@TomGrant91 yes, no more chunked reading. That's the one goal of the wrapper, we can really hook into the SoftVoice DLL and control how the flow of voice data is.
I wouldn't mind testing these too! Softvoice was included in a program I messed with for music called Fruity Loops now FL studio by Image Line. I messed with it with a group of people, a DJ called Nathan and 2 kids called Nathan and Jason and their mum Anita. The speech synth used was softvoice but only the word at a time varient version, you have to put underlines in the text to speak as a sentence.
@TomGrant91 oh yeah you would. What if I crash your NVDA because the driver has some stability issues right now when you move too fast around? no no. I wouldn't give you something unusable. :D
@TomGrant91 oh yeah, it'll only improve I think. It lets me expose a lot of other settings so the variants may just need some recreation on how they set up those parameters. but overall it'll be better then the prior driver I think, it's shaping up to be faster already.
Going to @fosdem this year? Me too! I'll even be babbling about the work we've done over the past couple of years to support Microsoft Exchange in @thunderbird - that'll be Saturday midday in the Modern Email devroom.
Question: what are y'all using as secret service on #Linux? (With #Wayland and #sway, if that matters.)
I did not like #GNOME #Keyring, because that pulled in tons of stuff I didn't want.
I'm currently using #KeePassXC, but let's just say it's a much better password manager than a Secret Service. (e.g., it can't remember authorized binaries over a session, and handling multiple databases isn't great.)
Ideally, I want something that does only this, but does it well.
Every time a politician posts on Twitter a journalist should ask them to justify supporting child sexual abuse and fascism. thebeaverton.com/2026/01/elon-…
AUSTIN, TX - World's richest man Elon Musk has achieved another lifelong milestone goal, this time training his artificial intelligence program Grok to make it easier than ever for users to create images of child sex abuse.
One of the items on our mobile roadmap this year is exploring better calendar integration on the Android app, whether through the built-in phone calendar or developing a calendar element of our own.
If TalkBack is running, TalkBack settings can be found among the TalkBack menu items. Alternatively, it is possible to navigate to installed services in
Coming up tonight at 8 PM eastern, it's the first Old Wooden barn of 2026! Join @jmd2000 for 3 hours of Country, Bluegrass, and even some cylinder music. Cause why the hell not. hkcradio.com
"consumers aren't buying based on AI” is demonstrably untrue, because i am a consumer, and i buy based on AI. i see a product uses AI and i choose something else
And now I'm learning Typst. AFAICT it's like Markdown with functions and PDF output, or a less noisy but just as powerful LaTeX. Found it looking for something that could generate invoices without me having to dig up someone's LaTeX template from GitHub and shoehorn my text into whatever format it expects. In addition to typesetting documents, I can store invoices as data in recutils, pipe out that data as a Typst document using the invoice template, then convert to PDF. Not sure of an easy way to do this in plain Markdown, and LaTeX would require a bunch of other noise plus using someone's random template. Apparently the Typst templates have visual regression tests too, presumably meaning I wouldn't have that one odd experience where for some reason my LaTeX invoice was pink and I had no clue why. Fun times.
I was using pdflatex to generate receipts for product purchases on my website, and I found it didn't have very good international multilingual unicode support. I found wkhtmltopdf, which works great for me. On a digitalocean debian server, I'm producing receipts that closely mimic my on-line HTML receipts in 16 languages. I highly recommend wkhtmltopdf.
Nice, thanks for that. Have you played with Typst at all? Curious if it's something you tried and dismissed for some reason--I'm just reading about it so maybe there's some hidden gotcha.
I observe some weird behaviour from my organisations #outlook server. I use #thunderbird as a desktop client. When I send a message to an unknown recipent, the non delivery report gets flagged as junk from outlook and will never be delivered into the inbox. All support staff I am asking are trying to convice me, I am doing something wrong or that is just the way it is.
E.g. #microsoft says: "This is not a misconfiguration in the traditional sense (such as no broken SPF/DKIM/DMARC, no transport rules required). Rather, it relates to how EOP handles NDRs based on the originating client’s submission method. It aligns with Microsoft’s design: Outlook web/desktop clients receive preferential treatment for internal mail flow."
We checked in with our desktop team, and unfortunately this is just Microsoft doing its own thing, as they say. For now, it might be possible to set up a filter using 'Undeliverable' in your subject keyword to direct these messages to your inbox and mark them as not spam.
How much would my Polish followers enjoy having a Wrapper for SMP Soft? It's not hard to make one, but I wonder if it's worth my time. Might have to make one for NVDA 2026.X, although at least SMPSoft can grab direct wave chunks, it's just that the engine is a bit meh Like, it's not as bad as SoftVoice. But like, it's kinda bad.
Well, it was the first Polish synthesizer I ever heard so I have a bit of sentimental value with it. It first came out as a hardware unit and then became the voice of Kajetek, our homegrown notetaker which is where I ran into it.
Something else you could look into if you ever feel bored enough is a forgotten synthesizer called Rozmowy, created by Wirtualna Polska mainly to make their instant messenger talk. datajake.braillescreen.net/TTS…
@pitermach oh yes. I've look into that one a bit, it looks to be based on FestVox, which is to say, it's using Festival-generated voices. Very interesting. But no DLL, there's an engine that drives the voices as an executable, which makes that one super tricky. Not one single DLL lib that we could load into NVDA, so we'd have to manipulate the client executable to get speech results, blah. It felt like a lot more work than worth to even try to get speech out of it, kinda sad.
Okay I promise I'll stop asking for resources soon but what are good PDF readers for Mac and Windows? I don't know if Microsoft Edge works as well as I thought it did, and Preview is doing some really ugly things to PDFs with images in them.
If you must read PDF, and you want full support for the tags (if you're lucky enough to be working with a tagged PDF), Adobe Reader is still the only robust option on Windows.
@matt Okay. I've thought about getting back into Adobe Reader. It's just been really sluggish for me and really cumbersome to navigate. I'm probably doing something wrong though, wouldn't be the first time.
And if the PDFs you need to read aren't tagged, I would of course recommend my company's own Scribe for Documents (scribeit.io/). We released a major upgrade just a couple of weeks ago.
Resource Limit Is Reached The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later. Apache Server at eurpod.com Port 443
@vol4life8657 ah yeah sad, rommix0/ removed his repo. The add-ons and Sam's work lives on, but I think he just didn't want to be associated with the project. I'll swap it out for Sam's for now I think.
The ruling affects metadata from calls and texts, shows who communicated and where; lawmakers must revise rules, tightening access and protecting privacy.
Minidisc or cassette might be cooler, but honestly CDs are probably the easiest “retro” format to get into.
Used players are still relatively easy to come by and you can get a drive for your computer to burn audio CDs very easily; and there’s plenty of dirt cheap used CDs. (This CD Walkman is from Goodwill!)
@Tutanota What is the long term plan for the tuta server (email, calendar, contacts)? Will tuta publish an open-source reference implementation (maybe headless) such that the community can start self-hosting, and such that other email provides can start adopting tuta's new standard in a decentralized way?
I have moved all my main chats to @delta@chaos.social. My whole family is there and the friends I communicate most often as well.
In order to help with information regarding setting up a chatmail relay server, I decided to take a stab at writing an easy step-by-step guide based on the official documentation and made a video to go along with it.
Hei! Jeg skal også bestille stickers før FOSDEM. Bruker stickerapp idag, men ser etter alternativer som er billigere til fange kvalitet. Hvem bruker du til å trykke stickers? 😸
“‘AI’ is not your friend. Nor is it an intelligent tutor, an empathetic ear, or a helpful assistant. It can not ‘make up’ facts, and it does not make ‘mistakes’. It does not actually answer your questions.”
I present for all interested, my annual HKC Radio megapack as I'm now calling it. This is a collection of various shows and special events from the current era of HKC Radio, from July 2021 to now. It includes official archives where possible, but also unofficial archives of events and shows no longer on the station from former broadcasters that did awesome shows during their time on the station. Missed a birthday bash or want to relive a Weakest link game? You'll likely find it here. This year's megapack comes in at an impressive 263 GB! Enjoy, and for fans of Digital Domain, I'll be working on putting together a separate package or set of packages, that'll allow you to enjoy all domains from 2006 to present. But for now, enjoy this year's HKC Radio Megapack. sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/kd…
@BorrisInABox Aww, don't feel like filling up your drive with bits of internet radio history? Never mind you probably wouldn't have room to extract the thing anyway, lol. I probably should recommend folks that want this should have at least 526GB of free space to allow for the extraction of this package, or have a separate drive to extract to, lol. :)
Slack is having a weird field day Friday where even though I'm messaging a person, her conversation shows as unread in the control+T "jump to conversation" dialog. It's as though it's not marking unread things as read. Maybe Slack decided to get lazy for the Friday, said fuck it, I'm done marking people's messages as read now, they've read too much. Ha.
Zu der Kartoffelaktion: mögliche Verteilstellen (z.B. Schulen, Kitas, Kirchgemeinden) sollen sich bis übermorgen melden, Lieferung ist dann nächste Woche Donnerstag oder Freitag. Die Verteilstellen geben sie dann an die Bevölkerung weiter.
You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation
Beginning Jan. 26, Quebec government employees will be required to work three days a week in the office instead of two, a move that is drawing pushback from one of the province’s largest independent unions.
> Prior to Alexa Plus, issuing a voice command for a pre-programmed coffee routine via standard Alexa was a relatively reliable affair. Now, the more advanced assistant has shown moments of confusion, failing to consistently execute a basic coffee order. This hiccup underscores a broader industry challenge: while next-gen AI assistants boast vast potential for complex, conversational interaction, they can ironically stumble over the straightforward, programmed commands that defined earlier smart home tech.
When I was young, we even had coffee makers without Alexa functionality.
They were rather ingenious, they had 'buttons', little surfaces connected to mechnical levers and an electronic switch.
As user, you would touch the 'button', and the coffee machine would then execute the associated command.
I dont know how it worked internally. I suppose they had a little speaker inside next to the Alexa microphone, and it would sound out the command at inaudible volume
the fridge that also uses computer vision to track when food items are running low and can advertise replacements.
"Advertise"!? That's not how this was supposed to go. The smart fridge is supposed to remind you, maybe add your preferred product to your shopping list or next groceries order, not take this as an opportunity to spam you with ads.
We are very well aware of the fact that X for Grok is now offering a spicy mode showing explicit sexual content with some output generated with childlike images:
📌 A detailed request for information on Grok has been sent to X, and we are reviewing the company’s responses.
📌 X has been ordered to retain all internal documents and data concerning Grok’s features until the end of 2026.
The Digital Services Act is very clear:
In the EU, all platforms have to get their own house in order.
The Document Foundation, the non-profit entity behind @libreoffice, has an updated Conflict of Interest Policy for its Board of Directors: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the LibreOffice project. It collects donations from users, and employs a small team to support and coordinate the worldwide community that makes the software.
one of my favorite (depressing) things to do is being in a large room of tech coworkers and figuring out the worst high frequency male name to female ratio, like the number of Davids vs. number of women.
![King Restores British Rule over U.S.
Hugo Burnand
[Photo of King Charles in full regalia]
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—In a move that was widely hailed across
the free world, on Friday King Charles Ill of the United Kingdom
reasserted British rule over the colonies formerly known as the United
States of America.
“In recent days, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller have
been advocating a muscular return to colonialism,” the monarch said. “I
couldn't agree more with those chaps.”
“We lost the colonies because our King went insane,” Charles added.
“But now the shoe's on the other bloody foot, isn't it?”
As for what this change in status would mean for Trump, the King said,
“Perhaps he could room with his old chum, my idiot brother.”](https://fedi.ml/photo/preview/640/746885 "King Restores British Rule over U.S.
Hugo Burnand
[Photo of King Charles in full regalia]
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—In a move that was widely hailed across
the free world, on Friday King Charles Ill of the United Kingdom
reasserted British rule over the colonies formerly known as the United
States of America.
“In recent days, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller have
been advocating a muscular return to colonialism,” the monarch said. “I
couldn't agree more with those chaps.”
“We lost the colonies because our King went insane,” Charles added.
“But now the shoe's on the other bloody foot, isn't it?”
As for what this change in status would mean for Trump, the King said,
“Perhaps he could room with his old chum, my idiot brother.”")
Christopher Duffley
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tom Grant
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in reply to Tamas G • • •Tamas G
in reply to Tom Grant • • •Tom Grant
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tamas G
in reply to Tom Grant • • •Tom Grant
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tom Grant
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tom Grant
in reply to Tamas G • • •Tamas G
in reply to Tom Grant • • •