General rule of thumb: Every time an organization updates their terms of service and/or privacy policy, it is never because they have your best interests at heart.
Setting aside the "worldwide license" bullshit, the privacy policy appears to have broadened both the classes of data Mozilla aims to collect, and the situations in which they collect them.
These are not the actions of an org that cares about your privacy.
Gack, I hate it when you follow a link to a YouTube video, and you recognise it and are sure you have watched it already, but you can't remember what the answer to the question in the title turned out to be. Anybody care to summarise for me?
It's not really a mystery.links 'n stuffMy video on 240V power in the US;https://youtu.be/jMmUoZh3Hq4This channel is supported through viewer contributions o...
BBC Sounds will soon be unavailable for listeners residing outside the UK, as from "Spring 2025". Those going abroad temporarily will still be able to listen to BBC Sounds. Only BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 will remain available over bbc.com. Please see bbc.com/mediacentre/bbcstudios… for more information.
@datajake1999 @rommix0 @Tamasg Uh, whoa brobrobrobro this thing is like, very very responsive now! A new and improved version of the bestspeech addon is released, with the hook enablement logic moved to dll initialization instead of on speak which suddenly makes this thing super, super snappy! Sorry it means more work for you Jake, you'll want to rebuild the wrapper this time when updating your version. github.com/samtupy/b32tts_wrap…
This is definitely on par with IBMTTS now! I'm still going to keep IBMTTS for obvious reasons, sounds more natural for reading web pages, but well, I do have tifloteknia for that I suppose. I might disable the add-on, see how I get on without it, then if needed, re-enable it.
@TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 lol wish I could! It's so close! Getting a rate boost module like through Sonic (or even looking at how the PR was done for the SAPI5 and OneCore rate boost) would be huge huge. I would at that point probably abandon eloquence, lately the bass in the voice has been getting to me more and noticing how Keynote is not so bass heavy is kind of nice, heh.
@TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 I need to try focusing on NVGT a little bit here haha, but I can probably hack sonick into place in a bit, I might just make the wrapper rather than the addon support it honestly as it'd be easier and more performant to just implement it directly in c instead of python being some sort of middleman.
@TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 well, I sent a little donation your way to help! It's just all a dream come true to me, and the wrapper is not something I myself could write easily as I'm really not a C or C++ person, beyond writing a bot that used the interception library to script my audio game, heh xD but my daily work takes place so much in React and HTML that Python is really the easiest language to move from when working with those at my job.
@TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 Even though I have no nostalgia for this synth I love how it sounds and the wrapped addon makes it so much nicer. In addition to agreeing a rate boost would be great, I found a small bug with the addon - the inflection control doesn't seem to do anything. Other than that it's been rock solid here :)
@pitermach @TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 oh? Inflection for sure works for me, it also lowers the pitch slightly as you lower it so you're able to get similar sounds with different combinations of pitch / inflection, it's fun to play around with that bit.
@alexchapman @TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 Oh I figured it out it's the earcons and speech rules addon. It inserts its own pitch changes into the read text and I guess that's resetting the inflection. If I pause it it works fine.
@TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 Whoa, thank you very much my dude that is super appreciated! This is nooooot the project I expected any donations from hahahahaha, that made my morning much more pleasant. Thanks!
@pixelate @TwoThousandStu @TomGrant91 Thank you very much for your donation, it is super appreciated! Wow this day didn't quite go how I expected it to, meant in a positive way haha.
@pixelate @TwoThousandStu Same here! I thought we were going to have to live with BestSqueak and Rommix's speak window for the rest of our lives. Oh yeah, Tamas's trained pyper keynote voice. Very accurate to say the least, as well. That's what started it all off for me. Even the phrase pauses on the trained voice was very accurate.
Wow this is indeeed snappy! Only thing this add-on has always had trouble with for me is reding very small strings, like letters. It always lags when doing that. This version is better than the others, but still does it. I wonder why?
@BTyson @musicalman Would this particular issue also be mitigated by the upcoming silence trimming in NVDA, or is the inserted delay some sort of very quiet white noise?
@BTyson @musicalman that's a good question, you'd have to test it with adding purpose=nvwave.AudioPurpose.SPEECH to the end of the player set-up and see.
@BTyson @musicalman I'll have to update to an NVDA snapshot and do that yeah, I usually stick with a stable NVDA but then again I don't usually do addon development haha. That might finally change now that the bestspeech saga has lead to me learning that API a little.
@TomGrant91 @pixelate @TwoThousandStu Haha can confirm, as I said before this was some sort of really cool and very silent/uncoordinated collaboration that just kind of happened. Rommix provided the first building blocks, I used much information from his reverse engineering efforts embodied in the bestspeak program to learn how to communicate with the dll when writing the wrapper, then ripped out code from various versions of the existing bestspeech NVDA addon and got some extra help besides, got to do some original tweaks like the indent tone things and soon I'll get sonick for us, and now we're where we are. This entire bestspeech recovery situation has been really great.
@TomGrant91 @pixelate @TwoThousandStu yeah, the only other engine that could really benefit from this type of work would be the Eloquence 2.0 engine - it too can only use an MME-based waveout, and of course we have SoftVoice that's using something similar too. Of course what's hard is that each engine has different needs for hooking, so there's no way to make a universal wrapper that magically converts any wave-out older synth to allow direct memory access of the raw PCM data, but what can we do. This alone is a great case example of how even older engines can be modernized.
@TomGrant91 @pixelate @TwoThousandStu ah darn, true, that company's site is still around too, even if they haven't updated the engine itself in decades xD
@TomGrant91 @pixelate @TwoThousandStu I didn't have the best interaction with him either. I told him I was interested in creating a SAPI5 wrapper for the engine, and he asked why that was necessary. After telling him this was for my own personal use, he never got back to me. He also doesn't plan on open sourcing the engine. Honestly, fuck SoftVoice as a company.
@TomGrant91 @pixelate @TwoThousandStu that's a shame! I mean considering how Willow-pond and that engine were super vital to the early days of speech development, there's actual historical impact when a company refuses to work with a community.
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).
Updated the older BestSpeak.nvda-addon to version 0.30, at eurpod.com/BestSpeak.nvda-addo…. Made it so installing this names itself something else in the synthesizers list and will not conflict with the add-on by Sam Tupi. Adapted Sam's hack for the indentation beeps and doing the text translation earlier. Squealing issues and memory leaks remain, so this was just a final push to align some of the functionality and see should things change, which they did not, alas. Still, for those of you who wanted both the Squealing and regular drivers side by side, now you have your wish, I guess, and you can also compare performance between the two
Inklusion - Das kann ja nie gelingen!
Davon möchte ich mich eigentlich gar nicht entmutigen lassen, sagt Heiko Kunert
https://www.kom-in.de/190/inklusion-das-kann-ja-nie-gelingen
#Info #Barrierefrei #blind #sehbehindert
We are very pleased to announce the return of Micro-Speak, after a few years of being unavailable. Back by popular demand, Micro-Speak now includes some exciting new improvements.
Oh, reading the story makes me sad. At least we will still be able to get BBC Radio four but I would miss Christmas Eve service on BBC radio Scotland and BBC Ulster. If they offered a paid subscription for those of us outside of the UK, I would actually consider it. Here’s hoping my favorite Christian stations from the UK will not follow suit as I would miss them terribly. radiotoday.co.uk/2025/02/most-…
I don't think Linux pros are ready to support the many people that will flood Linux once Windows 10 is end of life. Especially the blind Linux community which, for some, require users to go through what they went through in order to become "good" at Linux. That, of course, involves burning themselves on distributions that don't come with Orca, or learning which desktop environment works well with Orca, which ones work enough for a specific user to use the subset of it that works for them, all that. Oh and finding accessible apps. And games. And voices. And all the weird commands, like Control + Tab instead of F6 in some situations, like the language picker in the Fedora installer.
Also there honestly aren't enough blind Linux users to support everyone that will inevitably come to Linux from the BT Speak, or Windows 10, or the continuing entropy of Windows 11. I just hope we can be patient with newcomers and not expect them to know Linux before they've learned it. Oh and RTFM? There barely is a manual to read. But there is this:
But, it will allow me to have some bigger numbers in front of the Gnome, Wayland, and other devs, so we can fix the missing interfaces on Wayland, and in the process maybe make them better than was or is on X.org.
Ich bin begeistert von #WebXDC und #DeltaChat. Es hat mich einen längeren Abend gekostet, aus webxdc.js und jspreadsheet.js eine funktionierende App zum Teilen einer Tabelle in @delta zu bauen. Mein Anteil: 50 Zeilen HTML mit etwas JavaScript codeberg.org/phormanns/shareta…
Image by Carl Van Vechten, via Wikimedia Commons
“How did Faulkner pull it off?” is a question many a fledgling writer has asked themselves while struggling through a period of apprenticeship like that novelist John Barth describes in his 1999 talk …
Tapestry v1.0.3 brings improved iPad multitasking, new export options for OPML and backing up your data, fixes problems with footnote links, greatly improves connectors, allows Reddit users to choose between Hot, New, Top & Rising feeds and much more.
Join Cory Doctorow, Audrey Tang, Anna Tumadóttir, and others as we co-define the future of open at our March 8, 2025 Open House for an Open Future event at #SXSW in Austin.
AppleVis is pleased to unveil our 2024 Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card. The only report of its kind to focus specifically on the needs of people who are blind, DeafBlind, or who have low vision, the Apple Vision Accessibility Report Card provi…
In case you didn't know, The Wikimedia foundation has loads of other projects as well as Wikipedia. A few I find interesting are: Wikivoyage - a travel guide. en.wikivoyage.org Wiktionary - a dictionary. en.wiktionary.org Wikisource - a collection of public domain books a bit like Project Gutenberg. en.wikisource.org Wikimedia Commons - public domain images, video and audio. commons.wikimedia.org There's also Wikidata, which is a database of pretty much anything. I find it too complicated to use but some of you will no doubt get something out of it. wikidata.org Most of Wikimedia's projects are in multiple languages as well.
Tell your friends, The post on my site at eurpod.com/piper-voices-of-ret… has been updated to feature a link to the releases page for the amazing driver Sam Tupy (@samtupy) is producing for BESTSpeech (Keynote gold). I honestly don't know if I'll maintain the older driver. There's certain hacks and character conversions that I could in theory apply and improve it a little, but I don't think that will fix the squealing problem with rapid speech interruptions, because that's a direct problem of rapid teardown and re-initialization of the DLL, along with not having access to the raw data. In technicality, we also didn't have any async callback to the DLL (or really any callback at all), just a straight-up, "here, speak this chunk of text, and hopefully after you're done, we can close the engine. But when you're done, we have no idea of, so hopefully we get to close it in time before you're actually done!" So the work that Sam did to "modernize" this synthesizer is nothing short of a miracle, to be honest, now it behaves way closer to what you would see in Eloquence, DECTalk, any comprehensive synthesizer, and for that I'm grateful.
Hopefully, when 16 to 32, then to 64 Bit code translation is more than possible, a multilingual version will be released. Still I'm optimistic on how it's going
Anyone using "App Mount" – apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/a… ? Does it still work? Its last update was 2017, but it still had 200+ downloads this year already, so some folks sem to at least having tried it.
TalkBack, the built-in screen reader on Android, includes a feature that allows activating certain functions and changing options using voice commands. This
Ora DVX #Meloni all'amichetto nazi je fa er condono "ad personam". Il fisco italiano mette #ElonMusk nel mirino, ha evaso l’Iva di #Twitter: “Ci deve 12,5 milioni” #26febbraio #Bollette
great product! i only wish you had a plan for unlimited aliases like proton does with simplelogin/proton pass. 15 aliases doesn't do it for me... and i don't want to use a domain for that....
@bouncy Thank you for the praise. I am afraid we don't have unlimited aliases. But you can get more with Legend and business plans, if there is a need.
Whether or not you use LibreOffice, it's very wise to save your documents in a free and open format – so that you don't get locked out of them in future! Learn more on Document Freedom Day, coming up on March 26: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #OpenSource
In one month, on March 26, we will celebrate Document Freedom Day 2025. For the first time in a while, the LibreOffice project will play a major role in organizing the event.
This happened to me with MS Office Online. I began using it with my Hotmail account when if first came out. I had quite a few documents on it, then, one day, I received a message that I needed to pay for one of their plans to access my documents. That was the final time I ever used MS Office.
On the bright side, I already had #LibreOffice, so the switch was easy.
Absolutely. I have documents I created in the past that I can no longer read. Microsoft Works, Word Pro and CorelDraw 3. I own the data, I shouldn't be limited by a proprietary file format.
It is very wise to use such format. Furthermore, in France, it is recognize by #CINES @cines_fr for long-term preservation. Not the Microsoft office formats.
Op 26 maart aanstaande is het Document Freedom Day, incl. aandacht voor Open Document Formaat (ODF): "Don't get locked out of your data! Open Standards are essential for freedom and privacy. Document Freedom Day is an yearly celebration that happens on the last Wednesday of March." Meer info: digitalfreedoms.org/en/dfd #digitaleautonomie
Philippe Val se plaint du fait qu'il soit écrit sur Wikipédia qu'il est islamophobe... Alors qu'il dit lui-même qu'il est islamophobe. "Oui je suis islamophobe."
That's more than half of what the DOGE website says it has "saved" through layoffs, firings, contract terminations and funding freezes.
BTW the NYT had a story yesterday that talked about how DOGE quietly removed many billions from its "wall of receipts" after a slew of media outlets called total BS on their math.
"These were the original five largest savings on its list:
An $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The actual contract in question was worth $8 million. The mistake seemed to stem from an earlier, erroneous entry in a federal contracting database. But contracting experts said that the service should have known better: ICE’s entire budget is about $8 billion, making it implausible that one contract could be so large. The U.S. DOGE Service adjusted the figure on the site after The Times wrote about it, and said in a post on Mr. Musk’s X platform that it had “always used the correct $8M in its calculations.”
Three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development. This was actually a single cut that was erroneously counted three times, as first reported by CBS News. That mistake also seemed to reflect a misunderstanding of the way government contracts work; they sometimes have “ceiling values” far in excess of what will be spent. Experts said this cancellation was unlikely to produce anything close to $655 million in savings even once. Now, the site lists a much smaller savings for these three cancellations: $18 million in total.
A $232 million cut at the Social Security Administration. Here, Mr. Musk’s organization appeared to have mistakenly believed that the agency had canceled a huge information technology contract with the defense contracting giant Leidos. Instead, as reported by The Intercept, it had canceled only a tiny piece of it: a $560,000 project to let users mark their gender as “X.” The DOGE site now shows that small cut instead.
Some of the new canceled contracts added this week appear to make some of the same types of errors.
The largest savings on the latest version of its list is a $1.9 billion cut at the Treasury Department. But The Times reported last week that this contract was canceled last fall, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was president — and when DOGE did not yet exist."
The cuts, highlighted on an earlier version of the “wall of receipts” posted by Elon Musk’s team, contained mistakes that vastly inflated the amount of money saved.
Tapestry v1.0.3 brings improved iPad multitasking, new export options for OPML and backing up your data, fixes problems with footnote links, greatly improves connectors, allows Reddit users to choose between Hot, New, Top & Rising feeds and much more.
Eitan
in reply to Tor Lillqvist • • •