Tomorrow night at 8 PM Eastern, join @Jmd2000 for another episode of the Old Wooden Barn. On this week's show, we hear a deep cut Zach Top song, some more Hank Williams, and the return of Gunsmoke at 9 PM! hkcradio.com
Jeanne Pratt, Acting Commissioner of Competition, issued a statement following the Federal Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold a September 2024 ruling by the Competition Tribunal in a deceptive marketing case involving Cineplex.
We've built our own text-to-speech system with an initial English language model we trained ourselves with fully open source data. It will be added to our App Store soon and then included in GrapheneOS as a default enabled TTS backend once some more improvements are made to it.
We're going to build our own speech-to-text implementation to go along with this too. We're starting with an English model for both but we can add other languages which have high quality training data available. English and Mandarin have by far the most training data available.
Existing implementations of text-to-speech and speech-to-text didn't meet our functionality or usability requirements. We want at least very high quality, low latency and robust implementations of both for English included in the OS. It will help make GrapheneOS more accessible.
Our full time developer working on this already built their own Transcribro app for on-device speech-to-text available in the Accrescent app store. For GrapheneOS itself, we want actual open source implementations of these features rather than OpenAI's phony open source though.
Whisper is actually closed source. Open weights is another way of saying permissively licensed closed source. Our implementation of both text-to-speech and speech-to-text will be actual open source which means people can actually fork it and add/change/remove training data, etc.
I went to a dentist, and, as a result, I'll be getting a root canal on Monday... maybe... because we're supposed to be getting snow over the weekend, so what are the odds the office will be open?
I slipped and fell on the ice getting out of the car, got two items that were damaged in shipping, and you can't make this stuff up.
Also completely scrapped a project I was working on, because everything was just going completely wrong.
yeah, there's some, thursdayage going on here too. Not even anything spesific, just, there's this thurs, ass day, fucking fog, fag shit andnot I didn't mean fag,the word, fag the... sort of syno opposite today of fog
@dodecahedron I still contend that Thursday should be pronounced, ther sday, like the, stress on the er, with the hard s sound. Then maybe all the stupid would go away.
My SE 3 is here. You know what I didn't expect? The speaker sounds worse than my Series 9. It's a bit muffled and clippy, even with speech at a normal volume. My 9 had a great speaker for speech. It's not a big deal, just an odd change. Maybe it's true of all the newer Apple Watch models.
@BorrisInABox You're the second one to say something like that. You're probably right. Still, this was far cheaper than a new Series 11, so I can't complain. It does 95% of what I want.
singleWordFinalHoldMs: 45 Adds a bit of sustain to the last voiced segment (helps “R/are/you” feel complete). singleWordFinalFadeMs: 18 Adds a proper fade-to-silence frame (prevents the hard cut). singleWordClauseTypeOverride: "." and singleWordClauseTypeOverrideCommaOnly: true If NVDA passes comma clauseType for isolated words, it won’t rise anymore.
As a former K-12 technology educator, let me break this down for you. If a "toy" comes with an app, it isn't a toy; it's a data collection mechanism, and likely a brand loyalty engine.
Kids don't need these things. In fact, they're much, much better off without them.
FusedLocationProvider: restore pre-16-QPR1 GNSS usage policy of using GNSS for both balanced and high power requests instead of only high power requests since many GrapheneOS users don't enable network location and network location may not always be accessible such as temporarily not having internet access
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: add special case for sandboxed Play services making it so users granting the SMS permission enables reading SMS addressed to apps using the Google Play services client library (Android 16 QPR2 prevented using the SMS permission to read SMS addressed to other apps so a special case is needed for apps which use Google Play services to handle SMS-based authentication)
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: prevent sandboxed Play Store attempting to install the "Device configuration" package which is not used on GrapheneOS and serves no purpose
avoid compatibility issues with apps doing misguided anti-tampering checks by changing the initial call stack for secure app spawning (exec spawning) to match the standard zygote-based spawning
Settings: require device restart after changing the secure app spawning setting
Sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer: update Android Auto configuration UI to Material 3 Expressive
add workaround for upstream system_server startUserInBackgroundTemporarily crash
fix GrapheneOS support for recording permission usage history for a broader set of permissions
Dialer: set CallStyle for call notifications to improve the user interface and replace our temporary workaround of disabling notification grouping for it
Network Location: rename "GrapheneOS proxy" option to "GrapheneOS Apple proxy" for clarity
Network Location: add "Apple China" server choice required for China data due to China's laws about mapping the country (currently no proxy due to poor connectivity to and from China causing reliability issues with connecting to Apple's servers in China from ours but we plan to offer it as an option in the future)
Pixel 8a, 9th gen Pixels and 10th gen Pixels: disable NTP usage in Samsung gnssd which isn't as useful on GrapheneOS due to reducing the system time update threshold from 2000ms to 50ms along with avoiding us needing to redirect this to our own NTP service as we did for Qualcomm xtra-daemon
update code for disabling reporting of harmless fingerprint-service.goodix crash
improve user interface for Network/Sensors permissions in the permission manager
fix minor Material 3 Expressive styling issues for the Contact Scopes and Storage Scopes configuration UI
adevtool: raise minimal supported Node.js version to 24
adevtool: disallow running adevtool as root
adevtool: check for presence of prebuilts dirs at startup
kernel (6.12): update to latest GKI LTS branch revision including update to 6.12.67
All of the Android 16 security patches from the current February 2026, March 2026, April 2026, May 2026 and June 2026 Android Security Bulletins are included in the 2026012801 security preview release. List of additional fixed CVEs:
In his guide “Getting off US tech”, tech writer and podcaster @parismarx breaks down why #DigitalSovereignty matters, and how to get there step by step.
My fellow Canadians, if you want to be part of the USA, you can move there freely on your own. I encourage you to do so.
"To go to a foreign country and to ask for assistance in breaking up Canada, there's an old-fashioned word for that, and that word is treason," said Eby ahead of the meeting.
I'm curious about something. For NVDA users, I'm trying to get NVDA to say the word HashTag only when making Hashtags on a post, and not when I'm making numbers or if there's a number sign in something I'm reading. Is there a way to make this contextual? #Blind
The number sign is the hashtag, it's the same symbol. You could probably use a regular expression so it only calls it a hashtag if there are letters after it, but generally speaking the hash, number or pound sign (also called an octothorp by the way, is all just one symbol.
Not to be confused with pounds used in currency, as in £100, which we use in the UK. Those ones are different.
If you always want the number symbol and a series of words to be read hashtag rather than number, that's doable. If your platform uses hashtags that start with a number, though, then that wouldn't follow the pattern and NVDA would still say number in those situations.
Irregular reminder that whenever Firefox does not work properly on a Google website, it's because Google intentionally makes the experience worse for Firefox
First screenshot is taken on Cromite, second on Firefox for Android
I'm crowd sourcing once again. So as most of you know I lost my job back in February and have had no luck in obtaining another one. Previously, I taught assistive technology in a school setting. I'm interested in teaching assistive technology at a rehab center for blind adults, or anything I can do remotely, such as tech support or cold calling. Yes, I really will do cold calling at this point. If you have any leads to anything I can use, please make me aware of them. I've re-applied for SSI, but it could take up to 300 days for them to reach a decision on my claim. My resume will be available upon request. Thanks in advance for your help.
NEW, by me: A security and privacy feature rolled out to select models of the latest iPhones and iPads this week will make it more difficult for law enforcement, spies, and malicious hackers to obtain a person's precise location data from their phone provider.
The new security feature makes it more difficult for police and malicious hackers to obtain a person's precise location data from a cell phone company.
There are so many things about facial expressions I will never understand for example, why is rolling your eyes at someone seen as a bad thing? Keep in mind, I can't roll my eyes consciously, apparently, my eyes move without me knowing but sighted people see it.
oh no. I read the Audio games forum thread, now I'm definitely sad. I really just need to not work on SpeechPlayer ever again. Youch. Maybe no updates for awhile. Until I fix like, everything reported there. Horrifying.
I contend that when the apocalypse comes and the world is reduced to a swamp of putrefaction, when a deathly silence has befallen and all hope is lost, a nerdy gang of zombies will get boozed up and go looking for some entertainment. They'll find Audio Games Net, they'll consider taking it down, but even then they'll be like, "Nah, fuck it, not worth worrying about."
@Scott ahahahaha well at least that was very funny to picture, definitely thanks for that. LOL! I really think Cloudflare is the only thing protecting them from all the spam topics, and even then you'll see them come through every once in awhile, but yeah, with all the trolling / lots of ambivalence against developers, I just arely if ever visit there or post. Usually it's why I find more entertainment in the off-topic room then the game threads themselves which is ironic, but even then very specific topics too. LOL.
Bertie's first train trip today. He behaved admirably; a touch grouchy and tired on the way home, but nothing I'd consider untoward for fellow passengers. He only slept about an hour total of the 12 hour day out so is unsurprisingly out-for-the-count while I enjoy my Buffalo Fried Chicken Burger, Halloumi Fries, Jalapeno and Cream Cheese Bites, and a portion of Teriyaki Boneless Chicken Strips.
Mrs R had a work thing. I always get a kick out of going to the Pocklington Hub in London, I enjoy playing spot the blind person. 1 guide dog, 2 canes and a VoiceOver today. Also got to go for a ride on the electric travel assistance buggies again, which is always fun. A cheap upgrade to first class for the return leg of the journey meant I had leg room to spare, too.
For all that there is much strife and discord at home at the moment with a lot going on, the day out with the baby at 16 weeks was a right success.
Borris
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