My home server is back! I updated it to Debian 13, installed an Intel Arc B580 graphics card, and had no luck connecting via SSH. Monitors were blank. I finally connected headphones and a keyboard and found/fixed the problem. It wasn't the card at all. The update renamed my ethernet from enp12s0 to enp15s0, so the networking service was failing to start. It works now.

I'm going through the proofs of weakening, substitution, soundness, completeness, and hopefully compactness for first-order logic. At the moment, I'm on the substitution part. I don't know why, but semantics annoy me. The whole evaluation of terms with the structure and assignment thing is just so easy to mess up and there are, so to speak, lots of types that shouldn't be mixed: terms, symbols, elements of the domain of the structure... But I'll get there eventually.

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents.

They’ve had their necks kneeled on.

They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear.

At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them.

Revisit our Oct. 2025 story:
propublica.org/article/immigra…

#Immigration #ICE #DHS #USPolitics #News #Trump #Law

I have a serious question out there for those who like listening to music. How much do you think a musician/creator should get paid when you listen to their music?

I ask because the amount is pitifully small if you stream - for Soundcloud it would take around 400 streams for the musician to make 1 USD and that is one of the better streaming platforms. For Spotify, its thousands of streams - fine for Lady Gaga but not for small creators, often in niche markets.

On the other hand many musicians sell their music for a few dollars for a whole album or less than a dollar a track. Yet few seem to avail themselves of actually buying music.

Streaming is killing music and combined with the AI generated trash that is all over platforms like Spotify one has to wonder how much longer the market for music generated by real people will last.

So please, go seek out your favourite musician and BUY an album or track. Don't stream and certainly don't use Spotify.

Hugs, Sammi

#music

in reply to Sammi

I believe, a musician must be paid with live concerts, and as for albums, it must be easy to buy a CD as well as the whole album and individual tracks as physical files without DRM. but first and foremost, music must be allowed to play in public places to get known. Like, why would I buy random tracks from random people if I've never heard them? On the other hand, if I hear a track in a mall or in a restaurant, I liked it, I shazam it (or ask someone about it), then likely I'd buy it.

Well, if anyone ever gets me a copy of SVCTL32.dll / SVCTL64.dll without the timer restrictions, would seriously pay like a hundred bucks for it. But it's never gonna happen. Sigh. That DLL is forever time-locked to something Image Line do in FL Studio to give it proper licensing. So no newer softVoice, no 64-bit SoftVoice build until then. The DLL files at eurpod.com/svfl.zip for those interested. SoftVoice as a company is quite defunct, their website is up yes but as far as a company with filings and public record they have not been around since the mid-2000s. So, not a chance of reaching out and asking for my own licensed copy either. This is all making me very sad, now I've lost all motivation to code.
I tried to see if it was returning the last chunks of text in the callback, but nope. SVAudioCallback is either a query function (not a “register callback” function), orSVCTL only enables callbacks after some other registration step (likely via SVRegister / SVCommand), or callback is only for a different output mode (like “send audio to file” or “external device”), and isn’t used for TTS the way we’re invoking it. That's why my hunch here lies with the demo restriction and a timer that is set for each utterance, that when stopped throws away the last chunks of spoken feedback.
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
in reply to Tamas G

I was about to suggest you contact the registered owner of text2speech.com but of course it's a private registration. Chances are it wasn't always that way, but I have no idea if there's an archive of old whois data anywhere. But of course the fact remains that even if the actual company is dead, somebody, somewhere *is* paying to keep the domain renewed and the website active.
in reply to Jayson Smith

@jaybird110127 oh interesting. Yeah, that's very mysterious, because the site is just mostly a zombie one at this point, with content only archived to be archived. But I do wonder how FL Studio (well, Image line) got to build a new binary around 2014 or so, at least that's the timestamp on the DLL. It looks like even FL Studio 2025 includes it, so they especially are keeping it alive but of course I think probably have full source code or SDK if they had purchased it back when the company was still alive.

As a post about domain names comes across my timeline, I am also reminded, for the second time, by the Dot Radio organization that netmix.radio is up for renewal on February 12. Every time I look at the listener count over there, its usually me, myself, or no one, LOL. But that's totally expected. I just through up an audio-processed stream of 90,000 tracks of randomness with a couple jingles and let rip. So we'll definitely call that a half-fast job. I didn't expect to get much out of the project, and I probably don't want something like that getting too big anyway. So it'll probably not get renewed.
in reply to Adam MacLeod

Hmm, I get a problem loading page when trying to open that.
Yeah honestly as awesome as I find internet radio it's hard to pull something off with which I'd be satisfied. I have Azuracast, but just throwing in some ripped or maybe_not ripped music, semi good jingles and calling it a day seems not nice, but I don't have the capacity for anything else, nor would there be the interest by anyone.
in reply to Jonathan

@jonathan859 Internet Radio's ship sailed twenty years ago, for the average Joe really. As an assistant manager to a somewhat successful project, as in a peak of ten listeners, and now this defunct project of litterally zero listeners, I can definitely tell you that Internet Radio is a very niche, for select groups, market now. Its popular in the blind community for reasons, of course, but that's about as far as it goes. Even the majority of blindies are mainstreamed, and don't do Internet radio. Its Spotify, Deezer, Apple music, etc, etc. That and TuneIn, and they are even totally commercialized now, with a $1000/minimum per month to list.

Barrierefreiheit ist kein Extra und kein Bonus. Das ist die verdammte Unterkante von Qualität. Wer 2026 noch Webseiten oder Apps ohne vollständige Barrierefreiheit betreibt, ist fachlich ungeeignet. Punkt. Das ist kein „wir kommen später dazu“, das ist IT-Pfusch. Wer Mindeststandards nicht erfüllt, hat in professioneller Softwareentwicklung und Webdesign nichts verloren. #Barrierefreiheit #Accessibility #ITFail #Qualitätsstandard #WebDev

For the last nearly two weeks, almost all of my computing tasks have been done with my iPhone using NVDA Remote RC connected to one of two laptops back home in New York 500 miles away.
It's just so cool to pull out a bluetooth keyboard and connect to a familiar environment from anywhere, but it's even cooler what you can still do without a keyboard if you don't have one, thanks to the custom gestures and presets for them.
If you use Voiceover Announcements instead of AVSPEECH, you can even use a braille display, though it is nowhere as extensive as using a display direct with NVDA. So, if you absolutely rely on using a braille display, this is not the best way to work, but you are not completely without the ability to get an idea of what's going on.

I just did another small editing job remotely using Reaper on my laptop at home, and TeamTalk on a server running on a Raspberry Pi at home connected to Tailscale to connect the audio. Yep, it's an old TeamTalk server. I don't think there are rPi builds of modern ones anymore.
Not the best way to do it, there is some lag, but considering I'm using Airpods Pro, which adds more lag, internet latency, etc. it worked pretty well, all things considered. Sonobus for iOS is, unfortunately, very jittery most of the time, probably because it hasn't been updated since 2023, and iOS has changed around it.

I have still not quite gotten fully comfortable with editing stuff on Reaper under Mac OS, at least with the same speed and efficiency, especially when it comes to envelope automation, and I have some plugins installed on the Windows laptop that I don't have on Mac OS that I need for this small weekly project, so it's nice to just be able to remote in and manipulate that existing environment. The fact that I can do that from my phone from anywhere, provided internet connectivity is good, and latency and jitter is reasonable, is just fantastic.

Right now, I have the second eSIM on my phone using AT&T, and amusingly enough, latency is almost the same to my stuff at home whether I'm using WiFi or AT&T.
Jitter is worse on the mobile connection, but it's still perfectly usable, even for audio editing. I forgot that I had WiFi turned off for three days, didn't really notice.

So, anyway, technology is still cool sometimes.

This entry was edited (4 days ago)

reshared this

in reply to Borris

I've got to agree with this. If I may respectfully add to it, it's not so much that we can do these things, we've been able to for a while, it's that #NVDARC makes it easy and smooth. It just works without workarounds. You don't have to think, just hit the icon and start typing. Note also that, when I say we've been able to do it in the past, I mean with the keyboard. Touch stuff is simply a new thing, and a very impressive thing with the speed and the smoothness. It really is astonishing in how well it works and what you can accomplish.

Sneaker auf der Bühne, aber ein Weltbild aus den 50ern?

In meinem neuen Artikel analysiere ich den „Hochglanz-Fundamentalismus“ moderner Freikirchen. Ich zeige auf, warum deren dualistische Weltsicht („Licht vs. Finsternis“) strukturell der Neuen Rechten in die Karten spielt.

#ExEvangelikal #Freikirchen #Evangelikale #AfD #Rechtsruck #Fundamentalismus #Kirchenkritik #Dekonstruktion #Politik #Religion

open.substack.com/pub/heinerm/…

I have a first laptop with HiDPI screen and trying to set GUI scaling in #Gnome.

I enabled experimntal fractional scaling, and set 166% scaling factor in Gnome settings.

For GDK apps there is no problem.
But many other apps are not scaled, or are scaled partly - window header bar is small. Is there universal solution to this? Or how do you set scaling on all GUI toolkits like GTK2, Electron, QT, Java?

UK Prime Minister Starmer seeks support for international X ban

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is in talks with Canada and Australia in an effort to muster support for a potential international ban on social media X. It comes after the platform’s integrated AI assistant, Grok, was used to generate sexualised deepfakes of women and children.

euractiv.com/news/uk-prime-min…

I put my mouse in the microwave !!

Seriously. I have a bluetooth mouse that wouldn't enter pairing mode. It was connecting to *something*... maybe a smart switch or whatever. This cheap mouse has no way to enter pairing mode if it's connected to something.

So anyway, a microwave oven is a faraday cage. I turned the mouse on, tossed it in, shut the door and waited. It entered pairing mode quickly, and boom, connected to my tablet.

A+++ life hack by yours truly. Just don't start the nuker or magic smoke will come out 😆

#lifehack #bluetooth

reshared this

New scrape: Instagram allegedly had 17M rows of largely public data scraped from an API and posted to a hacking forum this week. 6.2M rows also included an email address, and some rows a phone number. 100% were already in @haveibeenpwned. Read more: haveibeenpwned.com/Breach/Inst…

"…muss ich bekennen, dass wir alle […] nicht ein Hundertstel, nicht ein Tausendstel dessen für möglich gehalten haben, was dann immer wenige Wochen später hereinbrechen sollte."

- Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern

Ein autobiografisches Werk Stefan Zweigs.

Das Buch entstand kurz vor Zweigs Tod in den letzten Jahren (von 1939 bis 1941) seines Exils und erschien postum 1942 in Stockholm.

archive.org/details/StefanZwei…

This is now my Windows startup sound. Taken from [Elecarlton](youtube.com/channel/UC9htxziaT…)'s latest video.

I'm not exactly sure why I'm doing this on a Sunday, and the hard work was done by others, but there you go; proposed fix for CVE-2026-0716. gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libsoup…

Mal by som otázku/prosbu na mieste osadenstvo. Vždy som chcel vedieť programovať, ale nikdy mi to veľmi nešlo. Naposledy som to skúšal pred 13 rokmi, kedy som sa skúšal naučiť PHP (konkrétne Laravel).

Chcel by som to znova vyskúšať, a tak otázka znie, či by mi niekto vedel poradiť, ako na to, resp. nejaké tipy na návody a pod. Potreboval by som to vysvetľovať asi čo najprimitívnejšie ako to len pôjde, a ideálne aby to bolo v slovenčine/češtine. Taktiež aby to bolo zadarmo, keďže nemám peniaze na nejaké platené kurzy. Mohla by mi v učení pomôcť aj AI? Aj keď viem, že tu nie sú jej priaznivci, no ja osobne nie som jej zarytý kritik.

A aby som nezabudol, prioritne by som sa chcel asi naučiť to PHP (aby som vedel naprogramovať webstránky, nejaké redakčné systémy a pod.), prípadne ešte C++ (keďže by som chcel vedieť programovať Arduino).

Vopred ďakujem za rady/pomoc.

in reply to SuspiciousDuck

Python je dobrá voľba z viacerých (netechnických) ohľadov, najmä dostupnosť učebného materiálu (dokumentácia, knihy, tutoriály, blogy) a veľkosť komunity (množstvo ľudí, ktorí vedia pomôcť).

Ako už bolo písané, je dobré mať nejaký cieľ (projekt), ktorý bude motiváciou učiť sa (áno, sú aj ľudia, ktorí sa učia teoretickú fyziku "len tak"...). Netreba sa báť skúšať, zlyhávať, pýtať sa a opravovať, dokým to nepôjde.

Ja "programujem" 2/3 svojho života a stále sa učím :)

This entry was edited (4 days ago)

Das letzte mal als ich versucht habe #NINA auf #GrapheneOS ohne Google Play Services zum Laufen zu bringen, habe ich es leider nicht hinbekommen (ist aber schon ein paar Jahre her). Wenn jemand passend zum #did #dut nach Alternativen sucht: #fosswarn

Mit FOSSwarn bekommt ihr offizielle Warnmeldungen für eure Orte direkt aufs Handy. Push-Benachrichtigungen funktionieren ebenfalls zuverlässig über UnifiedPush, ich nutze dazu die App #Sunup

#didit #dutgemacht

f-droid.org/packages/de.nucleu…

in reply to equinox

Dutch AON FttH specs are saying just TX 1310nm, RX 1490/1550 nm.
I bought a 1550nm one as they are much more common and got no link. So I bought a 1490nm one and the link came up immediately.

Then I bought fibre cleaning pens, got extra 10 dB by cleaning the connectors and now even the 1550nm one gets the link.
So probably if you have enough optical power, all SFPs are wideband 😁