Tech Blitz 2025: Assistive Technology Showcase Brings Together Blind, DeafBlind, and Low Vision Community for Innovation, Discovery, and Connection. helenkeller.org/tech-blitz-202…
Tech Blitz 2025 brought together assistive technology vendors and the blind, DeafBlind, and low vision community at Helen Keller National Center for hands-on demonstrations and direct user feedback.
The other week I covered part one of Fireborn's accessibility series and today we're back here for part 2, the section on the audio stack, something I am per...
I already decided right after Trump won for the first time that I will not travel to the US anymore. This announcement should send chills down your spine, IMHO (In My Humble Opinion). This is pure authoritarianism and proto-fascism.
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US-Außenminister: Wer in deutschen Sicherheits- und Regulierungsbehörden arbeitet, um extremistischen Content aus den USA – etwa Holocaustleugnung, Gewaltaufrufe oder Lobgesänge auf den Nationalsozialismus – zu monitoren und zu fla…
if you're an American on American soil it does seem to be a bit of overreach for the EU to punish you for something you say, but obv if you're an American living or working/doing business in the EU you should have to follow their laws.
I don't entirely disagree with this but I'm suspicious of what they claim they're doing. The entire premise of what they're getting at is probably intentionally misleading...
edit: e.g., the EU loves to write vague laws and then apply them selectively to extract tons of money from American corporations and that in itself deserves some severe punishment IMHO. "The EU could really use another $3B, so let's fine Apple for something" should not be a funding model of a government.
oh no, I'm not going to justify this stupid tariff tantrum. It's a huge waste of everyone's time and energy and historically taints the party who plays this game for decades, so I'm happy to watch it burn anyway. Something good will come of this even though we'll have lost a ton of allies and partners for the next couple decades...
@feld You said "if you're an American on American soil it does seem to be a bit of overreach for the EU to punish you for something you say" as if it that was true. It isn't. What really happens is that we have stricter laws on hate speak and certain symbols. So if you as an American post Swastikas and glorify the holocaust, your post will not be shown in Germany, as that is illegal content. Is all.
I think that's fine. If an American company wants to provide an internet service to a foreign country they must follow their laws, just like with any other business that operates in that country. No objections there.
My Firefox addon got approved! It ensures i.imgur.com and i.reddit.com actually send you an image when visiting links instead of redirecting to a page with a bunch of proprietary javascript!
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
The solution begins with restricting banks and financial platforms: mandate Tor-only access, mandate passkeys, criminalize fingerprinting, criminalize collection of biometrics
This is why I don't see laws as the answer to all of my problems. Many people would rather try to make privacy some legal right so that they can continue to use their devices that will more than happily trample on and bypass those laws rather than taking initiative and choosing to use devices that voluntarily follow the morals and ethics that they want. I trust a company that chooses to be good when they don't have to rather than trust a company only doing so because they want to avoid jail or a fine. Companies that do the right thing for the right reasons should be supported.
FTP is going out of style. The Chrome team has previously announced that they are deprecating and removing support for FTP. Mozilla also announced their plan for the deprecation of FTP in Firefox.
FTP is quite unique in the #curl collection of protocols due to its (weird) mandatory use of a separate TCP connection for the data transfer (and the fact that it can be setup in either direction, client to server or server to client) . It is complicated for users, for sysadmins and it is a complication in source code and internal curl TCP management as well.
So yeah, it also keeps causing us headaches to this day.
Add TLS session reuse across the two TCP connections to the mix (to reduce the hijacking risk of FTPS data connections) and it gets even more complicated. Does curl support this? This old mailing list post suggests it doesn't: curl.se/mail/lib-2017-05/0048.…
So, if I'm reading this right I can send a FTP request, in which case the server might do the TCP setup for me... or not ? Is it a random choice or is there a flowchart for which party starts talking first ?
if curl ever dropped FTP support I can predict with certainty that three of Canada's five major banks would instantly have cataclysmic issues performing wire transfers.
Eventbrite - The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) presents Imagining More: A Candid Convo About the Future of the Black Web Experience - Friday, May 30, 2025 - Find event and ticket information.
We are pleased to announce a new minor release from our stable branch.
This update addresses various issues that have been noticed since the previous release, as well as a few improvements, including some important fixes for invites.
Last year I gave a presentation at #ADC24 about #AbletonMove and finally that presentation is online. it's in a much longer video so I've shared where my bit starts, which is around the 1 hour 21 minute mark. I was told to keep it to 10 minutes, so that's what I did. youtu.be/ZkZ5lu3yEZk?si=zXyftn…
Well done sir. I wish they hadn't used DXRevive on the microphones though, the very first model they released did not work too well on the voices. Still, well done indeed.
@erion I haven't heard of it, does it use the same technology? During the bass line for example, it was going 'Dumb dumb duh dumb' as if it were trying to talk, which Adobe would have also done in the same situation.
@erion Well, better... i'd argue against it. Dx Revive is basically a "fill the gap" for dialogues, where hard to understand voice overs kinda get auto-completed and polished. Thing is, it trains your voice on the materials, and in parts that are really hard to understand, it tries to guess what you just said, and it can go terribly wrong with that. I once tried to fix a bad WhatsApp recording of two dudes, it messed up all that was said really badly.
There is no training involved, it just simply uses your source material as a reference. It has a model trained on various voices in various languages, which it uses for multiple steps (these are what you mentioned as polish). Compared to Adobe, it does more and locally on your computer without you having to send your audio files to their servers to process. That's definitely better in my book, but of course you may think otherwise.
As far as the quality goes, this largely depends on the source material, you will usually get better results if you use one plugin instance for one voice only. Some models may work better for a specific voice, as an example their Studio 2 model deals with lower frequencies better.
@erion "it simply uses your source material as reference", that is training, lol. Apart from that, yeah, being able to use it locally is definitely a plus, and i'm not saying that it can't do well, but in my experience it heavily depends on the source material, sometimes it even makes up words that were never spoken and don't make sense at all, that is something that IMO is important to remember.
If it is indeed training, it would be able to reproduce the same result without using your audio source, which it can't. It is not trained on it, it is using it as a reference to learn the characteristics of the voice or voices and enhance it by isolating the voices, recovering missing frequencies by synthesizing them from the AI model, balancing it to an EQ profile, etc.
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).
Did you know @drafts can send mail directly from your Gmail account via the Gmail API? Guessing not, since I just got an email from Google letting me know the OAuth credentials for this integration were at risk of being deleted because they hadn't been used in 6 six months! 🤦♂️
listen to "I'M NOT SCARED" here: https://salemilese.lnk.to/imnotscaredpre-save "growing down" the album here: https://salemilese.lnk.to/growingdownFollow sal...
Perso, je pense partir sur #Wallabag ? (à tester). Dommage pour #Pocket, c'était super pratique avec une liseuse #Kobo... => « Comment exporter ses articles de Pocket avant sa fermeture le 8 juillet 2025 ? » (via @profduweb) youtube.com/watch?v=Hrpta2mPL0…
Lien pour exporter vos articles https://getpocket.com/exportAide Mozilla sur le sujet https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/exporting-your-pocket-listLes alte...
The so-called reciprocal tariffs imposed on "Liberation Day" and the trafficking-related tariffs have all been ruled an illegal overreach by the President and have been blocked by a U.S. trade court.
DeepSeek released an updated version of their popular R1 reasoning model (version 0528) with – according to the company – increased benchmark performance, reduced hallucinations, and native support for function calling and JSON output.
(Clearly a much better word than simplification.) I believe we generally accept the truth that we should write simple and easy to read code in order to make it harder to create bugs and cause security problems.
I love the curl dashboard and I want to use some of the stats for other projects. I forked this repository and started generalizing the scripts. For instance, github-cache.pl grabs a copy of issues...
I don't want to come over too critical as I have a huge amount of appreciation and respect for you & curl. That said I have found that while having complexity in code is bad, it's also hard to reduce and one way that some people try to reduce it is to "hide" it across many simple looking functions. I once got my pen and paper out and found that to get from one function at the high level to the low level equivalent the path was through 5 lays of inheritance and 3 different branches
@pointswaves we don't have any specific checks for that, but all our changes are reviewed and we write code to be readable and maintainable. I consider the risk that someone would go overboard in the other direction to be slim.
@pointswaves I also had the experience of a developer breaking a long function into four or so shorter functions that called each other in sequence. I'm sure you don't have a high risk of this. My insight from that experience is that what really matters is that the complexity of the code is as low as possible considering the complexity of the problem. But the complexity metrics do not consider the problem complexity. I would rather see all the code for a complex problem in one place.
for macOS Sequoia Intro This guide will attempt to document all of the options in VoiceOver Utility and what they do. After the release of my guide for iOS VoiceOver settings, I figured I would create a similar guide for macOS.
for macOS Sequoia Intro Have you ever thought, "I wish there was a keyboard shortcut for that"? This guide will teach you how to create a keyboard shortcut for any option in the menu bar, under any menu, including the Apple menu.
Google has started rolling out version 16.0 of the TalkBack screen reader. This release introduces new image description features powered by Gemini AI and new
Samsung has begun rolling out the first beta of One UI 8.0, based on Android 16, to its flagship Galaxy S25 series. For visually impaired users relying on
It’s actually kind of amazing how often Ellison, who largely rides under the radar compared to Elmo, Altman et al., shuttles back and forth to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring. lumberjacks.social/@SiliconJet…
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A #gulfstream G650 (Reg: N817GS) reportedly used by #larryellison has just been detected in flight at Thu May 29 2025 15:56:49 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time).
The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210).
👀 Coming to Chrome DevTools in Chrome 138: CSS Value Tracing
When you hover a --custom-prop in a `var()`, DevTools currently shows you the computed value. From Chrome 138 onwards, you can hover the `var` part to see how CSS actually got to that value.
Keeps more stuff awake than regular standby. I think the idea is to get laptops closer to the “instant on” of phones and tablets. But in my experience it seems to be usually implemented pretty badly and just results in laptops overheating in bags and draining power in just a few hours.
I have old ThinkPads I can leave in standby and forget about for 3 weeks. With modern standby they’re usually dead in under 8 hours.
Something's bothering me, wanted to write up a Masto post about it up for a few days, but it wasn't until today that all my thoughts snapped into place. I read an article, "The Sony XM6 are an accomplished set of cans, but they’re not replacing my Sonos Ace anytime soon", at techradar.com/audio/wireless-h… - well written. However, it's also highly critical of the XM6 for the comfort. I have a few folks on my TL interested in these, so I wanted to weigh in with my perspective too, owning both sets of cans. For those who have super tiny earholes, or those with very large earflaps, the XM6 may indeed be a lesser-than-ideal fit. Not only are the earcups more shallow, but there's a plastic protrusion in the middle, something the XM line has had and helps with noise canceling, from what I understand. It's not large, about .7 inches long and .4 inches thick, but can dig into those with smaller earholes or if their ears are too large to align it to it comfortably in the earcup. Both can be problems. The Sonos Ace, however, has far inferior noise cancelation, in my testing. Mids in particular don't get attenuated well at all. It's far heavier, though the workmanship is very solid, with metal hinges (the XM6 has hybrid plastic-metal hinges, Sonos went all-metal on this inside the band.) The choice is yours, but for me, XM6 works well. Not others, maybe, and that's OK.
it's back to being foldable like XM4, I think better tuned drivers (less plastic-sounding than XM5, bigger sound stage with music), and a smidge better ANC. It no longer does the light ANC that XM5 did where it starts out super low and only loud sounds trigger a ramp-up into more intense ANC modes, something I really, really hated about XM5 sadly but glad they removed. It's still on a lighter setting initially, but not super light to block out snoring and will adjust to a slightly stronger pressure if it detects louder sounds. With XM5, moving your head ever so slightly would disengage the ANC, not so with XM6, so they addressed that complaint too. It supports Auracast and LE-audio now as well if you have the hardware BT support, which is nice but expected as a lot of the flagship ones do this now.
I still enjoy the Sonos ace as night-time headphones. They're far more comfortable to lay on (I've had very sore ears from time to time when the XM6 dug into the outer perimeter of the ear.) This has taught me to always adjust the fit and band if it's too loose, but beyond it, daily wear for me is great for hours. Since the Ace does have the less ANC, for hearing alarms and other morning noise to wake up to but blocking out snores or other lighter background TV speech, it works well. I still think Bose stands out for their adjustable ANC and ambiance modes, something neither of these pairs of earphones have. Sigh. No perfect one exists, they all really do have strengths and weaknesses huh.
have you ever tried something like Sleep phones? a headband with headphones in it. Sound quality isn't as good as traditional headphones, but it's good for going tosleep with.
Airport screening in the United States has detected the new variant in travellers arriving from those regions to destinations in California, Washington, Virginia and New York.
NB.1.81. is the latest COVID-19 variant spreading in the U.S. and Europe. Infectious disease doctors explain NB1.8.1 symptoms, treatment, and prevention.
on the topic of chromophobia, I love this little book by David Batchelor with the same title press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/b…
> The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse—a fear of corruption or contamination through color—lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought. This is apparent in the many and varied attempts to purge color…
one way to understand the chromophobic impulse is to look at it through binaries of prestige. if you had to associate subdued, pale, or black-white colours with one, and saturated, vibrant, strong colours with the other, between, say, Europe and Asia, which is the subdued one, which is the colourful? what about Black people and white folk?
for each binary you can think of, which one is "colourful"? - adults vs. children - straight vs. queer - masculine vs. feminine - civilised vs. indigenous - high-class vs. lowbrow - citizens vs. immigrants - residents vs. wandering folk - …
in basically every single case, the world of strong colours is relegated to whoever is despised in society. the pleasure of colour is too immediate, too sensorial and hedonistic for the sophisticated colonisers. adult civilised life is to be made of white walls, marble statues, beige appliances and pale wooden furniture; those are tasteful; the tasteless enjoyment of colours is relegated to exoticised adventures, a trip to Morocco or to your wive's embrace of silky lingeries, or to the movies to watch children's animation… before you return to the tame, controlled normalcy of desaturated palettes.
The central argument of Chromophobia is that a chromophobic impulse - a fear of corruption or contamination through color - lurks within much Western cultural and intellectual thought.
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
feld
in reply to Joe Steinbring • • •