Today's Christmas audio post to bring joy to everyone…except probably not! In 1983 someone wrote a program for a version of BASIC used on IBM PC and compatible computers. This program could play ten Christmas songs through the built-in PC speaker using the Play statement. While this just allows a single note at a time, if programmed correctly, it can still sound good…but this particular version of Jingle Bells was not programmed correctly, to say the least!
in reply to Matt Campbell

As I suspect, my conception of what a proper instrumental arrangement of "Jingle Bells" ought to sound like was set by the version I grew up with in Diversi-Tune, a MIDI music program for the Apple IIGS. It's in the key of F, and I distinctly remember imitating the walking bass line on the piano, and being told by some teacher that it was called a walking bass line. Here it is, along with the boot-up sequence, complete with emulated 3.5" floppy drive sounds.

Die Autoritarismus-Studie des Leipziger EFBI liefert alarmierende Einblicke in die Entwicklung autoritärer Ressentiments. Viel wurde in den letzten Wochen darüber berichtet. Doch ein paar Aspekte blieben ungesehen. Wir schauen noch mal genau hin.

volksverpetzer.de/aktuelles/au…

Did you know that heat pumps are good for your health?

Replacing oil and gas boilers eliminates in-home fossil-fuel combustion that vents pollutants like ammonia, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide into the outside air.

canarymedia.com/articles/heat-…

#OpenStreetMap is back on its feet.

Making edits with MapComplete is thus possible again as well.

We have a new version out too (but it got a bit overshadowed).

Some highlights:

- There is an insect-hotel theme (mapcomplete.org/insects.html) (thanks @RLin )
- The cyclofix, climbing, blind maps got some improvements (thanks to @midgard amongst others)
- Etymology-map will now also show parks without etymology, in order to be able to link them
- and a lot of bug fixes

Pietervdvn reshared this.

In 1976, Congress set fire to the country's libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!

--

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/das…

1/

So now, my website has 3 speech synthesizer add-ons. Perhaps this weekend I'll make a simple page for it or extend the Piper voices page to include them:
Brailab, developed in Hungary, Rom dump from original hardware box and dll obtained from Brailab source of the CD version. eurpod.com/brailab2024.nvda-ad…
BeSTSpeech (Keynote gold): eurpod.com/BestSpeak.nvda-addo…
and SoftVoice, with many unfixable bugs. eurpod.com/softvoice2024.nvda-…
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

~17% of registered voters in the riding of Cloverdale-Langley City have elected the same despicable pro-conversion therapy CPC candidate and MP it has in the past...

CPC is loudly and proudly anti-LGBTQ+.

enr.elections.ca/ElectoralDist… #cdnpoli #polcan

in reply to 𝕆𝕥𝕥𝕠 𝕧𝕠𝕟 𝕎𝕖𝕟𝕜𝕠𝕗𝕗 🐾🐐🐇🐔

do teraz som ju nepočul a sú to kkti nie fašisti, s prepáčením. V škole dnes v triede na stene ako sedí učiteľ som si mal možnosť prečítať prvé dve state hymny a niečo z ústavy, neviem čo si mám o tom myslieť.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

This is weird, I'm not getting the weird artifacting with Bestspeak all the time, but I was somehow able to almost consistantly reproduce it when going between the desktop and the Tweesecake window, I wonder what you guys think @Tamasg and @rommix0
in reply to Alex the Christmas Chap🎄🎅

that's an odd one! It might be a conflict with another add-on (sounds like you have the earcons one, haven't tested it alongside it admitedly) - it may be that the interruption gets locked mid-chunk while the audio plays, or at the very least it's causing some delay to bstShutup and invalidating the handle. I think it's interesting because for 90% of people it's working fine, now there's just that last 10% of random glitches and quirks that some are still getting here and there but I'm having a much harder time to repro in my environment. (would be interesting if you can get it back and if so, whether disabling that add-on and restarting would cause it.)
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Wow, a nice surprise! We just heart that @codelutin@mastodon.libre-entreprise.com
are to donate 4K EUR to our developments -- see their post (which unfortunately doesn't currently federate correctly it seems)

mastodon.libre-entreprise.com/…

Their web page: codelutin.com/

Thanks a lot! ❤️

(FWIW we have a money-contribution page at delta.chat/en/donate and are happy about donations to mitigate a potential financial crunch early next year)

OpenStreetMap.org is up and running again! Happy Mapping. 🗺️ ❤️ 🚀 Want to know more?: community.openstreetmap.org/t/…

Microsoft refuses pull request to put documentation in readable table form because LLMs are bad at parsing tables github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/p…

reshared this

We've edited and uploaded another 24 videos from the recent #LibreOffice Conference 2024! So the playlist is now 51 videos – enjoy learning about the technology and community behind our free and private office suite: youtube.com/watch?v=lsMoOtAxqh… #foss #OpenSource

LibreOffice reshared this.

Here at TetraLogical we put people first. One of our founding principles is ensuring everything we do is ethical. We make decisions for the good of our customers and their customers, our team, and for the world at large.

The @w3c has just released their Ethical Web Principles in the belief that the web should empower an equitable, informed, and interconnected society.

Read them in full: w3.org/TR/2024/STMT-ethical-we…

#SustainableAccessibility #A11y

[Forum Topic] Meta's Smart Glasses Gain Live AI and Live Translation applevis.com/forum/apple-hardw…

Schedule Rewind 1987-88: Star Trek: The Next Generation Leads the Way for Sci Fi TV cancelledscifi.com/2024/12/14/…

Come May 2025, #curl will drop support for Secure Transport.

If you develop something for apple devices and use libcurl, you might want to think about what this means. And maybe do something too.

github.com/curl/curl/discussio…

#curl
in reply to Billy

re: audiogame-manager
also, a lot of games fail to download, could you eventually either remove them or host them in a more permanent place? when I try to download the super mario bros audio rendition and a lot of other games, I get error downloading <file_name>, installation can not continue and stuff like that. Is it only me? O yeah, and also stuff like danger at the wheel is giving me ShellExecuteX failed, what's that even? agm doesn't give me any more logs besides that

We've been asked about it for years, and we are pleased to confirm that we have finally setup an official NV Access mailing list. You can subscribe to receive:

- Our fortnightly In-Process blog
- NV Access organisational updates
- NVDA Release announcements (Stable, and / or beta)
- Good news stories
- Job listings

To subscribe to any of the above, please go to: eepurl.com/iuVyjo

#NVDA #NVDAsr #ScreenReader #News #MailingList #Newsletter #Information #Accessibility #A11y #Blind

reshared this