Here's the christmas question of the day. Do you believe that the 12 days of christmas compounds or just lists the things you get as a reminder? Watched some christmas movie I had never heard of with Eddie murphy in it called Candy Cane Lane where this dude signs a contract with an elf gone bad (think sell your soul to the devil). Elf tells him that he needs the five golden rings or he'll turn into an ornament but gets him on a technicality by saying nope, you really need 40 rings because 5 golden rings appears 8 times in the song. Sneaky. So. Does it compound? or no. Thoughts?
@arfy Yeah she got him on that technicality. he was like I have five golden rings. then suddenly there's 12 partridges and everybody starts scrambling to figure out why. Sneaky.
Last week, I threw together Syntherceptor, a SAPI5 synthesiser which speaks using NVDA. This is useful for apps like Komplete Kontrol, Surge, etc. which use SAPI5 but you'd prefer the speech output to happen using your NVDA synthesiser and settings. This also prevents voices from speaking over each other, allows you to interrupt speech with a key press, etc. There is an existing project called NVDASapi which already does this, but we can't seem to identify or contact its developer, it isn't open source, it doesn't interrupt speech when the app requests it and it's a bit tricky to install. That said, Syntherceptor is very early in development, so you may wish to tread carefully. If it crashes, it'll probably crash the app you're using, so save your work regularly, though I haven't seen that happen yet. syntherceptor.jantrid.net/
Sorry to ask, but how am I supposed to uninstall this cleanly? Uninstalling says: "An error occurred while trying to uninstall Syntherceptor. It may have already been uninstalled." I'm trying to use it with a game (Code 7), and it just slows everything down. Here's a snippet of audio with keypresses registered through Filter Keys.
@twynn Are you uninstalling using add/remove programs? I haven't seen that error. Odd. As for the lag, that suggests to me that the game isn't requesting speech interruption for each new string it sends. Does it behave correctly in that respect if you use it with another SAPI5 synth? That is, does it interrupt speech if you move quickly?
Yes, but through Settings says that "This app can’t run on your PC[.] To find a version for your PC, check with the software publisher." I don't know what you're asking re interrupt, but here's the same thing with a different synthesizer.
@twynn Hmm. So I guess the game doesn't interrupt SAPI the way Syntherceptor expects. This is a bit tricky to get right because SAPI doesn't have a clear way to interrupt speech, surprisingly enough, and different apps do different things.
Hmm. But pressing CTRL does interrupt with both a real synthesizer as well as Syntherceptor, with NVDA's sleep mode on. Does that mean silencing speech is working?
Right, but if I have sleep mode on, use another program to send speech through the NVDA controller, i.e., TWBlue, and press Control to stop speech, NVDA continues to speak.
@twynn I'm about to push another build which just cancels before each utterance, but that will mean it can't queue multiple utterances without interruption. I'm not sure if that is a show stopper or not.
@twynn Nope, this is surprisingly hard to get right in a reliable way. New build is up - make sure to refresh the site. Should also fix the uninstaller.
Ah, that does fix the slow arrowing issue, however the first utterance of "MAIN MENU .. USE THE UP AND DOWN ARROWS TO CHOOSE OPTIONS AND THE RETURN KEY TO SELECT IT .. CURRENTLY SELECTED" is being skipped, however I can see it in the speech history.
No no, I am used to playing this game with a different synth than the one I normally use, but it was the first thing I thought of that used SAPI as output. Yes, uninstalling indeed works. Thanks for your efforts for sure!
With today being Christmas, here is your annual reminder to be nice to newbies in your spaces.
There is going to be a very sudden influx of people who are just getting into the spaces you occupy because they got a gift that acts as their gateway into that activity. Maybe you're into photography and someone just bought them their first ever camera body, or you're into music and someone bought them their first guitar, or you're an audiophile and someone bought them their first really nice headphones, or you're big into TTRPGs and someone just bought them their first ever core rulebook.
Whatever the specific activity and gift, these people are going to have no idea what they're doing, they're going to ask a lot of obvious questions, they're going to make a lot of rookie mistakes, and there's going to be a lot of them.
I cannot stress this enough: BE NICE TO THEM.
Few things will ruin someone's enjoyment of something faster than trying to join its community and getting such a rude first impression that their conclusion is "People who like this are kind of assholes. I don't think I want to do this if it's going to involve getting yelled at." Craigslist and eBay and FB Marketplace will be filled with mint condition gifts being resold to attest to this in the coming months.
You were there at the very first step once. Be the person for them that you wish you had back then. (Or if you were lucky enough, the person you did have who fostered your love of it!) Make this something they'll love just as much as you do, not something they'll want to sell and get away from as soon as possible.
Be the reason this Christmas starts a lifelong passion for them, not the reason they decide to abandon something that they would've loved because people made them feel bad for needing a helping hand.
Can you imagine if the billionaire tech bros were spending all their energy developing solutions to clean the planet and distribute resources better instead of incessantly enshittifying our lives and trying to devaluate labour?
What a different world that would be. I wish them all a Ghosts-of-Christmas experience.
This is our third Christmas as a couple, our second Christmas in Yukon, and our first Christmas as mr. and mrs. Erven. Merry Christmas to all. @alyssa6595
The 2024 Annual Hope Valley Carol sing, submitted to us by @jcast, is already in progress, immediately followed by the Lessons and Carols service @coasterfreak88 submitted.
@Friendica Support i really wish there was another option for having a dark theme in #Friendica. i would like having a multi-shade black / charcoal page, with lavender / violet accents, but so far have not found a way to achieve it (note, for many years i used to use the #Stylus AddOn, with which i created numerous custom themes for many sites, but a year ago i disabled it & others as part of my desire to begin minimising all non-essential AO attack surfaces). Though in many ways using #DarkReader for Friendica is quite good, overall i tend to eschew it being on for this site, coz it hides that handy temporary shading highlight of posts in a thread for which a Notification was received.
The small number of current dark themes offer me a rather unappealing colour choice.
The custom theme option initially excited me, til i realised, afaict, it is based on the Light theme, with no Dark theme option, so that all the dialogue boxes & dropdown menus remain eye-piercingly bright white, that hurts my eyes. The least-worst i could conjure was
but as mentioned, too much blinding white remains.
inevitably then, i keep returning to the so-called Black theme, but it is... quite boring. the entire page is simply all a single "shiny" black tone, with my chosen accent relieving the monotony. compare this to the so-called Dark themes, to see the difference; they use different shades of the base colour, which is more visually appealing, creating a "panelled" effect.
@Droppie [opensoc] is this your own instance do you have access to all the files if so go to view themes and open up the style CSS for the theme you're using and look for all the colors are and change them through the code it takes a lot of trial and error to get it quite right then save it as a new theme in a new folder move everything else to that folder along with that style then enable it in admin go back to your settings select your new theme and you should have what you want again it takes a bunch of trial and error and a little bit of time to go through it and do it I had done that a couple of times ended up going back to White but I've made all my icons green anyways if it's your own instance you can copy the style sheet like I said copy the entire thing over to a new folder under a new name or rename the current style is style x and your new one is the regular style
Bluesky suspending antifascist researchers for sharing publicly available information about literal nazis.
Should be no surprise considering bsky constantly protects nazis, the far right, and all flavors of bigotry at the expense of Palestinians and trans women.
Fortunately, their information already spread so far and wide that at least half of the Blood Tribe nazis lost their jobs following the mass doxx. Chris Pohlhaus, leader of BT, estimated financial losses at over $2 million lol. Happy holidays!
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
I suspect far too many of us are trapped in cycles of escape that consume all our time, attention, and energy rather than the things we would like to create.
I'm hooked on watching hours of YouTube videos, and I justify it by clinging to the positive that is that it feeds my 'random number generator' and allows my brain to do a lot of thinking in the background.
But I have all sorts of projects that I'd like to develop and work on that I never seem to have the time or energy for.
I talk myself out of blocking time for things because my attention might be called away or I will spend the next 82 hours working on it because of hyper-focus.
I'm personally averse to routine, and that's something I'm working to change, or at least do in moderation.
Then, I feel overwhelmed and reload the YouTube tab, and queue up another video.
Usually when Christmas is over, I instantly cut the Christmas music with a click. This has been the case for years. This year, what I will do instead is disable it, re-enable the normal music, then let the Christmas music empty itself from the queue. This way, rather than closing out with a bang, we slowly return to normality. Hopefully this keeps the spirit going for a bit longer, without an abrupt ending.
During the year’s busiest season of charitable giving, donors may wonder whether the nonprofits they are considering donating to are going to be good stewards of their money.
As I write this, I'm still waiting for a present from my Mum, which won't arrive today as no snail mail is delivered on Christmas Day, but I am definitely happy with the gifts I have opened so far, namely two chocolate oranges, my favourite British sweet treat.
There's a video of someone enjoying with family or possibly friends that needs deleting in the WhatsApp group FYI, and you're god damn right it is a Christmas film.
Today I learned why Sonata #TTS created a framework to run AI voices outside of #NVDA. First, NVDA doesn't come with all of the #Python standard libraries. Second, there's no good way of updating dependencies in a bundled addon. Third, NVDA really, really hates it if you include several hundred dependencies in your addon. Anyway, here's kitten TTS, the other synthesizer I wanted to try with NVDA. Unfortunately, the model doesn't support streaming output, so even though it's actually faster than Supertonic, it feels slower when used with NVDA. Also, it takes several minutes to install, makes NVDA startup 30 seconds slower, and freezes the change synthesizer dialogue for about 45 seconds when you open it. It does miss words less frequently, though, and pronounces text better. The ultimate result of my two-day investigation is that even the highly optimized open-source AI imbedded models are not yet ready for screen reader use. Some tree-shaking could fix some of these issues, but it still won't allow for streaming, so it's not worth it. I'd really like to know what Microsoft and Narrator are doing to get the natural voices so snappy. github.com/fastfinge/kittentts-nvda/#screenreader
uhm, did you know that waypipe with ssh is fast enough to use blender remotely over wi-fi? what? this works much better/faster than x11 forwarding ever did
A Sound Canvas takes on beatboxing. And it... actually kind of works. This is a karaoke cover of Dopamine, a song composed by WING of BEATPELLA HOUSE, a South Korean beatboxing group. Two versions of this cover exist. A simplified version designed for sound cards from DREAM SA, which are essentially compatible with the Roland SC-88, and a second one designed for the SC-8820. Both covers lean into the strengths of each source. Both played on my SC-8820. From KY Entertainment karaoke machines. DREAM SA version sequenced by Yunseong Choi (최윤성) currently unsure who the 8820 version's sequencer is due to encoding issues with the file. Original song: youtube.com/watch?v=qlrpeYdm9E…. MIDIs: drive.google.com/uc?id=1kILmA1….
> The Church of Odin will mount a lawsuit to put an end to Santa Claus, who they claim is an insulting parody of their God Odin the All Father, the real Father of Jul.
I'm sure that Quebec has pretty bad numbers too because of that piece of shit of Dubé (and Legault). $180 is the cost, and most no-choice-of-private-insurance don't cover it either.
Before heading to the Hill Country to spend Christmas with my grandparents, I stayed up a little too late packing and writing. This post is a quiet reflection on the past year, family, and trying to slow down even when I am not very good at it.
I GOT A STORY TO TELL ALL OF YOU. AND @ChrisDuffley you might like this, so i'm pinging you in. so it's Christmas day, right? around I dont' know, 9 ni the morning, we open presents. there's a few things I got like (yes) a brand new mini PC, small yetp owerful, and gummy bears, chocolate bars. that was it.....except it wasn't! after my sister and I (at least I thought) was done, I get told there's an extra present waiting for me. I get drove to a hill as part of our property, and what to I find? and i'm not kidding, what you're about to hear what I found is totally real. a 100 feet #ham radio tower. yes, I now have a ham radio tower ready to be installed and, once I get my license, used! I can't believe it! this has to be one of the best Christmases ever!!
I don't know how it was done, but now I have a 100feet ham towert!
* Buy new notebook * Leave Windows 7 * Find someone who installs @linuxmint * Photo shoot with black/white acrylic paintings with @weberjoerg * personalized labels at Kekila juicemaker
The Empire Strikes Back gets a dose of holiday cheer with a festive Christmas parade on Hoth. Originally appears in Auralnauts Star Wars Episode 5: Attack of...
![Reddit post from r/shittymoviedetails: In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Kevin meets [REDACTED] [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED] of the [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. This is [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED].
Attached is a photo of [REDACTED] [REDACTED] guiding Kevin McCalister to go [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED] [REDACTED].](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/741495 "Reddit post from r/shittymoviedetails: In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), Kevin meets [REDACTED] [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED] of the [REDACTED] [REDACTED]. This is [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED].
Attached is a photo of [REDACTED] [REDACTED] guiding Kevin McCalister to go [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] in the [REDACTED] [REDACTED].")
![[Screenshot of Thunderbird]
Subject: You’ll lose access to ChatGPT on Dec 28, 2025
You’ll lose access to ChatGPT on Dec 28, 2025](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/741461 "[Screenshot of Thunderbird]
Subject: You’ll lose access to ChatGPT on Dec 28, 2025
You’ll lose access to ChatGPT on Dec 28, 2025")
Mike Gorse
in reply to Kevin LaRose, Antifa Member • • •