Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: Jeffery Mewtamer - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

Okay, so the 1 TB external Hard drive my seed box uses for storing the files it seeds(because it doesn't have enough internal storage and lacks any SATA ports), is no longer being recognized by either the seed box or the netbook that serves as my primary workstation. When set-up, it hums as one would expect and makes an audible clicking that can also be felt if I place my hand to the drive enclosure. Not sure if the drive itself is going bad or just the power supply on the drive going bad, but either way, I think I need a new drive.

Fortunately, little, if anything of importance exists solely on that drive as it wasn't my primary external drive, but my primary external drive isn't suited to being used as a replacement as my primary drive is USB powered and my seed box is too old and decrepit to power it reliably(more often than not, hooking up my primary drive to my seed box just produces a similar clicking, hence my suspicion the the failure of the old drive is power related and not the drive inself).

So, I'm in the market for either a internal PATA drive or an external USB drive that's good with older hardware and has a dedicated power supply. Either way, I need a drive that won't buckle under being used 24/7 for seeding torrents, and while 1 TB would sufficient, I would like 2TB so I have enough room to make a copy of everything on my primary external drive. I'm on a budget and don't care about portability or aesthetics so a physically bulky drive is fine if it's significantly cheaper than a more compact drive of similar capacity and performance.

I find that most online stores aren't very screen reader friendly, so an Amazon.com product link to recommended drives would be appreciated.

Okay, I've got a weird glitch that prevents my screen reader from reading Firefox menus, yet doesn't affect things like context menus and noscript's Options menu. Since I've run into this glitch before, have no idea what causes it or how to fix it, and have had it resolve itself previously, I'm trying to find work arounds that eliminate the need to access the Menu bar. The Bookmarks panel serves as a decent replacement for the Bookmarks menu, I've found an extension that add the page style menu to context menus(useful for websites with screen reader unfriendly layouts), and can just access the Add-ons manager via about:addons.

The only thing I need from the menus that is still inaccessible via other means is my User Agent Switcher. The one I'm currently using requires access to the Tools menu, and I primarily use it's iPhone preset to force Sonic Retro to display in mobile view.

I know User Agents can be change via about:config, but that page leaves my head spinning and I'm not comfortable changing things there.

To meet my use case needs, I need either:
1. A User Agent Switcher that is accessible via context menus and includes a mobile preset.
or
2. A way to force Sonic Retro to display in mobile view without changing my User agent(I click on the mobile version link on the Forum Index, but I just get redirected back to the desktop version of the forum).

If you could provide any suggestions for either, it would be much appreciated. Also, if you have any User Agent Switcher suggestions that meet the above requirements and also includes a Windows Firefox(I'm on Linux), that would be a nice bonus as it would give me reason to make another attempt at getting Netflix to work(My last attempt got pipelight working(at least with Flash as I was at the time having trouble with native flash), but couldn't get pass the browser checks, pretending to be using IE threw an ActiveX error, and pretending to be an iPhone caused Netflix to present a protocol Firefox doesn't understand).

Due to vision loss, I am completely reliant on a screen reader in order to operate a computer, and the graphical screen reader I use cannot interact with Flash objects at all. For YouTube, this doesn't cause much of a problem as the HTML5 player works just fine with my screen reader and there are very few videos that have refused to play for me with the HTML5 player. YouTube does seem to default to the Flash player no matter how many times I tell it to use the HTML5 player, but this is resolved easily enough by simply not having Flash installed.

Unfortunately, most other streaming sites require flash and with some shows being easily found on streaming sites other than YouTube and being almost impossible to find on YouTube, I find myself wanting to start using other Streaming sites. I could probably deal with not being able to access the controls of a Flash video player provided the site had smooth playback and autoplayed videos when a video page loads, but the YouTube HTML5 player is so much more user friendly that I don't want to risk it exterting itself when I'm on YouTube. I could just install/uninstall Flash everytime I switch between YouTube and a site that requires Flash, but I would rather have something more convient.

I use a rebranded version of Firefox 24(newer versions are available to me, but they act screwy with my screen reader), and an easy to use extention to make Flash invisible to YouTube while letting other Streaming Sites use it would be nice.

Also, I run Linux and thus have no access to the Silver Light plug-in that Netflix uses for its streams, and a Dual boot or VM really isn't an option for me(Don't have access to a Windows compatible screen reader, never launch a full X session, and I'm running a 1.2 GHz Dual Core Celeron). Any tips on a work around that might actually work for me would be appreciated.

So, the total lack of a portable computing device is started to get to me, and I want to get something I can slap Adriane Knoppix on and it be small enough to carry in the tote bag I use for carrying things too big to fit in my pockets.

Money is tight, so the lower the price without being of disposable quality, the better. I don't need much in the way of power, so economy grade hardware is fine.

Firefox plus Orca running on a stripped down LXDE-based X session is the only time I ever leave text-mode.

I need an x86 processor as that is the only architecture my software configuration is available for. I have no use for 64-bit or extra cores. The modern counterpart to a Celeron would probably be overkill for my needs.
A gig of Ram should be more than sufficient.
No need for dedicated graphics, and a built-in monitor would only be dead weight(seriously, no monitor would be preferred).
Built-in CD-rom drive is needed for installing my chosen software, though an upgrade to a DVDRW drive wouldn't be a waste.
No need for built-in controls beyond standard qwerty keyboard.
A full-size SD card slot would be convient, but not necessary.
A Ethernet port is required, and built-in Linux-compatible wifi would be nice.
Don't need much in the way of harddrive, and would be willing to sacrifice capacity for an upgrade to SSD.

My Budget without needing financing is about 100USD.

Any advice on this would be much appreciated.

On account of recent vision problems forcing me to use a screenreader for all computer activity, I have been looking for ways to customize websites to make them easier to navigate with a screen reader. Based on my research regarding Firefox extensions, it seems the Greasemonkey scripting engine probably offers the best chance of accomplishing this goal. However, while I am fairly knowledable about computers, I know nothing about javascript and have no prior experience with Greasemonkey.

That said, I am requesting help. First of all, I would like to know if any of you know a good site for finding and installing already made scripts and any suggestions on finding scripts that are relevent to my needs. Secondly, do you think it would be worth learning javascript in order to make my own greasemonkey scripts, and if so, where would be a good place to start learning?

In particular, a few things I would like to do with Greasemonkey scripts if possible:
-Reduce the forum index table on this and other forums to just the new post indicates and links to individual forums.
-Similarly, reduce thread lists to just the new post indicator an links to indiviual threads.
-Reduce the table on thread pages to just the Username feild and the actual post contents.
-Reduce the compose post pages on forums to little more than the subject line, message box, and and submit button.
-Something similar to what retro does to its forums when viewed from a mobile browser(or a desktop browser with a user agent switcher like I am using) would be nice.


Any help with finding solutions to these issues, or anything else that might be helpful would be greatly appreciated.