I do miss my IBMTTS on 64-bit NVDA. Sigh. Eloquence is good but I'll always stay in that minority of people who likes the 22K IBMTTS, so back to 2025.3 we go. I'll keep the alpha around as a portable copy though so I can still experiment and update it once in awhile. Can't believe magnification feature is already in the alphas though, a bit surprising that they're already working on 2026.2, wow, shocked there a bit.
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in reply to Tamas G

Have you given this a try? It works fine for me. github.com/fastfinge/eloquenceโ€ฆ

NVSpeechPlayer now works with 64-bit NVDA. This is great news, and the fix was very easy to do, not a lot of refactoring. I wish the same could be said for other synthesizers, but ah well. Let's just feel lucky and enjoy that feeling while we can. Download: eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlayโ€ฆ (works on older 2025.3 NVDA too, no need to worry there.)
Also includes more Portuguese language rules. Includes the new settings for diphthongs transitions: autoTieDiphthongs, and autoDiphthongOffglideToSemivowel.
in reply to Mike Wassel

@blindndangerous @prism LOL people are thinking of the Espeak variants :) This one only had 4 voices they originally made for it. Edward though isn't the wrong thought: It's what this is now today in Espeak. So if you choose "edward" or any of the "ed" variants you're getting SpeechPlayer fed through Espeak directly, but a lot of people say it sounded different once they integrated as that voice.

Happy Martin Luther King Jr day. He said so many profound things and taught us so many valuable lessons, but this is the quote that resonates strongest with me. To me, itโ€™s even more important than ever when we all have the potential to be keyboard warriors and spread global disharmony with a few key presses. But in any aspect of life, they are words to keep in mind when we feel we have been wronged and the poison of vengeance is pulsing through our veins.

"Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction."

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in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

This is a specific trekkie brain injury: the idea that Star Trek series are strongly bound by rules that can't ever change for economic reasons or narrative expedience, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You stare at Star Trek long enough and you start to believe that any deviation is caused by writers not understanding the lore, when it's just a case of people making a television show on Earth over the course of 60 years
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Si he solicitado [el alta de] asistencia sanitaria a une cรณnyugue, alrededor de cuantos dรญas laborales se puede demorar [en aparecer como beneficiarie]?

Pregunto esto para espaรฑa.

Compartid porfi. Si me dais cifras de 2025 o cercanas me sirve, para hacerme una idea de como estรก el panorama.

This entry was edited (6 hours ago)

I think that's a no-brainer right now that Europe should pursue digital sovereignty aggressively.

It's not about MS Office vs Libre Office, it's about banking apps, cloud services, your phone, your daily life. Which is a way bigger leverage #Trump has about your daily life. #FOSS is security.

#linux

This entry was edited (1 day ago)
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

No spoilers, but I think the series started very well. The cast of adults is great, and the young characters are an interesting bunch. The series clearly has a lot of talent, both in front and behind the cameras. Shout out to Holly Hunter playing a chaos gremlin captain that sits on her bridge chair like a cat; Paul Giamatti for his scenery chewing; and Gina Yashere for her big Nigerian London Mom vibes
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

It's too early to tell, but what I've seen so far intrigues me enough to watch the rest of the showโ€”of course I'm not going to subscribe to Paramount Plus because fuck David Ellison; just like with his dad, never fall into the trap of anthropomorphising an Ellison. I'll do what I've done with Disco and SNW: I'll buy the season pass when it's out, and get the BluRays for my collection.
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

As an Old School TNG Trekkieโ„ข, the "Starfleet Academy" spin off has been in the fan discourse for a long time; back in the late '90s/early '00s discourse typically took the shape of "let's go back to the TOS era character when they were young", because the Star Trek fandom always had this predictable reactionary/nostalgic streak, which was counterbalanced by the "get that prelapsarian fuckery away from me and give me new characters to love" progressive currentโ€ฆ
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

I think the reason why the Starfleet Academy concept kinda works now, as opposed to then, is that the reactionary current that took over the fandom as a response to Discovery got hit by Strange New Worldsโ€”a series that, at its best, takes nostalgia and turns it on its head. Instead of the Academy of Kirk/Spock/McCoy, we got the first five year mission with a different set of legendsโ€ฆ
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

This freed up the part of the fandom that saw Discovery grow up from its grimdark season 1 and 2 into a series dedicated to building bridges and hope in the face of trauma, picking up the pieces of a broken, divided, and confrontational world; the part that is now trying to seed the next generation of the fandom, teaching new (and old) folks how to deal with Star Trek againโ€ฆ
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in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

Instead of looking at the past as a way to retreat into the comfy socks of the future as imagined by our parents and grandparents, we get pushed into a future trying to rebuild itselfโ€”and that future doubles for both the Star Trek and general SF fandom. Instead of going further and further dark (both figuratively and literally, just look at how Picard was staged and lit), we got bright, airy setsโ€ฆ
in reply to Emmanuele Bassi

I don't know if this effort will pan out, and we're going to get a long running series with a rotating cast going farther into the future, like the showrunners seem to indicate. At this point, just like with Discovery, I value a lot more a valiant effort even if that may ultimately fall short, than a safe bet on whatever grimdark slop they'll give us next if things don't change.

#startrek #starfleetacademy

๐Ÿ—ฃ๏ธ Welcome Mia and Mil, two new voices designed to read texts in Luxembourgish using screen readers. They are making progress, but sometimes still struggle a little with Dicks' language.
๐Ÿ”ง Would you like to help them? Come and test them out, and let us know what you think: gd.lu/15pM9q

RE: mas.to/@AccessibilityLU/115921โ€ฆ

Here's one of the projects that has kept us really busy these past six months: developing a Luxembourgish text-to-speech system for screen readers used by blind people.

We hope you like the result!

Many thanks to our partners Ministry for Digitalisation, Zenter fir d'Lรซtzebuerger Sprooch, Centre pour le dรฉveloppement des compรฉtences relatives ร  la vue, LouderPages and to all the contributors of the RHvoice project.

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Dear everybody:

Everything is so much easier to understand, once you realize that the Gold-foil-King is a Mafioso, who only know mafioso methods, and only use mafioso methods.

The letter to the .no PM is classical mafia:

"Nice country you have there, pity if something happened to it. Better think careful about who gets those peace-prices, capisce ?"

EU needs to stop pussying around, and go full in and stand up to the bully.

If not now, when ?

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A twenty-minute power failure has given me the opportunity to listen to and operate VHF and UHF amateur radio bands, and come to the conclusion that electrically operated devices are around 80% of my noise floor on weak signals. So my getting out of this place will probably do me better than getting a better antenna. A better antenna would likely amplify the noise, and make weak signals even more useless.
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in reply to Borris

@BorrisInABox Wow! That's better than a Shari can do in the same room! LOL. This machine isn't that powerful enough for me, I doubt I could key it with no duck, and with no duck, its about S7 at the top of my building. Its on the fire station about three minutes by fire truck from here. But I'm sure it would do a lot better if I went up there with the power off. I used to live in the east end, and there was a 400 watt repeater with a four-bay sintclair litterally a three minute walk from me, and that, I could hear S9 with no duck, and key it up too.
in reply to Adam MacLeod

I don't remember how much power this repeater put out, but it was near the top of a 1100 foot commercial tower. Man, that was a really nice repeater site. There were two repeaters up there. Unfortunately, time and bureaucracy have done what they do, and everything amateur radio was basically left to rot up there when things broke, and they couldn't get the very expensive climbers to go up there and fix stuff when the elevator broke, and the people who owned the tower wouldn't fix it. That happened fairly recently. One of the two repeaters up there was essentially running on a piece of coax for an antenna for a while. Still got out a few miles anyway just because of how high up it was compared to the surrounding terrain. Lol
in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

11yo Little Miss DJ has written by hand (no AI) a little script on her old laptop to do a rotating digital picture frame

Guess which bit of her tech stack has worked consistenly, right from the first experiments with the command to the finished product?

Debian? โŒ
X11? โŒ
feh? โŒ
curl? โœ…

Thank you to you and all the contributors for the only technology my daughter now trusts!

The flood of #enshittification that #Broadcom unleashed upon #VMware and its customers after acquiring it, and its seismic waves in the whole IT supply chain, are a testament of how bad managers who seek for short-term revenue hikes without thinking of the long-term are a cancer, and walking ticking bombs for the tech industry.

theregister.com/2026/01/15/delโ€ฆ

We all know what Broadcom did to VMware after acquiring it. VMware was turned overnight into Broadcomโ€™s cash cow, they hiked prices by 3x in some cases, scrapped perpetual licenses, forced all customers into more expensive subscriptions, said that they only wanted to focus on the most profitable customers and fuck everyone else, all while worsening customer support and providing literally zero added value and features to the product.

Basically a parasitic acquisition solely focused on sucking all the vital lymph out of another product - pure Oracle textbook.

When you play such stunts with individual customers, unfortunately, it works most of the times. Individuals donโ€™t have much leverage, nor choice if there is too much concentration in a certain market. They may complain, but often they swallow the bitter bite.

Things are different when you play them in huge corporate products that are an integral part of the IT infrastructure we all use.

It turns out that among the businesses who were disgruntled when Broadcom suddenly cancelled their VMware perpetual licenses there was Tesco.

But Tesco didnโ€™t acquire VMware licenses directly from Broadcom, of course. They acquired them through a reseller of hardware and software licenses - Computacenter. So Tesco sued them instead for failing to provide them the licenses that they were contractually bound to provide.

Computacenter, on its hand, didnโ€™t acquire VMware licenses directly either. They were provided with the Dell servers they sold, as Dell was an authorized VMware reseller. So Computacenter sued Dell.

Dell, on its hand, says that it has no fault if Broadcom has suddenly changed VMwareโ€™s pricing model, and that they are the ones who broke contracts with the whole downstream supply chain. So Dell sued Broadcom.

And there we go. A chain of 3 lawsuits between 4 giants across the whole IT supply chain in order to call a parasitic company accountable.

What a mess. But I guess that the manager who proposed to squeeze annual recurring revenue got his/her fat quarterly bonus home after things seemed to work for the first year.

This is also your daily reminder that as a sysadmin you must use only FOSS products supported by the community and by strong foundations - and contribute back to them once their success becomes your success too.

Enough with the โ€œbut stability - but support - but licenses - but my managerโ€ corporate bullshit.

The cost of writing your own little qemu CI/CD pipeline to spin up your virtual machines is much lower than the risk of your corporate subscription getting suddenly enshittified by chains of wrong financial incentives at any place in your upstream supply chain, and having to spend years of tears on expensive long-chain lawsuits.

And, even if things go bad, the cost of migrating out of proprietary and non-standard implementations is usually much higher than the cost of migrating to a compatible fork.

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in reply to Tamas G

Good morning. In Portuguese words where you have m or n after a vowel and before a consonant, the m/n is pronounced more or less clearly depending on the dialect. In any case, I believe that pronouncing it would be more standard. Thus, in a word like "antes", instead of หˆษฬƒล‹tอกสƒys, it should be หˆษฬƒล‹ntอกสƒys. Likewise, in the word "amplo", it should be หˆษฬƒmmplสŠ instead of หˆษฬƒmplสŠ. Is it possible to do please?
in reply to Cleverson

@clv1 Hey! Yep, this is possible, and we can do it cleanly in the language pack โ€” no engine change needed.
Whatโ€™s happening is that eSpeak often "compresses" those cases into a nasal vowel plus a single nasal marker before the consonant. So you get something like "nasal A + nasal marker + Tโ€ฆ", which is why "antes" looks like itโ€™s missing a clear "n", and "amplo" doesnโ€™t have that stronger "m" feel.
What I changed in the Portuguese pack is this: When eSpeak outputs that nasal marker before a consonant, we insert a clear "nโ€ sound right after it. That makes "antesโ€ come out closer to what you described (you can hear the consonant more explicitly). For cases like "amploโ€, when a nasal vowel is followed by "mโ€ before another consonant, we strengthen the "mโ€ a bit (by doubling it), so it doesnโ€™t get swallowed.
The nice part: you donโ€™t need "five maps, one per vowelโ€. You can write rules that target the nasal marker itself (or target "nasal vowel + m/n before consonantโ€), so it works across all nasal vowels.
About making it a global engine rule: I wouldnโ€™t rush that, because this is genuinely dialect/style-dependent in Portuguese. Some speakers expect a clearer "n/mโ€ closure, others prefer the more nasalized vowel with a lighter consonant. Packs let us choose a "more standard / clearerโ€ pronunciation for Portuguese without changing how other languages behave (or forcing one Portuguese style for everyone).
eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlayโ€ฆ
in reply to Cleverson

@clv1 If you want to experiment yourself, the easiest approach is:
1.
identify the nasal marker eSpeak uses in these contexts,
2.
add a single replacement that inserts โ€œnโ€ after it when the next sound is a consonant,
3.
add another replacement that strengthens โ€œmโ€ only when it appears after a nasal vowel and before a consonant.
If you share 5โ€“10 words that are still off after this (pt-pt vs pt-br), we can tune the rule so it doesnโ€™t affect cases like โ€œngโ€ clusters where you donโ€™t want an extra โ€œnโ€.
in reply to Tamas G

Regarding last issue, i.e. m and n after a vowel and before a consonant:
words containing am/an are quite good, e.g. amplo, antes;
Words containing em/en are good too, e.g. sempre, sente;
As for words containing im/in, and om/on, I still cannot hear a clear m/n, e.g. cinto, sinto, pomba, ronco.
Lastly, in words containing um/un, there appears to have a disjunction between u and n, e.g. mundo.

Today I joined the world of #Meshcore. @chiptronCZ, @RezzaBuh, @jan, @mirek spoke about it with such enthusiasm that I couldn't resist any longer.
A good thing about getting two devices is that you can send messages to yourself, which is the best I could manage today. ๐Ÿ˜„

I've found another interface to the Wayback Machine like The Old Net called Wayback Classic. Just enter a URL and hit lookup, and the site shows you capture dates for the URL in a nice table format. Click on a month in the table to see entries for that year and month. Unlike The Old Net, WBC will take you to the actual web.archive.org entry rather than giving you a site within a site. wayback-classic.net/

Today is the ten year anniversary for one of the best email series I ever received. The "Instagram and Spotify hacking ring" one.

daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/01/19โ€ฆ

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

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Hey @Tutanota do you know mubi.com considers tuta.com email addresses invalid? I tried to convince their customer support its their problem but they're giving me some resonse which makes no sense. Is there something y'all can do?

#Mubi #Tuta #degoogle #privacy

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in reply to Aryan

opinion

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Once again, the buy #European is trending. What are your favorite European brands? ๐Ÿ‡ช๐Ÿ‡บ

In our latest guide, we take a look at the best European products you can use ๐Ÿ‘‰๏ธ tuta.com/blog/boycott-us-choosโ€ฆ

#BuyEuropean #PrivacyFirst #GDPR #DigitalSovereignty #PrivacyTech

Who has still a #FOSS project hosted on #GitHub? Why?

Don't you prefer a development platform that is aligned with the values of free software?

Did you consider migrating to e.g. @Codeberg? Is there something holding you back?

codeberg.org/about

#opensource #software #git #gitforge #bigtech

People, with #Greenland raising awareness of our massive 24/7 dependence on US clouds for vital services, I made a list of what (government) stuff would break here under US sanctions. It is EXTREMELY depressing. Can I suggest that people also make a list like this one for their own countries? It is getting quite some traction here: berthub.eu/articles/posts/dashโ€ฆ
โ‡ง