Arduino Rap? "MIDI-triggered robots strike and vibrate glass bottles, coffee mugs, plastic wrap and a pizza box to make futuristic music out of the present's refuse and rubbish." clipping., the only hip hop group to win a Hugo. Tiny Desk concert.
Zítra nám držte palce. Čeká nás první velká streamovací akce. Ve spolupráci s @openalt budeme streamovat přednášky ze všech 7 místností konference #OpenAlt. Pokud budete mít čas a nějaká přednáška v programu vás zaujme, zkuste se mrknout. Při sledování videa jej zároveň sdílíte s ostatními diváky jako u torrentu (pokud nejste na mobilním zařízení) a každý peer se tak počítá!
Here's a short video about my cloudless, portable, small, low-resource "smart thermostat". It doesn't need an internet connection and uses MQTT. Here, it's directly driving a relay. It's running on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, powered by NetBSD, in read-only mode. I used it for years and it's time to go back to it, cloudless and local.
I wish I could find the HN comment by the Honeywell engineer that talks about like 6 different safety features none of the open source DIY thermostats have but I cannot seem to find it anymore. Stuff like
- it needs to lock out instead of continuing to try to start the gas heat so you don't flood the house with gas if the ignition is faulty
- it needs to automatically turn on the heat no matter what if if gets too cold
- it needs a mechanical safety feature to shut itself off if the heat gets stuck on
@feld My Netatmo doesn't do all that, and neither do the other thermostats connected to the other boilers I have access to.
Fundamentally, those are things the boiler handles (if it's less than 20 years old), not the thermostat. My boiler, even though it's 10 years old, has all these internal features; it also controls the water temperature, etc.
The thermostat is just for deciding if the house is cold or not - I expect all the other controls to be handled by the burner itself.
In other words, I'm not replacing the internal thermostat (the one that regulates the flow temperature, etc.), just the room thermostat. Besides, my sensor is located very far from the boiler, which is in a separate, ventilated room.
modern thermostats have neat features like compressor short cycle prevention for ac. 40 years ago you could literally make a call for service from the unit every minute and nothing would stop you until either the high side failed or the compressor motor failed.
I removed the Nest at this place I'm renting and put in a ZWave Honeywell, thought it was defective at first because it wasn't turning on the AC but it was just a safety thing and made me wait like 15 minutes before it would turn on the compressor the first time
on an unrelated note kids these days dont remember when a wet floor or frayed Xmas light could literally send you to Jesus same day delivery or flash fry the cat and burn the damn house down.
GFCI AFCI combo outlets save lives and their inventor deserves a Nobel prize.
Oh boy, traded in my iPhone at the Apple Store, and they needed to confirm it's alive, which requires getting from the hello setup screen to the regular Home Screen, which requires ten solid minutes of skip, skip, continue, set up later, skip, not now, later, continue, continue, skip, skip.
Ya know, I could just start typing and typing and paste a huge amount of stuff in here, and no one would even notice. Those who noticed wouldn't care. Those who care don't allow themselves to be seen.
A number of the #GigEconomy companies are offering discounts to #SNAP recipients in November. While this is almost certainly a strategic, not compassionate move it does help people who can’t shop for themselves and don’t have anyone who will shop for them.
However, please remember that your gig worker is still being exploited and are themselves often on food assistance. Gig companies pay extremely small amounts to workers, they absolutely depend on tips to meet their own basic needs.
For example, In 2023 I was working primarily for #UberEats, doing about 60+ hours a week. I working every weekend and holiday when trips were plentiful and tips were higher. On average, I drove 100 miles per day.
It was the best year I had doing gig work and I took home $35K, before taxes, of which, only 20% was paid directly by Uber themselves.
None of the gig companies I’ve worked for reimbursed for gas, wear and tear expenses or slow hours without any orders. You didn’t get sick time, there were no benefits. When someone broke into my car on Christmas while I was picking up food from a restaurant Uber’s only response was to suspend my account until I sent photos of my car having a new window.
If you can tip, please do tip, your driver is struggling too.
@feld I can't find out fedi-thread to reply to, but every since I asserted that SQL timeout you suggested, my AOX server has basically dropped to zero maintenance. It's amazing.
ICYMI, Joe Menn had a good scoop this week about how the US govt is getting set to ban TP-Link devices from being sold in the United States. If that happens, a whole lot of small businesses will probably need to find new networking gear. I have never trusted TP-Link devices and have repeatedly warned readers away from them. They have a history of flooding the market with massively underpriced hardware, and this is a market where generally speaking the cheapest means the most hackable. Here's one reply I sent to a reader in 2023 who inquired about finding what appeared to be an undocumented cloud login page.
"I realize that NYT and others constantly recommend TPLink b/c of the features vs price point, but I would stay away from this brand, and any that force you to register "in the cloud" before you can use them as local networking devices. You do not want your router to do anything except when you tell it do so, and to my mind all this cloud business being attached to network storage and local network things is troubling."
"If you are at all confident around computers, I'd recommend getting something like a high-end ASUS router and then installing an open source firmware on it, like Tomato or something. Because the default software that is on most routers is complete garbage, and often turns on a lot of stuff you really don't want turned on, or has other stupid default settings. If updating your new $160 router w/ third party firmware that could brick it if you screw it up is too much, then just stick with a Netgear router and make sure you check for firmware updates periodically."
This is pretty neat. It's common for IoT malware threats to patch infected routers, etc. so they can't be updated (with other malware or security patches).
@MostlyBlindGamer Gawd that's so overkill for a database with like 3 tables where I'm entering all data by hand though. Just tracking some metrics over time. I could use excel but the programmer in me hates that.
@jscholes Yeah probably. I just was hoping not to build a custom thingy, you know? Especially not a custom thingy that will get new data entered once every day or two for the next $years. Until something needs to change and someone, somewhere, will have to figure out the thingy again.
Cyclist falls down 130-foot ravine in France, survives 3 days by drinking wine he had in shopping bag
Updated on: October 31, 2025 / 6:45 AM EDT / CBS/AFP
A French cyclist survived for three days after a horrendous 130-foot fall into a ravine, kept alive by the bottles of red wine he had in his shopping bag, police said.
Včera jsem vzal extra směnu abych zaskočil za kolegu, který “se necítil dobře”. Dali mi autobus, který měl závady a já s ním odmítl jet, takže jsem si vzal náhradní, nahlásil změnu a včas a podle řádu jsem dokončil trasu. Dnes mě zjebal šéf, že protože jsem změnil autobus, přišli jsme o body v nějaké zbytečné soutěži. Myslím, že moje nasraní velice brzy vystřídá výpověď… Nebo ho zabiju.
ran out of primary IPv4s on my Hetzner account and now I am down a rabbit hole trying to figure out if I can go v4-less. For web apps / apis (which is pretty much all I have) it seems that I'd be okay (use A+AAAA DNS records) except SSH access from any v4-only network (like a lot of public wifi I presume). Could use cloudflare tunnel for that? What would you advise?
The thing about JAWS vs NVDA is that it doesn't matter if @freedomscientific packs it with objectively better features. NVDA is free, easy to use (within the context of desktop screen readers), and it's good enough for the vast majority of screen reader users. Want to browse the web? Want to check your email? Need to type up an assignment? Need to track data with spreadsheets? Want to write some code? Want to run virtual machines? Just wanna keep up with your communities on Discord? Want to test your app for accessibility? NVDA can do all of those things. There is no faffing, no caveats, no running obscure commands, and no license to install. You download it. You install it. You run it. That's it. Want it to do more stuff? Open the addon store which is built into NVDA. If you know Python, you can write your own addons and share them with other users. FS is relying on organizations like schools and governments where paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars is normal and expected and you can't just install an addon to an existing app. This does not work outside of those organizations. The blind kid who wants to listen to memes and keep up with their friends doesn't have several hundred dollars per year, but they probably know that they can go download a free screen reader that will let them listen to memes and keep up with their friends. NVDA is winning because it's good enough for most people and costs nothing. If you do have the money to spare for a license and you want to use JAWS because you prefer it, that's fantastic! I'm glad you found a screen reader that you like. Most people will choose the free option because they just wanna listen to their favorite streamer while they type up their research paper. #blind #AccessForAll #ScreenReader #nvda #jaws #jaws26
My opinion, as someone who has been in the AT industry for over 20 years, developed a Windows screen reader (Serotek's System Access), and worked on Narrator at Microsoft, is that NVDA also has a more solid foundation and more powerful addon support. FS is trying to keep JAWS fresh with new features, but IMO, JAWS is lumbering under decades of its own weight, and the main thing that's keeping it going is institutional sales and inertia.
I suspect that, in comparing screen readers, there may be a tendency to overlook the fact that the functionality of NVDA is distributed between the core application and a large collection of community-supplied add-ons. For a feature-level comparison with other screen readers (in the Windows environment or elsewhere), you really have to compare NVDA + relevant add-ons with the capabilities of the alternatives. Comparing only the NVDA core without the add-ons is misleading.
@jason @matt Except for in constrained environments. Of course, JAWS has the same thing with JAWS scripts, many of which are community supplied, but some ship with the screen reader, equivalent to NVDA's default app modules. I wonder which community is larger and has more active development and new add-ons? The store helped NVDA's process along I think, although the Spanish store was and still is going pretty strongly. I don't think JAWS has a central index of scripts. But JAWS scripts might cover some more niche cases than add-ons currently do, given longer history.
I'm fortunately in the position of having the freedom to choose my own hardware, operating systems and software - I'll never have to think about constrained environments. One advantage of NVDA is that there's now a centralized repository for add-ons, whereas there isn't for JAWS scripts. Voiceover for Mac supports AppleScript, but there are no published scripts as far as I am aware. Orca under Linux (which I use a lot) is moving toward supporting an add-on capability, but at the moment, all of the new features go directly into the core application.
@x0 @jason @matt Having said this I still don't think JFW has a particularly bright future. There aren't enough people in employment in my view, and a lot of home users are quite rightly switching to NVDA.
NVDA should be well suited to many higher education and employment scenarios as well. At least in the work I do, Web applications are becoming increasingly common (e.g., Google Drive/Docs for sharing documents that are not on GitHub), so it typically doesn't matter what operating system, let alone screen reader, one is using as long as they work reliably with modern Web-based interfaces, and the Web applications are accessible. Microsoft 365 is also widely used, and NVDA supports it. I'm sure there are various legacy enterprise applications around, but they'll probably continue to migrate to the Web over time, or be replaced by Web-based alternatives.
@matt The main thing that shocked me about JAWS when I tried it again last year, is that there is still an option in Settings Centre that is specifically for using DECtalk Access32 with single channel sound cards like the Soundblaster 16. I last needed to use that setting when I used a sound card like that in 1999 on Windows 95. I was using JFW 3.2 then which came out in 1998.. As far as I know, you can't run version 24 or whichever one I tried on a system where that would he needed but yet it's still there. What else I wonder is still there from 1998 that is no longer needed?
See but businesses will flat out refuse to deploy NVDA because open source bad, open source bad for security. What are you using for your website then? Huh? Thought so. And I bet your tech department all use Samsungs too. What OS do Samsungs run? Yup, Android.
@cubic @Rich I don't think anyone has seriously believed the "open source is bad" argument for many years now. We have a page listing many government & large corporate policies PROMOTING the use of open-source first: nvaccess.org/corporate-governm…
Many organisations need to have certain information about a program (license, what information it collects, etc) before they install it, and anything not on that page we are happy to answer via email - info@nvaccess.org
@NVAccess @cubic As much as I want that to be true, I don't know how much I believe it. The industry as a whole is still very heavily pushing tools that are over thousands of dollars on us and almost seem like they don't want to give NVDA a fair chance. As someone who uses NVDA full-time and truly appreciates the product, I feel like I'm in a very small minority. Whether directly or indirectly, blind people in developed countries are essentially being told "here's JAWS. Shut up and be grateful you have it". When you dare to question it people almost don't know how to handle you. I was specifically asked why I didn't want JAWS when the people for the state were doing my evaluation to determine what technology I'd be receiving.
@Rich @cubic When someone is pushing a paid or more expensive option, it is often because they benefit from it. We're happy to talk to state evaluators and organisations so they know about NVDA. At the end of the day, they should be providing the user with FULL information about the options, costs (up front and ongoing) and recommending the solution which is best for that individual, not for any other reason
@NVAccess @Rich @cubic If it would work with my work software, Eclipse, I would give it a try. And not Eclipse the programming language. For a minute, it worked in NVDA, but then it was reading everything twice in JAWS. So when they fixed that, NVDA no longer works again. I think the clickable thing just drove me nuts on the web. And I feel like I must be an idiot, because I believe people when they say it's fast and responsive for them, but I've found it stalls programs for me and such. Don't get me wrong. I'm glad you guys are around and applaud what you do.
@NVAccess @Rich @cubic If you are interested in making it accessible, contact their QA department because they are open to that. They worked with JAWS as there was a problem in windows 11 that was making it not read at all.
@EdenLinnea @Rich @cubic Thanks! Do you have a contact for them (Feel free to email us at info@nvaccess.org - they have a contact page but you can only get to it if you log in. Happy to chat with them if you can get us in contact.
@EdenLinnea @NVAccess @Rich @cubic I get that the "Clickable" thing is super annoying. If you go into NVDA Settings then Document Formatting and shift+tab five times, you find a box that says "clickable." Uncheck it and no more "clickable clickable clickable" nearly everywhere on the web. This should really be turned off by default because literally everyone I have taught NVDA to has wanted that turned off as soon as they encountered it.
@GamingWithEars @EdenLinnea @Rich @cubic I just had a look at our issues - github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issue… - and didn't see a request for it (it seems like something there may well be one for somewhere) - do feel free to create an issue - technically it wouldn't be hard to change it to default to disabled, it would just be ascertaining how the most users prefer it
@NVAccess @GamingWithEars @Rich @cubic There has not been one. I admit that. JAWS did not want to help. I had to pay a scripter to fix it when JAWS died. Since it was not working at all with NVDA even before, I knew it owuld take a lot of work. Right now there's less than ten of us using it.
@EdenLinnea @NVAccess @Rich @cubic Coming at this conversation as someone who uses both screen readers, I would encourage anyone who has even a slight interest in using more than one screen reader to take time to play with jaws, NVDA, and even narrator if you are so inclined. If you are someone who is quite happy with one screen reader, then that is fine as well. The fact that we can even have a serious discussion about multiple screen readers is remarkable in my opinion.
What a mess yeah, I regret having engaged in that and retract any dumb statements I made about that topic back then. I say gently, please lets not bring up old stupid drama like that my man, though in this case it worked out as it provides an opportunity for me to indicate that I now regret engaging in it so no hard feelings. Lets leave the sludge from the past in the past though from now on.
@Aryan I didn't know of this! As far as I knew, I just heard of Rommix's best speak. I thought it was a nickname Daney would say for bestspeak, speaky. You know what he's like! lol. Yeah that Dll ain't gonna work on the newer NVDA's
@TomGrant91 @Aryan I'm not even remotely worried about 32 bit synths on newer NVDA. First I'll wait to see if NVAccess fixes it. If they don't, I at least know a way how, and assuming time/energy/interest/life permits, look forward to implementing it. I use IBMTTS and while I'm not exactly addicted to it - I could switch if needed, I get what it would be like for an architecture change to force a synth change and it's completely unneeded even if it would take some extra work.
@Aryan OK. If needed, I will probably have the 32 bit NVDA to mess with the synth with a screenreader, and yes, I'm also an IBMTTS user, but first of all I was a keynote gold user and have a language master that uses bestspeech. Very historical for me.
@garo @TomGrant91 @Aryan Yep something like this is exactly my plan if NVAccess doesn't provide a general solution themselves. I want to emulate NVDA's synth driver layer in a 32 bit process, so then someone would install the 32 bit .nvda-addon package as they normally would but in this deticated 32 bit process. A 64 bit addon would then exist which makes all the 32 bit synth drivers show up in 64 bit NVDA using IPC to communicate. Surely this is not entirely thought out and I'd be dealing with some complications I haven't yet imagined, but it's very very possible that's for sure.
@TomGrant91 @Aryan I'd still like to know how feezable it would be to do a similar thing for sapi5, or even sapi 4, since I do occasionally use x86/ 32bit only sapi 5 voices.
@TomGrant91 @Aryan Since you said you didn't know about it, it's basically all here, stable NVDA addon with no crackles pops or squeals, C API to it, and command line speech utility. github.com/samtupy/b32tts_wrap…
@TomGrant91 @Aryan You're awesome Doctor Sam, thank you for everything you do good sir! I very much appreciate the open source awesome projects you share for the community.
Ja sé que tots sou molt racionals, però en el #DeltaChat, quan entres dins dels grups, en el fons de pantalla, a part de clar/obscur podria existir també la opció d'insertar una imatge des de la teva galeria, per canviar el fons?
In the early to mid 2000s, IBM created several text-to-speech voices. Some of the newer voices created after 2006 include a file called pcm.fli. If this file is imported as raw data in an audio editor, several hours of text that was used to train the TTS can be heard. Some of it is lifted from sources such as 1990s news articles, while other bits of it seem to be made up. One of the sentences the voice actors had to say was "did Michelangelo zap you?" The voice actors behind two of the voices, Michael and Lisa, said this sentence in two different ways which convey some... slightly different meanings. Lisa is lower quality because the 22 kHz version of that voice isn't very listenable if it's imported as raw data, with lots of popping noises that make it sound very distorted. The 8Khz version doesn't have this problem, so I used it.
@x0 Yep, it's part of the fifth generation voices produced after 2006. The oolder ones have a single file called OFFLImage which doesn't seemed to be listenable.
Huh. I have both. I wonder if the OFFL was compressed somehow. I wonder how parsable this file format is? THe little pops between voices for Michael suggest some kind of chunking header, perhaps indicating length and maybe even text, and if we could pull that out we could maybe train a piper voice or something on it.
@x0 Possibly? Going through an OFFLImage from a mid 2000s 8kHz voice , there's some audible data berried in it, but it's very distorted and low-pitched, at least with the settings that worked on 8k pcm.fli, U-Law encoding, 8 kHz sample rate.
Also disk_file.spe, which is audible but distorted, unsure what audio algorithm is being used. I'm actually wondering if the other two files are older artifacts that aren't actually used? Or if the disk file is the actual data for the synth and the others are training data.
@x0 pcm.fli does seem to be used. Just tried deleting it from a voice and it didn't work without it. It seems that that file only contains some of the training data, though, and disk_file.spe has more of it.
@x0 I don't think it's "just" training data. It's probably how they do unit selection, they must have metadata somewhere that specify which parts of that file constitute which units, and how those units should be stitched together to produce natural speech. Most synths split those recordings, I guess IBM doesn't and just offsets into them.
@x0 Btw, you could probably make that trained Piper voice appear as a real voice in Eloquence. eci.dll does not really implement any of the core Eloquence algorithms, that's all in the language specific libs. All ECI is is a "standard library" of sorts, implementing a sort of cross-platform abstraction layer on top of threads, mutexes, file access, audio playback and such, likely intended to be used by the voice libs themselves. It also implements the user-friendly C API (the rest of it is C++), as well as INI parsing and voice registration / discovery based on said INI.
@x0 So, if you understood the API between eci.dll and enu.dll, you could implement your own enu.dll, using whatever method for speech synthesis you wanted.
V posledních dvou týdnech jsme se soustředili na to, aby náš první workshop proběhl co nejvíc bez problémů. A tak jsme provedli pár změn pod kapotou, které usnadňují používání Stacků. Compose file je nyní možné uložit bez aplikování změn a pull+up URL pro CI/CD dává debug výstup, se kterým se dají rovnou vyřešit případné problémy. Chystáme se také na OpenAlt, kde jsme dali k dispozici část naší infrastruktury pro transkódování live streamů.
Your yearly reminder that the Salvation Army refuses to lend aid to struggling/homeless LGBT; therefore, you should refuse to lend aid to the Salvation Army.
@thunderbird Hi there, just a bit of a newsflash, It's not WindowsEyes. It's WindowEyes; although WindowEyes has not been in existence for a very long time now. You may want to update/remove that from this article: support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/t…
The company’s strategy is to raise money via a fundraising round and separately hold a tender offer to allow employees to sell some of their shares to a select group of investors.
Toasterson
in reply to feld • • •feld
in reply to Toasterson • • •