On this day in 1985, 41 years ago, Greensboro, NC, the city in which I grew up, experienced it's coldest temperature on record, -8 degrees F, or -22.22 degrees C.

I was alive for that, but being less than a year old at the time, don't have any memory of it.

My baby bedroom was the least insulated in that house, though, so that must have been fun keeping it at a reasonable temperature.

Mount Mitchell, NC recorded a temperature of -23 degrees F, or about -31 degrees C, on that same day.

This entry was edited (3 hours ago)

honestly, the janky-ass superflous animations & effects even with all the “reduce motion” #accessibility options enabled seem to exist only to slow down my previously very snappy recent-gen (n-2) #iPhone – this isn’t event planned obsolescence, it feels like hastened obsolescence to make the #Apple money printer go brrr just a little sooner than usual, as a treat 😤

on a device that has the hardware to support 120Hz refresh rates, why am I ever seeing folders & icons get visibly drawn on my screen? 🤪

#LiquidAss #enshittification on display yet again 💩

Oh, cool. My NAS back at home is apparently suffering from Dying Power Supply Syndrome (DPSD) or something. It apparently improperly shut down twelve times yesterday, according to the logs.

Of course, it would do this just a few months after I spent over 2 grand replacing the storage on it with 8 new 12 TB hard drives, replacing the 6 TB drives that were all starting to die.

Looks like maybe a new NAS is in my future when I get back... whenever that is.

This entry was edited (4 hours ago)

Brrr... new introduction time cause my old one is already outdated lol.

I am Sinclair-Speccy, your local resident computer nerd that can’t actually do a lot of tech stuff like people think. My primary interests are #Linux, #OldTech, and #OStan. You’ll usually find me boosting retro tech content and occasionally posting it myself, mostly retro tech ads.

My interest in emulation all started when I managed to run Yggdrasil Linux from the '90s (I know, so interesting /s). Despite having used XP as my first OS other older OSes (mostly Linux ones) interest me more if you look at the media I've posted on my account besides the tech ads.

I’ve moved around a bit online as I started on .art as my friend was there, then bitbang.social and now oldbytes.space.

One of my favourite niche fandoms is OS-tans which is turning operating systems and hardware into anime characters, though I tend to call them tech gijinkas. I even have my own tech gijinkas universe that is hosted on my site.

As for some other stuff I enjoy #mythology, #transformers, #cats, #fantasy, #nature such as #flowers and #plants and #animals, #steampunk, #starwars, #photography, #art, #space, #cyberpunk and #scifi... there is more but I'm not writing them all.

You can check out my website here: sinclair-speccy.github.io/The-… and I hope to expand it into a tech journalism platform or something, though motivation and its static nature kind of stop me...

Unlike in the past I'm not active as I used to be, sadly.

#RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #RetroComputing #VintageComputers #Introduction

Farewell to autumn: Danish Digital Ministry turns its back on Microsoft.

At the Danish Digital Ministry, all employees should be able to do without Microsoft. Instead, Linux and LibreOffice will be used, says the minister.
heise.de/news/Von-Word-und-Exc…

Sorry guys. I had to remove the timeline gaps system. It was just not working correctly at all, and was only causing issues and annoyances. Not sure if I will ever reimplement something like this in the future, however if it's of concern, you can disable caching entirely, at which point the app would load a fresh copy of the timeline upon every client start like before.

Thank you for using FastSM! We update the app hourly to keep your experience running smoothely! For best results, keep your app up to date!
FastSM will never ask you to review the app. Mainly because it can't, because there is no review system attached to GitHub.
Anyway, This update includes but is not limited to bugfixes, performance improvements, new bugs, unintentional performance degradations, issues, disappointments, problems, issues, and many more issues. Please keep your updates turned on to experience all of this, and more! Our developers will never tell you that they are taking a nap, or mowing the lawn, unless, of course, they are indeed taking a nap, or mowing the lawn. Why our developers would be mowing the lawn in a changelog, who actually knows. Anyway, more bugfixes and performance improvements time! Please keep your updates turned on for more bugfixes and performance improvements! Thank you for using FastSM! We promise that as we continue to add more bugfixes and performance improvements, eventually we will add so many bugfixes and performance improvements that we will be forced to rename the app to SlowSM, or potentially even BuggySM. So stay tuned for this eventuality. Anyway, again we hope you enjoy using FastSM!

reshared this

I don't think I like this new world, you guys. Every time Youtube Music plays me a song I haven't heard before, I wonder if it's AI. Hmm, that's a lot of releases in a short time. Is the voice quality a bit odd because the track quality is low, or because I'm imagining it, or because it's AI? Wait, those rhymes are really weak. Did an LLM just spit those out?

There are two primary reasons I like watching the output from Claude or Gemini, or any model for that matter: #1. you can learn some really cool shell tricks, #2. I love watching how it transforms my thoughts, e.g. from a markdown spec file, into a plan. Even the most careful planning on my part always has some gaps, high verbosity, etc. For that reason, I always request the model to ask followup questions.
#1 #2

In today's world of autocorrect, why do so many places where people write from their phones always include contractions with missing apostrophes? You'd think any modern operating system would see "isnt" and immediately correct it to "isn't". Same for "ive", "dont", and so on. I can understand the apostrophe being multiple taps away, and so not getting added manually, but why wouldn't software put it back in?

#TimeToTehOn...Good morning. I like FastSM rather more than tc, only probably because it loads faster, and takes up less RAM space. However, I won't be running it networkly like I can TC, for the simple reason that I cannot localise user data, or not that I know of. I don't use Telegram that much on the pc anyway, because most who have my details there, also follow me on mastodon, so no use boring people on telepaw if I already posted here anyway. BlueSky I don't have, and probably will never have either...Between my facebook/mastodon.africa/fluffy.family accounts I already have 3 social media related accounts, and that seems to be enough for now. However, knowing me, I may just fall for Bluesky, like I fell for the Seika Mini2 Smart Braille Notetaker...so I'll never say never, simply because I know myself well enough to know that curiosity might indeed push me to get bluesky regardless of the current reluctance. Anyway, have a nice day on this humpday.

It occurs to me that I haven't yet tested FastSM's ability to upload media to Mastodon. So I hereby present something which I call, "Girl, You Know it's False." I take the intro to the Milli Vanilli song "Girl, You Know it's True," where a man and a woman are talking to each other on opposite stereo channels, then I deliberately use and normalize the channel where each person is *not* talking. What you hear is a really echoy conversation, with almost certainly tape hiss and even some 50 Hz hum in the background. Then at the end the two orchestra hit type things also sound weird. Anyway here goes.

Well, I got GPT5 Pro mode again, asked it to help refactor my driver because I don't do a good enough job myself of that, and now it's been thinking for 88 minutes. Either it's going to give me a big disaster pile, or I somehow got it stuck. Longest time I've seen it think was like 65 minutes haha. But what the heck can you do for 88 minutes! This better be good. I feel like I'm asking a real coder to do the work, but worse, because it's not an actual real coder but a program, so it's more disappointing.
in reply to Brandon

@serrebi @FreakyFwoof @stormproductions @xogium oh interesting! May give it a try at work, we have access to both. I have Google One plan which I share with my partner so we both get Gemini, they prefer it and honestly OpenAI has never allowed for family sharing like that, quite unfortunate. I feel like I need both in my toolbox. OpenAI (pro for now, we'll see if I make enough use of it this month to count) for those "think through and patch files direct inside container for you" moments, Gemini for the "review my code I wrote and that it's not trash and passable to an AI to work on", and they both look at different areas of the code. GPT will get it done even if you give it a bad idea to get done, Gemini's for sure a lot more cautious. So I can't decide on either these days, usually my workflow is augmenting one's response with the answer of the other, which makes me wonder what a powerful tool could be built if it just passed your prompt between the 2 AIs to solve, I'm sure someone's thought of that by now.
in reply to Brandon

@serrebi @stormproductions @FreakyFwoof @xogium yeah, even in the "AI pro" plan :) + the 2 TB Gmail is nice, well, that's why I was initially subbed to it but they migrated people over with a slight price bump. economically speaking I think if I wanted to get the most use out of AI, Gemini does win by a longshot, even if GPT's now trying to compete with their $8 "go" plan LOL
in reply to Storm

@stormproductions If they are still up after all the crap they go through right now, that is...

Trials for the death of several people that trusted gpt with things, claims that chatgpt can even be trusted with health advices now when it clearly can't -- I'm not joking! I saw an ad about it!

Then also the Musk case. Oh dear oh dear. Now I don't like Musk at all but truth is, he's apparently got 60% chance of winning his case against OpenAI. And he asked for a jaw dropping $134b iirc.

I think OpenAI will sink sooner than later.

in reply to Casey Reeves

@xogium @stormproductions I do use Gemini, quite often to double-check code GPT wrote, because it will scan through it a lot faster. But (at least on web) it's horrible at pasting back code you gave it exactly 1 to 1 still, like it'll omit sections that it's pasting back of the code I gave it, and I'm yelling at it "give me full pieces! No omissions!" Haha. It's gotten better but GPT having an entire container inside to access and run Linux commands, not to mention I've uploaded a 30-40 MB zip file to it with my entire Gitub repo and Gemini just yells at me, "file is too large." LOL.

Pravidelné kombinování různých druhů fyzické aktivity může být nejlepší pro prodloužení délky života, ale souvislosti nejsou lineární, což naznačuje možný optimální prahový efekt www.news-medical.net/news/2026012...

Diverse exercise routines asso...

God, Mac OS is really awful these days! A notification comes in, no VO focus on it, so hit VO+F1 twice, notifications menu has "go to Notification Center" and..."No items in Notification center!" Also, "Go to Notification Center" doesn't actually do anything! If something this basic doesn't work, it's no wonder VO is so bad. Case in point, every time my Mac restarts now, it comes up saying "Installer has no Windows." I have to use VO+Shift+Space to click the mouse because it's hanging out in the Login Window, while Vo's focus refuses to move from this blank Installer Window no matter what. Pressing VO+F1 just says, "Authentication required." Shit, maybe I just need to blow the OS away and start over.

New: NV Speech Player finally gets a "pause mode" setting, like Eloquence has. This should not chew into lines with say-all, but rather does clause-based punctuation pause detection. And, it does appear to work. You can choose between "off," "short," and "long." This should solve a lot of complaints around words "merging together" after punctuation. I also began my first pass at abstracting parts of the driver out: _frontend.py and _dll_loader.py. Logging was also improved, I cleaned up over 40 try/catch exceptions, We're not trying to play Pokemon here.
download: eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
Oh! and for those wondering "where's classic pitch?" It's located in the Voice settings dialog, you'll find it as a checkbox.
This entry was edited (9 hours ago)
in reply to Tamas G

thanks for the last corrections concerning m/n between vowel and consonant for pt-br. Now, I've just added a phoneme which I've called "brã", for Brazilian ã, which consisted of a single change: take ã and change cf4 from 3300 to 2600. then I added to pt-br.yaml:
- from: "ã"
to: "brã"
Now, when I command it to speak a word like "região", the new phoneme appears to be used, but it's much less stressed and somewhat shortened, or at least de-emphasised. Can you give a look please?

Our parliament holds 101 members + bunch of officers in the parliament + a ministry which deals with finances. They recently passed a law, which, apparently by error, made all gambling websites except from paying taxes in Estonia. Loss in tens of millions of euros, which in Estonias view is a considerable sum. Now, to avoid this situation in the future, they are talking about implementing AI in law making and in the process. What could possibly go wrong.
This entry was edited (9 hours ago)
in reply to Jakob Rosin

Whatever the AI says is right. Yours is probably better than mine since your AI is the best AI the world has ever seen. Therefore you are the best person, with the best skills. Just an FYI, I'd like to purchase Estonia because why not? I could make Estonia a big data center. I need it because @BorrisInABox and @FreakyFwoof are all running AIS on their Macs which might be bigger than mine and yours combined. So gimme. Gimme gimme gimme ... urp.

My partner and I visited Norway and hiked (a surprisingly short hike) to a place called Litlefjellet -This was the view!
Litlefjellet, Norwegian for ‘Little Mountain’, is the name of the center mountain. Plus, we found the iconic pond that perfectly reflects the whole scene.
I loved it so much that I decided to make it into wood art! I hope you love it, too
#woodart #artandairplanes #art #woodworking #wood #norway #mountains #hiking #sun