Happy (slightly belated) Yule (to folks in the northern hemisphere, a blessed Litha to folks in the south). The darkest day of the year is now behind us and while the cold will remain for some time, we are already on the steady path to warmth and summer.
I don't really care much about cerifications of any sort so I can't be sure I'm describing the right one, but I remember when working at a small ISP/datacenter we wanted to get SOC II (??) compliance to please some customer and the process was like this:
Me: what are the requirements?
🤖 We have to document all our processes and procedures
Me: and then what?
🤖: an auditor will verify (by quizzing you in front of a computer screen they don't understand) to prove you're following the documented processes and procedures
Me: okay, but like what do we have to do? How long do we have to retain customer backups, for example?
🤖: there is no requirement. How long are you retaining customer backups?
Me: well we had that failure so right now we only have 6 months
🤖: so document 6 months
Me: can we just say one month? And then we exceed our documented retention by a good margin?
Well, guess time to unwind with the latest Saturday Night Live episode. Maybe that'll get me out of coding space. I just need to get in that vacation Christmas Holiday space spirit somehow.
Good Yule to my #Pagan brothers and sisters! May gods keep you from evil and dangers and lead you to the best probability of the future. #Yule #Solstice
Same to you as well, may your #Yule be blessed, peaceful and joyous. It's gonna be a busy one here, with a morning service (the one I play on #SleighRide for) and an evening service for which I'm playing #HandChimes. First year I'm actually making it to the intergenerational pageant service in quite some time. I think I've maybe made it once or twice over the 11 years I've been here.
the ListView API *should* be easier to deal with than TreeView, even for bindings, since there are no cell renderers or tree model implementations. We need more demos/tutorials, though.
TIL that the sixth largest pipe organ in the world is contained within the home of a man from Alabama called Barry Norris.
According to Wikipedia, it has 11,200 pipes.
By comparison, the Royal Albert Hall's organ (which TIL is called The Voice of Jupiter, which is an amazing name) has just 9,999 pipes. Tiny. Pathetic.
'It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens.'
We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB). It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 mil…
Self hosting a Postgres or MySQL/MariaDB database is often treated like a horror story told around a campfire, a narrative carefully created by big cloud providers over the last decade. But is it actually "terrifying," or just a lost art of Sysadmining? This post talks the reality of self hosting versus managed cloud versions like AWS RDS, cutting through the marketing to look at the actual trade offs for both IT pros and developers.
(For people uncomfortable with hugs but who want the badge regardless, I can of course make exceptions, but the badge name and description do say you got a Foxbrush hug)
Hey, budds. Just a reminder that it's that time of year when we all try to be just a little happier and leave the negative bullshit behind for a while?
like... I've seen so so much whining just on my home tl the last few days and to be perfectly blunt, some of yall really need a reason to smile.
Please stop fighting each other. please stop being so radically opinionated that you can't have a conversation with any level of nuance. Please just walk away if people aren't serving you anymore. Please stop.
Yes. This. I realized last night that I am for worse contributing to this and I'm sorry. Probably too late, but ehh. Definitely had an oh shit/wake up call moment last night.
@Bri Hugs. We all have those. It wasn't even directed at a single person or group, I just... It's been really bloody intense the last few weeks and I'm kinda tired.
I agree with you 100%, which is why I even got to the point I did, but I realize that was not the way at all and I was only contributing to it, not helping.
@Bri I can admit to not helping all that and I could have just left things alone. My give a damn was just busted a few days ago and needed some repairs.
@MariahL oh I know I made an ass out of myself. It's a common occurance for me, but it hasn't happened in a while and I would like it to not do that again thank you very much.
@Bri @MariahL Mine was busted the second I'd asked to be removed from a very toxic conversation and my wish was not respected. That's when I lost all of my cool and became an ass with the whole cookie thing. For the part I played in that, for any anger or whatever I've posted over the last few weeks I'm sorry. Christmas this year holds no weight for me at all and I've found it honestly beyond hard to find any happiness or joy apart from a few good things. This is the second Christmas I am spending physically alone on this college campus and I'm just not taking it well.
@MariahL @ky0les @Bri I think the point I wanted to make was mostly that, I would never expect people to be happy just because it's the holidays. That's not fair. But more that people try to be cognisant and not be the reason other people's happiness gets lessoned. Does that make sense? Is that fair?
1. Kwanzaa is a made up holiday. 2. So is every other holiday. 3. Anyone can celebrate Kwanzaa. 4. It was created by Black, (mostly American and Christian*) people in the 1970s to celebrate Black history and the influence of African culture in the African diaspora and to assert the presence of Black people in US culture. 5. Most Black Americans don't celebrate Kwanzaa. 6. It is not a holiday tied to any particular religion.
Ich konnte in einem Gespräch mit einer Bekannten gestern mal wieder die Empfehlung für den Schattenspringer von @Fuchskind anbringen. Die Empfehlung wurde mit Freuden aufgenommen und wird vermutlich in dieser Familie zeitnah verbreitet werden. Ich hoffe, ein zurzeit siebenjähriges autistisches Kind wird es mit einigen anderen aus der Familie dadurch in Zukunft leichter haben.
Data dokáží docela překvapit, co myslíte? Celá 1/4 elektřiny vyrobené v roce 2024 v Maďarsku byla ze solární panelů. Před pěti lety to bylo pouhých 7 %. Podíl FVE na české výrobě elektřiny byl v roce 2024 5,5 %. (0,9 % vítr, 7,1 % z biomasy a 3,6 % z vody).
New MindMaker FlexVoice Add-on: fixes crashes. Normalizes punctuation and other things in wrapper. Not perfect, but getting there. rate control works. eurpod.com/flexvoice.nvda-addo…
@pitermach yeah totally. I don't see it as a draily driver at all. Like, it's not the greatest sounding thing. I actually like BestSpeech more than it. I did it mainly to get another engine working that's a software synth. I figured, it's out there, I'm on break, what better thing to do than poke around this weird SDK. Ha. I'm happy with this final driver, at least people can try it and see what they think.
Yup, I know there is at least one person who really wanted this. Totally agree about BeSTSpeech though, that's one I actually found myself actively using for a while.
@pitermach I use BestSpeech sometimes, but for cases where you normally wouldn't hear Keynote Gold. Like when playing a round of battlegrounds in hearthstone. I don't know why but doing that amuses me. A lot.
FlexVoice 0.6: Fixes more normalizations for acronyms in wrapper. This will mean that "NVDA" is pronounced now, and many other things that started with 3 consonants. Try: eurpod.com/flexvoice.nvda-addo…
Lol it says replee instead of reply, I'm testing this out and it also seems to have trouble keeping up with typing, like it skips letters if you type too quickly, the letters get entered fine, just it doesn't do a good job of interupting with each character.
@alexchapman yeah, not surprised there. there's a very, very odd quirk in this engine that took me hours, I mean hours to solve. it cannot announce consonants on their own. That is, letters like S, K, and any digit, crashed the engine fully. I had to write into the wrapper a normalizer that basically makes these have full spellings: "es" for S, "cee" for C, "dee" for D, all that. Wow. What work. What buggy engine.
Hey do you think you can please give me a little help with the adon? I can't look to get it working in the latest version of NVDA. If you need certain info of my setup please let me know.
@GoemonIshikawa yeah no idea. on 2025.3.3 here,, I just reinstalled the copy I published, fom scratch, it's running fine. no clue. I haven't slept for well over 30 hours now my patience is low.
Oh I see, yeah don't worry I'll figure it out or if not and something chages that'll happen too. You do some fine work helping the others with the first started Keynote project, and you're working on this too. You shouldn't be up for cloce to 3 days at this man. Get some sleep and I'll talk to you later when you get back up if you're ready for it. Happy christmas king!
@GoemonIshikawa I'm wondering if maybe en-us locale is required or something. I know some have gotten it working, so that to me is for sure super odd of a quirk if it's tied to something like that.
@GoemonIshikawa It's something to do with the rapper. File "ctypes\__init__.pyc", line 376, in __init__ FileNotFoundError: Could not find module 'C:\Users\Thomas Grant\AppData\Roaming\nvda\addons\Flexvoice\synthDrivers\fvwrap.dll' (or one of its dependencies). Try using the full path with constructor syntax. INFO - synthDriverHandler.setSynth (14:20:47.500) - MainThread (37148): Falling back to previous synthDriver ibmeci INFO - synthDriverHandler.setSynth (14:20:47.751) - MainThread (37148): Loaded synthDriver ibmeci
@GoemonIshikawa @TomGrant91 you can always try to manually grab that file out of the nvda-addon itself and seeing if when you paste it Defender starts yelling about it. Even if you have downloads excluded, it would still be upset once it gets copied into the NVDA add-on directory itself, so it could be deleting it right after? not sure.
@GoemonIshikawa @TomGrant91 I put up a 0.95 version where I used the min build flag, so it should compile less stuff into that wrapper. maybe less chances for flagging, it's how the first add-ons were compiled. so you could try that instead in case it keeps the file upon install.
@FreakyFwoof @GoemonIshikawa Good to hear Andre. So what is your overall opinion on this compared to orpheus? I would prefer that or bestspeech compared to flexvoice, but it certainly is a good synth to play with
@TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa Nothing's ever gonna replace Orpheus for me, this isn't even in the top 10, but it's always nice to have new synths to play with. I've noticed it can't say the letter 'R' if written by itself. Oh, it can't even say the word 'Noticed' lol
@FreakyFwoof @TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa LOL I think for the R thing I'll have to have it do a replacement for all R with "arr". Also words with apostrophes need improvement. But ah well. It's at a way better place than BestSpeech original ever was in the start ha.
@TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa When I try to read my last post, it completely doesn't say anything. totally weird. Always fun to see the weird idiosyncrasies that new synths show up.
ahaha I'm just glad it's no longer taking down people's NVDA in a big logless crash. Not even any fun sounds to follow or proceed it with like BestSpeech days, that's what made this one so disappointing, somehow errors are a thousand times more fun when there's some weird effect it comes with than just a boring one. Ah well. I suppose a bunch of consonants together might throw the wrapper off although it's unlikely, I tried throwing some pretty extreme cases at it xD
@TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa Oh it's great fun typing random characters into synths like a child. Yep, still do that. They can have some very... Extreme reactions in some cases lol
@FreakyFwoof @GoemonIshikawa I do that all the time. I have a document called squeezy fweep I just created and it can't say squeezy fweep.txt - notepad. It misses out the word completely Squeezy notepad!
@TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa Go through various Mastodon posts, some will just get entirely skipped, at least they do here. Not even just mine, plenty of others.
that's so oddd, for sure not happening to me at all. Like, even all mentions have read so far. At faster rates though I find this voice gets a bit muffled, it's odd. Slower somehow is more clear. Hmm, tried to scroll with 3-second firing of arrow keys through masto posts, still read. hw odd that one.
@TomGrant91 @GoemonIshikawa In the file 'MindmakerPresentation' is this line... What on earth do they mean by this? Perhaps I'm better off not knowing.
''SoulSim Ltd. is offering is a popular and highly targeted web property for teenage girls. '
ok. I haven't slept. It's 6 in the morning. Last update to this thing. We now have proper pitch control. MindMaker FlexVoice 0.7. All bugs be damned, I'm going to bed. eurpod.com/flexvoice.nvda-addo…
@TomGrant91 ha, I'd say better, at least unless you were to feed it a very large number it's not likely to crash your NVDA. So a lot more stable than that early driver was.
Praising you lots again. I remember when I was making your timeline of likes go nuts last year with bestspeech-old. Giving suggestions and the like. Roll on the same with flexvoice.
@TomGrant91 ha. thing is, I actually like BestSpeech somewhat more, maybe not as much as Eloquence but it's up there. This one? No way. It has trash pronouncing on a lot of words. It would require a huge dictionary to fix it up all, so to me it's more of a toy synth than a real one sadly. I guess that does make me a bit less dedicated to it overall.
I agree with bestspeech. But I love the fact with that, I created a voice dictionary for that. So you know the way eloquence puts the intonation properly for control panel, bestspeech can't. Put a hyphen in there? You're laughing. So I got lots of modifications in its voice dictionary.
Just read from a #ccc toot that German Bundestag is ... Aagaaaiin ... Trying to bring IP collection / storing into discussion... While all the previous attempts have been ruled illegal by highest German court
It's definitely been an interesting time here at LGA. TSA was being extra slow and TSA-ish today. I had a Ubiquiti U6 Mesh access point in my suitcase, which looks suspiciously like an aerosol can, so they had pointed questions about that.
Then, the gate for my flight changed five times. First, it was gate 30, then 31, back to 30, then 18, then 29.
So I'm sitting here at gate 29 hoping for the best. I should be boarding in a few minutes, so there is still time for a couple more gate changes just for fun.
I was flying out of panama City Beach Florida and didn't have my "real" ID. Instead of doing the usual hey we're going to have to do a swab of your hands, they took the extra step. I didn't even go through the damn metal detector, no no. They did a full pat down which was a bit much for multiple reasons, even my meet and assist said so. Plus I had recently been in the hospital and had dealt with sooooo many people touching me at once I was still a bit edgy when it came to being touched by unknown folks. I already have issues with that anyway, the hospital visit had just made it worse. That TSA experience did not help.
it was incredibly stupid. I've never had something like that happen and I've flown under a lot of different circumstances. Even flying with my now retired guide dog was never that much of an issue, though I have had some issues after security when it came to dog travel but that's a different ball game entirely.
Fortunately, my gate wasn't changed again, and I'm now on the plane using AA WiFi. I can't get Ookla Speedtest to work, even through an exit node, but fast.com says I have 36 megs down. So that's cute. In case anyone cares, my IP address is 164.86.16.207
Wow! I figured this would be at least a bit more interesting. IP appears to be from Ashburn, Virginia, United States (20149). The latitude and longitude coordinates are 39.043800354, -77.4873962402. The ISP is Intelsat Global Service Corporation. The timezone is America/New_York.
That's a rather oddly low flight level for a commercial flight. Perhaps the weather. But you should hear the engines working extra hard at that level. The atmosphere is still rather dense there.
Adventní countdown dnes doběhl, Stromečkovice jsou za rohem, takže nám nezbývá, než vám popřát pěkné Vánoce, pod jedli hodně investičních paměťových modulů a do nového roku rychlé internetové připojení. Slibujeme, že i příští rok budeme u nás na OSCLOUD makat na lepším a svobodnějším pracovním i zábavním prostředí na internetu!
Roll with It Typing, my self-voicing accessible browser-based app with @Marconius , is two days old. Marco has fixed the accuracy of typing stats, added controls for how the practice is spoken, and created a field where you can paste up to 36 lines of your own and type from that. Custom typing practice is new to the accessible typing coach space: you won't get this from any other guide marconius.com/fun/rollWithIt/
We’re giving away two of the new ones for free to two random people who boost and favorite this post! Winners will be announced on December 25th, just like last year.
If you’d like to support our server and projects like these, donations are always welcome:
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Feel free to **donate** using one of the below links:
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China cracked the US ‘super code’ that controls most power grids in the world. Breakthrough could shake-up global tech markets with nations able to run their own grids and break away from US dominance. 🎉
In addition to achieving an average computational efficiency that surpasses leading American solvers by 14 per cent, Tianquan’s computational error is also 23 per cent lower than that of US solvers and the computational stability is 21 per cent superior.
feld
in reply to lain • • •