Online games for the blind, have been around for a while now dating as far as 2001 to accessible chat and accessible battleship, then a few years later, AllInPlay. those were then folowed by games that didn’t use a dedicated server like top speed, sound RTS, or acefire. One drawback to most of the online games that used a dedicated server though was that they were all paid for. With AllInPlay you have a monthly fee for a membership, ditto for the Blind Adrenaline cardroom, for rail racer you pay for the game.
then in 2009 RS games released their game of monopoly. I was lucky to have submitted, and aprooved, into the betatesting team and helped with the sound design (the all to annoying background music… yup, sorry for that.)
The game was extremely popular and had been featured on blind cool tech and main menu, or even blind geek zone, which normally doesn’t rreally feature any games.
Then in 2010 RS changed the monopoly game into an rs games client capable of playing any game without the need of updating the client (thanks to rs’s unique ZGP protocol for downloading sounds).
I’m a member and administrator of an msn group called CrapTalk. MSN groups are like chatrooms where msn users can talk to each other without having each other on the contact list, though you can exchange addresses easily enough. QuentinC asked me to test his new gameroom thing, I spread it to the craptalk group, which quentin joined later. After he had received a lot of positive feedback the gameroom went live for audiogames.net, then shortly followed by audyssey.

It isn’t surprising that it is quite a competition for RS, I thought I’d just outline some of its advantages and disadvantages.
*multilinguality: Quentin said the client can be made multilingual, it’s already available in english and french. it does open it up for people who normally wouldn’t be able to play like that, so yeah.
*Games which are unique to the playroom; 1000 miles is probably the most notable, then texas holdem. I was waiting for a free accessible poker game for ages, so I’m quite excited about this one.
*additional rules for some of the games. Uno alone has like 5 additional rules, including the chaining/response rule where draw cards can be accumulated for a harder blow to who ever can’t continue the chain. Now that alone, is just friggin’ awesome.
*has a on-screen prezence: the menus and cards are displayed in lists, and the message field can be tabbed to and reviewed character by character, etc.
*no ads.. though I don’t mind those in RS. I actually made use of one of them (the bookmark iOS app)
Those are the good. now the bad:
*really crappy keyboard support. let’s just summarize it by saying the game handles keys in such a way that there is a spam protection, where if you hold a key for .5 seconds or more it’ll just close.
*list synchronization can really mess up. happens a lot in 1000 miles, you pick a card to junk only to find out that you just, in fact, junked another card.
*no window-eyes or system access support.
*is not multiplatform
*does not have its own protocol to download sounds, so if there are any new sounds the client has to be re-downloaded.

Over all I’ll just say there’s room for both. I know, not the best blog entry I did, but hey, it got the job done.

Filed by pitermach at 11:13 pm under technology
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Hi guys. my last and quite recent blog entry was more of a rant. I thought it’d be time to give you something a little more personal and misc’ish, so, this’ll be it. A lot has been happening, and there are 2 things of importance, to me anyway.
The first thing which is slightly less interesting is I finally, got myself an external hard drive. the “low disk-space” baloons have been plaging me for ages on this tiny 120gb drive in this acer laptop, but there were things I had to get before a second drive. Most notably my iPod, and then we were planning a new laptop. the ladder didn’t quite work out. Anyway some time later I was skyping with my ant who happens to be living in brazil. She said she had one of these. it was a 500gb samsung drive and asked if I could use such a thing. I gladly said yes, so she sent me cash so I could go and buy one. The next thing was to hunt one down. I first looked at the prices of such drives, and then in local stores. The biggest I could find in a store I do like going to was 750gb. I was planning a 1tb drive, but it was better than nothing. With my leg problem I couldn’t go there myself, but my mom and sister could, so with a specifications printout they were off. I spent the time playing uno and the second thing I got which we’ll get to. They called me, and the biggest drive available was even smaller - 640gb. Mom offered to go look in another store which was more geared twards pc’s rather than tech in general. 15 minutes later I got another call. They got me a 1tb drive. That was just great. I ate lunch and got the drive out. it was a plain plastic box with a usb cable. It didn’t need a power source, so that was quite nice. I plugged the USB cable in, and as expected, it was plug and play. I finally could see what kind of drive it was. It’s a western digital elements. I quite wanted a western digital drive, so I was quite happy. So, that’s for the first item of interest.

The second one is actually alive. Those things have a much greater impact on life. We already had one cat. My dad found another cat, and she had 3 kittens. 2 girls and 1 boy. 1 girl went to one of dad’s friends, the boy stayed with mom, and the 2nd girl went to, yep, us. He arrived with her late evening. She was quite scared having just taken a 6 hour trip in a travel cage, being separated and all. And our first cat didn’t make things easier hissing at her and such. So you can imagine the first moments were pretty difficult for me and my sister, feeling helpless. We both cried. Yep. That doesn’t happen often. She cried all night, so the first day was pretty hard, but she eventually got used to it, so did our other cat. Now she frequently wants to be near me or my sister, so she’ll sleep with us, and all. Over all I’m quite happy. I may possibly post a few pictures and sound recordings, we’ll see.

So, here it is, a massive blog update. enjoy!

Filed by pitermach at 1:26 pm under life
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“Voice over on. slide to unlock.”
This is something that many people have heard. In fact, in 2009 when the iPhone 3gs came out it was yet another accessible phone solution. You could go with it, but you didn’thave to. then in august/september aple released the iPod touch 3g, which also included voice over. this certainly was cool. But what I’m seeing
it’s like every blind person needs an iPhone. or that’s how it seems. I even know people that initially got an iPod byut grabbed the iPhone as well. People are switching in high masses. Is it a good thing?
I really think it is not.
I wanted to get one as well. going to orange’s website, I found that I could only get an iPhone on a specific iPhone plan, which ran at about 116zloty/month. That’s about 40 euros.
I ended up going with a symbian phone since I could stick to my current plan. The next month, nokia switches to windows phone seven. that one’s totally inaccessible. ANdroid isn’t exactly fully usable. so, voice over. iOS. it’s like apple is slowly but surely getting the bulk of the vi users. I’m not exactly keen on tha idea…
And also we have the amount of restrictions apple puts on users. For instance importing music and especially ringtones. on a normal non-apple phone, all you have to do is either use a full-sized mp3 file or what ever, or you ca cut a chunk out as a ringtone. with apple, however, you need to go in, save it as an aac file, and then set the extension to the file as .m4r. There are more things like that, IE, you can’t just transfer files via bluetooth and the kind of probing they do on apps before they get into the store. etc
So, this is that bit of rant for today. I’m sorry if I offended anyone but I just couldn’t help saying it.

Filed by pitermach at 1:03 pm under apple
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Before we proceed I’d like to crrect myself about my nokia review. Just wanna say the web browser does, in fact, work. Also, talks will be getting support for ovi maps in 5.2, so that will make things even.

To be honest, I don’t update this as often as I wanted. Well, one reason I may see for it is th at I’m not good at writing long articles, you name it.
If you’ve been following my twitter you may have heard that I still have my leg immobilized. The reason is something that happend tuesday morning.
I was heading down to go to the toilet, as the upstairs one was being worked on. I was going to get my phone today, so needless to say I’ve been preoccupied. I thought I reached the bottom, but there were like 3 or 4 more steps to go, so with a jolt I crashed down to the ground. I couldn’t start on my left leg, but we didn’t really care at first, but I had issues walking, so we decided the next day we’re heading to have it looked at. So with
mapler
Which I bought the day before playing a tng episode, I went to bed, watching said episode before falling asleep.
The enxt day We went to have it looked at as I said and it turned out it was a broken bone, to make things worse the bone apparently moved. However it was decided that I’d wear a splint for 2 weeks, so we could avoid having an operation. I was pretty nervus before the inspection day, not so about wearing the splint itself. Locally we avoided the operation. Some days later I cracked said splint so I had to have that fixed. We’ll see how this proceeds. On monday, I am going for another inspection, Hopefully we’ll have it removed. I am sort of missing all of my friends at school, so life isn’t as interesting as it could have been. I do tend to say I count myself lucky that I didn’t break a hand or something and that It won’t be operated on.
With that out of the way, this concludes one of the rather longer blog entries.

Filed by pitermach at 4:25 pm under life, technology
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So this is a small review of the e72, which I’ve decided to tag extensively. If anyone cares… lol

review navigation:
• intro
• initial looks
• Pros</a.

cons

Intro

So, After I failed to get an iPhone I had to get another phone. My choice was shrinking quickly. iPhone was out of the question, android was in too early stages, and I still needed a phone that would have a screen reader. Although I had enough, Symbian seemd the best option.
I was going down the page, as the phones were listed by heading. So I kept hitting h. I was just going to pick a random phone. I stopped on the nokia e72. the e series is symbian based and, there fore, can support a screen reader. I also heard that the e71 had a qwerty keyboard, so probably the e72 would also have one. And that was an additional motivation. If I were to get one of these, I better pick something I’ll like. I had it sorted by the plan I use, the price seemd reasonable, and I could stick to my current plan.

Initial looks

Ok, the provider’s info page was very scares. I found out it did have a keyboard and that it ran symbian 9.3, but that was obvious enough.
So I went to googl0e, and up on further reading I found out it also had wi-fic onnectivity and integrated gps. So, everything I’d like to use.
In the end, I did order the phone and red a bit more. about it. It also had an accelrometer, and the first thing that came to mind was… light saber!
I know, stupid. I already have one on my pod… Though I still got the symbian app
<a name=”packaging”

Packaging

Tuesday came, I broke my leg, but that’s for another topic. the phone actually arrived.
The packaging… Well, extensive if I can say so. a lot of paper and a lot of cool stuff that’s, well, more accessible
The phone looked pretty groovy when I took it out. The battery was separate and, of course, no sim card inserted.
They also thrown in some nice headphones, a mounting bracket thing for those who want to use this as a gps in a car, and a really annoying priopriatary USB cable.
Why annoying? Well, while my 6120 used the standard mini USB, this one uses its own. and the cable can’t be more than a few centimeters in length. I have a laptop so the phone can sit next to me, but for someone with a desktop… well… you get the idea. accepting install prompts would probably be a pain.

the actual review, pros

Booting the phone was very quikc. I asked someone sighted to come over and read me the initial screens, IE, the region selection, the date and time. and that was all. As soon as I done those the phone started getting text messages and took me to its standby screen. The message tone was just great, lol.
Ok, so next step was installing a screen reader, I picked mobile speak because it has better voices. And wow is it snappy on symbian 9.3. When I was transfering data from my phone I couldn’t help noticing the lag I was getting compared to this new phone. Speaking of the transfer process it was very easy.
Just run phone switch from settings (the welcome screen runs it automatically), and after you proceed it will automatically tell you what to do. First it asks you to activate bluetooth on the other phone. Then if bluetooth is off on the new phone it asks should it be turned on. Then it searches for devices and asks you to pare with the old phone.
When that’s done, it asks what do you want to retrieve and it does it. That’s all there is to it.
When exploring the phone there were some things I didn’t know. Do you know the 3d ringtone capability some nokias have? well this is one of them. Ditto for audio themes. Now that’s something I like.
I found out that this had already a new memory card inserted. So, I did a quick memory details looku p, and it said that it’s 3.1gb, with most of it being taken by “other files.”
I connected it to my pc and the phone surved as a memory card reader, so I went ahead to explore what the heck were those other files. It turned out those were map files for ovi maps! and voice guide, some of those were even tts’s with street name announcing. and that was all free!
I found that quite neat, remembering the old days of nokia maps where you had to pay for voice guide…

cons

Ok, we could brag about how awesome this phone is, but I think it does deserve commenting what I don’t really like. So, here goes.

As of this writing mobilespeak does not appear to work with the web browser and email, so the wi-fi isn’t quite as useful as it could have been. Apparently it works with talks
Some of the things on the active standby screen don’t quite read as well as they could have been.
The voice recognition has not improved one bit. It still compares to the lower quality tts, which results in extremely poor recognition, unless you want to talk to it like a dalec, or a borg drone, or marvin… you get the idea. and no, 42 won’t help in this matter. I don’t think s, anyway.

the end summary…

Over all, I’d say this is a decent phone. The build quality is outstanding, so is the voice quality on calls or in recordings. To proove that,
here is a sample. If you’re using klango player, the link is http://q-audio.net/d/16393
The fact it has integrated 250 of internal memory, wi-fi and gps, a qwerty keyboard and ovi maps make this a cheeper alternative to an iPhone.
Ok, that’s it for my review!

Filed by pitermach at 6:50 pm under technology
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So, this is the last post of 2 thousand 10, 20 10 or 20 oh 10, or 2 thousand and 10, how ever you prefer to say it. It’s been a very mixed year, good and bad happend. I got my iTouch, my pm’s been updated, a lot of stuff that’snon tech… My dad’s going back from sweden more often, as far as personal stuff. Just wanna say I’m around and I’m wishing everyone a happy 2011!

Filed by pitermach at 6:11 pm under MISC
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Hi all!
I must admit, I’m pretty thrilled about this whole chritsmas thing. I mean, it’s pretty dang close. I want to say what happened yesterday, it’s one of those really memorable days.
So I woke up pretty early, then played some smugglers 4. And then papa sangre was released. Many people have been waiting for this game… And many thought it wouldn’t work on the iPod touch 3rd generation. Well it’s kind of true, kind of false.
It will not work on an iPod touch 3rd gen 8 gig as it is basically the iPod 2g just put in a new case and with better graphic tech.

It can’t even run voice over so for us blind the game will run on anything. Anyway, liam did as stream of the whole game, and half way through I actually bought it. this is giving me a lot of fun…
the rest of the day passed smoothly. when I was about to eat some frenchfrize a friend of mine asked on an msn group if anyone had the tosheba tts that used to ship on those laptops. Some discussion, then googling. I didm, of course eat those frenchfrize. I did another google search but this time I searched from the bottom moving up the list, and found the toshiba speech driver pack which had both their speech recognition and tts pack. it said it only worked on vista, so I gave the link to said friend who has windows 7. the whole package wouldn’t install due to local errors (IE it had to be english), but he extracted the tts part out of it.
It actually worked! He said itt would probably work on xp, so I asked him to upload it. Sure enough it actually does work. it’s a sapi synth, so it’ll work with anything that uses that standard.
if you’re interested, send me a pm.
So, that’s it for today!

Filed by pitermach at 12:49 pm under apple, life, technology
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I just posted to a thread about favourite podcasts, tv shows, etcetera and have just voiced my thoughts about ACB Radio’s main menu, how it is now, that is. I thought that those who don’t read the forums may be interested, everyone is entitled to their opinions, and here are mine. Feel free to agree/disagree.

over the years I am losing interest more and more. For instance, Most if not all material aired on there is usually available elsewhere considerably quicker, And chase chrispan’s tech news is, well, very unprofessional if you ask me. it’s mostly unedited, and if edited at all very pourly, with clicks or noticable gaps, and there is a lot of hasitation, you know, uh’s, um’s, etc. I really miss the older mm episodes with a live segment, conference coverage, etc, or the even older main menu back when Jonathan was doing it with like 10-20 minute reviews. Don Coco’s regular app reviews were probably one of my favourite things back then.

I’d also like to appologise for not blogging for a while there were other things that were of greater importance.

Filed by pitermach at 1:26 pm under technology
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So, another year of school started.sure, 2010 isn’t over yet but I think I have to summarize.
As far as school, I started another major stage in education which led to a few major changes and getting used to things. I also pretty much found a gf, lol.
Lord joined our family. he is this reallllly cute puppy. though he’s pretty big. I got my pac mate upgraded to an omni. I got a copy of window-eyes. I changed my phone number.
I started pmcast.
I saw my ant who is doing some things in brazil, and she cam come to poland only every 2 years for about a month. While she was here, I got my iPod touch.
I also saw a braille sense and a book sense.
I learned how to operate flight simulator. I do like to take off once in a while.
I ate a lot of food and finally swtarted downloading tng episodes for my pc, seeing I’m a trekky. All in all I’d say this half of 2010 was pretty eventful the happy way, although the country of Poland did have its issues. first the prezident died tragically in a plane crash. Then there were these floods.
But otherwise, Iam really happy, this is a great yeear and I hope it continues as well as it was happening.

Filed by pitermach at 4:13 pm under life
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So, today is august 24th 2010. looking at today, pc’s are pretty much everywhere these, days, with at least a gig of ram. People play games, download music or movies at wapping couple hundred kbps speeds, etc. Blind people have free solutions to access stuff, such as nvda, voice over or orca, depending where you are. But, let’s look back.
It was a big day for any computer user. august 24th 1995. even the empire state building was lit up with the colors of the windows logo. lines of people at computer stores durring midnight, and all the fuss, adds, etc. All because of the launch of an operating system
Windows 95 is still remembered today, Well,I hope so anyway, lol
It was a revolutionary step forward, allowing for easier use, and more games, etc. this was back in the day when everyone was probably on dialup, and so on. Music and movies were then on cd’s or vhs’s. 32 megs of ram was a really powerful number back then, and let’s not forget these hardware synthesizers hooked up to blind user’s computers

I am just writing because of this date, following is a generated line of events and such that day…
Thursday, August 24, 1995
Top News Headlines This Week:
Aug 24 - Fire that wipes 6,000 acres begins in Hamptons on Long Island Aug 24 -
Windows 95 debuts Aug 25 - Indians’ Jose Mesa fails in save attempt after 38th
consecutive saves Aug 25 - Andrew Symonds scores 254 Gloucs v Glam, world record
16 x 6 Aug 26 - Andrew Symonds hits 20 sixes in match for Gloucs v Glamorgan
Aug 26 - Lara completes 7th Test Cricket century, 179 at The Oval
Top Songs for 1995
Another Night by Real McCoy
Waterfalls by TLC
On Bended Knee by Boyz II Men
Take a Bow by Madonna
Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio featuring L.V.
Don’t Take It Personal (Just One of Dem Days) by Monica
Creep by TLC
Kiss from a Rose by Seal
Fantasy by Mariah Carey
This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan
1995 Prices
US President
Bread:
$0.79/loaf
Bill Clinton
Milk:
$2.51/gal
US Vice President
Eggs:
$1.46/doz
Al Gore
Car:
$18,360
Academy Award Winners
Gas:
$1.21/gal
Best Picture:
Braveheart
Directed By Mel Gibson
Best Actor:
Nicolas Cage
in Leaving Las Vegas
Best Actress:
Susan Sarandon
in Dead Man Walking
House:
$158,700
Stamp:
$0.32/ea
Avg Income:
$51,353/yr
Min Wage:
$4.25/hr
DOW Avg:
5,117
People born on August 24
1872 - Max Beerbohm, England, caricaturist/writer/wit (Saturday Review)
1898 - Malcolm Cowley Belsano Penn, author (Flowering of New England)
On TV in 1995
The X-Files
Frasier
Party of Five
Friends
ER
Babylon 5
N.Y.P.D. Blue
Star Trek: Voyager
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
Homicide: Life on the Street
Hot New Toys in 1995
Virtual Boy
Sega Saturn
Top Books in 1995
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech
copyright 1997-2010 dMarie Direct Inc

Filed by pitermach at 1:44 pm under technology
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