We're just over a week into 2026 and I've just found out that my father has lost his battle with Leukemia. He had just turned 54 on December 12th. I wouldn't have got into computers if it wasn't for my dad bringing home that custom built Windows 95 desktop PC in 2002/2003. My dad got me into video games. I would not have the love and passion for tech I do now if it wasn't for him. He served in the British army from 1990 to 2012. Very sadly, this battle he could not win. December 12th 1971 - January 7th 2026.
Servers described as "Glitch Mastodon" or "Hometown Mastodon" work just like Mastodon but have additional features such as larger post sizes, rich text formatting or local-only posts.
Mastodon's server software is free and open source, so programmers can tweak it to make their own versions. (Untweaked Mastodon is often called "Vanilla Mastodon".)
You can find good Glitch and Hometown servers to join or move to at:
Although there won't be any dedicated devroom for #accessibility electronics at #fosdem , nothing prevents us from hooking up in the cafeteria or something. Anyone interested in adaptive technology for the disabled, it will be great to meet you.
My fellow homelabbers: which sultion would you recommend if you would like to build a Spotify like Streaming Service for youre family with music you have in a local library? Important would be that there is an App for at least iPhone/iPad and that things like smart playlists, multiuser etc ist supported so everybody could use the same big catalog but with its own playlists, favourits etc. If have already found three projects which could be okay: Navidrome, Funkwhale and Koel. Any thoughts about this? Which route would you go? #homelab #selfhosting #spotify #navidrome #funkwhale #koel @homelab @homelab_de
Hey fediverse! At one point one of my followers posted a .reg file or script that added exclude this folder from Microsoft defender to the explorer context menu. But I’ve lost it. Can anyone help? #windows#win11 boost okay @FreakyFwoof
@jonathan859@FreakyFwoof Thank you! I just walked out the door. Andre, could you test this and stick it somewhere for the world to have and enjoy if it works?
Sorry, I can't resist showing you one more. "One night in Bangkok but it's a 16th century chanson" youtube.com/watch?v=i3jHv0GZB9… Note, performed by one single man, Jonas Wolf, he did all the voices. #Music #Baroque #YouTube
If Clément Janequin (ca. 1485 - 1558) was the songwriter for Murray Head...One Night in Bangkok, words and melody in their original form by Tim Rice, Björn U...
My mother is in the market for a new home-office PC, or will be soon. She's an accountant; she's retired now, but she still does taxes for our family and some accounting work for her church. The last time I helped her select and set up a desktop PC was in 2013. Now she uses the church's old office PC, which has a Skylake processor and a spinning hard drive (not even an SSD; I checked). So naturally, that machine's getting slow. 1/?
She doesn't need much computing power, but running Windows is non-negotiable. I'm thinking I should recommend a small form-factor desktop PC, roughly the size of a Mac mini, that she can connect to her existing monitor and keyboard. Any recommendations? Something prebuilt would be best. I can live with uninstalling some crapware during initial setup.
I ran an Intel NUC for two or three years with no problem. Nowadays, Intel has abandoned that idea, but companies like Minisforum and Beelink have run with it. I have an AMD 5600 machine on my desk right now that's about 4x4 inches, maybe 3 inches tall. I got it on sale for, I think, $279, and it came with RAM and an SSD. They probably cost more now, because of the RAM crisis, but I love tiny machines.
I got this to run Linux on, but it came with Windows 11 23H2 installed with just a bit of crapware. Smaller than a Mac mini, super quiet and fast. amazon.com/Beelink-SER5-5560U-…
I bought a refurbished Dell Optiplex years ago, for non-gaming Windows Desktop use, and it held up pretty well. One of those things at your doctor's office reception desk that's just been replaced by a newer model.
I got this mini PC a couple months ago for a home server. It comes with Windows pre-installed and has sufficient USB ports for the basics. I imagine it can handle what you need without issue.
When did you stop posting on X?
Person A: When its owner made nazi salutes.
Person B: When it became a production and distribution channel for images of child sexual abuse.
Government: We're still posting there.
I wonder how common the Eloquence phenomenon is in blind communities around the world. That is, an old speech synthesizer made years ago and long since abandoned by its maker, which blind people tightly hold on to for one reason or another. Two examples I'm familiar with are Neurosoft's SynTalk 1.6 in Poland, and IBM's ProTalker in Japan, and I'm curious if this happens in other places as well.
I mean this hasn't been abandoned and isn't comparatively as old, but I know of many folks who still use this Vietnamese SAPI5 speech engine which essentially plays audio files in sequence. It was initially released in 2004 with a southern voice reading three different encodings and updated in 2009 with a northern voice according to the timestamps within the installer: saomaicenter.org/en/smsoft/vnv…
@twynn Wow it really is raw audio files. I opened the VCE files as raw data in an audio editor, and the sounds are completely audible, not even including a click from a header. Interesting.
As for what the voice data for the sample TTS engine sounds like, here is the VCE file played as raw PCM. The sample format is 16-bit little-Indian mono, and the sample rate is 11025 Hz.
Yep, I can say for myself, speechlab is a Bulgarian synth that was abandoned in favour of the new neural voices. More like, no one knows how to update or fix it, and no one bothers to pay, but I like it and I know others who do too. So, yep, there's a thing like that in a lot of places, I suppose.
🧵 I know, outrage wants to break out. You want to scream in disgust. Point the finger at the guilty parties.
First, take a deep breath. Remember that in a network like the Fediverse, lots of people are vulnerable themselves, they may have experienced traumata. It doesn't cost you much to make a CW: fedi.tips/how-to-use-content-w… Everybody can read your post - but decide before if one's strong enough.
🧵 who is trained to be tough about photos. But that's precisely why I know what consuming too much violence and brutality in images can do to even stable people. And at some point, the effect of provoking outrage or activism wears off. Readers become numbed.
This morning at breakfast, I saw two horrific photos in my timeline where the victim's face had been insufficiently obscured. I don't know when I'll ever get these photos out of my head. I'm tough, and it was
🧵 horrifying. The person who posted it achieved nothing except a few helplessly cynical comments. With CW, I would have been prepared to deal with it appropriately (but not during breakfast). And others, too.
Please show your social skills in social media. It doesn't cost you much.
No sleep. I'm busy implementing proper chunking into the SoftVoice-Say program, of course. What else? Codex sucked at it, it did a half-assed job. So now I'm manually writing up patching section prompts to GPT-5.2 Pro instead, because it'll actually build it, unlike Codex which prefers to make minor changes in the file and do one single task from many. That's the downside of Codex. Think of it more like a code review friend who can do quick repo scanning and read context if you tell it what files and where. However, Codex won't write you a new feature in your program from scratch, regular GPT is still way better for that.
See, didn't I tell you it's the wrong time to sleep in the EU? ;) Try in about, four hours, it'll be perfect time. Haha. Also, you really should get sleep, though. Running on fumes isn't real fun. IT makes you yawn a lot, and that's very contageous, and it also makes your face hurt, and your eyes water, and ugh. Yawning sucks. LOL.
@tardis hahahaha maybe by the time I actually get to sleep it'll be the correct time! It's only 9 in the morning here though, so I'm at least sleeping on more correct time thinking of it as in the EU :D even if most people aren't sleeping at 4-5 PM, true true xD
Haha. I am the last zone of time in the eu though, so it'll still be 5 something to the west of me. Cause, why not, throw us out,, the little evil bulgarian humans. LOL.
This is a survey all #Discord users need to fill out {edit - seems they closed it within a day?}. Discord wants to know if we want AI to run the app. It'd be using data from pictures, conversations, voice notes, live streams, art, 'learning' from us in the app if they don't get strong enough pushback.
Let them know how you feel before they ruin that app for everyone as well.
I've been using Eloquence 5 for several weeks now and find I can listen to it much easier than I can Eloquence 6.1. I like how it reads things better mainly.
Are you adding to a pile-on of criticisms? If so, is the target of those criticisms someone who might be exposed to undue amounts of judgment already because of who they are (whether through race, gender, queerness, etc)?
Might you be magnifying the underlying bias against the person with your actions? Are there more compassionate approaches to take? Do your actions help or hinder in the grand scheme?
This is a masterpiece. "When you play billy Joel like it's 1700" youtube.com/watch?v=BRRLAQjKPx… #Music #Baroque #YouTube alt: Some clever guys and girls from Germany took four songs by Billy Joel and made it into a genuine Baroque concerto for two recorders and basso continuo. In spite of what we're living through as humanity, we are blessed to live in such times. Imagine this before YouTube!
1. Uptown Girl (Adagio) 0:002. For The Longest Time (Allegro) 2:553. And So It Goes (Grave) 5:594. She's Always A Woman To Me (Allegro) 7:39Words and melodie...
I love improvisations and interesting stuff like that. And every time I see someone, like playing on the street and having fun, I am genuinely happy. Because it's not the internet, it's them wanting to do it, that feels a bit like it. :D I should subscribe to the channel. Also, it's real cool to make stuff be played by a huge number of people, the more orchestral you make a track, the more people you bring together, not because of the instruments only, but also because it goes wide and far in the air, carried by the wind, etc. I digressed. ;)
@Tamasg There is a dll in the pwWebspeak version of SoftVoice that, unlike the NVDA version (which uses the one within Note Talker/Talk It! from Microsoft Plus! for Kids), it doesn't have the character limit, and produces true 16-bit audio output, not 8-bit.
@TomGrant91 ah darn nope. I grabbed it. Looks like they use a completely different DLL structure, and it's an SSIL-type COM server, interesting. Speech Synthesis Interface Library, an early standard for connecting speech synthesizers (like external hardware or software engines) to screen readers and other assistive technology.
"Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her in broad daylight": Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder techdirt.com/2026/01/08/abolis…
Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old award-winning poet, a mother of a six-year-old, and a wife who had recently moved to Minneapolis. That all ended yesterday when a masked ICE agent murdered her i…
Ah, I see, this is awesome. Sadly, nne of the foss android is accessible out of the box. Lots of sighted assitance in the form of humans is required to make it work.
Another fdroid question though, is it translated into bg? Cause, if I ever want to try it out, I will need that sighted assistance to be able to read. The assistance can't read English even if their life depended on it. :D
I just started encountering quite contradictory opinions. Also people who value confidentiality. Another thing is that Matrix still doesn't have an official code release. Another thing is that quite a few institutions such as NATO have started using Matrix, which is a little worrying.
I guess this warrants a screenshot, as I keep seeing #GNOME + #Linux threads where folks freak out about the "middle click paste" gsetting being set to False by default in gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gsettin…. Some ask "How dare they hide this into a gsetting to be toggled", or "they should add it to GNOME Tweaks" etc.…
Instead of relying on xsettings overrides, let's make use of a proper gsetting newly added for this purpose that can also be used by gtk+ on the wayland backend. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=775847
Wow, so yeah, SoftVoice itself can't handle text longer than around 500 characters, it kind of poofs itself and fucks off if you feed it more than 200-300 chars. Wow, what a limitation that is. Thank you late-90s computing
usually after 19:00 and the address is Impasse de la Fidelite 4A, Brussels 1000 Belgium. I hopefully will be there as well if you want a company for a beer
Hey @FreakyFwoof have you taken a look at this? I just got to the crossover reveal chapter, probably gonna be done in the next 30 minutes LOL, shortish chapters but I'm loving it.
Title: The Owl, the Witch, and a Man Named Anthony Author: White_Squirrel Author Summary: Holly Potter learnt at Gringotts that her father wasn’t James Potter, but some guy named Anthony Stark. Tony Stark was very confused when a paternity claim was delivered directly to his bedroom by a snowy owl. They begin a correspondence of letters, not knowing what bizarre revelations will come of it, all mediated by our favourite Arctic avian and told in real time as the letters are delivered. Covers Hogwarts first year. Holly was born in 2000. Formerly “Flight of the Post Owl.”
Zach Bennoui
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