fastfinge

fastfinge, 18 days ago

Prophecy approved companion is excellent! It gave me all the feels. It’s both extremely funny, and extremely poignant as the main character learns who she is, what’s really going on, and her intended roll in it all. It’s one of the few series where the reader knows exactly what’s happening from the start, but the fact the main character being slow to catch on isn’t frustrating.

fastfinge, 21 days ago

I dunno, the sub I got 9 years ago is still going strong. The play fives they quote unquote bricked still work on the s1, for Spotify connect and Apple Music. The only unusable equipment is some 20 year old zone controllers. Sonos stuff is supported for years longer than literally any other tech brand. And I’m sure I’ll get a pretty decent price when I start selling off my Sonos stuff on Tuesday.

fastfinge, 21 days ago

I’ve sold two systems used with no issue. Just factory reset and it’s fine. Yes, I could lock the buyer out. Best thing to do is transfer system ownership to them in person. In a public place of course.

fastfinge, 23 days ago

I wonder how long they’ll be able to keep it free? GPT4 isn’t cheap.

fastfinge, 1 month ago

Can Mistral describe images yet? Not sure if it’s multi-modal or not. If it could that would be a super useful feature for those of us over on rblind.com. And/or is the code available somewhere for us to hack in something like openrouter and spin up a copy?

fastfinge, 1 month ago

No, Mistral 7B can’t describe or work with images. Thanks for answering!

fastfinge, 1 month ago

It really depends on your use case. If you want something that sounds pretty okay, and is decently fast, Piper fits the bill. However, this is just a command line TTS system; you’ll need to build all the supporting infrastructure if you want it to read audiobooks. github.com/rhasspy/piper

An extension for the free and open source NVDA screen reader to use piper lives here: github.com/mush42/piper-nvda

If you want something that can run in realtime, though sounds somewhat robotic, you want dectalk. This repo comes with libraries and dlls, as well as several sample applications. Note, however, that the licensing status of this code is…uh…dubious to say the least. Dectalk was abandonware for years, and the developer leaked the sourcecode on a mailing list in the 2000’s. However, ownership of the code was recently re-established, and Dectalk is now a commercial product once again. But the new owners haven’t come after the repo yet: github.com/dectalk/dectalk

If you want a robotic but realtime voice that’s fully FOSS with known licensing status, you want espeak-ng: github.com/espeak-ng/espeak-ng

If you want a fully fledged software application to read things to you, but don’t need a screen reader and don’t want to build scripts yourself, you want bookworm: github.com/blindpandas/bookworm

Note, however, that you should build bookworm from source. While the author accepts pull requests, because of his circumstances, he’s no longer able to build new releases: github.com/blindpandas/bookworm/discussions/224

If you are okay with using closed-source freeware, Balabolka is another way to go to get a full text to speech reader: www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

fastfinge, 1 month ago

If you use Bookworm and use the built-in support for espeak, you can get up to 600 words per minute or so. Dectalk can go well over 900 words per minute. As far as I know, cocoa tops out at around 500 words per minute. So all of the options accept piper should be fine for you.

fastfinge, 1 month ago

Also, if you don’t feel comfortable building bookworm from source yourself, and you feel like you can trust me, Here’s a build of the latest bookworm code from github for 64-bit Windows: www.sendspace.com/pro/dl/rd388d

fastfinge, 1 month ago

And the vast majority of my addons are already working! Good job making this a much smoother release than it has been in previous years.

fastfinge, 2 months ago

Wow! Is there a decent open source magnifier yet though?

fastfinge, 3 months ago

Your best bet is to use an app called UTM to create a windows virtual machine. The vast majority of audio games are windows only sadly.

fastfinge, 2 months ago

Mostly it’s free and the interface is more accessible.

fastfinge, 4 months ago

Personally I find myself renting GPU and running Goliath 120b. Smaller models could do what I’m doing if I spent more time optimizing my prompts. But every day I’m doing different tasks, and Goliath 120b will just handle whatever I throw at it, no matter how sloppy I am. I’ve also been playing with LLAVA and Hermes vision models to describe images to me. However, when I really need alt-text for an image I can’t see, I still find myself resorting to GPT4; the open source options just aren’t as accurate or detailed.

fastfinge, 4 months ago

Okay, get comfortable. This answer is going to take a minute. First, I need to introduce you to the concept of Braille contractions. A Braille contraction is a set of symbols used to represent a longer group of letters, or an abbreviation for a longer word. For example, there are symbols to represent frequently used English letter groupings like “ing”, “ation”, “ed”, “and”, and so on. There are also short forms for frequently used words, like “cd” for could, “l” for like and many more. These contractions were introduced to Braille because of how large Braille is. The idea is to compress writing to take up less space, making books smaller, and reading quicker and easier on the Fingers. However, these contractions are different from one Braille system to another. In Grade 2 literary Braille, some of the contractions could be ambiguous. However, the meaning was always clear to human readers thanks to context. In UEB, the contractions were changed to make sure none are ambiguous and to simplify the rules for there use, so it would be easier for computers to translate between contracted and uncontracted Braille.In the case of signs in public buildings, these are almost always written in what’s called Grade 1 Braille. All that means is Braille that doesn’t use any of these contractions. In fact, in UEB, I believe grade 1 Braille was renamed to be called Uncontracted Braille. This was done because not everyone wants to, or can, memorize the hundreds of Braille contractions; perhaps due to age, cognitive challenges, etc. Now, we get to math! A single Braille character is composed of six dots (I’m not going to get into eight dot computer Braille right now). This means there are only so many symbols to go around. So what Nemeth did is remove all of the Braille contractions, and replace them with math symbols. But the basic numbers from 1 to 9 are nearly identical between the two systems. The symbols that are different are things like brackets. As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I don’t even know if literary Braille has a plus symbol. When I want that, I type the “number sign”, indicating that I’m switching to Nemeth Braille. After a number sign, all Braille is assumed to be math, until the next space character. I hope that helped, even if it wasn’t a direct answer to your questions!

fastfinge, 4 months ago

Some of the universal contractions require more symbols than the American ones do. As well, some contractions were eliminated entirely in UEB because they could cause ambiguity. Others had more strict rules instituted about when and how they could be used, to make those rules easier and avoid having rules with exceptions.

Please note, however, that I am extremely biased. The way I learned Braille (grade 2 American, and all Nemeth for math) when I was seven years old is, obviously, the way God intended Braille to be written, and probably how he wrote the ten commandments on those tablets he gave Moses back in the day. Modern changes to it are obviously abominations, and go against the natural order of things. Lucky for me, all of my devices still let me switch to Grade 2 American Braille anyway, so I can ignore this new fangled universal Braille code the kids want me to learn, and shake my cane angrily at them. Okay, Okay, I’m only 36. But that’s how I feel! LOL. If you want the pro-UEB argument, maybe one of the younger commenters who actually likes it can be provoked into an argument…uh…I mean debate. I think maybe @dhamlinmusic uses UEB?

As for signs, I have seen some with grade 2 Braille on them, especially when they have a lot of information to convey, like on a plaque with fire exit/emergency instructions for example, or in some museum exhibits with Braille information. But stuff like “bathroom”, button labels like open/on/off/start/stop, or elevator buttons, or room/class/office numbers, will generally be in grade 1, even when they could save a few symbols by using grade 2.