Lunch time! You know what I'm gonna do during lunch? Implement a new "voice profiles" parsable YAML section that transforms phonemes into different voice profiles. Yes yes, this needs to be one phoneme table, not multiple, and it needs to not break existing packs. Let's get coding. This is how the pro engines did it.
We don't need to load another phoneme table entirely, just shift core phonemes to desired voices.
This entry was edited (11 hours ago)

The nice young man witnessing to me about the light of Jesus while I was trying to get some work done at the library (the library!) was not at all ready for my light of Jewish Anarchism + Buddhism tossed right back at him. We had a very nice chat (truly), but I ceded no ground and while I may pick up the Book of Mark (his suggestion) he will probably read about Emma Goldman and Howard Zinn.

Reaper Made Easy - First stream of the year happens on Saturday, January31st, 3PM Eastern, 8PM UK.

Here we go again,; another year; more questions, more answers.

I'm perplexed, what's next?
Join Scott and Jenny K for a Q&A session covering all things REAPER, OSARA and accessible production. As usual, we'll be making sure questions from newcomers slip to the front of the queue.
Details are at reaperteacher.com.
That's also where you can send us something that you're working on to listen to during the session. Constructive feedback from objective, experienced ears can be super useful.

If you're able to help cover the time we put in to running these meet-ups, here is where to top up the kitty.
paypal.me/TGVTraining

See ya there,
Jen

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mastodon - Link to source

Scott

@zersiax A recording of each Q&A session stays up for a week so people can catch it in any time zone. We don't keep them up forever because it's good for people to be able to take their first steps, talk through any initial awkward misunderstandings and share their first projects without that being preserved forever. Leads to a little more repetition, but given how difficult archives in this format would be to search anyway, I'm pretty sure it helps newbies more than it hinders anyone else. @ZBennoui @technowitch

RE: mastodon.online/@mastodonmigra…

Breaking: Bruce Stringsteen has just released what may become an historic protest ballad.

Streets Of Minneapolis is a beautiful brave soulful anthem destined to take a place among the great songs of the struggles for freedom.

in reply to Mastodon Migration

News: Daily Beast | Springsteen Releases Scathing New Song About Trump and ICE

Bruce Springsteen just put out a new song called “Streets of Minneapolis” that both memorializes the protesters killed by ICE in that city and lambastes the Trump administration’s “lies.”

He also calls out “King Trump” in the brutal lyrics, slamming his “private army from the DHS”

“A city aflame fought fire and ice / ‘Neath an occupier’s boots.”

thedailybeast.com/obsessed/bru…

in reply to Mastodon Migration

News: Hollywood Reporter | Bruce Springsteen Releases ICE Protest Song About “State Terror” in Minneapolis

Bruce Springsteen released a protest song Wednesday about what he called the “state terror” ICE committed in Minneapolis and the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

“I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis,” Springsteen said Wednesday.

hollywoodreporter.com/music/mu…

as someone who is a bona fide expert in the underlying technology of LLMs, the amount these genai CEOs executives managers and boosters simply fail is mindblowing. I cannot explain the details but these fucks have only have one idea: prompting chatbot. If they have a second idea it's prompting chatbot more.

these fucks are intellectually vacant. they have all the innovation of a 3 day constipated turd. but you can't really expect more from the type of guy who allegedly raped his own kid sister

the fundamental ideas behind LLMs can in fact do things, but you have to dig below all the layers of coprolite fossilized anti wisdom like "buy more nVidia processors" (which btw has been the received wisdom ever since nVidia gave out a bunch of free GPUs 15 years ago)

I have to reiterate that my dog has more interesting and novel ideas than sam, dario, or whoever is at Google.

these Thought Leaders have only one thought. its "more chatbots more prompts"

so now we have chatbots that require illegal powerplants that poison your neighborhood to get enough electricity to help someone convince themselves to kill their own mother! 🆒

also yes all the people building the infrastructure are just cryptocurrency grifters trying for a better grift. including Musk and Altman. watch @davidgerard episode on gas town

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mastodon - Link to source

Jiří Eischmann

@enot I cannot access the repeater's admin ATM, but when we did measurements before installation on the terrace 5 meters below the platform (only authorized persons could access the top platform) it was ok (~ -100dB). But we found out that on another building 200m away at the same height there is mostly likely a GSM BTS, so there may be noise at that height we didn't fully measure at lower heights.
@enot

Pretty sure LibreOffice help-folks in forums are gaslighting the users saying that #LibreOffice Write style application problems are user error. I've got the same problems as several help-seekers in forums as recently as a few months ago, and the "helpful" forum replies just keep insisting that what the user is saying they did or didn't do is false.

I'm convinced LO Write has some bugs in this department, so it feels borderline aggressive for the help-folks to keep insisting that there can't possibly be bugs; it must be the user.

Edit: A less serious but still frustrating thing: LO helpers online repeatedly state the precedence rules for formatting text (paragraph style, character style, direct formatting, etc.) and simply lament that users can't handle such an advanced and user-friendly system.

Then they tell someone with a 400-page novel including thousands of paragraphs that, instead of suggesting LO adopt a system where styles might (if users choose) override direct and paragraph formatting, this person should quadruple-click each of their thousands of paragraphs, one by one, then press CTRL+M to remove all formatting, and finally apply the LO style.

If you have to work this hard to ignore a repeated feature request, there is something wrong.

#ui #ux #design #foss

This entry was edited (17 hours ago)
in reply to Proto Himbo European

Hi, can you link to the specific discussion? (There are various places to get help for LibreOffice.) Please remember that helpers on forums are volunteers, doing all they can to answer a huge amount of questions. Sorry if you didn't get the answer you wanted, but also bear in mind that they are not developers, so they can't implement feature requests. You can submit a request at bugs.documentfoundation.org but the more help the community gets to implement features, the better! Thanks 😊
in reply to LibreOffice

@libreoffice Thanks. I'll try to find the discussions.
I can't find some of them (and don't have time right now; the whole issue is that I am extremely busy trying to get things done and don't have a lot of time to search forums when I run into problems, right now). Here's one.

ask.libreoffice.org/t/update-s…

I'm aware that the volunteers answering questions can't implement changes. My frustration is with those who keep telling users some verison of "you are wrong to want that."

And all this research made me realize why building a female voice for SpeechPlayer would be tricky. It's not just like, "multiply" this by that. It can work, but would sound artificial because vowels and consonants don't all need a constant multiplier of a band to "sound female", they need specific tuning dependent on the vowel itself to shift to another formant frequency. What I'm saying is, to get a female voice, we would need a separatly tuned phonemes-female.yaml. This is why ESpeak's female voices also sound very much like a man is pitchshifted and too much on some sounds. Eloquence, ETC probably built this through multipliers too but very specific rules on how various formants get scaled.
This entry was edited (11 hours ago)

The senate votes on #DHS funding tomorrow and way too many of these fucks want to help fund #ICE in return for some magic beans of promises that the Gestapo will start following laws. Please call your senators and yell at them.

Sick of being told to call your senators? Get plastered drunk and swear at them. It's more fun, and they deserve it.

#dhs #ice
This entry was edited (12 hours ago)

I told GPT Pro mode that zombies ate the GitHub servers and it needs to rebuild me an entirely new set of phonemes in phonemes.yaml because I've lost all copies and only have the language packs. I told it that if this doesn't get done in the next hour, the zombies will come for the language pack files and eat them too. Let's see what comes of it while we reply to Slack messages.
This entry was edited (12 hours ago)

So I left for the weekend to visit family, came back -- avoided contact with sick people the whole time -- only to find my wife was sick with a cold and she didn't tell me and now I have it

Just pisses me off because I've been able to go a couple years without getting anything and now this. It always ruins my week. I can't get shit done because it's a constant nuisance disrupting my concentration

People who are coming to the #FOSDEM this week-end : please do not forget to wear a facial mask to protect yourself and others. Flu this year is pretty agressive and the orange code for respiratory infections has been raised by the Risk Management Group.

#retoot can save lives.

#brussels #respiratoryInfections #covid #flu #mask

This entry was edited (15 hours ago)

RIP Gladys Mae West, the Pioneering Black Mathematician Who Helped Lay the Foundation for GPS

openculture.com/2026/01/rip-gl…

FYI, I reviewed my account on dragonscave again: @jonathan859@dragonscave.space, this is not an advertisement, but as I'm feeling rather emotional again I'm shifting the kind of personal ranting posts and also other stuff that's not my typical tech timeline to there. Also to filter who sees what, in terms of post privacy etc. I'll probably share more occasional stuff like music I like or other stuff I don't wanna spam to uninterested people as well. Looking forward to nice interactions.
This won't change a whole lot for this account over all.

Habe beim "Entrümpeln" noch einige DVD´s und Blu-ray´s gefunden, die ich gegen Übernahme der Portokosten abgeben möchte. Wer mag darf gerne eine kleine Spende dazulegen, aber das bleibt euch überlassen.

Die DVD´s und Blu-ray´s werden als ein Paket abgegeben. Der Aufwand ist mir zu hoch sie pro Stück zu versenden.

Ein Boost wäre nett, Danke !

#verschenken #dvd #bluray #boost

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)

In 2026, it'd be nice if we could scrap euphemistic terms like 'special needs' 'Additional needs' 'different abilities' 'very special kids' or anything 'inspo-p0rnish such as 'Autism is a superpower!'. Instead, use the words 'Disabled' 'Disability' ... it's not an offensive term. In fact, many disabled people find these sugarcoated terms actually offensive. And let Autistic and other neurodivergent people decide if they have exceptional powers, or are disabled by societal structures. Or both at once.
Thanks :) 🙏💪 ❤ #disability #neurodivergence #ableism

So what is development like for the BTSpeak?

Are you limited to making apps that only work with desktop mode, or can you do things that also integrate with the non-desktop experience? (Not up on my BTSpeak terminology so maybe there's a better description for "non-desktop-mode experience" but hopefully what I mean is clear)

What is development like? I know there are Python tutorials but is it limited to Python? Or can you build a TUI-style app and adapt it to work with specific keycodes/conventions?

Are there any developer docs?

I've had an idea for something that would likely be great for the BTSpeak and other notetakers for a while now, and my assumption is that the BTSpeak is probably the most open/easy to develop for. If that's correct, I'm curious what that process looks like.

On this day, forty years ago: 28 January 1986.

I was working on my astronomy PhD in the terminal room at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.

Someone came in & told us the awful news. After so many launches & astronauts, we’d grown blasé & didn’t pay much attention anymore.

That changed in 73 seconds on that cold day & we learned again that space is hard.

I still remember their names:

Onizuka, Smith, McAuliffe, Scobee, Jarvis, Resnick, & McNair.

Ad astra, STS-51L Challenger crew ✨

#space

This entry was edited (19 hours ago)

Most hashtags are pretty obvious, you just put # in front of a topic. For example if a post is about coffee it might have the tag #Coffee

However, many popular hashtags have difficult-to-guess names, so I've started a list to help people discover them:

➡️ fedi.tips/fun-and-useful-hasht…

Copy-paste a hashtag into the search box in Mastodon if you want to browse or follow it.

If you have suggestions for non-obvious hashtags that should be added to the list, let me know in the replies 🙂

#FediTips

If you would like to help financially support the development of a new Wayland compositor for Xfce, you can do so by contributing funds via our #OpenCollective accounts.

For US contributions:
opencollective.com/xfce

For EU contributions:
opencollective.com/xfce-eu

These contributions will help pay for the funding of longtime Xfce core developer Brian Tarricone to create xfwl4, a brand-new Wayland compositor for Xfce.

Thank you for your support!

#Xfce #Wayland #Rust #FOSS #Linux

From the Slint email list:

Dear all.

I am very sad to inform everyone that our friend Didier died last week.

Early 2015, I asked on the slackware list if brltty could be added in the
installer ; Didier answered promptly that he could do it on
slint. Afterwards, he worked hard so that slint became as accessible as
possible for visually impaired people.

You all know that all these years, he tried and succeeded to answer as
quickly as possible to our issues and questions.

He will be irreplaceable.

@Friendica Support

There is a fork of Mastodon available, called "Glitch Edition", that has some special features implemented. My new instance at social.defocn42.net is running this fork.

I came upon an interesting error when trying to connect to the instance. Adding the user "m1rk0@social.defcon42.net" failed because of an unknown network. Then i tried it the other way around from the Mastodon instance and could follow myself on Friendica. The connection is now mutual and the Mastodon instance is recognized as "glitchsoc".

Are there known issues with glitchsoc and Friendica? It's weird, that the connection can be established only from one side and is working normally afterwards.