This is going to sound a bit weird, but it might be a good idea to purchase a shortwave radio if you haven't got one already. They're quite cheap and small, you can buy one and store it long term just in case.
Shortwave is the only way to receive news and information internationally without relying on the internet or satellite. It might be a useful fallback to receive news from the outside world if your country's media and internet are ever restricted or closed down.
If you've never used one, it's like a normal radio but the frequencies reach around the world. Every country used to have its own station.
I made a joke yesterday about the fact that we'd be fine with China as long as they don't keep us from making the second season of Heated Rivalry, and Trump actually posted today that he hoped China would leave hockey alone when taking over us.
Can't even make jokes anymore, everything becomes true 😅
Shutdown leaves no alternative database to look up sites in Nova Scotia, expert says
The announcement has caused alarm in heritage circles across the country and in Nova Scotia in particular.
Launched in 2004, the register is a national searchable database of historic places recognized by federal, provincial, territorial and local governments. It contains about 13,500 listings.
When launched, the site described listings as "places that shape our lives, describe our history, and represent the diverse character of our country."
The majority of organizing happening in Minnesota isn’t just peaceful, it’s INVISIBLE. Moms showing up who won’t be interviewed on TV, people whose ICE patrols don’t turn into viral video. The grocery runs, the donations, the people filming bc they happen to be there. Please remember this.
I wish every Blind person could own these. They are two globes. The one on the right is a relief globe, with the land masses outlined with fabric paint to make them textured. The globe on the right is an Intelo-globe. The stylus allows you to choose a mode, geography, geology etc. then run the stylus over the globe and hear information spoken. They were game-changers for me, and I still like to explore them. Not entirely tangentially, I was startled to discover how close Greenland is to Canadian territory like Elsmere Island.
A solo parent asked what they can do to resist ICE without putting themselves in the line of fire, knowing that their death would orphan their kid. Here are a few ideas.
If you're new to Signal, it might feel a little overwhelming to get the hang of, but you can get it set up and working pretty quickly. ssd.eff.org/module/how-to-use-…
Download location: Google Play Store, Apple App Store
System requirements: Android 5 or later, iOS 13 or later
Version used in this guide: Android: 7.38.6 iPhone: 7.5.
Please check out delta.chat and spread the use about this messenger.
Developed in Germany, end-to-end-encryption by design, using email-infrastructure (therfore cannot get turned off by an authoritarian state), including applets, like polls, todo-lists, calendar, collaborative work on documents, games, ...
I use it with several people and really can recommend it :)
Am I the only person that is sad the Sense Player is dead? It could've been such an awesome device for third party apps, games, media players ETC. I haven't used mine in a few months, since the battery died, I am going between orbit player and good old BookSense XT. I don't feel like paying $50 for a new battery.
Well, we could barely walk outside this morning, almost slipped on some melted ice. Only stayed out there for a few minutes. Holy shit it was cold. there is snow on the walkways on some trees and grass. we took some pictures, though not sure if this server will behave if we upload anything. It didn't, the last time we tried it, earlier this week. -- Altheda/lillianna
Ugh, at some point in the recent past Apple News started intercepting cut-and-paste and wrapping it in a copyright notice. Which means if you want to search for a thing mentioned in an article, you need to paste into Notes, and then copy it again.
Hello @Bri, I was wondering if you could add the capability of making your own soundpacks on the NVDA Remote Controller app? I can't find a place where the soundpacks are stored, unless I'm missing something.
@Bri Love seeing your hobbiest project, I am reminded of similar person with the same passion, not sure if you are aware of Jamal Mazrui, a great Blind programmer active in the late 2000's and early 2010's creating great tools, like edsharp, for text editing and file dir a feature rich file directory. He also open sourced many of his tools and frameworks that he played with, there are many Blind folks that still have ed sharp installed in their system. github.com/jamalmazrui
If Democrats in Congress want to fight Trump regime’s fascism, these steps are a start. 1. Vote no on DHS funding bill. 2. Repeal the multi-year $75 billion funding for ICE. 3. End qualified immunity for ICE agents. 4. Investigate and prosecute every single ICE agent who broke the law. 1/2
Hey everyone. Tonight at 6 PM Eastern, Sonic Synergy goes live for another 3 hour tour: through the back roads of crazy conversation. Tonight, we lay out some of our plans, hopes and dreams for the upcoming year, both for the show and all of our crazy endeavors that we hope to follow through with. We want to hear from you. Whacha got planned for the year? We are powered by your calls and texts to (833) 452-4452. very NSFW and not for everyone. Listen Live at sonicsynergy.space/live
It's so excruciatinglyannoying to wait until Native Instruments clears up the serial number for my Komplete Kontrol keyboard. It was bought second-hand... And it's the weekend in Germany! I cannot download NI Accessibility Helper. Yes, I can do some stuff thanks to VOCR but it's highly inefficient and time-consuming! :)
Pressure on Senators •is working•. Previously head-in-sand centrist Senators are actually coming out to vote against ICE funding. Their positions are still weak and insufficient, and more need to cave to pressure — but they are visibly buckling.
Again, we should not and must not wait on elected officials to save us — they will not — but we can and should deploy pressure on them as a strategic tool in moments when that can be useful.
Can Walz discharge all the members of the MN National Guard and then immediately swear them all in as State Troopers?
If so, this would be a clever way to prevent them from being federalized and allow them to push out ICE. And then when it's all over just swear them all back in as Guard members again
Yeah it's a lot of paperwork but you gotta fight lawfare with lawfare
Friendly reminder of why #Google is just plain evil: they've taking down #IzzyOnDroid (a third party Open Source Android "app store" like #FDroid) *twice* in the past 30 days over false positive malware scanning.
We are receiving reports that Google flags our repo as "having dangerous apps" or being a "dangerous site" – texts being very vague, no proof given (nor did they inform us). They also link to a page they call "Transparency Report" – which is of the same vagueness, but definitely not transparent (transparencyreport.google.com/…)
We're not aware of any such dangerous content. All apps on our repo are properly scanned, see izzyondroid.org/about/security…
it's things like this, which hinder the adoption of open source software. I today had an unproductive discussion online with someone who sells why Apple products are the best out there and I annoyed that guy by saying that Linux on a laptop could perform better, but the thing it's always an uphill battle.
Hardware companies not cooperating, laws, no funding, no market, etc.
@phantasus Yeah. Linux is great! But how is anyone ever going to find out when you can barely ever buy it preinstalled (at least not in any "normal" store)?
And then with all the extra fighting we have to do with smaller teams and less budget to not have our existence be censored by the big players, we are even expected to meet higher standards than them (nobody calls Google Play "scary" despite all the malware cases they've had while we had none...)
Right now, the frontend wil compile on all platforms, including Linux. SpeechPlayer itself though relies on windows.h so it does not compile, so that would need to be made cross-platform, for those asking. I purposefully tried to keep Frontend very platform-agnostic to avoid headaches later.
I do want to add Gemination though, kind of itching to for Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, these languages use it, and without rules that help them, they just won't sound good on their own unless you do lots of YAML hacks. Also that word sounds cool. Gemination and geminates.
It's really nice now. Like, all I need to do for a new setting is: 1. Create passes/liquid_dynamics.cpp, or whatever rule I want. 2. Add my settings to LanguagePack 3. Register it in pass_pipeline.cpp 4. Done The core engine stays clean. Each rule lives in its own file where you can tune it, break it, fix it, without touching anything else. Honestly this would be an old 1990s TTS engineer's dream and that's a good feeling.
“Can we just stop equating success with short-term economic growth? What if we used usefulness and longevity? What if we gave more value to the fundamental technological infrastructure instead of the shiny new marketing gimmick used to empty naive wallets? Well, I guess that if we changed how we measure success, Europe would be incredibly successful.”
Y'all I want to get in the hot tub and not code for the day I hope that's acceptable. We added a lot of stuff today, now I hope languages can take advantage of these new settings. Only by adding good structured rules can we make this thing sound better. Now that the frontend is moduler. So I'm going to update packs from here on out probably, mainly English ones, make words like "good" and "book" sound less British, stuff like that, but I really want to lock the frontend down a bit with some more modularization like this and then worry about extending it as languages need it. It's now as easy as adding a new CPP in /frontend/passes for any extr things, that makes me very happy. I'm not going to keep bloating ipa_engine.cpp with more rules.
Cate Blanchett as Steve Jobs Natasha Lyonne as Steve Wozniak Maya Hawke as Susan Kare Kathryn Hahn as Phil Schiller David Tennant as Craig Federighi Shohreh Aghdashloo as Johny Srouji Emma Thompson as Johny Ive
and Tilda Swinton as Apple Legal. All of them. Every single one played by Tilda.
yep, he never pointed it at anyone, never even touched it, they just used him carrying as an excuse to execute someone being a slight nuisance in their presence
New NVSpeech Player update! Huge one. But it's V13 so maybe it'll be unlucky. Who knows! I did a major engine change, but languages are kept the same for now. You'll see checkboxes for coarticulation, microprosody, and phrase-final lengthening. Here's what they do — and why the difference is subtle but real. Coarticulation: Your tongue doesn't teleport between sounds, it glides. These settings make consonants "lean toward" neighboring vowels. The "velar pinch" makes /k/ sound different before "ee" vs "oo" — try "key" vs "coo" and notice how the /k/ changes. That's real, and now the synth does it. Microprosody: After voiceless sounds like /p/ or /s/, the next vowel's pitch starts slightly higher. After voiced /b/ or /z/, slightly lower. Maybe 10-15 Hz — tiny, but expected by your brain. Phrase-final lengthening (off by default, useful for some languages): We slow down at sentence endings. This stretches the final vowel so speech feels punctuated, not abruptly stopped. Rate-dependent reduction: At high speeds, unstressed schwas get shortened, keeping fast speech crisp. Anticipatory nasalization (off by default): Vowels pick up nasal resonance before /m/ or /n/. Optional since languages vary. Will you hear a dramatic difference? Honestly, each one is subtle — like color-grading a photo. You might not spot what changed, but it feels less synthetic. I encourage language speakers to mess with them for their language and report which numbers work. eurpod.com/synths/nvSpeechPlay…
Also liking Robert with the 16 khz sample rate. Reminds me of the Toshiba TTS that used to come with old Toshiba laptops, if you've ever heard that one.
@miki oh, both from people's Feedback being critical but genuine on how things sound in their language and then 3 different AI systems (Claude, Gemini, GPT) to pass code through and ask research-level questions about sounds and phonetics. I feel like I've absorbed months of linguistic knowledge in a matter of about 2-3 weeks, LOL. How strange to learn this way, way more hands-on than first reading all the papers and you learn a lot by ear too and just gain a deeper appreciation for human speech and language. Honestly that's probably why I'm sticking to it in the first place for now.
@Alan nah, but the 2026 one is still compatible! I've kept it around mainly to keep a version locked down, but truthfully maybe it could confuse people into thinking they can't install the 2026 one on NVDA 2025.X and below, so I'm considering removing it, but then I'd break lots of old links too, ah the quandery
I have another question. Is there a parameter I can adjust to change the gap between consonants? I find it hard to understand because they are all squished together.
@Alan so stopClosureMode — controls when closure gaps are inserted. If you want maximum separation, try "always". If you want “mostly, but not everywhere,” keep "vowel-and-cluster" and tune the gap times. stopClosureClusterGapMs — the size of the gap used in clusters.
Tomorrow, provided both hosts have power, the Digital Domain with @nick and Bob is also known as the 'Bring on the Snow' show! How was Snowpocalypse 2026 for you?
Also, predicting the grammies and listener submissions that fall into the category of WTF?
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