The new @PixelFed redesign is rapidly taking shape and will replace the entire existing webUI (admin dashboard, settings, guest UI, user UI, legacy UI)!
We are also shipping several new API endpoints and resolving bugs/issues as we proceed with each page redesign.
The thinkfriend is the only portable computer that can love you back. It is never too slow, too hot, low on battery nor does it fail to boot. It simply is, and is very good at it.
#AMD #Framework 13 and #ArchLinux. It's alive! And from the beginning it just works. Not like the previous Lenovo with Nvidia, that after 6 years of driver updates still can't wake from suspend properly.
The same progress is with disk encryption using #TrustedPlatformModule. Now it's just systemd-cryptenroll --tpm2-device=auto --tpm2-pcrs=0+2+7 /dev/nvme0n1p2
6 years ago I needed to deploy disk keyfile, then manually seal it to TPM, and setp up initramfs to work with the sealed key.
And last thing, the #ArchLinux installation is still the one I installed back in 2012. I always just create new partition layout and copy the root filesystem from old machine to the new one.
My first distro was Ubuntu, but it often broke a lot on major version updates. So I did several distro hops until I landed on Arch. Arch is rolling release distro. No major updates, just regular small updates. I like it.
Of course It also breaks from time to time, but it's usually just a one app that changed configuration format, or deprecated some feature. And you know what was last updated and thus can more easily find the culprit. I was always able to fix it.
It's 14 years old installation, it still perfectly works and evolves. It used to be installed with grub, in dual boot with Windows, now it sits there alone and boots by efistub. It used to run InitV, X11 and Pulse audio, now it uses SystemD, Wayland, and PipeWire.
This is it's 4th machine and still stable. I love Linux, and especially Arch.
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1/2 Dnes slaví kulaté 20. výročí můj operační systém. Nainstaloval jsem ho 6.12.2003, tenkrát ještě na nějaký Thinkpad, kterých vystřídal asi tři, potom dva Latitudy a nyní běží na #tuxedo Pulse 15 gen1.
I heard something. It seems to me like community hysteria and bad company response on the topic.🤷 Well, I know a little about this, but what I heard, they are paying to multiple open source projects, right? And one of them is Omarchy/Hyperland? Which is run by a open far right idiot? That itself is not making them facist.
There was a bug (thanks to someone for discovering, I won't name names) where your own custom settings in SoftVoice applied to all variants, rather than them using their own parameters upon speaking. This is fixed partially: You can now choose a different voice but if you adjust pitch again from what you set, it'll apply. This second part is more tricky, as the engine doesn't tell us, "Hey, this is the pitch I set it to when the voice changed." Instead, you call one of the variants and the engine resets with the parameters it has internally for them. Tricky tricky. Nonetheless, it's (mostly) solved, what a relief. Re-Download 2025.3.5: eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…
I have created a Speak Window for SoftVoice that implements the wrapper. Besides allowing you to choose variants, it also lets you save a wave file of the spoken text. Now you can proudly feature SoftVoice in your audio productions. Enjoy. eurpod.com/softvoice-say.zip - this is also for @jaybird110127 who asked for this one. Note: a bug exists where variants like Martian do not apply all of their voice values, actively in progress to solve.
@x0 yeah, I might be able to add CLI flags to make the wave generation automatic, once these text chunking issues are sorted out it's not a hard add and then it can be all automated.
Also, I can give you DLLs from FL Studio, or you can find them maybe on jake's site under svfl.zip, FL Studio still ships softvoice to be used in all its productions, and that stuff probably has waveout by default.
@x0 I tried looking at PW WebSpeak but it used SSIL for the DLLs, so a no-go. ideally some other program would have at least a DLL that has matching exports (or the shapes aren't hard to re-do compared to this DLL currently.) That's the challenge. If somehow they used tibase32.dll and tieng32.dll, that would be a miracle drop-in.
@x0 wow, good news. This DLL can actually be dropped in (alongside tispan32.dll) and it works with the wrapper. All functions match and thankfully the ordinal changes didn't wig out my wrapper.
See if that does something for your say all. This is used inside a DAW so I imagine it's got much better behavior for that kind of thing, maybe even generates proper indexes.
Unfortunately, I doubt it's got any docs, so one might have to actually get FL studio and intercept and observe the calls made to it while synthesizing speech somehow, but I don't think that's accessible even if you ahve the debugger skillz
@x0 Trouble is, like I said, the FL studio varient of softvoice only has word at a time, not the other speaking modes. so, if, you, want, NVDA, to, be, doing, this, then, sure, thing. lololol. But seriously I'm sure that's a different version they're using.
@TomGrant91 @x0 not at all. I dropped into the add-on as well and it read natural. That's the cool part. It just, magically worked with the Wrapper. Something even I didn't expect.
@x0 @TomGrant91 here's what's new in the FL Studio DLL that I can work with: _SVRegister@20 • _SVCommand@12 • _SVAudioCallback@12 • plus “utility” stuff: _SVGetVolume@8, _SVSetVolume@8, _SVSetWAVFile@16, _SVSetPitchAdj@8, _SVSetRateAdj@8, _SVSetUserVoice@12
@x0 @TomGrant91 so if one of those callbacks can receive marker events, then maybe. Right now the problem is our order of things: • we call SVTTS/SVNarrate, • we intercept waveOut, • we detect end-of-utterance, • NVDA sends the next chunk, • the engine inserts its own little “tail” silence and/or waveOut open/close gaps happen. And that's the pause. Because I can't get a callback from SoftVoice saying "I'm done processing this chunk now, send me the next" it's all very sequential and the wrapper is the only thing that can tell NVDA a DoneSpeaking event properly occured
@x0 @TomGrant91 yeah, and oddly mellow male never worked even in the original add-on. I'm not sure what's up with it. The variants are internally set though so it may be an engine quirk in that one. That's why I had to be so aggressive about not overriding the variant's own pitch and inflection with the one you set in your settings.
@x0 @TomGrant91 actually no working Spanish. Tiaspan32.dll won't speak with this svctl32.dll. Sad! I wonder if there was ever a Spanish fruity loops with the Spanish DLL, but probably lost to time.
sigh. After fiddling with this DLL for the latter part of the day, it's just buggy. Even if you use it in the old driver that directly called it and used MME with no hooking. It will stop before finishing longer chunks, so it'll sound as though it's stopped before speaking has finished. Very unfortunate. No amount of hooking can fix it as the same symptom appears in the wrapper. Tried to remove the trim silences logic to fix it, thinking it was the cause. But nope. So it just never sends the last few samples either. What a shame.
darn. I think I know why: It's a trial DLL. It looks in the registry under: SOFTWARE\SoftVoice\ and checks. If it's not there, it bails out on a timer. There's strings for "Evaluation period has expired (demo versions only) " too. So it would need that timer cracked by someone who's good at, well, cracking. :D (which will definitely not be me xD )
PW Web Speak was one of the first ways I accessed the internet back in the day, my school got a 'Super-fast' bonded ISDN line at 128 Kbps. You could only access it in the library and on one machine but wow, the internet felt so magical back then, even if it was via a weird browser. Still, that was my introduction to Softvoice. @Tamasg @x0 @jaybird110127
Bug report: No idea why, but speaking the following text with the Tipsy variant causes a hard crash where the program goes not responding: Drinking all day. Drinking all night. Now, I'm, drunk! Darn! Freakin, darn!
Another bug report, just found this one. Apparently if you Alt+F4 while SoftVoice is speaking, the program goes not responding, taking NVDA along for the ride.
Wow this thing is buggy! The following text crashes the thing! I'm just guessing about the inflection command but here goes: {{rate 90; pitch 100}}Never gonna give you up, {{pitch 50}}Never gonna let you down, {{rate 50; pitch 200}}Never gonna run around and dessert you. {{rate 75; pitch 100}}Never gonna make you cry, {{pitch 100; rate 150}} Never gonna say goodbye, {{pitch 50; rate 50; inflection 0}}Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
well, now it doesn't crash it :D but it stops dead silent in the middle of it. I re-uploaded eurpod.com/softvoice-say.zip - this one fixes the focus stealing bug and lets you alt+f4 during speaking without a race condition happening. Eventually I'll add a "stop" button and things but gotta polish the basic program first.
@cubic @TomGrant91 yeh it's not reinitializing it from the default male variant params. I have updated ApplyWrapperSettings to be more aggressive. 1. Force-set the personality twice on the very first run. 2. Add a small Sleep after setting the personality to let the engine's internal table update. 3. Explicitly Reset the engine state when the app starts. eurpod.com/softvoice-say.zip
@cubic I'm downloading the one that was it's not reinitializing it from the default male variant. That one doesn't have the additional sliders. Whoops!
@TomGrant91 Download it from another browser. I had the same problem as you at first, and it turns out that Chrome was somehow caching an old version of the file. So I downloaded it with Firefox and lo and behold it worked. My variants are back to normal now too.
@TomGrant91 You could work around it by appending the version number to the filename, E.G. 25.4, 25.5, but of course then you have the issue of zip files accumulating.
@cubic @TomGrant91 I fixed the intonation combobox to reflect the actual styles the engine gives us. I think the other values in the combo-boxes should map correctly but if one is off let me know. eurpod.com/softvoice-say-v2.zi… (no caching funk!)
@cubic @TomGrant91 perterbation, vowel factor, glotal source, gender, ETC added to softvoice-say, so now you can change those settings in the say program too.
@TomGrant91 Another thing I've noticed, when I hit the Speak or I think Save Wav buttons, once it's done, I have to Alt+Tab twice to get back to the window in such a way that I can actually do anything.
To je tak, když 4 dny v týdnu strávíte zavření minimálně 8 hodin v plechové bedně s 80 lidmi, kdy půlka z nich chrchlá jak před smrtí a kapesník, roušku nebo aspoň si zakrýt hubu zvládne tak 10%. Ta interní cirkulace vzduchu tomu taky moc nepomáhá. A pak se mě okolí diví, že jsem nesociální. Než jsem začal řídit autobusy, byl jsem nemocný naposledy v 19 letech. Teď každý rok minimálně dvakrát.
@archos lidi jsou sobecký nevychovaný prasata. Těch 10% mi, věřím, promine, protože to cítí úplně stejně jako já. Já to schytám jen přes klimu, ale představ si, že takové hovado sedí za tebou a 3 a půl hodiny ti chrchlá na krk 🤦
@archos Nápodobně. Permanentně pokašlává, zvlášť po návratu z víkendu nebo delšího volna, navíc je taková zimomřivka, že kdybych vyvětral nebo aspoň otevřel na mikroventilaci, asi by mu nastydly vaječníky. Kvůli němu jsem si vyprosil aspoň pračku vzduchu. @cynik_obecny
Jezdím do/z práce autobusem a tohle můžu podepsat. Nedávno jedna paní kýchla tak hezky, že ozdobila okno nudlí, měl jsem štěstí, seděl jsem naproti ní na 4, kdyby nekoukala z okna, měl jsem nudli na sobě. Halt výchova doma a ve školce asi ty lidi nenaučila základní hygienické a společenské návyky.
@Zettl_josef A to kolik lidí má problém si po použití záchodu umýt ruce. Ani se nedivím, že je v ČR rozšířená žloutenka. A pak se tihle prasata hrabou v pečivu v obchodech.@cynik_obecny
yeps I totally agree. It makes me upset and sad at the same time. Also I understand that it is of course partly on me because it is open and I should contribute and help and not complain.
from my point of view of both user and maintainer, complaining is a good way to contribute to free software UX (as far as the criticism is constructive, of course).
My Server is working well, currently. Only Element as Android-Client is acting kind of randomly with notifications on different devices in the family. I finally managed to set up bots for my house-automation using cURL😁
same feeling, i still dont get completely used to it. FluffyChat client made it easy to understand but only my wife is using it from my environment, so :')
Matrix isn't a static thing and we keep working away trying to improve it. If you can let us know what's gone wrong (and critically on what client, platform and what server instance) and give us actionable feedback it would be much appreciated.
@matrix Half of the problems are caused by matrix.org instance not following the actual matrix protocol specs, or matrix.org instance introducing changes that break compatibility with other (non-synapse) servers or othe (non-element) clients.
@chebra while matrix.org does sometimes enable experimental MSCs, they should always be backwards compatible (especially on federation). it doesn’t seem likely that bagder is hitting an edge case where that failed.
@matrix should, but often aren't. I'm saying as a long time daily user of matrix. The number of problems caused by this is so high that I totally understand how a non-technical person will end up with a broken account sooner or later, and never come back. Dismissing feedback won't help. Prioritize compatibility. Prioritize stability. Prioritize "users will never see Unable to decrypt". New features don't matter if it keeps breaking.
@chebra not trying to dismiss feedback, but we’re not aware of any problems caused by matrix.org running something incompatible with other clients or servers. what are you actually thinking of? unable to decrypt errors are not to do with matrix.org instance compat (and should be largely gone since sept 2024 as per youtube.com/watch?v=FHzh2Y7BAB…)
My (public) weekly emails celebrate three years today. The fact that almost 500 subscribers willingly want my nerdy details every week fascinates me. I love you. 💚
Starting this week, you can subscribe to my weekly report and receive it as an email. This is the brief weekly summary of my past week that I have been writing and making available for over a year already.
Took me under 10 seconds to give the synth an auditory seizure and have the voice parameters all screwed up. Now Colossus sounds like he has laryngitis lol.
@cubic nah, they're definitely the same variant/ voices. It's a bit more static when I go back to the original crappier softvoice driver, but setting pitch to 4 on the new one makes the voice have the same tone and tambor. So not sure. Those variants are internally stored. Of course it's easy to make any voice clip if you manually mess with the NVDA exposed controls, they are mostly there for fun or customizing a variant - but some settings don't match with the variant you chose so then it can't apply properly. So, not much else to do, this is probably as good as it'll get, which is to say, better than the prior NVDA driver.
@cubic oh yeah. you have to go into NVDA.ini and delete the [sv] section. old driver can somehow conflict with the settings, so they need to be cleared.
@cubic also try the newer 2025.3.5 driver. it force-sets the pitch and other params for the voice even if yours mismatch so they should sound more normal on that one.
@cubic yeah, I found the bug for this in the say program, will be fixed soon :D it just reapplies some of the male parameters to those voices is all, just will take some time to debug it.
problem in the speak app: It's either that we set those defaults on the engin to get the male voice to work, but then we break the custom variants. Or, we don't apply a thing, male voice stays silent, for some odd reason it needs default params applied, but variants are screwed up. Argh. no winning
I downloaded the new SVS, uninstalled the NVDA add-on, cleared the [sv] section of nvda.ini, but the settings are still reapplying. Maybe NVDA somehow re-adding the [sv] section after a restart isn't helping.
@cubic oof. well I made a 2025.3.6 version of the driver at htttps://eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda-addon. It's weird because for me, robot and martian sound actually robot and monotone. Quick “is it fixed?” test you can run in NVDA 1. Set pitch to something obvious (ex: 9) while on Male. 2. Switch to a custom personality (Martian/robotic/etc). 3. Speak a sentence. It should not keep the high pitch because we reapply that variant's own pitch there.
En Leonieke, wat doe je dan eigenlijk met al die borduren die je de afgelopen jaren hebt gemaakt?
Eh, ja, die zitten (al dan niet netjes) opgerold in diverse theedoeken. Bij sommige borduren heb ik een ontvanger in mijn hoofd, maar bij anderen? Ik vond ze leuk om te maken, maar na een paar jaar is het wel duidelijk dat ik er verder niets mee doe.
Dus ... in de aanbieding, gratis te ontvangen, incl. verzending binnen Nederland, de volgende borduren (niet allemaal gesigneerd/gedateerd, want ja, beetje lui).
@marta Android's lifecycle management basically recreates the entire activity ("app screen") when a device gets rotated because the "screen size changes".
It's 100% on me. It's much easier to prevent now, but it's very old legacy code so needs a rewrite. However as solo dev of a hobby project I have to pick priorities and make sure it stays fun so I can keep going so I just haven't gotten to it.
Part of me just hopes someone else comes along and fixes this code for me so I don't have to 🙈
In the USA, in most states, you can get a restricted driver's license at age 16. Anyone who is born today, and is qualified to get such a license, is three years younger than the original iPhone.
Quite frankly, it scares me that there will be people driving who were not even a thought of a thought when the first iPhone was announced, possibly with older siblings who also were not around at the time the iPhone was released, who might be in their first or second year of college by now, but here we are.
@Tamasg unfortunately no statistically significant change in the IT space related to accessibility was every done without some form of negative incentive like courts, laws or standards...
@jstark Sometimes though change happens because people did work on the inside. When Microsoft decided to add MSAA (Microsoft Active accessibility) to Windows, it wasn't because there was a lawsuit, but we had people like Kelly Ford and others working inside to make change happen. Wouldn't call that one fear-based, although perhaps pressures by orgs did help that come along, since people were so concerned about transitioning from DOS to Windows. But I definitely know that that one wasn't lawsuit, but in 1997, primarily due to pressure from disability advocates and government agencies. @yatil
@Tutanota there is a discussion going on over at lemmy about you, that is interesting, but also seems misinformative. Would love to hear your thoughts on it
Hi there, new accounts can get disabled if they are marked as possible mass signups and need manual approval. As a private email service, we do not ask for phone numbers or any other personal information so we must be very strict with this which can lead to the fact that real users get locked out. If this is the case, please contact our support at hello@tutao.de, and we'll be happy to look into this and approve the account.
oh, my bad. I thought that fediverse accounts, and content was accessible across multiple instances 🤷
Your reply is fair and has been mentioned by the OP too. It also is the point of the discussion
I have a paid account with you so I feel like it won't be an issue for me. It's just sad if new users are discouraged from using Tutanota based off one users experience who got flagged as spam
I went to trans swimming last night and it was amazing.
Trans swimming happens weekly in two public swimming pools in London, one in South London, one in North East London. Each sets aside a pool for trans and gender diverse swimmers, we get our own changing room, and we have 90 minutes allocated in the evening where the pool is exclusively ours.
It is amazing.
I've been multiple times, but seeing the joy on every face to swim regardless of top surgery scars, bulging bikini bottoms, or even topless (pre surgery mascs and early HRT femmes).
But no one cares about the bodies... This is what makes it amazing. People just swim, splash, do handstands, snog, do lengths... It's just this really amazing safe space.
I can't describe how big a deal it is to feel this safe, and to have this space, and to do an activity that has such fear associated to it (trans person in a public pool and changing rooms).
If there's trans swimming near you, go swim! If you're near or in London, join us! If you're in London DM me for the WhatsApp group details for trans and gender diverse swimming.
Friends, this is the coolest thing I have ever seen and you should see it too. A guitar amp labelled entirely in braille. #accessibility #blind #blindness #braille
For those interested in my text cleaner, here is another version. It grew a better readme file, and a cli! dropbox.com/scl/fi/qtqwcj036uh… I still strongly suggest that if anyone were doing serious programming though, who wanted to be efficiant with resources, humans all the way!
Greetings, retro computing folks. I was just telling @Bri about the horrible noise that Apple 5.25 inch floppy drives used to make when encountering bad sectors. I still have nightmares about that from when I was a kid.
Surprisingly, that sound is stupidly hard to find on Youtube.
Can one of you help a fwoof out? They need to experience the bad.
I don't have any of my Apple equipment set up, it's all in a storage pod, or I'd set up some scenarios wherein a disk is deliberately damaged, then mic up the drive attempting to read those damaged segments.
Well here's a recording of a disk being formatted, from the perspective of leakage from the cassette output jack. As the drive is running, you hear a really low noise which is almost certainly derived from the motor, then sounds an octave higher than they should be derived from the head being moved. Also since I assume what you're really hearing are the impulses controlling the stepper motor and not the actual head movement, you don't hear the loud buzz once it reaches track zero. Also at the end, once the format is complete, it goes to track 17 to write the Volume Table of Contents, then to track 2, then 1, then 0 to write DOS, but then I hit Ctrl+Reset to interrupt it before it can finish going back to track 17 to write the Hello program.
@jaybird110127 Apparently the C64 disk drive can make some interesting sounds, there is a video by a guy on Youtube called 8-bit show and tell. Our BBC micro disk drive made similar noises, but when we upgraded to a Master 128 we got a more expensive disk drive and it didn't make those kind of noises at all.
Support me on Patreon! - http://www.patreon.com/MrSolidSnake745Three years ago today, I uploaded my first FDD cover video. I had absolutely no idea that a sm...
@jaybird110127 So what is that, the stepper forcing it to go to track 0 by stepping the total number of tracks, and every time it does the head smacks into the side?
@x0 Exactly. One of the components Steve Wozniak eliminated to reduce costs was a track zero sensor. So whenever it needs to recalibrate, it just seeks back forty tracks so it can know for certain that it's on track zero.
@jaybird110127 @x0 So, theoretically, if you had a way to do that, you could just manually move the head to track 40, and it would just smoothly widge all the way back when you start the format, and not go "ack?"
@x0 Yup, except IIRC the format actually seeks back as though it's on I think it's track 64, which is waaaaaaaay beyond what is physically possible. I actually have a modified DOS that only seeks back from track 40.
In my quest to keep all my possibilities open in the world where all of the operating systems seem to get worse in different ways in accessibility, usability and privacy, I decided to also set up my mac as secondary system, complementing my main Windows setup. So last night, I nuked my mac drive and reinstalled macos. its definitely running way smoother than before, when it was running a setup from 2015, most likely riddled with gunk from the intel era. On boot, VoiceOver was stuttering, virtual machines failed to run properly and in general the m1 system wasn't as snappy as it should've been. The current goal is to set up parallels with windows 11, as we all know, VoiceOver can't be used seriously for many text processing or web tasks, things which I do a lot. There are definitely oddities. Don't know if its because apple is vibecoding MacOs now, but for example, the option to disable function row and return it to f1 f2 f3, is only findable via the system settings search, nowhere in the settings itself. You will have to search for "function keys" which is when the option pops up in results. And I am not envying first time macos users. I mean most of the time it fails to focus the setup screens properly, so you have to use the VO F1 command to find the window. A command I bet most first time users have no idea about. I had to set up dropbox 5 times, because the first 4 times, dropbox decided to crash when a system permissions dialog showed up. still, windows does equally stupid things, so its not like there's something better around.
@FreakyFwoof As soon as someone convinces me that Linux is better than the MacOs and Windows hybrid setup I am trying to create in terms of accessibility usability and productivity across all the different areas I need, I am game.
I have a decent VM running Fedora that comes up speaking, and it's nice and usable, but I haven't tried being productive in it yet. It at least hasn't crashed, burnt and died on me though.
I'm annoyed that Apple can make a processor that scores 23000 On Geekbench, far above Core I9 or the fastest X86 chips, it's just bundled with such a subpar screen reader that the M4 Pro sits in the bin not getting its muscles used. Sigh. @jstark @FreakyFwoof
@FreakyFwoof I'm not saying any of this with any intent to knock what you do there man, but I've got to chip in from a perspective of making music in the same DAW across two platforms. VO shows itself to be a bottleneck every time, it doesn't seem to matter how powerful the Mac is. There are plenty of cases where I've spent a lot of time making absolutely sure it's not a gap in knowledge slowing me down, optimised VO config as much as I could and made certain that I'm navigating in the most efficient ways I can find, yet navigating the DAW is noticeably, consistently faster than I'm able to do it on Mac. Have also verified multiple times that this isn't the application itself being slower, it's VO every time, on every Mac I've used/observed. I don't know what else to try at this point. It's a massive bummer because in just as many sessions where I see VO shitting the bed, I see Apple Silicon making heavy workloads look trivial. If I didn't need VO, a Mac would definitely be the daily driver here, but with VO in the equation, as things stand, that'll have to be a nope. @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark Absolutely fair. It's a very subjective thing, and maybe I'm just easy to please, but VO does not slow me down. Categorically not. I'm still faster than most sighted people using Logic by their own say-so, not mine. Not a brag. Both teachers and some quite shall we say, well-known studio engineers have seen me work and agreed this. Doesn't mean my experience is the same for everyone because of course it isn't, but I do not feel slowed by VO, for whatever reason. I don't know if I'm just lucky, or as I say, just easy to please. Really don't have a metric here.
@FreakyFwoof I've seen you using Logic enough to agree that you're fast. Also know someone on Mac who's consistently faster than me in REAPER. I guess what I'm saying is that if you and that person were using your DAWs with a different screen reader, I'm certain you'd be faster than you are now and they'd be leaving me even further in the dust lol. @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark It's so weird because, and you probably won't believe me when I say this, I don't feel slow in Logic. Maybe I am and 9 years has just acclimatised me to the fact, but yeah I'd love to see how that works out. Now though, I can use Logic with the sound of Orpheus and it's more responsive than VO natively so maybe I'll be faster just by that fact alone. This requires testing.
@FreakyFwoof Shall we organise the daw and screen reader skills competitions? Who can configure a compressor faster, set up a sidechain or step sequence a pregiven melody. Don''t ask me whats the point of this all, but it sounds intriguing @Scott @Tamasg @jstark
There was something like that at one of the American conventions. Let's just say the users weren't chosen based on their speed, or knowledge, or... well... I don't know how they got chosen lol. Listening to it nearly made me chew my own legs off. @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark
@Scott @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark Oh I remember that. I think it was a competition between JFW and WindowEyes, possibly Mac or Linux as well. I ended up ducking out for the reasons you said.
@FreakyFwoof I believe you. I mean, you're super familiar with the software so you probably don't need any more than a few sylabols from VO along the way. The fact that you're already noticing Orpheus feels faster when Bri's already pointed out the method for obtaining VO speech is kinda hacky tells me something though, no? @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @Tamasg @jstark For sure. It did the thing it does in the apps folder yesterday, where it starts expanding rows and the only way to stop it is to mute speech or restart VO. Even over NVDA Remote however, the other side interrupted itself and got on with it in short order. That was my first clue as to the latency issue.
@FreakyFwoof @Scott @Tamasg @jstark VO does have some very specific features that work well in apps like Logic and others that have a lot of "grouped" things on screen, I think. There's apps I use for cybersecurity that make me wish I had item chooser, fastSearch and window spots in NVDA because they'd make things so much faster
@zersiax There's an add-on with something kinda like item chooser, think it's called Enhanced Object Navigation. It felt a bit crunchy building in cluttered hierarchies to me, so I didn't keep it around, might be worth a try though. @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jakobrosin @jstark
@Scott @FreakyFwoof @Tamasg @jstark Yeah I've been monitoring it. Unfortunately the things I run into this with Java apps which aren't supported yet :)
There's also the fat that with @Bri's new NVDA Remote app, using VoiceOver via NVDA is now more responsive than VO natively. That could help productivity.
I haven't tested this app yet,, but does it allow you to lkike send all keyboard input to the controlled computer? Or if not how do you press keys that require the NVDA modifier.
@Tamasg @FreakyFwoof that's the case on all OS'es though... the screen reader is rarely efficient... or taking advantage of the hardware... in some significant way....
@Tamasg @jstark @FreakyFwoof Yeah. I know. I keep wanting to learn it but keep hearing horror stories. Starting to think I just don't have time for it. becI want to spend my time making music. I thought it would be easier but even sitting through the group Mac class I was so confused. AndI was not impressed by how much it messes up. And I'm a Braille first user. I've been told it's quite laggy on Mac and while I use a screenreader, I prefer when doing audio to use Braille.
FWIW, I was able to find the FN toggle thing under system settings without explicitly searching for it, under ... hmm, was it general > keyboard? Anyway, I know I didn't search for it. But yeah, Dropbox has done weird stuff. They changed how the file provider thing works.
IMO, the Mac OS cloud files API thingy is a regression from the good old days. In the Mac OS 11 era (which is the first version I used), I could comfortably stream audio from Google Drive, including e.g. via QuickLook, and it worked like a charm. Now? The folder won't even open if there are too many files in it, forget streaming. I basically switched fully to Cyberduck for cloud storage.
Thank you for sharing your experience. You are very valid for your observations and I have always thought the same. Software even up to this day does not adequately meet a good standard to meet accessibility. The fact that this is still a problem is abysmal and it drives me mad. It will only get worse and we all have capitalism to thank for that.
I was today years old when I figured out that the Windows 9x SB16 OPL3 MIDI driver is tuned to 437.5 Hz. In the replica source code that is part of the user mode Windows OPL3 drivers, there are two notable constants in opl3midi.h. These are opl_samplerate = 50000.0 and opl_tune = 440.0. As the actual OPL3 sample rate is 49716 Hz, setting this value as a constant results in 440 Hz tuning. I gradually reduced the tuning constant by .5 until I got null tests with the original code to result in total silence.
Updated eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…: number processing added. Say-all should no longer have gaps. Pause factor set below 100 will now trim silences between indexed chunks. Enjoy.
new: SoftVoice NVDA Driver (softvoice-2025.nvda-addon) version 2025.3.3: Adds "use abreviations" checkbox. Since SoftVoice itself does not have a way to toggle or control this, we hack around it by splitting all-capital letters to have spaces for the engine. It's a crude hack, not ellegant, but I'll call it for "it works." eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…
Man stabs woman with knife. Knife manufacturer committed wrongthink in the past. Knife manufacturer is now guilty of murder. theguardian.com/technology/202…
What a great conversation with Dominic Miller. I agree with so many things, including not changing the strings too often! :) youtube.com/watch?v=R91NQgD7M-…
▶TAB of intro playing available on Patreon!◀ A conversation with Dominic Miller exploring the origins, differences, and modern role of the Nylon guitar!▶PATR...
There was this tree when I was a kid, I could climb up right to the top. I loved that tree. My dad cut it down because its leaves would go into the pool. Turns out, when he cut it down, the leaves didn't stop. Turned out it was our neighbor's tree and the wind blowing it into our yard. Still love my dad, mist the tree.
The key figures behind SoftVoice were Joseph Katz and Mark Barton. They originally created the famous MacinTalk for the first Apple Macintosh and S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) for the Commodore 64/Atari before forming SoftVoice, Inc.
SoftVoice (mostly) modernized for NVDA 2025 versions. The only pesky problem I can't get rid of is pauses during say-all, but "pause factor" does improve pauses mid-utterance, which is nice. Pitch, variants all work. Slight speed boost with wrapper as we now capture Wave output ourselves and pipe to NVDA. eurpod.com/softvoice-2025.nvda…
@jaybird110127 oooh I wonder. See I'm not sure how safe it is to distribute the tibase32 and tieng32 / tispan32 libraries. Isn't the distributor for SoftVoice still alive and well? Might still be able to make one, just not bundle the libs in it, would be very simple to create.
Thanks Hetzner, another todo entry resolved. Your request was automatically validated by our system. All outgoing traffic to ports 25 and 465 will be unblocked on all your Cloud Servers within the next few minutes.
Hubert Figuière
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