Day 18 - #adventOfIOSAccessibility. When building custom components, or if not relying on UIControl's attributes to configure state, it can be easy to forget to specify the right accessibility traits. These are indispensable for a good experience with VoiceOver, Switch Control, Voice Control, Full Keyboard Access...
The Internet Museum translated to Swedish becomes "internetmuseum". It is a digital, online-only, museum that collects Internet- and Web related historical information, especially focused on the Swedish angle to all of this.
Great to see you recorded for posterity. How do you feel about being part of future research for a few generations?
A similar thing happened to Digital Art a couple of decades ago with the Digital Art Museum. It spurred a few awards for excellence, most notably Vera Molnar who received the Dam Digital Art Award before her death last year: digitalartmuseum.org/history/i… ddaaward.org/
c'è una piattaforma di microblogging Fediverse che è assolutamente meravigliosa e piena di caratteristiche di design brillanti che rendono il suo utilizzo un vero piacere. Il suo nome è Sharkey, è un "soft fork" di Misskey , e merita sicuramente la vostra attenzione
Discover the beauty and joy of Sharkey, a stunning Fediverse platform that is a Misskey fork. Explore its elegant design, user-friendly onboarding, and unique features – like Antennas.
For anyone curious, I fed the code of both drivers into GPT pro and asked it to do a final comparison of how they work and are different. I mostly did this for future notes to have in case another NVDA breaks the add-on model for speech synths, I can't say this is without any possible hallucinations, but it aligns with ~95% of my observations: eurpod.com/eloq_differences.tx…
@joshknnd1982 true, but Sapi5's indexing is just... Very shit and minimal compared to what you'd get with NVDA, and some complain of a slight delay that it going through Sapi5 causes. It's for sure a valid point, though.
I've used various sapi5 tts engines for years and personally I don't notice any delay. You could just make a sapi5 bestSpeech and say: "ok there you go folks, live with it and have fun."
ha yes. But I also don't have the set of Visual Studio C compilers, and would have set up an environment with the SAPI SDK and everything. So for sure a bigger project, but if it came to the end of the road for the add-on or at least it was on the horizon, that would be the time to act on it more urgently.
Seems like Jake Gross is good at the sapi5 stuff. He may eventually make bestSpeak sapi5 who knows. I prefer sapi over NVDA addons because then it works with NVDA to balabolka to audio games but that's just me.
@joshknnd1982 yeah, you can install it alongside, but it's just a multi-gig set-up is all :) along with the overall SDK environment. Can't say it won't happen, but one step at a time I guess. The speak program is good for standalone conversion though it's true that it sadly won't work for audiogames that rely on SAPI alone.
Both Eloquence 4.7 and 4.2 received updates in the drivers: (common): Properly call DLL handle termination after switching away from either synthesizer. Previously you would fry your NVDA by switching from one to the other, as they both leave traces for one another if doing consecutive initializations. This was a problem of the past, no longer, we take care of it in both drivers for you. - Eloquence 4.7: Updated it from the 4.2 driver to also have the bgPlay function accept onDone, attempt multiple tries to feed audio, and use a lock to ensure thread-safe access to player.feed(). While this does not solve issues with Wasapi, it (slightly) improves it while keeping things more thread-safe for the older-style single callback. eurpod.com/OldEloquence2024.nv… (v 4.20) eurpod.com/Eloq47-2024.nvda-ad… Done for the night, exhausted now from reviving 2 more synths in a single day.
so it's really out of necessity if anything, most of my debug hours were spent on troubleshooting thread lock-ups and freezes. Without a second thread, if the main background thread tried to handle both the DLL’s message loop and synchronous audio feeding tasks, any delay in feeding audio chunks or flushing buffers would just make NVDA fuck off entirely or just freeze the UI up without any logs generated. I split it into eciThread for the message handling and BgThread does Audio (this approach I took from Bestspeech to solve it for the older DLLs) It may be (hopefully, from what I've seen) that the 6.1 driver lets this get managed more gracefully from a single thread since it looked more event-driven so you at least don't have things that can lock it up so easily. (Ok yeah, shit like ECIMessage.eciWaveformBuffer, eciIndexReply would have been a lifesaver if they could come from the DLL)
That might suggest that you're not calling WavePlayer.idle() when the utterance finishes. That is necessary in order to push the last buffered chunk of audio. So you need some indication of when an utterance finishes, since the next one might not come for some time.
aaaah I reverted to a prior version where I added it and it did the chunk-ends breaking, but no luck - now NVDA will silently crash with no log? TF. Think I'm just done with it for now, these are older synths and I may have to revisit it later to make them single-thread if it's possible to. But for sure a good tip on nvwave! Will keep this in mind for any other modern synth work I may get to do xD
@jcsteh your idea did help me fix eloquence 4.7 though :) I now use player = nvwave.WavePlayer(1, 11025, 16, outputDevice=config.conf["speech"]["outputDevice"]) to correctly feed it the right one, and the BGPlay thread does call player.idle() which is good. Making it run on one single thread though caused that silent crash oddly, and that's with logging set to "debug." so I'm just like SMH
Err, sorry,I'm actually wrong anyway, which is hilarious because I wrote that code. idle() isn't necessary to push the final chunk of audio. But if you don't call idle(), you won't get callbacks (onDone) for the final chunk until another chunk is fed.
not sure if this is something I need to fix on my end, or this might be a bug, but I noticed if you try taking the 4.2 one up higher than 60% on the speed, it crashes. no error or anything like that, but just stops talking. I have to use the ctrl+alt+n key to force shutdown, and restart NVDA. as long as I don't go any faster than 60% on that one I am fine. now the 4.7 one I would use at 70 percent, but too fast for me, had to slow that one down. the previous version I had to take it up to 70 percent, to make it fast enough for me, but this particular version, the latest one as of right now I had to slow down as all of a sudden 70 percent was a bit too fast for me. I hope this helps.
I am currently using the 4.2 one for right now, but I just can't set it faster than 60% without it crashing which is just a bit too slow for me, but I love it! this is classic tts's at there finest.
@JamminJerry very odd as I have it fully max at 100. could be another one of those hard ones to ever get pointed down since not everyone's seeing it. Unless someone else jumps in to work or fix these drivers I most likely won't as they are just too old of software synths, I only cared to get them functional under modern NVDA
ok, I don't know if this matters or helps you in any way, but I have put the inflection back to 30 percent, and now I can take the 4.2 version to at least 71 percent.
@KaraLG84 strange! works here, but I'm not familiar with that bug! Wasn't really a jfw 3.2 user when it was around. As long as the dll is in the eloquence folder it should load though, inside synth drivers in the add-on's folder of it inside eloquence folder there are the 2 dlls it loads.
All the DLLs are there. What happened was that when your pc automatically switched daylight saving off, JAWS crashed. And it was a bug with this version of 'Eloquence, I think. @MutedTrampet would no.
@KaraLG84 It's really strange! For me I tested it out by setting my date to 03-09-2025, and now the driver, well, it silently crashes without even a log entry. Wow. That's nuts. I hope I can do something that @MutedTrampet or others can recommend, maybe we gotta fool the dll to think if it's a different time, check if system condition is DST and apply a fix? That's my guess anyway but good find! Weird quirk.
@KaraLG84 Perhaps try adding or subtracting one hour (3600 seconds) from the time you pass to the license function during DST. I remember trying this but not sure which one worked.
this fixed it I think! Going to patch the driver with this change in the license request function: ``` # Patch for old DST bug: if localtime indicates DST, shift time by 1 hour # If adding doesn't help, try subtracting instead (lic_time -= 3600). lic_time = int(time.time()) if time.localtime().tm_isdst > 0: lic_time += 3600 lic_time ^= 0x39AB43F2
eci.eciRequestLicense(lic_time) h = eci.eciNew() for i in (rate, pitch, vlm, fluctuation, hsz, rgh, bth): vparams[i] = eci.eciGetVoiceParam(h, 0, i) return eci, h
``` Will be uploaded in a moment. In my testing, moving my clock to Mar 09 at 1:59:59 and then clock changes, I can still load the DLL. Test it in a few minutes (update: uploaded) and let me know if you still encounter issues. Huge thanks for this idea.
@KaraLG84 Also curious, why are you calling the old Eloquence driver Eloquence 4.2? The version number in the resources of ECI32D.DLL is 3.3, and the language DLLs are at 3.0.1.
ah yeah, originally I was looking at the wrong DLL's version :) Great point! Easy to change on the site. Can't believe it's 3.3! Makes me wonder if there's an intermediate version now even more between 3.3 and 4.7 as that's a huge jump :D (fixed version in add-on manifest as well)
was there ever a 1.0 or 2.0? Wonder if we would have recordings of it somewhere. I wish there was a way to pinpoint down when the voice so drastically changed, clearly there must have been other versions developed between those that slowly got it there. The more you unravel about that product the more fascinating history it has :D
3.3 also appears to accept the current community dictionaries, although don't think these can be language specific like newer Eloquence. I renamed them to main.dic and root.dic from the community dictionaries, loaded them and surprisingly that worked. I don't see a way to disable abbreviations as this appears to be built-in to the language and I couldn't find a function in 3.3 that toggles them off or a speech parameter, would be nice to add that as a setting if it's ever found.
@TomGrant91 @KaraLG84 From what I remember, dictionary loading for multiple languages wasn't implemented in that code, and the release notes for Eloquence 5.0 claimed that all languages shared a single dictionary set in older versions. Recordings of 1996-era versions of Eloquence can be found in this article. archive.nytimes.com/www.nytime…
@MutedTrampet @TomGrant91 @KaraLG84 this is huge help! The other issue I had was with pp1 tags, it would announce a back quote after parenthesis symbols with it sent. I don't think Pp2 and PP3 did this so I may be able to add some form of pause shortening.
There probably were many intermediate versions between that which aren't publicly available, or at least not in the known sources. ETI was known to produce lots of minor versions of major releases, example: Eloquence 5.0. That version was officially released on February 8, 2000 according to the release notes, with the earliest build I can find being version 5.0.000.0004, compiled on March 31, 2000, and the last known builds were of version 5.0.3.8, compiled on December 10, 2001.
@MutedTrampet @KaraLG84 aaah I love your eloq research. It's been super helpful and I added the abbreviation setting into Eloq 3.3 driver. I'll see what I can do about the other PP tags for the shorten pauses, it may be that I add the setting as a choice slider like the IBM drivers and people can just choose then in both 3.3 and 4.7. Even if the tags add some broken punctuation for 3.3, at least folks can decide.
Kanál s přednáškami z konference OpenAlt, která se koná tradičně v listopadu v Brně a zaměřuje se na otevřený software, data, IT bezpečnost, DIY a IoT.
@stepan @fredbrooker Nahraval jsem je primo do PeerTube (vcera vecer 2023, dnes rano 2024), ale porad jeste bezi transcoding, takze se na kanalu neukazuji vsechny. V playlistech ale jsou.
Alright, here we are. Old eloquence 4.2 driver for NVDA 2023-2024: eurpod.com/OldEloquence2024.nv… (works both with Wasapi on or off) Eloquence 4.7 driver for NVDA 2023-2024: eurpod.com/Eloq47-2024.nvda-ad… (Fixed to work fast with Wasapi off as well)
@twynn I tried that version but it wouldn't index right for me :( would just read the first half of a dialog and then, boom, stop. So when it was re-done it was very hastefully done so, maybe just ran through a py2 to py3 parser but it meant that a lot of newer stuff wasn't in it.
Thanks for all your efforts over the past... five or so days in reviving these old synths. BTW, Eloquence 4.2 doesn't allow you to switch to other languages besides American English, but it sure sounds far different to what we have today that's for sure.
@twynn added these! I just only put ENU initially when debugging it for the language dictionary list. We have two french, two spanish, UK, US, and Italian in that version now.
@twynn As a very much non-eloquence-using person, what's the difference between all these versions and IBM as well? They all sound similar to me. Didn't grow up with them so just don't really get it.
A Coast Guard Commander Miscarried. She Nearly Died After Being Denied Care. —
U.S. service members have long faced strict limits on abortions, even when used to resolve miscarriages. Under federal #law, the #military will only pay for abortions in cases of rape, incest or to save the mother’s life.
U.S. service members have long faced strict limits on abortions, even when used to resolve miscarriages. Under federal law, the military will only pay for abortions in cases of rape, incest or to save the mother’s life.
A Further Review Update on the Choyong LC90 By John Figliozzi, NASWA Journal Shortwave Center Editor Prepared December 12, 2024 Having previously reviewed the overall performance of the Choyong LC9…
Removed three dead domains (catgirl.life, vtuberfan.social, natehiggers.online). They have no DNS records, or redirect to a subdomain with no DNS records. Will properly comb through for dead domains at some point later.
You'll want map_err if you have function A that returns a Result with one type of error, and you need to call it in function B which is required to return a Result with a different type of error. I did serious Rust programming for like 2.5 years before I recall having to use map_err. It'll be there if you ever need it, but it's not necessarily something you have to learn right away to get productive.
While you're changing tactics, though, I'd suggest thinking about starting a real project in Rust rather than working through exercises. I never actually worked all the way through the official Rust book myself. I didn't seriously make an effort to learn Rust until I had a real project I wanted to do in it.
Eloquence 4.7 driver for NVDA: Used in older JAWS versions (35, 3.7): eurpod.com/Eloq47-2024.nvda-ad…. Modernized indexing : On end-of-utterance (0xFFFF), flush once, then send all indexes and None, and set speaking = False. Similar to BeSTspeech logic, the code stores intermediate indexes (currentIndexes) during the utterance and only sends them all at the end. For me, it was interesting to see how older and newer Eloquence drivers were different: The newer V6.X DLLs schedule tasks like flushing audio, sending indexes, or finalizing utterances via a background thread. Older Eloquence did a lot more just from the Callback thread alone, huh. also: Instead of sending indexes as soon as they appear, the newer ECI stores intermediate indexes for the entire duration of the utterance. Only after the utterance fully completes does it send all intermediate indexes, followed by a "None" signal to mark the end. This prevents premature indexing events and ensures that the indexing data sent to NVDA accurately reflects the final audio and why I was stuck for 3 hours debugging it.
@sclower I can kind of see why though, it doesn't have the random pops and clicking noises that eloquence 6.1 at faster rates has, that's a nice part of that one.
I'm noticing some unusual artifacts with 4.7 which I don't recall hearing before. Specifically, words that end in a long e sound odd, and the combination of r and a long e, like the word "tree," are slightly garbled. Aside from that, it's working well.
@sclower wow yeah you're right, that's an odd one. Wonder if that's a change we ended up with after playing through Nvwave or not, hmm. Only really there if you're looking for it, but once you notice it you can't un-notice it either from knowing it's there, ha.
@sclower I think I remember it happening in JAWS 3.3 comedies and a demo I got some time back. Words like tree, three and bree, for example, do sound garbled, that's normal as far as I know.
@TomGrant91 No, it's definitely not normal, at least with the version of ELoquence that shipped with 3.5. Does the add-on use the newer wave speed compression algorithm?
@sclower @TomGrant91 hmm, is that a driver setting? Not that I'm aware of. I even swapped in the files from eloq-4.7-2023 and it still had that odd artifact! Even though 2023 4.7 did not, it's super strange. I did get to fix the character-by-character reading issue though.
@sclower @TomGrant91 also verified we're using same bit depth / sample rate and set up the engine with the parameters from the older 2023 driver. A headscratcher for sure.
@TomGrant91 Yeah. It sounds like the original audio is slower and being externally time-compressed in some way. But this is all observation; I don't know the internals of that driver.
@sclower @TomGrant91 what I'm curious about: Why is Eloquence 5 technically the 6.1 dll, and where are the dll versions between 4.7 to 6.1. Personally I'd love to get the pacmate-Style eloquence working, which I believe was closer to 4.7's driver model than 6.X, but might be thinking of it in reverse.
@TomGrant91 Really? Based on the audio I've heard from the Pacmate, I always assumed they were using 6.1. That would have been about the right time for it.
unless they had set the inflection to be super high, but it's also the same driver that would have shipped in JFW 4.1 and 4.2 (then 4.5 got the flatter, more monotone 6.1 we know today) which... gives me an idea... Oh no.
It's so weird hearing this again. Though I did use Jaws back then, it was almost exclusively with a Doubletalk PC. I mostly avoided the use of Eloquence for everything until just a few years ago, except for Talks, when that was still a thing.
I just found out that, if you want the rate to go faster, for the languages in eloq.cfg, for example, 1.0/enu, you can change the version from 2.0 to 4.7, and then in eloquence.py you can change MaxRate to around 200 or 300, and the synth will go much much faster after that.
Wait, aren't you doing it wrong, then? Indices are supposed to be sent to NVDA as soon as the synth fires them, they should only be premature in the case of a few samples ahead due to buffers. IBMTTS is actually doing it wrong and it means that the phonetic punctuation add-on does not function. So don't take your pointers from it.
@x0 Thanks for pointing that out. I really appreciate the detailed insight into how indices should be handled. I’m still learning how to integrate everything correctly, and updated both drivers with what you mentioned: Removed storing indexes in currentIndexes for both drivers. Instead, we now Call onIndexReached(lp) immediately when we get an intermediate index (lp != 0xFFFF) in the callback. Also, the final utterance index (lp == 0xFFFF) still triggers a flush and then a finalization, but doesn’t involve delayed indexes anymore. It meant I could Simplify finalizeUtterance() since we’re not handling a queued list of indexes so it cleaned up the older driver quite a bit. Not sure if people will notice any user-facing differences, but nevertheless this is great info to have.
Glad I could help, that's my understanding anyway but pretty sure it's correct, that's why indices exist, to give immediate, real-time updates of exactly where the synth is. NVDA itself actually injects index marks into the stream to help with synchronization, say between sentences so it can move the cursor in say all. Phonetic punctuation uses them to decide where it should inject sounds into the stream, asking the synth to pause at the same time. So that has to be precise, and buffering, as IBMTTS does, throws that off.
@x0 oh that's fascinating. I think I was used to the older simpler drivers where we had to generate our own index (even if not exact) so it's interesting to me that even the older eloquence drivers were sophisticated enough to do this.
Well they had to be, as eloquence actually has a callback option to communicate visemes. That is the most precise you can possibly get, it's sending you a note of the mouth shape corresponding to every phoneme its putting out in real-time for speaker synchronization.
@x0 DO you know if Eloquence Threshold does it right? I use that one rather than IBM TTS for performance reasons, I always found it performed better and now i'm wondering if this is the reason why.
@nick @x0 it's yet another packaged eloquence. IBMTTS never gave you the binaries so had a feeling of legality about it. Threshold was just installable and worked. github.com/pumper42nickel/eloq…
Eloquence synthesizer NVDA add-on compatible with threshold versions of NVDA (2019.3 and later). Supports Python 3 and new NVDA speech framework. - pumper42nickel/eloquence_threshold
@cachondo @nick @x0 ooh ooh, but they fail to remove the DLL handle when the synth is terminated in Threshold, bad bad. Loool. Only if you have both installed really, IBMTTS does correctly unload it so you can go from that to "eloquence" but not the other way around.
@x0 @matt @cachondo @nick I've actually always wanted to hear those! Never got a chance to play with them. I tried the 6.7 version with the 22K sampling rate and it had a weird high-pitched artifacting to it. Now that I've used eloq at 16K and 22K going back to 11K is like someone switching on an AM radio xD
That's because the concatenative voice binds to voice 4, Rocko, rather than voice 1. Also, you got the formant synthesis to operate at 16 and 22 kHz with NVDA? how? What DLLs are you using?
@x0 @matt @cachondo @nick nah, sadly just 22. Ideally I'd use the 16K version but that one I think is only found on Android and iOS (when choosing high quality / sampling rate). 22K is not bad but sounds a bit forced, although v6.6 at least removes that high-pitch squeal in the upper parts of speech.
@matt @cachondo @nick I never had the 6.4 or 6.6 DLLs, they run the formants at 22kHz? Where can I get those? IBM's 6.7 doesn't support it, it just ends up running at double speed.
@matt @x0 @cachondo @nick interestingly the DLL copyrights of 6.6 still say 2002, unless they were too lazy to change it from 6.1 values. It may be that several versions of these were concurrently developed (certainly the weird reversals in stability might indicate this)
you have to run the command: C:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\nvda\addons\Eloquence\synthDrivers\eloquence>regsvr32 ibmcmm.dll (change it to your username and folder where you store the files for it)
@matt Version 6.6 of IBMTTS came out in February 2003. IBM continued maintaining IBMTTS for many years after SpeechWorks stopped developing Eloquence in 2002. Their last big version update was 7.0, released some time around 2005, and the last recompiled IBMTTS language DLLs I can find are from May 2007.
wow really there was a 7.0? Wonder how that one performed, and why 6.1 somehow became that defacto standard in all AT products. Maybe it just wasn't quite as stable even in 7.0
@MutedTrampet I can only speak for Serotek, but as far as I know, we didn't try to license IBM TTS, only Eloquence, because the latter was what everybody wanted. And when we finally got access to Eloquence from Nuance in 2009, the latest available was 6.1.
@matt That was indeed the last version ever developed for PCs, as far as I can tell. Kurzweil got 6.1.0.2 in 2006, but that only applied to a few files, and was probably meant to primarily resolve the conflict that occurs if Eloquence and IBMTTS are running at the same time, which IBM was aware of but never got around to fixing.
7.0 was really obscure, I can't even find a changelog for it and I also had to rip it out of various installers. Its main features seem to be the introduction of version 3.2 of the Torrent engine which was used by the 22 kHz concatenative voices, and for US English, a bunch of DLLs that seem to be some kind of heavily rewritten synth engine with individual DLLs for different components, with names like enuparser.dll, enuphonetizer.dll and enuprosody.dll, which are oddly never used by enu50.syn and I can't seem to find how exactly they were meant to be used. Version 7.0 actually completely fixed the stability issues of 6.7 with the June 2005 build of ibmeci.dll, but it never made it to the assistive technology market for some reason and 6.7 ended up being the last update that would ship in AT products, even though that version is extremely unstable.
@x0 @matt @cachondo @nick Do these need any specific driver to run with NVDA? I can't seem to get ibmeci66 to load if I change the DLL name in the settings, and the eci.dll that comes in that zip file doesn't seem to support 22k. Am I doing this all wrong?
@guilevi @x0 @matt @cachondo I could load it undeer the latest IBMTTS driver but you have to register the ibmcmm.dll file first with regsvr32 and then the ibmeci66.dll file will load and then you gotta go to voice settings > sample rate to change it in NVDA
@guilevi @matt @cachondo I think I already have a version of that registered for 6.7, do I have to register this one too? Ibmcmm.dll is for the concatenative voices.
@x0 @guilevi @matt @cachondo yeah not sure if they're compatible, I've had conflicts before where it would weirdly error out when I had the wrong one registered from a viavoice install
@x0 @matt @cachondo NVDA still dies after registering that DLL when trying to load ibmeci66. I don't recall installing any particularly weird Eloquence/IBM versions (or any versions at all) on this machine so not sure where I went wrong. This is exactly what I remember from every time I tried to get anything nonstandard about IBM to work before hahaha
@matt @cachondo @nick Though that one goes by the name viavoice, which is IBM's version of that engine, and its rules are different, including its internal dictionaries. Mohammed's repo actually has a special dictionary set for it because of some words it fixed and others that it broke. Jake's site has it as a giant 7z file called viavoice something or other.
@TomGrant91 @x0 @matt @cachondo @nick wow I wonder how the performance on one of those voices would be and if they're even that natural sounding. My guess though if I haven't heard a lot of folks use it it must have been pretty trash for day to day usage.
@nick That may have been mitigated by now, there were some changes to threshold itself that changed buffer intervals to try and make it a bit less floody, and then WASAPI happened. I've got an open issue on IBMTTS to integrate this behavior now that it's feasible, they're still using index buffering. THey don't buffer until the end of the stream, they buffer by larger chunks to avoid short feeds. This is likely the performance difference you're noticing, as I think threshold is sending the chunks immediately, whereas IBMTTS actually sends a chunk after receiving the next one, unless it's less than the normal chunk size, then it sends them both at once. The old NVWave really didn't like being sent a tiny chunk at the end.
@nick Threshold is here. Also take note of how it handles pauses, in ECI, pauses, the `p annotation usually triggered by the break command, are dependent on rate! At least in 6.1 it is, impirical testing would be needed for the others. github.com/pumper42nickel/eloq…
Eloquence synthesizer NVDA add-on compatible with threshold versions of NVDA (2019.3 and later). Supports Python 3 and new NVDA speech framework. - pumper42nickel/eloquence_threshold
@nick The reason pauses need to scale correctly is because of phonetic punctuation, which knows the length, in milliseconds, of the sound it needs to play.
@x0 @nick it really is snappier for sure, wow. It's probably what I was noticing on the older drivers, they've gotten a slight improvement in just how quickly they respond to commands I feel like.
Salesforce says it will hire 2,000 people to sell AI software, a month after saying it would hire 1,000 for the task and two years after laying off 7,000 staff (Jordan Novet/CNBC)
SCOTUS rejected ISPs' challenge to a NY law requiring ISPs to offer $15 or $20/mo. services to low-income customers, by refusing to revisit a lower court ruling (Jon Brodkin/Ars Technica)
Rebuilding much of my infrastructure in NixOS again because I'm sick of shit breaking and being hard to fix. In the process I've been revisiting services I run to ask whether they're worth maintaining or whether a simpler alternative would do.
Started poking Nextcloud today and oh wow is its app ecosystem extensive. I thought it was just a nerdy contact/calendar/file-syncing app but no, you can really build out your own household-specific portal with it.
Right now for instance I'm playing with the Cookbook app. So far I've pasted in a few recipe URLS and have gotten back nicely-accessible, no-fluff copies of those recipes, saved locally, linking back to the originals, with spinners that seem to scale them by serving size. That's really neat.
So I don't think I'll be replacing it with Radicale quite yet. It can apparently somehow parse emails and extract travel itinerary data into calendar events with kitinerary but I'm not sure how. That's one more proprietary service down.
Right now each service like Gitea and Nextcloud gets its own native NixOS container. Nix config assumes things like one instance per server for many of those. Fortunately it's pretty easy to spin up a Nix config in a container vs. directly on the host, and Docker/OCI containers are pretty easy to declaratively build and run in your engine of choice if Nix containers/services don't work.
🚧Disclaimer: This blog post has been edited and rewritten using Claude and Gemini.
It's always good to be on a lookout for ways to improve your day-to-day workflows and be able to automate away at least some work that isn't very creative o…
I like this snippet from the article: "Just like the rest of our image and video generation models, Veo 2 outputs include an invisible SynthID watermark that helps identify them as AI-generated, helping reduce the chances of misinformation and misattribution." blog.google/technology/google-…
TIL about Crabeater seals, an animal that looks like every other seal out there, like the recipe was fifty percent chonk, fifty percent derp, moisten and add fippers, but then when it opens it's mouth you find out that it is secretly hiding the answer to the question, what if my teeth had teeth.
🚨help ginny pay for necessities—she lost her rented house and many things to flooding and theft. she needs continued funds for a place to stay, and care for herself and her animals. the stress (and the impact on her health) has put her in and out of the hospital.🚨
she is an amazing person who has suffered greatly. she is disabled, an orphan, and was targeted by the Proud Boys.
she survives on community support, so please support her 💖
NEW! When you support my work for $15/month or more, a glossy postcard with personal note and featuring photography from my current photo/poetry project (Come Outside) will be yours.
Tennessee Ernie Ford is a legend and I hope I've done his classic tune "Sixteen Tons" justice in this re-imagining of it. Thanks for watching! LINKS AND SUC...
Peter Dering, the founder and chief executive of Peak Design, says he called the N.Y.P.D. tip line on Wednesday after receiving a wave of messages showing the suspect carrying a distinctive backpack.
Con il suo nuovissimo design, la nuova interfaccia di PeerTube non è solo più bella (anche se lo è). È anche più semplice, più facile da usare e da capire e più accessibile. Benvenuti in una nuova era di questo software che consente ai creatori di ottenere, controllare e connettere le proprie piattaforme video.
Riflettiamo sulla crescita dell'ecosistema PeerTube
Sette anni fa, PeerTube era principalmente uno strumento con cui gli appassionati di FOSS esperti di tecnologia erano felici di giocare. Poi è diventato popolare tra i creatori di contenuti che volevano uno specchio auto-ospitato dei loro canali YouTube/Twitch; e tra le comunità che volevano creare e regolamentare il loro spazio sicuro (persone sorde, persone queer, ecc.)
Oggigiorno, PeerTube sta riscuotendo un successo crescente tra i creatori di contenuti che pubblicano contenuti originali (o contenuti esclusivi per la loro comunità), media alternativi e istituzioni: college, ministeri dell'istruzione, archivi televisivi e radiofonici nazionali, ecc.
Le strutture pubbliche hanno spesso bisogno di condividere contenuti video senza meccanismi di cattura dell'attenzione o di sfruttamento dei dati.
Per noi si tratta di un nuovo passo nell'evoluzione del pubblico di PeerTube.
Ecco perché quest'anno abbiamo chiesto a La Coopérative des Internets di condurre una ricerca UX approfondita (completa di interviste, test, ecc.) e di aiutarci ad avviare una riprogettazione completa dell'interfaccia. Il nostro obiettivo era migliorare PeerTube in modo che si adattasse meglio alle esigenze di quel nuovo pubblico. Avevamo chiaro che tutto era sul tavolo: colori, vocabolario, layout...
Bene, siamo orgogliosi di rilasciare questa v7 di PeerTube , che getta le basi per una completa riorganizzazione dell'interfaccia.
Anteprima: temi, nuovi colori e vocabolario
Il design di PeerTube, gli schemi di colori, il vocabolario, ecc. sono stati costruiti in sette anni, mentre andavamo avanti, imparando, ricevendo aiuto dalla comunità. Questo nuovo design è stata un'opportunità per fare un passo indietro e ottenere alcune intenzioni dietro l'interfaccia.
Il nuovo tema predefinito Light/beige è più calmo e piacevole alla vista rispetto all'originale Black & orange. Abbiamo anche aggiunto un tema Dark/brown nel core per gli amanti della modalità scura. Entrambi mirano a facilitare la navigazione video.
Creare quei nuovi temi è stata un'opportunità per ripulire e semplificare il modo in cui è codificata l'interfaccia (in particolare: ripulire il CSS, concentrandosi sulle variabili), limitando al contempo le rotture con temi personalizzati preesistenti. Ora è davvero più facile creare nuovi temi per PeerTube e speriamo che condividerete le vostre creazioni!
Abbiamo anche aggiornato il gergo di PeerTube. C'è un motivo per cui ora stiamo usando il termine "piattaforma(e)" per parlare di tutti i server in cui è stato installato PeerTube.
Sì, chiamarli "istanza(i)" è stata la norma nel mondo esperto di tecnologia degli appassionati di activity-pub. Ma, per coloro che non sono abbastanza privilegiati da conoscere il fediverse e il suo protocollo, la parola piattaforma è autoesplicativa e facilita l'inclusione.
Godetevi layout più semplici e pertinenti
Ci sono molte informazioni da visualizzare su qualsiasi pagina di PeerTube. I layout e i menu sono cresciuti organicamente durante sette anni di sviluppo... e avevano bisogno di qualche potatura! Abbiamo rimodellato quei menu e quelle pagine per portare avanti informazioni rilevanti e presentare un modo più intuitivo per scoprire cosa stai cercando.
Ad esempio, i creatori di contenuti accedevano ai loro canali e caricavano video nella loro libreria (dove qualsiasi utente di PeerTube può accedere alle proprie playlist, cronologia, ecc. dei video guardati). Ora in PeerTube v7, c'è una nuova sezione chiamata "spazio video" specifica per le esigenze di chi carica video.
Allo stesso modo, le pagine "admin" per gli amministratori delle piattaforme PeerTube sono state ora separate in una pagina Panoramica (per ottenere maggiori informazioni sugli utenti, sui video ospitati, ecc.), una Moderazione (per gestire abusi, blocchi, registrazioni) e una Impostazioni (per accedere a configurazioni, runner, ecc.).
Le diverse pagine che presentavano i video sulla piattaforma PeerTube (Aggiunti di recente, Video locali, Di tendenza) sono state unite in una pagina "Sfoglia video" , che include filtri rapidi per visualizzare le stesse selezioni di contenuti in modo più diretto.
Lo stesso intento ha guidato il nuovo layout della pagina "Scopri video": ci auguriamo che possa dare spunti agli utenti curiosi.
Ovviamente, la barra di sinistra e i menu dell'intestazione sono stati riorganizzati per riflettere tali modifiche e rendere la navigazione ancora più intuitiva. Ora puoi accedere alle impostazioni del tuo account e alle notifiche dal menu dell'intestazione , come è consuetudine su altri siti web.
Visualizzazione di informazioni rilevanti per mostrare la diversità dei video
Uno dei commenti più frequenti dei nuovi utenti è stato che la vecchia interfaccia era confusa, ovvero era difficile per un utente capire dove si trovava e da dove provenivano i video.
Ecco perché, in PeerTube v7, abbiamo aggiunto più modi per consentire ai proprietari di piattaforme di personalizzare e identificare le proprie piattaforme : aggiungere facilmente un banner (utilizzato nelle pagine, nell'esplorazione delle app mobili e nel nostro motore di ricerca SepiaSearch ) e un'icona della piattaforma (utilizzata dall'applicazione mobile). Inoltre, il nome e la descrizione della loro piattaforma vengono ora visualizzati agli utenti non registrati nel menu di sinistra.
Abbiamo anche cambiato il modo in cui le miniature dei video appaiono in tutte le pagine che elencano i video . Gli avatar dei canali sono sempre visualizzati, quindi è più facile identificare i creatori, i titoli sono evidenziati, la data e il numero di visualizzazioni del video sono presenti ma attenuati. Queste modifiche rendono le pagine che elencano i video più facili da leggere e facilitano l'identificazione del video che vuoi guardare.
Accessibilità in prima linea
La riprogettazione è stata anche l'occasione per dare priorità all'accessibilità dell'interfaccia (per le persone con disabilità). Nel 2023, abbiamo preparato il codice e lavorato su ciò che sapevamo ... così l'audit di accessibilità completo pianificato per il 2024 (grazie al consorzio NGI Entrust) avrebbe portato quanti più miglioramenti nuovi e dettagliati possibili.
Grazie all'audit, abbiamo migliorato moltissimi aspetti : abbiamo sistemato i contrasti e i temi dei colori, la barra di avanzamento, diversi componenti e vari problemi con lo screen reader. Abbiamo aggiunto etichette mancanti sugli elementi interattivi, link "salta menu", sottolineatura dei link. Abbiamo anche migliorato la navigazione tramite tastiera e reimplementato componenti di una dipendenza non accessibile.
Crediamo sinceramente che PeerTube abbia risolto i problemi di accessibilità e dovrebbe essere all'altezza degli standard ... ma sappiamo, ora, che c'è sempre spazio per miglioramenti e per imparare direttamente da chi è interessato .
Modifica dei sottotitoli, promozione dei video e molto altro ancora...
Con il nuovissimo strumento di transcodifica remota che abbiamo introdotto l'anno scorso, ottenere una trascrizione o sottotitoli per il tuo video è più facile che mai. Ma lo strumento di modifica dei sottotitoli era... ehm... diciamo "barebone". Ora stiamo introducendo una nuova modalità che rende la modifica dei sottotitoli davvero comoda .
Abbiamo accolto e integrato a monte un contributo della comunità su SEO (ottimizzazione per i motori di ricerca), per aiutare a promuovere i contenuti ospitati da PeerTube sui motori di ricerca. Un avatar della piattaforma ora appare nei tag opengraph, gli account e i canali vuoti sono nascosti dalla mappa del sito, mentre ora sono presenti tag video aggiuntivi.
Infine, PeerTube è stato tradotto in slovacco .
Vorremmo davvero prenderci del tempo per ringraziare la comunità che contribuisce alle traduzioni di PeerTube: non avremmo mai pensato che un giorno il nostro software sarebbe stato disponibile in più di 38 lingue.
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
Canadian dollar dips below 70 cents US for first time since March 2020 | CBC News
Canada is not an ally of the USA, it is a vassal state.
Just the posturing of an incoming POTUS is enough to cause severe damage to our economy.
We are suddenly spending $1 billion more on defending our border, not on preventing the flood of guns FROM the US, but on preventing the trickle of drugs and migrants TO the US.
Trump couldn't force Mexico to pay for the wall but he is forcing Canada to pay for border patrols to prevent smuggling into the US, which is surely the job of the USA.
BestSpeech NVDA Add-on V0.15: Added a Nasality setting, also in the synth settings ring. Increments by 5, default is 75. Have fun. eurpod.com/BestSpeak.nvda-addo…
@erion haha, ironic :) But it's sadly in a similar state as Brailab, in that we have a DLL that's closed-state compiled who-knows-when we can use since it's Win32. @rommix0 put a lot of work in exporting the functions and getting it to work in his lightweight reader tool but I doubt we'll ever get it cross-platform.
@rommix0 @erion @datajake1999 I bet it was a surprise to wake up and have a bunch of sudden contact with members of the blind community rapidly increase on each one :D Not many would have taken it as in well of a stride as you did with interaction! Many would be like, "huh? They can use computers?" xD
Nice! Is there no way to fix that staticky thingy that happens when bunches of utterances are being sent to it at once? Drives me crazy and almost made me jump lol. Great work here so far! ☺️
@ChrisDuffley the last versions should have it way less (for me it still hasn't happened more than twice in about an 8 hour period) but I don't think so, the DLL is just too old to handle interruptions mid-chunks
I figured that. How sad, but understandable obviously given that it's quite an old one there. It's more like when I first enter File Explorer for instance when I get that since it's trying to say, literally: Dropbox - File Explorer. Items view list. BestSpeak.nvda-addon 1 of 2935.
what makes it infinitely tricky to point down is that it depends on sound cards people are using, and potentially rate setting too - if the sound card is slower at buffering audio or they're using it slower, it'll probably be more likely to do the static (although having it on 2 bluetooth headphones was better than with my Realtek with enhancements on, so it's just odd. Once I disabled them the speaker got better, so getting rid of any add-ons which generate sounds or enhancements you have on can help)
Yeah, they got it perfect on the BrailleNote. But also that's because it was older tech and it worked perfectly in that day and age. But yeah, that's an interesting observation there...
@ChrisDuffley @TomGrant91 sometimes these days I've found they put the enhancements in the "advanced" tab rather than giving it an "enhancements" tab since Realtek wants you to use its inaccessible control panel exclusively, so it's called "signal enhancements" in the advanced tab of the card (mmsys.cpl from run dialog will get you to the old sound panel)
@ChrisDuffley to be exact, it's not just Bestspeech that's responsive now, even IBMTTS has no lag whatsoever. I didn't actually see any difference with enhancements on or off because I have great HP speakers, the only decent speakers out there to be honest.
It's a very minimalistic-looking indie game about how to create illegal poker hands. That's the most terse way to summarize what it is. playbalatro.com/
Balatro is a deck-building roguelite where you must play poker hands and earn chips to defeat enemy blinds. Enhance your deck of playing cards, buy Jokers to modify each hand you play, and discover new and wild synergies to win!
If you like poker just a tiny bit, you will be addicted to this. The runs are super fast, there's a ton of content to unlock (which you can just skip if you like), not to mention that the source can be tinkered with due to the nature of the engine and the dev being awesome for not compiling it into Lua bytecode, so technically you could convert it to a platformer for personal use, though no idea how that would work, maybe complete a platformer level to obtain a card instead of just buying it haha.
Exciting news! Envision has been nominated for the David Goodwin Award by AppleVis, recognizing developers who empower people who are blind or have low vision. We’re honored to be in the running and would love your support. Cast your vote here: applevis.com/blog/cast-your-vo….
We are very pleased to announce that voting for the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards of 2024 is now open. We are also excited to announce the launch of a new award to recognize a developer who has made a significant and enduring impact for our community.
Download a 3.6MB tagged PDF of my slides or try the embedded view if your browser displays PDF inline. The text in the slides is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible. The PDF is exported from PowerPoint, after confirming reading order and alternative text.
It is easy to be cynical about the do-gooding motivations of a $3 trillion company, but Apple’s commitment to accessibility is admirable. This music fan bought Airpods Pro and nearly cried after learning they were also hearing aids. threads.net/@andycandy45/post/…
Guys I could actually cry right now. I bought myself some AirPods just as a treat to myself cuz I’ve been using cheap headphones. I’m setting them up yesterday and it says there’s a hearing aid setting.
Alan Hicks
in reply to daniel:// stenberg:// • • •Great to see you recorded for posterity. How do you feel about being part of future research for a few generations?
A similar thing happened to Digital Art a couple of decades ago with the Digital Art Museum. It spurred a few awards for excellence, most notably Vera Molnar who received the Dam Digital Art Award before her death last year:
digitalartmuseum.org/history/i…
ddaaward.org/
Digital Art Museum - Technology timeline
digitalartmuseum.org