The Life and Times of Me

Hi all and welcome back to Friday. Yes indeed, I've some technology news to share with y'all. But before doing that, I want to wish y'all who celebrate it, a happy belated Valentine's Day. Perhaps one of these years I'll get one of my own, but for now I'm still living the bachelor life and to be honest that's most probably how it'll remain. But who knows? I'm expecting a package today from my mother.





And now onto the technology news I promised I'd share. Drumroll please! On Monday I got a new iPhone. But I'm not saying goodbye to my iPhone 7 just yet. My dad and I went up the street earlier this week to an AT&T store to see about getting me a new phone. The representative with whom we chatted was wonderful, and I walked out of there with a shiny new iPhone 14 after a bit of friendly banter. The data transfer was done in the store, as well as all necessary updates and what not. Then my dad dropped me off back here and we went our separate ways.





I'm liking this phone thus far. Life without a home button is taking a bit of adjustment, but it's not bad at all and Apple isn't going to hell in a handbasket. The whole world might be going to hell in a handbasket, but that's another story.. As a matter of fact, I just listened to a good demonstration of this courtesy of AppleVis. The demonstration is from a few years ago, but it still seems to be relevant. I will of course continue to explore this and all other features of my new phone.





Well people...that's gonna have to do it for now. I will of course write again next week so as they say, don't touch that dial! Cheers for now.

Tap-tap, everything okay? Hello everyone and welcome to February. I'm coming to you today from my eReader. Well sort of. I think I've pretty much got it up and running. I'm still learning, as it's been ages since I used a Braille display. But I'm getting back into the swing of things and am happy thus far. A big shout out to the awesome people at NLS, as well as HumanWare! A big shout also goes out to my wonderful brother for getting me up and running, and to the good people on the Braille Display Users group.







The rest of the week has been nice as usual.. I attended a gathering last evening at a sibling's condo and a fun time was had by all. Two neighbors were going to accompany me and my personal assistant, but they decided to stay here and do their own thing. But thank you as always to my personal assistant for helping out.





Yesterday was also my first periodontal follow-up, and it went great.




Well...I want to proofread this entry with a fine-toothed comb prior to publication. As always take good care and talk soon.

That's right folks, 2024 is now upon us! I hope y'all had a happy and safe holiday season, and are working on those New Year's resolutions. I am too, slowly but surely. Please see below for a brief explanation.





I am planning to exercise more this year, and I think I'm already headed in that direction. I *might* be taking an additional morning class at the fitness studio. They let me have a trial run this week, and I liked it. The next step is to get the financials in order.





The other thing I'd like to briefly talk about is my eReader. Yes, the device I got for free back in April courtesy of the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled and HumanWare. I'm happy to say that I am making great progress and probably have a lot to learn but I'll get there.





Well...that'll have to do it for this week. As always take care and be good.

Hi everyone and welcome to yet another week together. I hope all is well. All is well with me, although I've been a bit busy again. I am excited for that jolly old fat guy to once again make his way down my parents' chimney and work his magic. Speaking of that, there is a website and app where people can track Santa Claus's progress. I've known about it for a few years, but just became aware that it is actually pretty accessible with Apple's on-board screen reader. So I went and grabbed myself a copy of the app, and you can too by looking for it in the app store or Google Play store. Their website is https://www.noradsanta.org . It's a neat little app.





One thing which I'm hoping to get for Christmas this year is of course a new iPhone. My iPhone 7 has worked well, but all great things must come to an end. If reading and listening are any indication, I'll be able to do some additional things with the new iPhone. One of those things appears to be a diary. I'm definitely going to keep track of health/fitness stuff, and perhaps other things.





Well...I think that is all for today. Happy holidays to all, and to all a good day/night.

Hi all. This is just a test to see if Safari on Mac is back to its old self in the latest update. For the most part, the answer to that seems to be a resounding Yes. Talk soon.

Hi everybody and welcome back to Friday. Today's entry is being brought to you by the new beta Create Entries page here on the mighty Dreamwidth. In the spirit of the season, I would like to sincerely thank the development team(s) for letting users test out features before they go live and are available to the masses. I'm happy to report that for the most part, things are working great thus far. A few hiccups exist, but what or who is perfect? I'm certainly not, and I don't expect others to be perfect either. Having said that though, Dreamwidth is fabulous and the devs have worked and are working to improve things over here even more.





I've had a pretty good week. I'm again staying in town for Thanksgiving, and will for the most part be flying solo for the better part of the next several days. But in addition, I will of course take my stuff with me and have it at my parents' 2-flat. I'm hoping to meditate at least a bit when I'm there. I don't want to go into why I'm doing this, but I've sporadically been trying it out already and like it. But enough of that for right now. I've gotta get this thing published. To all celebrating, I wish you a most happy and safe T-giving and don't eat too much. Or do eat too much. I've promised myself and my parents that I'm going to try not to go overboard this year. This is because some unnamed people keep on loading me up with sweets.

Hi all. That's right, I'm going to talk about only one thing in this week's entry due to time constraints. But before doing that, I'd like to wish all those who are celebrating/observing, a most happy and safe Samhain and Halloween.





Now to what happened on Sunday of this week. Actually this kind of started the day before when I was using my wonderful blue-tooth headset with my wonderful iPhone 7 to read more in a book that I am reading. Well...I inadvertently left blue-tooth on all night. The power to my headset was of course switched off, but my phone's blue-tooth was still on. So I woke up Sunday morning thinking I would read some more in the book. Well...that ended up not being the case. Instead, I somehow managed to dial emergency services. The phone was answered of course by a dispatcher, and I told him that this was a mistake and I didn't mean to call them. He was very understanding and hung up without dispatching anyone to my location. I kind of had an idea that some of my contacts would be notified, but little did I know at the time exactly how many would be notified. So needless to say, that entire day was basically spent assuring friends/family that I in fact was and still am fine. But this incident was honestly rather comical.





Anywho...that is all from me for this week. As always, take care and talk soon.

Hi all. I'm busy again so this will have to be another short one.





First off, I got another COVID shot yesterday and highly encourage others to do so if they haven't already. Science denial is no excuse.





I'd also like to publicly announce that I have now made Google Chrome my default web browser. I did this a little while back, but then changed it back to Safari. However, it appears that Apple has made some rather significant changes to Safari at least on the Mac. These changes aren't sitting well for VoiceOver users, as illustrated on AppleVis. Just have a look at their site and you'll see what I mean. I won't go so far to say that the Mac is no longer a viable option, but until these changes are reverted or a fix is found I'm strictly using Google Chrome. There is a website where all kinds of Apple issues can be reported, but I just reset my password on there and haven't had much of a chance to look around.





Anyway...until next week please take care.

Hi everybody and welcome back to Friday. I hope y'all are doing well. Good, I'm doing okay.





I'm afraid this will have to be another short one, but wanted to let everyone know who doesn't that Mac OS Sonoma is out. I just upgraded a couple days ago, and thus far I'm very impressed. Besides new voices, there are additional features and bug fixes. As usual all the blindness-related stuff can be gotten from AppleVis. Additionally, you will find some debates on there this time 'round.





Well...I think I'm going to have to draw this thing to a close for now. As always though, please do take care and I'll write again next week.

Hi folks and welcome to yet another Friday. It's starting to feel like Fall around these parts, although a neighbor read me an article earlier this week which indicated that we may be in for some interesting weather this time 'round. I don't have a link to said article, so just trust that what I say is correct. Only time will tell what exactly happens. But anyway...on with the show.





As the title suggests, I'm still a kid in that candy store. Well not really as there's actually no candy store around here that I know of. Another neighbor worked in one, but she hasn't for several years and I think said store has closed for good. She always brought us left-over candy though which was nice. But sadly those days are over, and that's probably a good thing too because I need to lose weight.





Speaking of losing weight and other health/nutrition-related shtuff, I have been happily beta testing a part of an app which I think is really going to revolutionize life for many of us. I briefly mentioned this last week, but since it's being widely discussed on AppleVis and eventually will make the rounds outside of the AppleVis community, I don't think the app developers would have a problem with me discussing it here. If I am mistaken on that, I kindly ask said developers to please ask and this entire discussion will be taken down. But anyway, the app is called Be My Eyes and I only became aware of it recently. Traditionally the way this app works is that people needing assistance identifying things call a sighted volunteer and ask them. These volunteers sign up with Be My Eyes to do their thing. I haven't yet read up on the inner workings of this, but I did have the opportunity to call one of these volunteers. Long story short, I've been needing assistance with some inaccessible thermostats. Well, that's exactly what I got when calling this volunteer. She was patient and did everything she could to assist me. This included telling me how to position my iPhone so that she could get a better view of the thermostat. This thermostat contains a lot of functions and is apparently not the easiest even for a person with fully-working eyeballs.





Well...apparently the good folks at Be My Eyes decided to take this whole concept a step further, and there is now a virtual assistant which I and others are testing out. I'm happy to report that thus far I've been very impressed with this virtual volunteer, now called Be My AI. One thing I like is that even when the pictures I take are blurry--as they often are--Be My AI is still able and willing to describe to me what it sees. I think the blurry photos primarily? have to do with the fact that I haven't upgraded to my second smartphone yet. As readers of these pages will know I have an Iphone 7, which has served me quite well indeed since 2018. But I think it's almost time to say goodbye to this phone, and get a new one which apparently has a slightly better camera. I would like to sincerely thank the Be My Eyes team though for bringing this wonderful app to life, and I look forward to future developments. There's currently a debate going on at AppleVis regarding face detection, but I honestly don't care so much about that at least for the time being. Similar apps such as Microsoft's Seeing AI have face detection built right in.