mastodon - Link to source

Friend: I don't know what to do!

Me: (I explain what he needs to do.)

Friend: That sounds like just what I need. I'm going to do that!

(a week later)

Me: How did it go?

Friend: Oh that? I didn't do it.

Me: Why not?

Friend: I don't know. I just didn't.

Me: Okay. Will you try again?

Friend: Probably not.

Me: So you'll just ignore the problem then?

Friend: Oh no. It's still a problem.

Me: But I gave you the solution.

Friend: And a great solution it was.

Me: And yet...

Friend: Exactly

reshared this

mastodon - Link to source

Dear Amazon, if you're going to use AI enhanced synthetic speech for Audio Description on your Prime TV series, the least you can do is check it for pronunciation quality. The voice being realistic isn't enough.

In Talamasca: The Secret Order, AD mispronunciations include "Surré" instead of "Surrey", "alyus" instead of "alias", and "one hundreds" instead of "hundreds".

#Amazon #Prime #Talamasca #AD #accessibility #MustDoBetter

#Accessibility #ad #amazon #prime #talamasca #mustdobetter
in reply to Austin Nix

mastodon - Link to source

Austin Nix

Naturally when I mentioned The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus earlier it's because I was reading it. and now I am not because I've finished it. I've read enough of the Oz books to know that I probably would have guessed this was written by the same author even if I didn't know that up front. Baum has a very particular style of writing that you can always tell it's him when you read one of his books.
in reply to Austin Nix

mastodon - Link to source

Tech Singer

This has nothing to do with Christmas, but I thought I'd mention it since you mention Baum. He wrote a ton of other stuff besides the Oz books, and it did sell quite a bit. I think the one which sold best, I'm not sure whether sales were better than the Oz books but am sure it didn't last as well, is his Aunt Jane series. It's an interesting glimpse of the time, I'm not particularly into that myself but did read the first one. Anyhow, it's on Gutenberg, I believe, as well as being in the usual Delphi collection which they call, with some justification given that it contains, at least, the vast majority of what he wrote, the complete Baum delphiclassics.com/shop/l-fran…

L. Frank Baum – Delphi Classics

www.delphiclassics.com

mastodon - Link to source
I love this recording of the Nat King Cole trio performing The Christmas song in 1946. The version you always hear with the strings is lovely and everything but this stripped back version with just bass, guitar and Nat's piano and vocals is something else.
youtube.com/watch?v=5QJNhCi3Ay…
#Music

"The Christmas Song" (1946) Nat "King" Cole Trio

King Cole Trio recording of "The Christmas Song"
YouTube
#music

mastodon - Link to source
People in power keep trying to make technology more oppressive and indifferent to your rights. But EFF supporters fight back, every single time. Stand with our community today! eff.org/yec

Stand Together to Protect Democracy

Donate in 2025 and you’ll help EFF receive bonus grants. Support digital privacy and free speech!
Electronic Frontier Foundation

iceshrimp.net - Link to source
Good grief I wish someone would create a way to do a mass migration from #lemmy to #piefed. Lemmy is by far the most annoying software I have the displeasure of maintaining. In today's adventures, the Lemmy developers finally created a #postgres index in 0.19.15 that I'd created myself ages ago for performance reasons. But the database migration fails if the index already exists. Even if it's the exact index it wants to create, created exactly the way the migration is doing it. And no, you can't skip a database migration, and no, it's not smart enough to check and skip the migration by itself. So you have to log into the database and drop index idx_post_aggregates_creator, and let Lemmy recreate it. Yes, this takes a while, for absolutely no reason. And if you wanted to do it without downtime in an offline copy of the database, I guess you'd have to do a bunch of fiddling to trick Lemmy into thinking the migration happened when you went to upgrade production. There had to be a better way to do that! But it's not documented and I have no idea what it would be.
#lemmy #piefed #postgres

André Polykanine reshared this.

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“What makes me transgendered is that my birth sex—which is female—appears to be in social contradiction to my gender expression—which is read as masculine. I defend my right to that social contradiction. In fact, I want to live long enough to hear people ask, ‘What made me think that was a contradiction in the first place?’”

(Leslie Feinberg, "Trans Liberation")

#trans #lgbtq #lgbtqia #nonbinary

#trans #lgbtqia #LGBTQ #nonbinary

mastodon - Link to source
Super huge panic. Took left Cadence out of backpack, now cells across two sides of it won't raise or lower at all. Gosh. Did me dropping my bag on the car floor ruin the display? (another reason I wish cases existed for it.)
I ran the dot calibration tool, nothing- those dots, 4 cells on either left and right sides of the left display, appear dead to it. Wow, just wow. What a holiday.
This entry was edited (5 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

We are grateful to everyone who has become a #FriendsOfGNOME. Your donations help us plan new programs for 2026 and strengthen the future of #GNOME. We also thank all our contributors across many roles, without whom our desktop would not be possible.

Happy Holidays!

#Linux #OpenSource #FOSS #GNOMEFoundation

donate.gnome.org/

#linux #foss #opensource #gnome #gnomefoundation #friendsofgnome

Emmanuele Bassi reshared this.

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I have to give @Tamasg for making the initial version of the FlexVoice 3 NVDA addon! I like it, and there is another version of that synth you can try and make an addon for, it is version 2. I believe according to a sample I heard, that I kind of like the intonation of version 2 more than version 3, and it contains other .trv files for the voices. Now you kind of know why I've been waiting for this TTS to speak my own text for so long (it has been about a year since Rommix found it), it is one of the most unique speech synths, and that's what I'm looking for! Anyway, here's the .zip of FlexVoice 2 for anyone who is interested:

datajake.braillescreen.net/tts…

@Tamas G
in reply to Alex Krier

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

I guess the problem with that zip is that it's not a full SDK like with FlexVoice 3.0. That one was so easy because all the header files and calling conventions were there for me to ingest and quickly understand the order of arguments functions take. For 2.0, it's mostly a guessing game, so I don't suspect a driver for it would be ready for awhile unless some type of headers or deeper docs emerge around the API it used.
in reply to Tamas G

mastodon - Link to source

Alex Krier

I will be patiently waiting for the FlexVoice 2 addon. FlexVoice is one of my dream retro synths I have been waiting for since circa 2019. It is using a hybrid synthesis method, combining diphone concatenation with parametric LPC. That's why it sounds like that. The voice I am using in the current addon is Kim, since I am biased towards female voices. I will be getting later addon builds when you let me (and others) know through this Mastodon account. Again, thank you so much for making one of my retro TTS dreams come true!

mastodon - Link to source

Today's #FreeSoftwareAdvent is paperless-ngx, a key part of keeping us, well, paperless.

It is a document management tool, but I use it in a very basic way: it is hooked up to our scanner, and anything we scan gets automatically converted to PDF and OCRd. We then shred the paper. I try to scan, and shred, everything on the day that it arrives.

It is particularly useful around tax return time, as it means I can easily get the information I need from stuff which people have posted to us.

github.com/paperless-ngx/paper…

#FOSS #SelfHosting #Paperless

#foss #selfhosting #freesoftwareadvent #paperless

mastodon - Link to source
Well well. It's very unlikely Monolog95 or Monolog97 will ever get a driver or wrapper. Thing is, voice font data and other speech DLLs were scattered across the system, including in \windows\speech, making integrating a simple portable wrapper solution quite impossible as it looks for them in these hardcoded areas, including registry keys. Both do this, after extensive debugging, Monolog95 is somewhat better but still Voicefont data stays in program files. In short, not an easy one, unlike Flexvoice where I could package it up nicely into one synth for everyone to quickly have. Sigh.
It doesn't matter anyway. The voice I'd want was only ever part of Monolog16, not Monolog 32-bit variants. With Monolog 95 and 97, you already get a different voice. So I wouldn't be working on one I'd actually want or use, either.
in reply to Tamas G

mastodon - Link to source

Tamas G

on the bright side, I'm less sad about my Braille display! Used some sandpaper to smoothen out the scratch (they were just 2 little dots where it got slightly nicked), and now, the scratch is virtually undetectable. So yes. Sandpaper does work on plastic to at least smoothen down scratches and get them to be good again. I was surprised to find this out.
This entry was edited (7 hours ago)

mastodon - Link to source

Someone please xplain to me why Conversations and Monocles costs money in Google Play and not in F-Droid.

Is it because of the Google fee to keep an account? Wasn't that a one-off thing?

I'm genuinely curious since I paid that fee a decade ago to put a shitty (yet useful) app there that I made with MIT App Inventor back in 2016.

#askfedi

#askfedi
in reply to Maikel 🇪🇺 🇪🇸

mastodon - Link to source

Daniel Gultsch

The F-Droid version has some features that Play store policy prevents us from putting in (address book integration, channel search). The Play version has features that F-Droid policy prevents us from putting in (FCM push notifications).

That’s orthogonal to it being paid or not though.

If it were up to me i'd probably make the F-Droid version paid as well but F-Droid doesn’t have a billing system.

mastodon - Link to source

Wrt my last boost, it is saying something when the NFB and the ACB agree on something and are on the same side!

But, seriously, hopefully there is less feuding between the two blindness organizations than there had been in the past. Hardly anyone alive would have been around for the original split that created the ACB, and some of the reasons for it are not relevant anymore. I would like it if we don't have hostility between the organizations and if they can work together where they agree.

This entry was edited (7 hours ago)
in reply to Mike Gorse

mastodon - Link to source

Kevin LaRose, Ho Ho Hum

For my part, I can say that my issues with the #NFB don’t have anything to do with what happened back in the late 50s. Rather, it’s something more recent. I don’t necessarily have animosity toward the organization in general, I was actually a member for a time about seven years ago, it has to do with the organization’s response, or lack thereof, dealing with the sexual misconduct allegations in the training centers.
#NFB

mastodon - Link to source

ACB is speaking out in response to recent federal action that limits how the Randolph-Sheppard Act’s blind vendor priority is applied to Army dining facility contracts. This change threatens economic opportunity and independence for people who are blind or have low vision.

Read our press release: acb.org/american-council-blind…

Graphic with the ACB logo on a purple background and the following text: ACB firmly rejects any suggestion that qualified blind vendors operating dining facilities on Army installations negatively affect American service members.

American Council of the Blind Responds to Federal Action Weakening Randolph-Sheppard Act Priority | American Council of the Blind

www.acb.org

mastodon - Link to source
I took a closer look at this new Beyerdynamic headset. The only question I still have is: is Bluetooth 6 comparable to old 2.4 GHz dongles in terms of latency? Has anyone had any experience with this? I'd be grateful for any insights.
europe.beyerdynamic.com/p/mmx-…
#bluetooth #wireless #headset #latency #tech

MMX 230 wireless: Closed-back Gaming Headset | beyerdynamic

MMX 230 wireless: The MMX 230 wireless is a wireless gaming headset with precise sound and 60 hours of battery life – perfect for passionate gamers.
europe.beyerdynamic.com
#tech #bluetooth #headset #wireless #latency

mastodon - Link to source
Ok. The Christmas buffet consists of: mini yorkshire puddings filled with beef and horseradish, Schwama chicken kebabs with sweet peppers, smoked sausage barbecue bites. that's all the meat, everything else we can both eat. So, my favourite Wolfgang pizzas, so called because they were origianlly invented by chef Wolfgang Puck, tiny pizza bases topped with lemon pepper mascarpone, smoked salmon, pickled shalot and dill. Really delicious! Cheese and onion puffs. Tomato, mozarella and pesto skewers, feta and rosemary focaccia bread, mini hasselback roasted potatoes with sour cream and chive dip, mini thai fishcakes with sweet chili dip, and finally Drew's incredible jam tarts, we prefer them to mince pies. Bon Appetit!
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