other mobile technology is acceptable anymore unless it begins with the letter I. (That is meant to be a little humorous, and earlier I made a joke to someone that perhaps I […]
keep external drives from going to sleep
My computer has been rebooting itself at random. The most recent time made me angry enough to look at the event logs to see whether I could find the evil program causing the problem. There was an error on “disk3” which I determined was my 250GB Western Digital Passport drive. I decided the drive must […]