What are the current plans from BlueSky (the company) for interoperability with Mastodon/ActivityPub? We currently have two emerging alternatives to X that deserve to be taken seriously: the fedive...
Have they posted an announcement somewhere? Nothing on the audiogames forum so far. I didn't play but this is definitely something I'd like to mention in the next digest.
@pitermach I tried to recreate my account to start over with the tutorials with all the new changes over the past two years, and the signup app was off line. When I asked on their discord I was told the game was going offline permanently as of march first.
Hey Mozilla, if you want to be the "AI rebel alliance" then you have to do all you can to reject it. The Rebel Alliance wasn't "Ethical Stormtroopers".
talking about cisgender men on fedi (and the internet as a whole)
This is gonna sound like a call out post, and... No, it really isn't. I'm not calling out anyone in particular. I've just seen it one too many times. The straw, the camel's back, yadiyada.
My cis dudes. I love you. I really do. But I'm tired of you going under women's post expressing their grievances about men, to explain how ashamed you are of other men. It's... It's tiring. Like, it's really fucking tiring. Because you don't realize that every time we make such a post there is at least one or two of you. Every time.
We don't care about you being not like the other guys. Yes, sure, are one of the good ones, whatever. Good boy and all that. But when you do this, not only do you not contribute anything to the discussion, you're actually adding to the problem. It's adding emotional labour to the women trying to explain themselves when really you should just stay quiet and listen.
Give a like. Boost the post, even. But you don't need to say anything, not to us. Call out other men in the responses that are probably trying to argue and ending up exactly proving her point. Do better, instead of saying that you already are.
I learned the other day that dropout.tv is built on Vimeo's platform. It had been awhile since I'd thought of Vimeo, so I went to see what they've been up to. When I saw they were purchased by Bending Spoons, I figured this was coming.
I enjoyed this thoughtful post by a musician that I've followed intermittently for over two decades now. "the future is small" patreon.com/posts/future-is-sm…
One of my key takeaways from IETF123 was that we should specify #XMPP over WebTransport. However, I want to reiterate that, even without QUIC, XMPP can be pretty FAST.
@Isofruit sadly there won't be any recording of the workshop. Only talks are getting recorded. We hope there will be more opportunities to learn about contributing to GNOME though, maybe for now you can join or newcomers chatroom and read the newcomer website here: welcome.gnome.org/
I would appreciate it if you could discuss how GNOME can create an enabling environment for attracting contributors. It definitively deters contributors, if (some) GNOME developers behave arrogant, disrespectful, insulting, don't listen/read, are incapable of proper discussions, biased and prejudiced, and understand meritocracy as dominance.
Vimeo was recently acquired by a private equity firm and you know what comes next: Vimeo Lays Off ‘Most’ of Its Staff, Allegedly Includes ‘the Entire Video Team’. gizmodo.com/vimeo-lays-off-mos…
FreakyFwoof@universeodon.com Have you tried the new ones yet? If so would you say extra precision/volume make them a lot more useful real-world? I'm thinking of picking a couple up for some travel/hotel stays I'll be doing soon ish, but I didn't know about the iOS 26 requirement. My phone is old. Pretty sure it's allowed to install 26, I just didn't want to.
Native Instruments has posted an official statement from CEO Nick Williams, reassuring customers and partners that support for NI products will continue through the restructuring.
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Turn on subtitles, lyrics are displayed.[English,Indonesian,Tagalog,Portuguese］Album 「one-room survival」DL & STREAMING→https://lnk.to/oneroomsurvivalセラニポージのセ...
this is an incredible analog in more ways than one.
From how it’s mined, to how it was marketed as a wonder material, to how it is used as cheap filler, to how it’s impossible to get rid of safely, to how it’s deeply damaging to people’s health and wellbeing.
It's like we took the worst aspects of environmental harm brought to us by cryptocoins and instead of making fake internet money evaporate, we made people huff it like leaded gas fumes in an enclosed garage.
I predict that in a generation or two, if science as we know it is still being done then, researchers will find a link between AI use and early dementia.
Eloquence “Sandy/Bobby” also talk differently: micro pitch movement, timing, and energy. You can get 80% of the timbre without it, but the last 20% “personhood” often comes from prosody. We will never get that 20%. I'm crushed. This project will always be, "it's missing that last mile."
Apparently, we are supposed to get between five and 8 inches of snow here in Central North Carolina over the weekend. Problem is, I have places to be and things to do, and this place shuts down at the slightest provocation. It's only just now kind of sort of opening up again after the last storm. Never mind, I guess.
Edit: Got the answer I wanted and made my decision. Thanks.
Question for #blind people who use refreshable #Braille displays routinely: Does anyone run brltty on Windows? NVDA has the option to use brltty, but NVDA's default plug-and-play drivers don't use it. JAWS doesn't use brltty. Narrator does. So does anyone actually use Narrator's Braille feature, or otherwise use brltty on Windows?
Trying to gauge the usefulness and reliability of brltty on Windows specifically.
I used NVDA’s BRLTTY support a few times for testing my BRLAPI server for the Monarch before the Monarch got a Braille terminal, but otherwise I always use NVDA’s native Braille display drivers. I did test out BRLTTY on the terminal as well, but I found that it did not support the new Windows terminal, or at least the only console window displayed was the window BRLTTY was running in. That could have been a configuration issue on my end though. Also NVDA’s BRLTTY driver has very limited support for Braille commands.
@Pratik Patel @Matt Campbell I have helped some folks setting up brltty with #NVDASR on windows because their legacy braille display models are not supported by other driver combinations.
Sigh. When you change the sample rate, the driver recreates the SpeechPlayer instance (because it needs a new sample rate), but it doesn't reapply the voicing tone to the new instance. Fixing it next update. Sorry y'all. This tilt thing took forever to solve so I rushed it a bit.
@clv1 hmm. most IPA can be left unquoted in YAML, and quoting is mostly about avoiding YAML’s "special meanings." You should quote an IPA string if any of these are true: It contains # (YAML comment marker) e.g. a# must be quoted or everything after # is treated as a comment. It contains : (colon + space.) YAML treats that as a key/value separator. It starts with characters YAML uses for structure, like -, ?, :, [, ], {, }, &, *, !, |, > (This one depends on context, but quoting avoids surprises.)
I can change these to all be quoted though in that file for consistency, probably not a bad idea. Sometimes I've hand-edited and maybe left out a quote on some of them so it's good to make that the same.
Thanks for the explanation. The thing is that the phoneme editor leaves many of them unquoted. I found it by comparing pt-br.yaml in my current installation, which I've edited, versus pt-br.yaml in your last add-on package.
What is your favorite tilt setting per voice? Let me know, and we can tweak it to be a default, if people think "adam" is too boomy, we can now change this. Will consider replies by end of day.
I learned recently that Didier Spaier, maintainer of the blind-friendly Slint distribution based on Slackware, passed away. May he rest in peace, and may his loved ones find comfort in the memory of all the good he did for the B/VI community.
The speechPlayer.dll now exports additional functions for real-time control of the voice source characteristics. These allow callers to adjust the "voicing tone" — the spectral shape and character of the glottal pulse — without modifying individual frames. • speechPlayer_setVoicingTone(handle, VoicingTone*) — Apply a new voicing tone configuration. • speechPlayer_getVoicingTone(handle, VoicingTone*) — Retrieve the current voicing tone settings. • speechPlayer_hasVoicingToneSupport(handle) — Check if the DLL supports voicing tone control (for backward compatibility). VoicingTone struct: voicingPeakPos double 0.85–0.95 Glottal pulse peak position. Lower values create a more pressed/tense voice quality; higher values voicedPreEmphA double 0.0–0.97 Pre-emphasis filter coefficient. Higher values boost high frequencies before formant filtering. voicedPreEmphMix double 0.0–1.0 Mix between original and pre-emphasized signal. 0.0 = no pre-emphasis, 1.0 = full pre-emphasis. highShelfGainDb -12 to +12 High-shelf EQ gain in dB. Positive values brighten the output; negative values darken it. highShelfFcHz double 500–8000 High-shelf corner frequency in Hz. Controls where the shelf boost/cut begins. highShelfQ double 0.3–2.0 High-shelf Q factor. Higher values create a more resonant shelf transition. voicedTiltDbPerOct double -24 to +24 Spectral tilt in dB/octave. Negative values create a brighter sound (less natural roll-off); positive values create a darker, more muffled sound.
We just tried out our collaborative text-editor Reflection on a smartphone using @postmarketOS and are a bit blown away by how cool that was. All it took was to install it via the Flathub store.
Is software ever done? When I started writing this I assumed the answer was yes, but by the time I finished, I'm not sure anything is ever done (not just software)
I posted a graph on LinkedIn. It showed that of the 10 million open source projects tracked by ecosyste.ms, more than half haven’t been updated in two years.
NVSpeech Player with phoneme editor and NVDA Addon version 1.8.5 Update from this link, or the updater in the add-on. I must run to work stuff. No more speechplayer until the evening. This release adds proper tilt control to the NVDA driver. No changes to phoneme editor, no time before work. Only changes to the speech player exports, and the driver, and packs to improve the R sound. github.com/tgeczy/NVSpeechPlay…
This is the first time I'm using this add-on with NVDA as one of its voices. I like the 44100 Hz sample rate! However, at least in this release I'm noticing that with the US English default voice, the k sound actually sounds like the t sound, either individually or as part of words. For instance, comma sounds like taama, and combo sounds like taambo. Any chance of improving this?
@amir yeah that's interesting, it's almost like the edge of the "K" gets too sharpened into a "T" at that high of a sample rate. It sounds more fine at 16000 or 22050 even, but it sort of, over-emphasizes certain consonats a bit more turning them into other letters.
Maybe I'm mad or something - LOL, but it also sounds like someone who suffers from a disease called Cleft Lip and Palate. I sometimes have difficulty understanding what it says.
@amir I think I can add a frication lowpass only when SR is high, that'll definitely help itabove 16000. I think it sounds best at either 11025 or 16000, then things just lose shape beyond it, but the wave generator isn't tuning that for different sample rates yet.
Absolutely right. Looking forward to new releases. I tried 44100 mostly because unlike, say, Eloquence, the voices don't sound full. I was thinking that I could get that lacking so-called fullness with higher sample rates.
@amir I know, me too. I'm in the same boat as you. Then I realized how shit formant synthesizers are at spreading out the band equally in voices when they sample higher. That's why most of them like Eloquence actually keep the synth's internal sample rate at 11025, then just upsample that instead, rather than it outputting at that raw sample rate. It's a little nuance.
@amir I could have done the upsample trick with Audioop in the driver, it might sound a bit cleaner but also create aliasing (unless we upsampled the 16000 hZ version to it, maybe slightly better.) So in true reality with these formant synths upsampling is always cleaner, but telling the engine to sample at a frequency results in more burstyness and voice character becomes more "whispery" as well.
Yo, so I've finally checked this out, and wanna say great work on this man. It really has potential, happy to see there is also german in the languages, I'm still trying to think of good words to describe whhat I'd love to be improved with the voices, but let me try around with it a bit more first. Well done, don't burn yourself out or down talk your work. If you need a break, take it, noone wwill judge you. But nice progress.
"Hello, We're Firefox, The Only Browser That Hasn't Hit Itself In The Dick With A Hammer. For years now, folks use us because of our un-hammered dick. Now, you may be wondering why today we've brought this hammer and pulled out our dick.
@cstross @TheZeldaZone I am not happy with Firefox’s current path, but tell me now, and true, have you ever donated to Mozilla.org and how often? I asked a few open source folks this today and got a lot of sheepish looks.
Mark Surman, president of Mozilla Foundation, speaks at The Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival in New York City, U.S., May 22, 2024. Andrew Kelly | Reuters Tech Mozilla is building…
The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is exited to announce the 28th XMPP Summit taking place in Brussels, Belgium next year - just before FOSDEM 2026. The XSF invites everyone interested in development of the XMPP protocol to attend, and discuss all …
Wow! This powerful new Bruce Springsteen song just released all about the horrific events in Minneapolis, definitely worth listening to. It already has over 1.7 million views and it's only been up for 12 hours! Wow! youtu.be/wWKSoxG1K7w?si=o_EWrO…
Lyrics:Through the winter’s ice and coldDown Nicollet AvenueA city aflame fought fire and ice‘Neath an occupier’s bootsKing Trump’s private army from the DHS...
Next up will be a VPN ban. Many tech-y people will see that and think “lol yeah well that’s not going to stop *me* from using a VPN”
A VPN ban isn’t really meant stop you from using one. It means when they catch you doing so, they’ll use the fact you’re using this harmless technology itself as a *pretense* to lock you up without needing to do any “hard work” (i.e. an investigator’s job) like actually confirming whether you committed a real crime.
Don’t think you won’t be impacted just because you know how to outsmart an ISP filter! This is not a plan to protect children or stop you from consuming adult media. It is a ploy to eventually eliminate ALL freedom of expression and free access to information in the UK.
And the same goes for Chat Control and encrypted messengers, btw
Many #UK Users Soon Won't Be Able to Access #Pornhub
https://www.404media.co/uk-pornhub-blocked-age-verification-vpn/
#nsfw #porn #privacy #OnlineSafetyAct #AgeVerification #IdentityVerification
I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.
Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.
This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.
Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.
This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.
This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.
Matt Campbell
in reply to Anuj Ahooja • • •