Hello y'all

[BTC4]

What's happening

[Tsui]

We keep having people come back and make topics about what's been going on in everybody's life lately. It is a thing that keeps happening.

[chaoadventures]

Real Answer: I hate school. Even though it hasn't started for me yet.

[Pufflehugs]

Well, Fox Boy's getting so exposed he'd feel less exposed being completely naked and so roasted he would be less roasted if he went to Hell.

[BTC4]

^ what does this mean?

[chaoadventures]

^ viewtopic.php?f=23&t=47825

Fox "got exposed" by letting people make fad topics for a time and then getting quoted months after.

[Rajikaru]

We keep having people come back and make topics about what's been going on in everybody's life lately. It is a thing that keeps happening.

It's an endless cycle at this point. People feel like forum is dead -> make topics asking "whats going on guys" -> topics get 5-10 replies and then end up dying, repeat ad infinitum.

[retrolinkx]

No, BTC. Leave while you can, this site is nothing but dead discussion and dead memes.

Or stay, I guess.

[Skonia]

i have someone that's making me happy and i'm just happy lately. it's nice.

[Nano]

College and stuff I guess. Nothing big. How about you?

[BTC4]

College and stuff is fun.

I work in a field I've always wanted to, infosec. I'm a 1337 hax0r now and I get paid for it

[Mamkute]

College and stuff as well.

What exactly is your job? I get that it is some sort of computer wizardry, but beyond that.

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

I start the last semester of my first Bachelor's degree Wednesday, assuming no last minute changes to my schedule.

I've enjoyed having the summer off for the first time in years more than I thought I would, but I'm looking forward to again having something to keep me focused towards a goal.

[BTC4]

^ Are you really blind? no offense but that's fascinating. How did you find CI?

[Jeffery Mewtamer]

None taken.

Strictly speaking, I have some vision left, but it's little enough to make little difference from total blindness. I can detect presence and direction of light sources, distinguish blurs of contrasting color, and detect movement in my field of view, but nothing that would provide useful information more timely than my other senses.

I have congenital(since birth) glaucoma(a characteristic scarring of the retina) and have been legally blind my entire life. My right retina detached in infancy and I've been functionally blind in my right eye since before I started forming long term memories. My left retina detached in the summer of 2012, and after two reattachment surgeries, there hadn't been much improvement. My left eye is still my better eye, but both are practically useless.

I wore glasses from around six months of age until some point in my teens when I decided they weren't worth the money my parents were spending on them. My vision was never good enough to get a driver's license, but I'm not convinced the cost of owning a car or the stress of putting up with other drivers on the road would be worth it if I did. I know grade 1 Braille, and at one time knew the entirety of Grade 2 Braille, but my touch reading was never near usable and I've forgotten most of the Grade 2 contractions. Not that braille would be practical even if I could read it as fast as I could read print back when I could see, since even with the multitude of contractions, Braille is extremely bulky(A 22 volume set of encyclopedias, each printed on 8.5*11 stock and an inche thick translates to 145 volumes in Braille, embossed on 12*12 stock and 3 or 4 inches thick). I was also never a fan of large print editions either as they tended to either double the page size(resulting in something unwieldy) or turning pages of the standard edition into sideways two-page spreads. Not to mention the tendency for large print editions to have old school photocopier quality(including grainy, balack-and-white versions of the cystal clear, full-color illustrations in the standard edition). Back when I could see, I much preferred to just read standard print at a shorter distance, even if it meant putting nose prints on the page. I also made heavy use of a pocket telescope back when I counted myself among the sighted, and in fact, the pocket telescope is what convinced me glasses weren't worth the money(a 50 USD pocket telescope provided at least an order of magnitude more benefit than 500 USD worth of eyeglasses). Seriously, even people with 20/20 in both eyes(hell, even those blessed with 20/10 or better) should make it a habit of carrying a pocket telescope. A street sign I couldn't even see with my naked eye could be read as if I was holding it in front of my face with the telescope, and most pocket telescopes are small and light enough to be worn on a lanyard around the neck and barely be felt when no in use.

I joined Chao Island about a year before my vision started failing, and I'm pretty sure I found it via a Google search at a time I was feeling nostalgic for Chao.

Since going blind, I've had to give up video games, scanlated manga and fansubbed anime, listening to music while surfing the net, among other things. I can still enjoy English television programs to some extent, though most action scenes and sight gags are lost on me. I don't have a TV in my room anymore as there isn't enough on television that's good enough to work into my schedule and I decided I need the space for other things.

I've been a full-time Linux user for more than a decade, and since going blind, I've shifted most of what I wasn't already doing from the command line to the command line. The Firefox web browser coupled with the Orca screen reader is the only thing standing between me and ditching the GUI altogether. I was using Debian's LXDE edition prior to blindness, but I've since switched to the Adriane variant of Knoppix because it has vastly superior accessibility out of the box, though I wish I knew enough about custom Linux distros to port the Adriane accessibility suite to vanilla Debian(sadly, it isn't as easy as adding the Knoppix repository to my sources.list and running apt-get update && apt-get install adriane) as Knoppix isn't designed to be used as a harddrive installed OS(I'm stuck with no passwords for sudo or my user account, I had to do some hacking to get a separate home partition and have to manually mount it after every reboot, I'm stuck with Knoppix as my username, etc.).

Outside of screen readers on the PC, other assistive technologies I use frequently include:
-A Blaze ET. Basically a smartphone for the blind minus the phone and appstores. Built-in apps include:
+Meidaplayer that can play most audio files and the audio from most video files(MKV and OGM being the most notable exceptions).
+Talking e-Book reader that can read just about any text file that isn't Kindle and is using a Latin character set(Greek and Japanese text gets skipped over, and I'm assuming the same would happen with Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, etc.)
+OCR of jpeg images, either from internal storage, loaded from the SD card, or from the 5 megapixel camera built-in to the unit.
+FM and Internet Radio with recording.
+Voice recorder
+Color reader, though experience says it's not a very good one.
+Talking clock, alarm, calculator, other odds and ends.
+Full-size SD slot instead of that microSD crap. and it works just fine with cards bigger than 32GB once they're formatted to fat32(it's built-in formatter can only handle cards up to 32GB and it won't even detect Xfat-formatted cards). Put a 256GB Card in this bad boy and loaded my entire Music and Audiobook libraries in glorious FLAC with plenty of room for future growth(hopefully, by the time I fill this card, 2TB cards will be economical).
+And the 800USD pricetag is actually fairly reasonable if you compare it to what a smartphone costs without the huge discounts most providers offer to encourage long-term patronage.

Also, tempted to buy a talking barcode scanner when I get my financial aid disbursement for this coming semester. At 1200USD, the model I'm considering is much less reasonably priced than the Blaze ET, but considering that every cheaper option either needs to be coonnected to a Pc, a DIY project that is likely beyond me and would involve tracking down a database, or being able to take a photo of the barcode(if I could see well enough for that, I wouldn't need the scanner), it seems worth it if I ever found myself with the cash to spare. The unit I'm considering is completely self-contained, comes preloaded with a database with millions of items, supports adding user created databases via plain-text dat files, allows downloading of updates to its official database either via PC and loaded via SD card or via the device's built-in Wi-Fi, and probably other nice little things I forget at the moment.

[BTC4]

Man that's super interesting. Really cool you have a good attitude about it all. How are you liking chao island? What other forums do you go to?