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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
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completely blind computer geek, lover of science fiction and fantasy (especially LitRPG). I work in accessibility, but my opinions are my own, not that of my employer. Fandoms: Harry Potter, Discworld, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Buffy, Dead Like Me, Glee, and I'll read fanfic of pretty much anything that crosses over with one of those.
keyoxide: aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
Location Ottawa
Birthday 1987-12-20
Pronouns he/him (EN)
xmpp fastfinge@im.interfree.ca
keyoxide aspe:keyoxide.org:PFAQDLXSBNO7MZRNPUMWWKQ7TQ
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@matt Because NVDA is native ARM. So the Addon can't load the eloquence DLL files. I've tried it on an ARM virtual machine on mac. No go. I guess they'd have to do some kind of RPC the way the Sonata neural voices handle it.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@matt I love eloquence, and depend on it for my productivity. But now that codefactory eloquence is abandoned, I won't be able to use it with the next NVDA Update. And there is no way work is approving IBMTTS or Threshhold or any of the other hacky solutions. There's also talk of moving us to ARM laptops, where even those solutions won't run. So I have to start trying to move away while I can still take it slow.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@modulux Not sure yet. Looking into espeak, but it sucks on iOS. Maybe rh voice? I hate how muddy vocalizer sounds so not that. Maybe I give up on having the same voice on all platforms? I’m open to ideas!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@modulux Also code factory eloquence won’t get updated. And there’s no way work will approve IBM tts.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@modulux Because I want to do it on my own time. Rather than be forced to do it when NVDA goes 64 bit. Or work converts us to arm laptops where eloquence won’t run.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
My resolution: 2025 will be the year I find a way to get eloquence out of all my workflows.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@mojoaxel I hope you're right! But I thought I'd broken the cable that connects the midplate to the mainboard, and I looked at getting a replacement. It was $20 before shipping. Lucky for me, I hadn't; that cable is extremely fussy about alignment (or there's some visual indicator I couldn't see), and the ninth time I reconnected it everything worked. However, it doesn't cost them $20 to make a ribbon cable. Probably they'll just keep making parts more and more expensive, until it would be cheaper to get a new laptop than to fix the old one.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Also, I could replace the motherboard! Or 3D print my own third-party components! But...yeah. I'm never gonna do that. But I could! At any time! And that's all that matters.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
I think I feel the same way about laptops that sighted people who drive must feel about giant off-road capable SUVs. At any time, they could drive through the wilderness! Not that they ever will. Similarly, at any time, I could compile giant rust applications on this laptop! Or run important mathematical calculations! But I never will. And the same way it's impossible to park an SUV, the Framework 16 laptop is impossible to actually, you know, use on your lap. If I could see and drive, would I have some kind of Chevy Tahoe that can tow fifty tons and takes up two zipcodes just to drive me to work? Now I feel sad.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
Got the new hard drive and ram that Santa brought installed in my Framework 16. I now have more storage and memory than any one laptop needs. Lovely!
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes I wonder how the Sonata neural voices handle it? They’re doing something with RPC and hosting the AI in an external process.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@jscholes I’m sure something horrible with TCP/IP and an eloquence server in another process will get done.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@stirlock @jaybird110127 Oh! I’m glad it’s not dead. Hopefully we can get something good and cross platform.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@stirlock Wasn’t she in need of government grants that she didn’t get, so the project was shelved?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@stirlock The fix should be easy. But eventually, NVDA will be forced to go 64-bit, and that will break eloquence forever. My guess would be probably 2027.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@Tamasg Also sounds like it's bugs in the DLL, or bugs in the way Windows 11 is running the ancient code from 1995, and not something you can fix. Maybe grab an old copy of NVDA and see what it does on Windows XP?
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@Tamasg So oddly, that only happens on my Intel Microsoft Surface laptop. It's fine on my AMD Framework Laptop. But just pressing the up and down arrows quickly on a webpage on my surface can get that to happen every time, howling squeaking random eloquence samples and all. A sighted person tells me that the "okay" button eloquence tries to read is for a dialogue that says "The instruction at {random numbers} referenced memory at {random numbers}. The memory could not be written. Click on OK to terminate the program." But if I don't press okay NVDA just fixes itself and comes back.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@Tamasg @cachondo Oh God, whatever you do don't play that audio file I tagged you in! LOL
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
@cachondo @Tamasg Amusingly, bestspeech is unaffected. It doesn't pass buffered=true to NVWaveOut so it's fine.
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🇨🇦Samuel Proulx🇨🇦 @fastfinge@interfree.ca
1y
I can't wait for how excited everyone's going to get when NVDA 2025.1 breaks eloquence and a bunch of other third party TTS addons by retiring WinMM and making Wasapi the only output method. There's going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth. The fix for threshhold is a one-line change, but I have no idea about ibmtts.
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