My next project or mission is to look into whether we can remove silences from speech ourselves somehow, if the engine doesn't provide a pauses setting itself. Since we get the direct audio stream, it may be possible but anything would need to carefully be assessed in performance penalty and whether it causes audio overlaps if the work isn't done right. For now at least V1.1 is a lot more stable and performant wrapper.
Updated: FlexVoice 1.1. the native wrapper was doing redundant normalization work (literally normalizing twice), which can add extra stalls between chunks. Do not sync() inside _runWrapperTextSegment(). If we still want “accurate doneSpeaking” for non-indexed one-shot speech, only sync() once at the end of the utterance. Remove the second normalization in workerLoop and just move the already-normalized string into the prepared list. Also a small micro-opt: normalizeFragileTokens was scanning alpha tokens twice (once to find token end, again to detect ALL-CAPS). I changed it to detect “allCaps” during the first scan. eurpod.com/flexvoice.nvda-addo…
Interesting. unfortuantely, i don't know if I can use this as a daily driver at the minute, because it refuses to read most mastodon posts, which I see as a problem. however, I know this is actively being worked on, so I will get it time. It also skips a few words. Hopefully these issues will be fixed soon, however, I'm not too sure about a daily driver as of right now, as again, some things it refuses to read.
@mckensie that's so odd, since it's reading everything for me here. But I also have my system locale set to Hungary, which means some unicode characters get interpreted a bit different. So far scrolling through my timeline with posts that have emojis and such, it all reads. So I just haven't been able to repro it at all
I wonder what I should do to fix this issue. Restarting NVDA didn't fix it. I'm wondering if running NVDA as admin or perhaps even restarting might do it? I don't know
@mckensie @mcourcel well it's been some people who get it with Masto posts, whereas others don't. for sure one of those illusive bugs. but if you can do a "view post" on the ones that don't read, then perhaps it's possible to find where it falls silent, like which sentence or set of words it stops reading at. Once we have a text piece that does that it's a lot easier to make a new rule inside the normalizer against it and patch.
I'm buying a Fairphone six. In the US, you have to get it through Murena. Their offering doesn't run stock Android out of the box, but rather /e/OS, a version of Android marketted as "degoogled and privacy-enabled."
I was curious how they handle the accessibility services, since they all come from Google. e/OS's accessibility page states the following:
To learn about accessibility on /e/OS devices, go to [Google's Android Accessibility knowledge base.] Rest assured all the accessibility features you’ll find in /e/OS are deGoogled and Open Source. [...] When an update is available for an accessibility app, it’s part of our monthly updates.
My read of this is they ingest any updates pushed by Google to the TalkBack github when they appear. Unfortunately, the last push to TalkBack's github was from October 2024, meaning any updates will be few and far between. You'd be better off downloading TalkBack from the play store--except there is no play store!
Fortunately it looks like app lounge can also install play store apps via API's, so we'll see how that works.
Still real curious what "degoogled" means in this context!
Splendors and miseries of #OpenSource, I've been repeating this phrase for years and I will more. "Degoogle" is a very fashionable word here in #Europe, especially among leftists who want everything open-source, free, etc., etc. another fashionable word is "anti-GAFAM". And of course, most of these nice people don't realize that the vast majority of open-source stuff is either not accessible or poorly accessible and again, for the vast majority of that stuff, if you ask them to fix #Accessibility, the answer most likely would be "Our code is open-source, so go and fix it on your own".So, good luck, No sarcasm, I actually do like the concept of #FairPhone, it's something I'd love to have, especially if it had an option to add a hardware QWERTY keyboard.
I have never quite gotten my head around the argument that the best way to deal with big tech surveilence is just avoid it. Sticking your head in the sand has never been a viable solution to anything. Do they not see the numbers? Gmail has nearly 2 billion monthly active users. Facebook has over three billion. Android (to get back on topic) has nearly four billion. That number is going up, not down. We are scraping up against the amount of people in the world with internet access. But yaknow, you don't have to, if you don't wanna. Wanna be a sheep, that is.
All the points are good ones, but they are made in a complete void absent how humans on planet earth operate in the 21st century.
Those leftists say like if you boycott them, they will fail. which is, honestly, a so-so argument. Given the point that some categories of people won't boycott them because their services are simply friendlier, more convenient, more accessible. I mean, the majority of people don't want to suffer just because.
@menelion "Don't tell me you can make a better burger than McDonald's. I can make a better burger than McDonald's. Show me the people lining up around the block to buy your burger instead of McDonald's."
(Heard in the context of songwriting, but it applies to basically everything)
So in today's edition of #screenreader problems: reading a book with a #Japanese character named Mami is deeply disconcerting, because my screen reader pronounces it "mommy". I just thought...the character was weirdly being called mom by everyone until I finally stopped to check the spelling. Screen readers of the time are also why I thought "anime" rimed with "time" until I was like 14. Uselessly, looking it up online gives me four different examples of how to pronounce Mami, all with different emphasis and "a" sounds. Including one joker who really is pronouncing it exactly like "mommy". So I dunno.
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
I'm gonna go with "may-me". Just so I don't have to hear about someone flirting with "mommy". I have no evidence that it's the most correct of my four options, but it's the one I like best. So meh.
What's the current state of XMPP and OpenID Connect? My web search returned that ejabberd is still considering if and how to implement and Prosody has experimental alpha-stage support via a module. I couldn't find anything conclusive in regards to XMPP clients. What's with Gajim(?) and Conversations? Or other clients? Are there any web clients supporting OIDC?
the answer depends a bit on what you are trying to achieve. Authenticate against a third party? Throw the password away and log in with a session cookie? Give access to third parties to data on the XMPP server?
We do the session tokens with FAST. Prosody has some support for giving third parties access to (scoped) data on the XMPP server and clients (Conversations and Gajim) aren't involved here.
@daniel I have Keycloak running and ponder if I want to go for Prosody again but authenticating against Keycloak this time. This means, users are created and managed in Keycloak. My previous projects with Keycloak used OIDC for authentication. But the clients should be able to authenticate via OIDC otherwise this would be futile 🙂.
Authenticating with oauth with a third party is not currently available. @mattj probably has the most insights into what steps we made into that direction yet.
Part of the problem is that we loose nice security features like channel binding by using web stuff.
@daniel @mattj I tried reading the XEP re channel binding but I don't understand what it's supposed to achieve. If you could explain it in a sentence or two I'd be grateful. If it's too complicated, that's fine, though.
@mattj Channel Binding ensures that client and server are in the same TLS session by mixing in unique stuff from the session into the password handshake. This is basically MITM protection for the TLS layer.
For more information the search keywords would be: SASL, SCRAM and Channel binding. The XEP is just negotiation and boring wrt the security aspects.
@muppeth @mattj Sticking with LDAP would at least on paper leave the door open for channel binding.
2FA could be added to XMPP w/o involving web stack stuff.
I'm not fundamentally opposed to oauth. I'm just pointing out that the use case of oauth is convenience rather than added security. If we implement it wrong me might even loose security (channel binding).
I had people asking, so here's the first level of Armadillo Army. Think pacman just. not pacman. The main objective is to clear the maze of goodies without getting wrecked by the armadillos. Yes you can shoot them which I do, but every shot costs ten points whether you hit or not. If you do hit an armadillo you get 30 points. Armadillos are represented by a really fast spoken directional cue. You'll know, I'm sure. As the levels progress things get harder, there are more goodies, and a tornado that can eat the things you're after. The second thing in this level that I encounter is the pepper. Once eaten your character tex goes "loco." This means arrows are reversed and your laser for armadillo shooting doesn't work right. this last for fifteen seconds, I think.
And why is the Node.JS Setup status Trumping me? Please wait while the Setup Wizard installs Node.js. Installing Node.js Status: Progress bar -2147483648% complete.
I agree with just about everything Sean Goedecke writes, but I'm also glad I don't work in big tech anymore. I was okay at playing politics but I just didn't like it.
The "big tech companies are evil/stupid" framing is not only wrong but unhelpful. It's like calling a bear evil/stupid and then getting mad at him when he devours you for following his nature. The bear has internal logic that makes sense in his bear-brain, just like big companies do. Although it's more around promotion-seeking, risk-minimizing, legibility, etc. than around honey.
Tonight at 6 PM Eastern, sonic synergy goes live for our year in review. We unpack all the cool stuff we were involved in throughout 2025 and send the year off in our irreverent yet thoughtful way. So join us for our unique brand of crazy conversation and say 1 last hurrah for 2025. Extremely NSFW, and not for everyone. Proudly powered by your calls and messages to (833) 452-4452.
„Jeden ersten Sonntag auf die gute Seite wechseln!“ am militärisch klingenden „di.day“, aber die „gute Seite“ hat die digitale Barrierefreiheit vergessen und eine für viele Menschen unbenutzbare Website hingestellt. Ohne Überschriftenauszeichnung, ohne Navigationsbeschriftunng, ohne Alternativtexte.
Nur einmal dazugehören und mitmachen können… is‘ das so schwierig? #39c3
Hi everyone, I wanna tell you about a really cool #trans person I’ve learned about recently - Wendy Carlos. (Thread: 1/3)
Carlos was born in 1939 and is currently 86 years old. She helped develop the first ever commercial #synthesizer, Moog, in 1964. She created the scores for iconic movies including A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Tron (1982). She even won three #Grammy awards in 1970 for her album Switched-On Bach. (First trans woman to ever win one!)
She was also one of the first public figures to disclose that she underwent a feminizing gender-affirming surgery (she got the procedure in 1972, went public in 1979).
And here is the video where I first came across Carlos.
Two bits of context here:
1. This is one of the most impressive explainers of how electronic music works and the different wavelengths that go into turning electric signals into sound that I’ve ever seen (and I studied physics for 2 years in university, so I had at least some background on this.) youtu.be/4SBDH5uhs4Q?si=kll8Uv…
2. At this point, Carlos had started hormone therapy but was not public about her transition. So she’d put on fake sideburns, a wig, and try to appear more masculine.
Wendy Carlos interview on PBS' NOVA in 1989: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EtH5E1N91YNote: the BBC has posted a longer version available here: https://www...
Deep breaths and go slow and gentle one by one asking questions. It's important to not waste time on the weirdos while not ignoring the good ones. And to not break in the process.
## Summary:
This report describes a state‑level security invariant violation in libcurl where credential‑ or key‑related state may persist or be re‑applied across logical trust boundaries...
I stop after I read the python script that is supposed to reproduce the issue. It is in fact expecting two different results for the exact same function call (that compute hash) 🤦♂️ The amount of slop is unbelievable.
If I was to bet against you it would be no more than a mini-jelly-donut... I'll be really surprised if more than one turn out to be anything but slop...
Ever notice how people who spit bigotry and racism immediately turn around and say they have friends who are of the race that they claim to hate? For example. The guy who says I hate black folks and drops the end bomb like it's going out of style. But in the next breath he's all like, I hate black folks, but I have black friends. What exactly is the point in that? I find that very confusing. If it's true that you really are racist, would you not avoid friendships or any kind of interaction with the people you claim to hate?
These are people who hate for the simple reason they can,, and for the simple reason that they don't know what they want, and are confused forever until they are aware of their own idiocy.
That is to add that, there are people who are assholes of any colour, race, group, disability, etc. because they are also unaware of their own idiotic actions. We are all people at the end of the day, and if we can't tolerate each other, then we gotta fix something in ourselves and realise that humanity is humanity, and to not invalidate the struggles of others, too. But the first step is to realise, and some people never pay attention to it, or want to, even if their mind screams it at them. They are too busy with their hate for no reason what soever.
Hey #support guys who work in a #NOC or #datacenter or provide support for #vps hosting: if I open a support ticket about an issue, and the issue is resolved an hour later without a response to my ticket, what's the Etiquette here? Should I close the ticket as resolved without waiting for an answer? Or does that mess up your quotas or workflows or whatever? Is it impolite to close my own ticket when I notice the problem is fixed without waiting for your response? Am I taking away the satisfaction you get from closing a ticket? Or am I just making your life easier by saving you from dealing with yet one more customer.
@menelion That was my first thought. But I wonder if places like this measure the performance of the support staff by number of tickets closed. So if they fix a big issue, maybe letting them close a bunch of the related tickets would give them a boost to whatever nonsense corporate performance metrics there managers force on them?
@RegGuy@menelion That's true. And I guess any well-run place (and mine seems to be) isn't going to do nonsense like "Dave answered 68 tickets last shift, while Joe only answered 22! We should put Joe on a performance improvement plan." Any locally owned and run place with there own building filled with racks of servers that sells directly to highly technical customers isn't going to treat the staff like frontline consumer telephone support. Or at least they'd better not.
@RegGuy@menelion Good to know. I have too many friends who work in the sort of horrible call centers that monitor and time bathroom breaks, so I guess I kind of assume everywhere in support is like that haha.
SUDBURY, ON - Local girlfriend Ashlynn Timbers is currently monitoring her boyfriend as he watches the program she told him was the World Juniors Hockey Tournament, but is in fact the steamy gay romance sensation Heated Rivalry.
Well, we finally opened our Christmas gifts today now that we're not feeling so awful. And there's a particularly useful one I got I want to highlight here. As a blind person with not a lot of training I've always struggled with keeping my fingernails trimmed independently. I'd cut them too short, or uneven, or have difficulty getting the nail to cut at all, or sometimes really hurt my finger. The clippers in this house also aren't the best. Now that's changed! One of our Christmas gifts this year was the Edjy fingernail cutter, a clipper which is loads easier to use and comes with blade guards so you physically can't cut it so short the nail bed is overly exposed. It makes clean, precise cuts without near the amount of fiddling traditional clippers require, and it even stores the clippings in a little basin inside it that can then be dumped into a garbage can or whatever instead of just launching them anywhere immediately. The only thing I'd say is that depending on the curvature of your nails, you potentially can't clip the entire nail at once, I have to do mine in three pieces. Best is one side, the middle, then the other side. Used it this morning and got a perfectly rounded and even cut on all of my fingernails including my thumbs, which the normal clippers have trouble getting at sometimes. edjy.com/products/edjy-fingern… #blind @mastoblind
Experience perfectly smooth nails with the EDJY Fingernail Cutter. Crafted with a precision single blade, EDJY provides effortless cutting and a built-in collection system for easy cleanup.
The official lyric video for Debbii Dawson's 'Downer'.Stream Debbii's new single 'Too Strange for the Circus' now: https://found.ee/Debbii_TooStrangeForTheCi...
It’s #winter. The buzzing has stopped - mostly. So what’s happened to all the #bees? Let me explain. Please #repost this thread. Don’t just like/look. It literally takes you a second. Costs you nothing. Bees are in trouble and need you good people to help. Thank you. #share 1/14
So after a relatively good summer here for #bees what are they up to now you’ve probably been wondering? Okay then, let’s take a broad look at our little #friends at this time of year. Again please #repost / #share. The more informed more folks are the better for bees. 2/14
#Honeybees don’t hibernate. They reduce the colony numbers but stay active within the hive. As temperatures drop (below 50ºF) they form a cluster (ball of #bees) in the #hive in order to use body heat primarily to keep the queen alive. This cluster will have a densely… 4/14
…packed ‘outer shell’ of #bees surrounding a less tightly packed inner core and requires a lot of honey and body vibrating to maintain the heat required for survival - up to 100ºF in the centre. #Honeybee worker life expectancy increases greatly during the #winter from… 5/14
…around 6 weeks during the summer to up to 6 months over #winter due mainly to the lower work load. Male honey bees don’t do winter - dying off before the colony retreat to the hive! In warmer climes the colony works all year round.
After mating in spring/summer the female will have prepared a nest into which she will have laid her eggs in individual pods/cells - fertilised eggs will become females and unfertilised eggs often laid nearer the nest entrance will become males. She will have provisioned… 7/14
…these pods with food before sealing them up. The males and females will have died off shortly afterwards leaving the kids to ‘fend for themselves’. The eggs hatch and the larvae will eat the food provided and develop into adults while overwintering in their pods/cocoons… 8/14
And finally to the big girls of the bee world - the bumbles. Towards the end of summer #bumblebee nests come to a natural end - the males, female workers and old queen die leaving just the new queens alive. These queens feed up and go into… 9/14
…#hibernation (some for as long as 9 months!). They will dig their own hibernaculum usually in loose well drained soil on a north-facing bank (banks are less likely to flood and north-facing means that they are less likely to emerge too early due to unseasonable sunny… 10/14
…days heating the soil over the winter). They will dig down about 4/5 inches into the soil and when comfortable enter a dormant state. During hibernation glycerol in the #bumblebee body acts like antifreeze preventing water in the bee body turning to ice. Other preferred… 11/14
…#hibernation sites include inside tree hollows, under bark, beneath fallen #leaves, #compost heaps and even in plant pots - so be vigilant in your #garden!
In the UK and Ireland we are now increasingly seeing ‘winter active’ #bumblebees specifically Buff-tailed bumbles. 12/14
This phenomenon and how to help bees over the winter I will cover in a separate thread. Hope this has helped increase your understanding of #bees a little. Thread is a generalisation and there are variances between species and regions. Please share among your crew. #repost 🙏🏼 13/14
In a world that appears ever more divided, ever more angry, ever more willing to embrace the obvious annihilistic option we refuse to give up on the premise that most #people are #decent. That most people #care deeply. Maybe we can #unite over #bees. Do the right thing for once. Make the good choice. Maybe? Please share this thread far and wide. #repost We know you care. Show us. Show one another. Show the bees you care. It’s okay to care. It’s more fulfilling than hate.
More natural than vitriol More infectious than Covid. More godly than prayer. More active than hope. More powerful than greed. Don’t be afraid to care. Deeply. You’ll find you’re not alone. Promise.
Thanks for your time. I’ll shut up now… 14/14 Part 2/2
Cory's rousing #enshitification talk mentioned how capital always imagined the web as a kind of interactive cableTV, a series of walled gardens, reminded me of this text of mine from 2013, one of many on how the internet cam to be centralized. #39c3
A more in-depth look at the forces of counterantidisintermediation, not nearly as catchy a term as enshitification, but key to understanding it underlying logic
A letter to the editor which reads: "APPARENTLY it costs the NHS over E300,000 a year to remove foreign objects from people's rectums. Why aren't we removing British objects instead? was Brexit all for nothing? - Gerry Paton, London"
In the Netherlands we had a weird law introduced a while ago: to fight sodas the government introduced a tax on all drinks, with the exception of dairy (because, you know, lobby). For some reason it was exceptionally difficult to make a distinction between sodas and fruit juice, so they got swept up in the tax.
The food industry retaliated by adding trace amounts of milk to their fruit drinks. After all, there’s no legal distinction between a milk drink with added fruit flavor or a fruit juice with added milk.
So we got this kind of nonsense: fruit juice “with a twist of dairy” to avoid the tax. Dutch innovation at its best I guess.
#GNOME Foundation supports the infrastructure for a lot of foundational technologies that are widely used.
If you are a company or individual, consider donating to the GNOME Foundation so we can help make the infrastructure sustainable of this software. donate.gnome.org/
Don't want my TV to be smart, only connect to RF or video. Never the Internet or even LAN/local WiFI, because, Google, Amazon and NONE of the TV makers can be trusted at all.
Surely you've a better example than "spying" so-called smart TVs?
I got weirdly good sleep last night. It could have been better, but at this point I'll take what I can get. I've had my usual two cups of coffee and I'm pretty sure breakfast is happening. I'm not 100 percent on that but even if not it's all right. I switched back to old WhatsApp which has improved things a lot, hoping I don't get force updated, again, if I do I'll cross that bridge. Even though there is some physical discomfort I'm in an oddly good mood. Hoping to stay that way. I've been down as of late and I hate it. Fuck you depression.
Do you want help with using Mastodon or the wider Fediverse?
Please feel free to ask if you have any questions about using this place! There's no such thing as a silly question, it's fine to ask about anything however simple.
I'm especially keen to help new or non-technical people on here 🙂 And yes I am a human being, I don't use AIs!
(Alternatively, you can browse my website at fedi.tips which has lots of easy-to-understand help and advice.)
There's a new FREE Thirteenth Doctor audio story releasing this week, it joins 9 other free stories released by Big Finish! Find out more in TARDIS Guide Weekly!
![Steps To Reproduce:
[add details for how we can reproduce the issue]](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/742280 "Steps To Reproduce:
[add details for how we can reproduce the issue]")
Bri🥰
in reply to YourFavoriteAtheist🇨🇦 • • •