Mauve 👁💜 @mauve@mastodon.mauve.moe

I'm yet again reminded that accessibility technologies are priced unfairly. Did you know that a pair of hearing aids starts at roughly £500 but an average model can easily cost over £1500? And it's not like it's rocket science.
Similarly, Braille displays start at £1500, but can easily cost over £5000.
Similarly, the most popular and one of the most affordable Braille printers costs almost £3000.

Something can be said about special design requirements for such devices, or about the fact that there is no demand to make them at the scale that would allow to cut the costs ten times. And I can't even say that a high price is an excuse; if you'd try to build a Braille embosser that can operate at practical speeds with decent reliability using off the shelf components, you are likely to spend more money on it than you'd spend getting a commercial solution, even without R&D costs.

So, uh, folks, we can do better. I can't be the only one who keeps thinking about making such technologies cheaper, right?

And of course on a SiliconGraphics workstation there's also a 3D gopher client: GopherVR

Daily affirmations:

I am not sleepy.
I got adequate sleep last night.
I will not fall asleep standing up like a horse.

Bing has blocked Neocities and all its sites from the search results
https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2026/01/27/bing-block

#bigtech #microsoft #bing #neocities #freedom #capitalism #microslop

1/ Congestion pricing in New York City, one year later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgRTyKbkDUo

• Car traffic: −11%

Positive effects (many nonlinear):

• Broadway revenues: +11%
• Storefront vacancies: decreased
• Crime on transit: −5.5% (safety in numbers)
• Serious injury crashes: −9%
• Illegal parking complaints: −14%
• Network delay from traffic jams: −28.4%
• Excessive honking reports: −70%
• Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution: −22%

Even people who drive cars are now predominantly in favor.

traditional software development is dead