I went through this with a track I was writing for our last album- I had a guitar, vocal and drum machine demo. I thought âwhat would Tony Levin do?â And it didnât work. Then I thought âWhat would Colin Mouding do?â and I was getting all wrapped up in the idea, and nothing came of it. The third thought was âWhat would Chris Vreeland do?â And the track flowed like water. Itâs busy as fuck, but thatâs me. đ
So, Perspective Intelligence is amazing! There are new vision features that are really amazing, and we now have web search thanks to @tayarndt The beta will be out soon. You will need All Access from the app Store version to try the web search beta though. All vision features will be free. I'd really love to see everyoneâs feedback. #AI, #tech, #iOSDev
Well, you lose some, you win some. Yesterday morning our water froze. This morning at around 7:12 AM Central time our power went out, but thankfully we have a whole house generator so we're still good to go. Power's still out. At around 7:19 AM, the water thawed, so for at least right now, we have water again. Needless to say, many jugs and two-liter bottles are now full of water in case it freezes again which it almost certainly will.
Call me what you want but every time someone responds to some huge fascist attrocity with a lot of urgent action language, and their call to action is ... Call congress and ask them to impeach someone? I can't help but heave a heavy sign as I see people's time and energy being fucking wasted, while we should be forming emergency response networks on our residential blocks.
What's happening in Minnesota is an escalation of things that have happened in other cities - Chicago, Portland, LA, DC. It could be coming to your city next.
I don't say that to scare you. But it might be good to ask yourself:
If this was happening in my neighborhood, who would I reach out to? How would I take action? Who would I trust?
Start building those connections now. If you already have some, strengthen them.
Die #CD Kollektion wird neu gerippt. Diesmal nicht zu mp3 oder ogg, sondern zu flac đ Mag sein, dass das #Audio #Esoterik ist. Aber mit diesem KopfhĂśrerverstärker ein Genuss. đ #DOUKAUDIO
Stay away from the U.S. and its federal thugs. Do not come here for FIFA. Do not come here for the Olympics. Do not come here at all if you value your life and liberty.
Trumpâs âBoard of Peaceâ is a Grift on Global Scale
The absurdity of our times may best be summed up in the Trump regimeâs brand new oxymoronic âBoard of Peace.â ...
Unsurprisingly...Trump...appointed himself Chairman for Life. Permanent membership on the board requires an investment of 1 billion US dollars...
A âBoard of Peaceâ created by a megalomaniac obsessed with imperial ambitions is the ultimate example of grift on a global scale. counterpunch.org/2026/01/22/trâŚ
The absurdity of our times may best be summed up in the Trump regimeâs brand new oxymoronic âBoard of Peace.â Established by Trump on January 15, 2026,
A little side project to provide the fediverse with information i've been missing and have had to rely on FB/IG on to get:
Concert and festival announcements.
A ton of this information is only available on these platforms or sometimes days later through other platforms, often resulting in missing your chance to buy tickets.
None of this is automated and mostly catered towards my own region (NL) and interests for now (Indie/Punk/Metal/Hardcore).
not just gratitude, the rest of the country should be stepping up with their own bravery (and they are, but moreso!) -- and the rest of us need to be stepping up ourselves
Every American owes a huge debt of gratitude to the brave people in Minnesota who are risking their lives to video the horrific crimes of masked thugs under Trump's vicious regime.
I really appreciate people calling out specific words, those examples are exactly what helps us decide which cases to tackle next. Eloquence handled many of these cases with hand-tuned lexical rules, which is something weâre gradually adding back where it makes sense. The improvements so far are mostly foundational (engine stability, timing, phoneme consistency), and the next phase is more about targeted language-specific overrides.
Recall that case when I asked for y before ĂŁ to be made more longer? I don't know whether the normalization rule tontaining the length mark should be explicitly present in pt-br.yaml, but the case is, the lengthenedScale setting appears to have no effect on such words when I change its value, whether I make this change on NVDA's settings or the phoneme editor. Currently, the normalization rule isn't present in pt-br.yaml; only the lengthenedScale setting is.
lengthenedScale only has an effect when the IPA contains a length mark (Ë). In pt-br, some eSpeak builds output y in the â-iĂŁoâ type sequences, and Speech Player normalizes y -> i after the base pt rules run, so the existing lengthening rule never sees it. Fix: add this to pt-br.yaml right after the y -> i rule: - from: "iËĂŁá´" to: "iËËĂŁá´" - from: "iËĂŁá´" to: "iËËĂŁá´" After that, changing lengthenedScale will actually do something for those words.
@clv1 oh good, I'm glad we can test this way! :) The extra language rules might help too once we add them, I'm careful to not screw up the current sound but it's clear we need more rules to change prosody on some languages where stress and semivowel conversions are different.
Just discovered one more thing: the synthesiser converts both lh and li to lj, but they should be different. Li before a vowel should sound like ly, not lj. So, in words like "itĂĄlia, famĂlia" etc., it should use ly. lj should remain for lh, or more specifically, lËj
I've just managed to improve the pronounciation of the digraphs lh and nh, represented by lj and ɲ respectively. For nh, it is better to use ɲj instead of ɲ only, so I've added the following to pt-br.yaml, which worked: - from: "ɲ" to: "ɲj"
The hate. The coverups. The justifications meant to strip you of dignity and humanity.
Itâs ugly. Itâs harsh. Itâs violent.
But it has always been this way.
For years, Iâve said something many of you did not want to hear: that âgood white folxâ would eventually find themselves harmed by the very systems, institutions, and policies rooted in the myth of white supremacy that you believed protected you by default.
Marimar Martinez was the first US citizen shot by ICE.
They claimed she was a terrorist. Said she was brandishing a weapon.
They lied. Video footage exonerated her and showed the ICE agent shot her five times.
He bragged to other agents âfive shots, 7 holesâ.
Silverio Villegas GonzĂĄlez was an undocumented immigrant who was shot and killed at close range while allegedly trying to flee.
He was dragged from his vehicle at a traffic stop after dropping his children off at school.
The bullet went through the back of his neck.
Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off duty ICE officer on New Years Eve in LA.
The officer alleges Porter pulled a weapon on him but the family and other witnesses deny that.
Renee Nicole Good was shot three times by an ICE agent who called her a âf*cking b*tchâ after.
ICE claims she was using her vehicle as a weapon despite multiple videos showing she was trying to drive away from the agent.
2 of the 3 shots were through driver side door.
The ICE agent shot her through her windshield, moved out of the way of the vehicle and kept shooting.
He was in no danger. But he didnât stop shooting until he got the kill shot.
Independent autopsy confirms it was through her left temple and out the right side of her skull.
Thereâs been so much documented abuse of power.
In addition to the shootings we have Liam Ramos, a five year old child who was used as bait and then taken by masked agents and sent from Minnesota to Texas.
Thereâs Geraldo Campos who was choked to death in an ICE camp in Texas.
The medical examiner officially ruled his death a homicide, and DHS moved to deport the witnesses!
Chaofeng Ge was found hanging in ICE custody.
They ruled it a suicide despite his arms and legs being tied behind his back.
Randall Gamboa Esquivel was in perfect health when detained by ICE.
He disappeared while in custody.
By the time his family located him, he was in a persistent vegetative state.
They deported him to Costa Rica and he died soon after.
David Courvelle worked as a detention officer in an ICE facility in Louisiana.
He sexually assaulted a Nicaraguan detainee for three months, forcing other detainees to keep watch while he abused her.
Silvia Reyna Mendoza, a mother of 8 who had been in the US for 40 years, was sexually harassed by an ICE contractor.
He reportedly would tell her if she was good to him, he would be good to her.
When she reported the harassment she was immediately detained.
Bayron Rovidio Marin had his leg broken during an ICE raid in LA.
He was then held in the hospital under a fake name so no one could find him.
He was chained to a hospital bed for 37 days until a court ordered his release.
Thereâs Rodney Taylor, a disabled double amputee whoâs been in ICE custody for almost a year.
He was only two days away from receiving new prosthetic legs when they grabbed him.
Heâs being denied his prosthetics, heâs been placed in solitary and his health is declining
Now thereâs Alex Pretti, another US citizen shot and killed in broad daylight.
These are not just a few random incidents.
Itâs not a few âbad applesâ.
Itâs a systemic problem.
These agents have been allowed to hide their identities, filled with hateful rhetoric and told they have immunity.
People are being abused, assaulted and killed by ICE.
This isnât about immigration or crime, itâs about control & creating fear.
Itâs tyranny and no one is safe under tyranny.
The scariest part is these are only the cases we know about.
At least 1,200 people are missing from Alligator Alcatraz.
Elected officials are regularly denied access into the camps.
We have to assume we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
I literally just found out that I can play final fantasy 3 through 6 and I am super hyped. I've never played a final fantasy game before, but I'm definitely gonna spend a bunch of time playing for sure when I get those games.
I actually don't mind that Robert voice as my default either. But again, that's just me. Can't really put my finger on why, but also that voice somehow makes clearer consonants at 16000 and above, so beyond some minor tweaks it'll probably be kept
> the Working Group requires participants to either be a paid W3C member or to be an Invited Expert. There are only two organisations that are active in the fediverse that are a paid member of the W3C: Meta and the Social Web Foundation. With the Social Web Foundation also receiving funding from Meta [...]
Hey, can anyone on Tahoe confirm if VSCode works properly with VO? I'm still stuck on some old version of Sequoia and want to update at some point soon.
It depends on what you mean by "works properly". It works, yes! My biggest gripe is probably with VoiceOver. If you are happy with what you see in your setup, I don't anticipate any big surprises though.
I've said it before now, but I'll repeat it in the context of FIFA or the Olympics: Please don't come here. The rule of law is gone. I could never have really "guaranteed your safety" before, one can't. But now, I can't even guarantee that we'll get you out of this.
Do not come to the US, which is currently busily become a failed pariah state with no rule of law.
The latest generation of Ubiquiti equipment is looking fast and good enough to form the foundation of my network rebuild. Plenty of 10 gigabit ports to go around, SFP+ and twisted pair, WiFi7, yah mahn! Time to hit that checkout button and watch the wallet cry.
I've been using UniFi stuff for years. I think you will find it great and frustrating in equal measure. It'll be interesting to see what you think of it.
Yah, I don't expect it to be networking with accessibility on a silver platter, but I figure if you and many others are using it, its obviously a fair bit better than useless, which is just about where the Asus and Netgear shit I've got sits.
I do as much as I can from the mobile app, because it's just faster, but where you need to use the web interface, I.E. for detailed policy and VLAN stuff, things get a little bit weird, especially concerning the drop-downs for firewall rules, and finding things in the first place.
So, the surface-level stuff is easy. The more advanced stuff is potentially hair-pulling.
A friend has a huge file with links to stuff in the interface, because some of it is not straight forward to find. I should get that for you, and me, for that matter, as I am probably going to soon upgrade my router to a UDM Pro. I've been using an Edgerouter since 2018.
@BorrisInABox Wellp, that'sabout the crucks of the Asus and Netgear stuff too. If all you need is plug in and power on, it works. If you want to manage the management, it grades from shit to utterly useless. Any resource you might have would certainly be appreciated. I really got this stuff so I could diversify and more secure my VLAN configuration, have it synced to all networking devices, and have proper effective WAP isolation, which the Asus does not do correctly or properly. As for the firewall, block-all on inbound, and allow all outbound on the WANs is probably okay for me, but will probably need more advanced stuff to ensure VLAN security, and perhaps some selective inter-VLAN routing.
Yah, open sounds pretty dumb for VLAN, considering isolated is typically what they're used for? LOL. Well, what I'm really hoping I can do with it is have VLANs split by SSID for the WAPs, and have those tagged on the switches and Dream Machine, so traffic from designated ports can be sent on those same VLANs. Will want a management VLAN where all the UI gear will go, with selective routing to only my machine on the trusted VLAN. a trusted VLAN which will act like a dumb network and allow anything to everything on it, plus Internet. a guest VLAN with Internet-only, an IOT VLAN with the same policy, and a custom VLAN for the room mates devices, with Internet, and access to only the printer.
That part, at least, is relatively easy. For a while, at this house, I had an SSID called "YouAreNowCanadian" which routed all internet traffic through a Montreal VPS over Wireguard, and put all the LAN stuff on it's own little subnet.
@BorrisInABox LOL. Well, that's good that my config appears easily doable with this new gear. My current gear can do all that too, but making it do so across all devices is impossible with its lack of accessibility, and on the devices that are impossible, a lack of CLI as an alternative. So having all this stuff sync up and a single control center will be helpful for sure.
Yep. I don't have quite that kind of integration, because at home, I'm still using an old Edgerouter, and here, it's all UniFi stuff except for the switches, so I still have to do manual VLAN tagging on the one switch here that supports it, which fortunately is accessible. It's also cheap junk, and not what you would want.
Well, the fact that its accessible is kind of a celebratory victory these days. Pretty damn sad, but I don't run the world, and I can't make laws that user interfaces legally need to be usable by all. But definitely looking forward to a bunch of boxes showing up with a Dream Machine Pro Max, Pro Switch 48-port PoE XG, and two U7Pro XGS WAPs.
@BorrisInABox I started using Ubiquity stuff after my Ciscorouter couldnât keep up with 100mbps in 2018. I still wish everything was command line, but at least Ubiquity offers enough features to keep the network engineer in me happy.
I'll add this... Crosstalk Solutions got me into UniFi and has a lot of getting started and tutorial material available on their website and YouTube. Chris is very good at walking people through exactly how to do something. You're not at all a beginner so you probably won't find most of the tutorial material (like explanations of what everything is) very useful, but if you ever get stuck or there's someone else who asks for some good getting started with UniFi stuff, definitely consider sending them there.
I've got a Raspberry Pi stuck in a dusty corner behind a chair, in a place where no one ever goes, next to a fire place that no one ever uses. I think it's only ever been lit once since my parents moved into this house a little more than 8 years ago.
This Raspberry Pi is connected to a cheap Behringer audio interface, which is, in turn, connected to a pair of cheap Behringer microphones that lives outside, such that it is always capturing, streaming and recording the ambient sounds in the neighborhood in stereo. I've been doing this for almost 16 nearly uninterrupted years, other than some time around a move in 2017. It's a blind man's webcam, as it were.
Since I don't actually live where this is anymore, I sometimes find it nice to just listen in on the place when I'm at home. Sometimes, interesting things happen. It's generally pretty peaceful, though.
Anyway, maybe two years ago (can't remember exactly when now), I was experiencing some major issues with the Raspberry Pi's built-in WiFi connecting to the network. Unfortunately, this Pi is not where I can run Ethernet, which is also the case for most devices in this house.
My solution was to get a cheap TPLink Archer something-or-other USB WiFi adapter and use that instead. It was less than $20, and only supports what is now being called WiFi5, I guess... 802.11AC. It's one of those adapters where the antenna is in the same housing as the dongle itself. I don't really like anything about that design. It's way too top-heavy.
It turns out that the Realtek chip TPLink used wasn't natively supported by the rPi kernel, requiring a third party driver that some random user compiled.
I installed this driver, got terrible performance and crappy throughput, switched back to the built-in WiFi, and managed to make it work OK by adjusting some stuff on the access point.
Apparently, I just left this USB adapter connected to it and forgot about it, because according to my UniFi controller, that host had two IP addresses assigned to it.
The UniFi wireless access points all have iperf (not iperf3) installed on them, so I installed iperf on the Pi, and did speedtests between the access point and the Pi from both IP addresses, since they were both active. Because of another unrelated stupid compromise situation that currently exists involving a much narrower than intended wireless mesh channel bandwidth that I am still trying to find a solution for that isn't just not using wireless mesh, which is what I would really like to do, I knew that measuring with another device on the network would probably be slower than theoretical achievable speeds to/from the wireless interface and the access point itself, so I opted to use iperf directly from the access point, since it was already installed, albeit an older protocol and a binary from 2016, for some reason. And, yes, this is with a firmware from December of 2025.
Anyway, turns out that the forgotten WiFi adapter provides significantly more throughput than the built-in chip, not to mention a stronger signal (-47 dBm vs -60 dBm), so I have once again disabled that Pi's onboard WiFi, and am now using the USB adapter again.
The end-result: probably no one at all will ever notice the difference but me, and even then, only under some very specific circumstances.
Oh well.
All that for that.
Completely unrelated: This Pi is still running Raspbian Buster, and probably should be upgraded. It isn't hosting anything that is directly exposed to the internet, though. Liquidsoap is streaming to a local Icecast server, which is then being relayed by a larger server over a Wireguard VPN. The ISP here only does CG-NAT, so I can't serve things from the IP address directly even if I wanted to, which I don't care about as much these days thanks to how easy things like Wireguard and Tailscale makes it to do on damn near any type of connection, combined with a properly configured exit node.
If you want to listen to the live stream that this thing provides, feel free to click here, or plug this into your media player of choice.
I'm hearing some electrical noise in there. Also seems like you're getting some winter precipitation over there. Freezing rain maybe, it doesn't sound like snow or sleet. Also, nice clock.
(everything is a LOT right now and you don't have to be perfect for me or anyone else, and we are multi-faceted beings that are capable of feeling many things simultaneously, so choose everything applicable)
Hey #blind #linux users. Quick question. What is the most accessible linux desktop these days? Is it still mate, or how are we doing. Context: I want to try to switch from Windows, and I'm fine spending some time setting things up, but I don't want to have a 30 min debug session every time I want to use my computer
A VA nurse and a UMN alum who decided to stand up for what's right. He was just an ordinary Minnesotan. He could have been your brother, your son, your neighbor, your colleague, your friend. Executed by ICE face-down, like a contract mob hit. How many more will there be?
Incidentally, yesterday's event(s) are why I ALWAYS switch off video autoplay in all browsers and social media apps and refuse to use TikTok or other video media platforms.
I do not need to see that kind of shit, and you should think twice before sharing it with strangers without a content warning.
In the rare instances I do choose to share extremely disturbing things, I don't even solely rely on CWs since many people - myself included - auto expand them. I'll make the URL unclickable so someone has to copy paste it if they want to see it. Surround it with backticks if your software supports markdown. Put a space in the URL. Something so only those who actually choose to see things that may haunt dreams see it.
I dunno who needs to hear this today, but: âdonât look awayâ is metaphorical. It means donât pretend itâs not happening. Youâre allowed to not watch the videos.
New SpeechPlayer update, adds voice: Robert. Fixes Hungarian language rules by mapping new phonemes for them and not contaminating other languages with these. I can say that Hungarian is more understandable, it's not fully there, but it's getting there, so call it experimental support. Both Hungarian and Brazilian Portuguese have the most phonemes in their table now. Not much else. Still sad. I know people still hate SpeechPlayer. I use it as my primary voice now. Part of me is proud of it for sounding very American, part of me is super ashamed. So ashamed and sad inside today. eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlayâŚ
Keep it going. I can see the improvements. It's going to be a long process, but I think you'll get there, but you will need some serious stick-to-itness.
Hey man, don't feel sad or ashamed at all, you're doing amazing work, and the fact that this synth is open source means that others can and probably will end up contributing.
but I'm sad, it sounds too much like Keynote Gold, LOL. Eventually I do plan to tune more voices, I think it's just that the defaults don't really set a lot of the characteristics either. So that's why I created that Robert voice as an experiment but it's very easy to give it the wrong multipliers and end up with something that doesn't sound like a voice at all. Probably like 3 hours of manual tuning work just to get Robert to sound distinct, but it taught me a lot on what and how you control it. There's 5 axis you control voices on: Prosody feel , Noise integration , Glottal tension Resonance sharpness, Vocal tract size. And you tune parameters within those 5 core areas. What a learning.
No need to be ashamed. Speech synthesis is probably one of the hardest audio processing tasks to do, because there are so many moving parts. It's taken me two years just to get a working "ah". I really admire your efforts.
It sounds very American? I hadn't noticed, it still sounded off, but I guess as someone who lives here I'd be more able to notice that. Not ragging on you, though, eSpeak's own phonemes for that aren't very good, used to be a lot worse, and making this shit is hard. Hopefully we can get some more people to help with that. Lot more phonemes, especially the vowels, should be fully dependent on language.
Chris Vreeland
in reply to Gene • • •I went through this with a track I was writing for our last album- I had a guitar, vocal and drum machine demo. I thought âwhat would Tony Levin do?â And it didnât work. Then I thought âWhat would Colin Mouding do?â and I was getting all wrapped up in the idea, and nothing came of it. The third thought was âWhat would Chris Vreeland do?â And the track flowed like water. Itâs busy as fuck, but thatâs me. đ
flakrecords444.bandcamp.com/trâŚ
Way Station, by The Coffee Sergeants
Flak Records