SAPI4 is returning to NVDA 64-bit.
Support for SAPI4 via a 32 bit shim runtime:
github.com/nvaccess/nvda/pull/…
@NVAccess

Let's start with what my 24/7 outside Mics, the Clippy EM 272, attached to my window have captured. I sadly didn't have the time to setup better quallity thann opus with meh settings which where already in place, but I'll post some of the stuff I captured with the Zoom H1E as well. this are 5 minutes which give an overviewe quite well, no processing or anything. This was right 5 minutes after midnight, so 12:05 to 12:10.

Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.

No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.

This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.

So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.

I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?

#creativity #hobbies #art #depression #socialmedia #newyear #resolution #happynewyear #MentalHealth #Culture #enshittification #creative #design #writing #reading #books #drawing #music #gardening #nature #running #fitness

Wow! What an adventure! But first, an explainer. So ever since I had Speedy, my primary Windows machine custom-built in January of 2022, it has been unpredictably unstable when the system was really busy. Specifically, it seemed to crash and reboot randomly, but whenever the GPU was being heavily used. That, or if I switched from playback to recording controls for my PCIe sound card. But again, only sometimes, only randomly. It was really strange. A bunch of Internet research told me that I was very much not alone amongst owners of the particular Asus motherboard. People who know a lot more then me about hardware, and its associated firmware settings and workings came to the conclusion that when devices rapidly changed power states, or when the PCIe bus was heavily loaded with power draw, and that device rapidly changed C states, it would cause an APIC error on a random CPU core, the OS would bluescreen, and auto restart. So whatever, I lived with it for a while, just expected the machine to randomly reboot whenever it decided to, when the GPU was loaded, or the random time it would reboot after changing audio modes on the add-on sound card. But then I went to check for BIOS updates, and what do ya know, Asus still writes terse, if at least non-generic release notes, and amongst these notes was a line that roughly said that the PCIe C states crash problem was fixed! I almost jumped in my chair, but i held myself down, toned my excitement down, downloaded the update, and put it on a USB drive. My motherboard has a pretty neat feature called Asus BIOS Flashback. One of its features is a physical button on the back panel that, when the system is mostly powered down, but not entirely powered off, as in fans not spinning, but ATX power switch is on and motherboard is still getting power, it will update the BIOS from a designated file on a flash drive plugged into a designated port, with no user interaction! You hold the Flashback button in for 8 seconds, wait 18 minutes, and your BIOS should be the version you put on the flash drive. Wellp, I did this, waited, the fans and drives powered up after I tried the power button, but no OS. I was mad, I was growlin' like a mad wuff puppy! I thought I had wrecked the entire machine! I couldn't even figure out the correct key sequences to get a Debian installer booted, to at least see if the BIOS was posting and booting something. Nope. None of it worked. So I just crashed out myself at around 8:00 AM until 3:00 PM, then I tried a few more times, with no good results. But then I had an idea. What if I put the version of the BIOS that used to be on the board back on the flash drive and reflash it? Wellp, what do ya know, it actually worked! I have the computer back! Yay! So now, instead of jumping from BIOS 4602 to 5308 in one shot, I'm doing the upgrades one version at a time. See if that works any better.

Toward the end of 2024 we added a feature to Thunderbird desktop and Android to import accounts via a QR code (desktop generating the QR code and Android scanning it).

I think this feature should be abused by websites helping their users set up mail accounts (in TB for Android), so I've created a little library that helps with generating the QR codes: github.com/freaktechnik/thunde…