Quin

Sorry to anyone who's been having issues with streaming timelines on dragonscave.space in the past hour or so. Noticed this broke right in the middle of my workday, which is right when you want to discover service outages. Restarted everything like usual but actually upgraded our node.js and deps to the latest versions this time, so this will hopefully leave me alone for a while now.

Had a really interesting maintainer experience today that I think perfectly captures the nuance of the current AI coding situation.
I got an AI-generated PR on Paperback from a new contributor with a very small GitHub profile. My default stance isn't anti-AI and I've even used Claude on Paperback's codebase as recently as yesterday, but open source is getting flooded with automated slop, so I left a polite comment asking for a bit of human-written justification for the feature and confirming if they had actually tested it manually, and I received a well-thought-out, genuine response. The contributor is a long-time computer scientist who doesn't know Rust, using Claude Code to build an accessibility feature to make Paperback optionally match NVDA's browse mode navigation that directly improves their daily workflow. They tested it on their end, I double-checked the diff and edge cases on mine, everything looked great, and it got merged.
To me, this hits the exact middle ground of how AI in OSS should work: A knowledgeable developer used a tool to bridge a gap and ship a genuinely valuable accessibility feature to an app they use. If I had a strict "no AI" policy, this contribution would have been shut down immediately, and both the project and the user would be worse off for it. But still, human oversight is mandatory. If maintainers just let everything slip through without pushback, repositories quickly get overrun with untested slop PRs.

Working in large codebases such as Paperback or my company's web backends has really shown me the value of writing tests. In just a couple thousand lines of code, you can figure out what broke and why. But when you get into the tens of thousands of lines across multiple programming languages, having a command you can run to confirm at least parts of your code are still working feels very very nice. I'm still not a test-driven-development person and I honestly don't know if I ever will be, but I like unit tests. We're friends.

I recorded a quick audio demo comparing Dolphin Easy Reader and Paperback head-to-head on screen reader accessibility and general app performance. In the attached recording, I walk through Easy Reader’s clunky UI, duplicate speech readouts, tabindex quirks, and much more, followed by showing how Paperback blows it completely out of the water by opening massive EPUB's instantly and just being generally much easier to navigate.

I've just released version 0.3.0 of Taskmon, my lightweight, no frills replacement for the modern, bloated mess that is Windows Task Manager. Changelog:

• Added Ctrl+Q as a shortcut to exit Taskmon completely.
• Added 11 new columns: Service, GPU, GPU Memory, CPU Time, Elevated, Path, Window Title, File Version, Product Version, Session Name, and Package Name.
• Added File > Restart as administrator to relaunch Taskmon elevated.
• Added a hierarchical Process Tree view (Ctrl+T) that groups processes under the parent that launched them, with an End process tree action that terminates a process and all of its descendants.
• Added an option to start Taskmon already minimized to the tray.
• Added a Windows installer alongside the existing portable version, with an option to replace the system Task Manager with Taskmon.
• Fixed a stack overflow that could occur when sorting by CPU usage.
• Fixed Ctrl+A not selecting all text in the Run dialog's edit box.

Download links:
ARM64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-arm64.zip
ARM64 setup: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-setup-arm64.exe
X64 portable: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-x64.zip
X64 setup: https://github.com/trypsynth/taskmon/releases/download/v0.3.0/taskmon-setup-x64.exe
Cheers, enjoy, and may you be free of a 5+MB application to manage your computer being unresponsive!

If you're a blind Claude Code user, put the following line in your settings.json:
"axScreenReader": true
restart Claude Code, and have your life changed forever. I can now properly review and resume old claude sessions, I don't get endless Unicode symbols spammed at me, I can review the output with my review cursor much easier... OMG this is so nice!

Today I learned: On Windows 11 at least, Windows+Shift+Dash types an em dash (—). Have yet to find any other combo like this that does anything similar.

I noticed some core NVDA modifications (namely unfamiliar .pyc files in library.zip) while poking around on my BrailleNote evolve, so I reached out to Andrew Flatres about GPLv2 source compliance. To my delight, HumanWare actually packaged up the source code for the community! If anyone wants to take a look under the hood at how their commands and display layers interact: https://humanware.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/braillenote/Evolv/Public/nvda.zip
Huge thanks to Andrew and the team for turning that around so quickly, this makes my nerdy heart happy.
Additionally, I grabbed all the GPL-licensed code HumanWare distributes in NVDA's AppData directory on version 1.0, and put it in a zip file here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/s872ianc6bfzk9ogkh060/evolve-addons.zip?rlkey=q93kvhfcmxzlxhyeiemjaf37f&dl=1

It's getting closer and closer to Paperback 0.9.0 release time, which of course means Paperback mobile! However, mobile app stores are mobile app stores, and in order to get the Android version into the Play Store, I'll need 12 testers to install it on their device and use it for 14 days. Not necessarily every single day for hours on end, but please don't just install it and let it sit there for two weeks, Google actually tracks if people do this unfortunately. I've got a couple friends with Android phones and I think I myself will count as one of the 12, but would anyone be interested in helping me out here? Please send over a google play email in a DM if so. Cheers!