What’s your relation to Japan?
The company my Dad founded was this:
Or this:
This is the report of takeover from 2002:
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/kent-business/county-news/hardcastle-ousted-at-densitron-a6078/
Discussion
I have a degree in Japanese and spent some time there having squandered my undergraduate education I had to scramble to get a degree and because I had studied Japanese through out I was able to throw the degree together with some advanced courses in Japan.
Amazing, I can speak a little Japanese, but can't read or write it.
My Dad's Japanese name was Katashiro San
Hi Japanese co-founder was Degawa San
Where in Japan did you go?
Densitron's offices, when my Dad ran it ,were in Ota-ku, Tokyo
I lived between Chiba and Tokyo in a place called Higashifunabashi. My best experience there was working at an elementary school a few days a week. One day we spent the entire day cleaning the rooftop pool. Little kids were slipping and falling all over the slimy much we scraped off but it was fun to watch 8 year olds work hard to make their space nice and tidy. I went on to be a nanny for a few years before law school. Those kids are now a doctor and registered nurse, really makes me proud. Children are the future.
🧡
Neat company! I'm currently thinking through ways to allow the blind and very hard of seeing to use digital braille outputs in order to self-custody in a sovereign independent manner. But I dont have the chops, but would love to put people together to work on that problem
What a small world, my Dads best friend in the RAF (Royal Air Force) was Bernard Chapman, my Dad was his best man at his wedding.
Bernards son, Julian was best man at my wedding in 2005.
Julian came to work for us in the late 1980's to continue his fathers project, as his father had died earlier that year.
It was a braille reader which connected to the serial output of a PC, back in the DOS days.
Windows pretty much killed the project, but his son pivoted to a company selling electromechanical devices (solenoids, stepper motors etc...) that he became expert at while developing the Braille machine.
He bought that company out after the hostile takeover of Densitron and runs it to this day it is:
This gave me chills. I would love to help build a device that could put sovereign stacks in the hands of the blind. I lean toward braille rather than text to voice because its more secure from my perspective in terms of being overheard but we're still at the stage where people can self-custody and the blind shouldnt be left behind nostr:npub1q6ya7kz84rfnw6yjmg5kyttuplwpauv43a9ug3cajztx4g0v48eqhtt3sh.
I probably can’t help much directly, but if you want me to put you in contact with Julian Chapman or his company, I’d be happy to.
His braille knowledge dates back to the 1980’s, so may be a little rusty, but may give some insights, we had a product and we had started selling it through the
If you need any parts, I’m sure he could help, he has offices in the UK, South Carolina and Yokohama, Japan.
I’ve just tried to google him, but he really has no Internet presence, but I can link you through WhatsApp. I just checked LinkedIn, he doesn’t even have a profile there!
He's very much a nuts and bolts guy 😂
I look forward to the day where I've collected up my bitcoin frens and family and go strict nuts and bolts myself and spend less time on this thing. I wouldn't bother him now, I dont have a damn clue what Im doing but with people like nostr:npub1q6ya7kz84rfnw6yjmg5kyttuplwpauv43a9ug3cajztx4g0v48eqhtt3sh around, maybe we can get the conversation going?!
Of course. Message me if you want to connect in the future.
He's a nice guy and would be happy to help, he's firm is pretty successful and he adopted the Densitron philosophy of entrepreneurship and looking at opportunities.
That's a beautiful thing, thank you.
Of course, this doesn't seem to be open-source and it is super reliant on windows, which I find gross, but might be the way to go since it does have a lot of accessibility features. I don't know how well this would work on Linux.
But a part of me feels like this is progress of a sort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIg4rI4cDw
WTF! This is cool! No idea if it's in use.
Ok this is damn cool.
Got it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXi1tG78AW4
This is it. This is how we can build a system. Almost all the work is done. The hard part is the connectivity with software.
Ok, and there is no way this guy isn't a bitcoiner, am I right? I've gotten zero fiat work done this morning because this has me so fuckin' excited.
Eh, hardly anyone is a bitcoiner. 😅
Ive actually got to whack at this fiat mine now finally, but Beave, maybe we can get in a spaces and talk about how to move this project forward sometime. It'd be fun to learn but I'd also work on fundraising and contributing myself. Id really like to see this project get in the hands of some vision impaired bitcoiners. nostr:npub15dg963ct3r2mzgpdmnk4xtvyd82en9eq2t0v92fqvyve8jj6pesqleq7gf why do I vaguely remember you posting something about vision impairment? If that's the case, I'd love to hear from you on this
Hey! Sorry for the delay. Though I have spent some time in the low vision community - I am not a braille user. Most of the folks I know are using text to voice not braille.
No worries and thanks! I've been thinking about the security profile of text to voice versus braille but the primary goal of this project is to help visually impaired folks custody in a sovereign and independent way. I'd love to hear from more folks from that community whenever possible if they come across your path.
When I first set up my HWW I had to have someone sit and do it with me. I’m going to check out the links you guys were passing back and forward - the space is lacking in adaptive technology.
🫡 🫂
Interesting discussion. While I’m not part of the low vision community myself, I know a few people that are. One of them has been involved with a project developing the open source NVDA screen reader software. It’s Windows based but last I heard it was pretty capable and a good alternative to the commercial options like JAWS. NVDA also seems to support refreshable braille displays. Being open source it might be an easier option to get it working well with HWW software.
Oh interesting! I use to use JAWS - will have a look at this!
nostr:npub1pzmcx6c5z77r6zf9rf7xlj3kp9mt8wk29snuphdzu7ezzl97kqrsacns7v was digging around in this a bit too.
I'm going to ahve to mute translator bot, lol. I hate that I am so ignorant to electronics/programming because I want to work on this right now.
This is nearly exactly what I was thinking of, but it's not as slick as the other one:
bookmarking all these examples
Now just need to figure out how to interface it with an airgapped signing, prvpub key pair creating device.