I decided to set up my GitHub account so I can receive sponsorship.
If you have played around with Chronicle and like what it does, even the smallest donation would always help especially with testing thousands of pages repeatedly, which can get quite pricey.
https://github.com/sponsors/harry6116
I'm also going on a podcast to talk about this program, which I can't wait to do actually.
#AI #BLIND #Technology #Accessibility

@FreakyFwoof I have a general question for you regarding all of the programs that you create.
Do you use AI to create the read me documents, or do you write them yourself? Do you do a bit of both? I know that probably seems like a stupid question but I'm not the greatest of writers, so a lot of my documentation has been built with AI.
I'm just really curious.

I'm on a group with people discussing an audio flight simulator, and there's something that has been really irritating me more than it should.
Sometimes you will get a message from someone saying something along the lines of, I'm a fully qualified commercial pilot because I've flown on Microsoft flight simulator.
Or you might get, I do know what I'm talking about because I flown a plane on such and such simulator.
I just cannot understand the logic here, you flew an aircraft from your bedroom on a keyboard or maybe with a dedicated flight controller, you haven't flown the real thing.
Granted, you might understand the theory and the technical systems, but you still are not a fully fledged internationally recognised commercial pilot.
if we are going by this logic, I really should be called a war hero, I have driven tanks into enemy positions at great personal cost, I have Captain submarines under the waves in hostile seas, I have dealt with the trauma of having been shot down out of the sky by an unseen missile.
I just can't wrap my head around this.

Some time ago, on 11 labs, I cloned the voice of Walter Cronkite because I wanted to do something with an article about a story I’d written, and I wanted to have that Cronkite kind of sound.
With the new V4 model, I decided to play with the ElevenLabs speech generator from @FreakyFwoof because this new model is so expressive.
I decided to see what would happen if I made Walter go a little, crazy.

@FreakyFwoof I've been playing with your fan fiction downloader to try and make a version for the Mac, and I thought you might be interested in a couple of things I'm working on.
I've actually built a rough Mac interface for this one instead of the CLI because I just prefer that.
I'm working on one thing with Archive of our own, if my plan comes to fruition, you will be able to click on a series name from an author and have the program download all stories in the series at once.
I managed to get the program to play nice with fanfiction.net, but it still uses fanfic fair and fickhub as a fallback.
I'm even using some of your excellent cleanup settings in HTML downloads.
I haven't released or put it up online yet because I'm still working on this stuff, but I thought you might be interested.

I fucking love Codex! One of the things I love doing is downloading historical broadcasts, particularly from radio.
what I get sick of, though, is seeing the same recycled clips over and over again around the internet.
I used Codex to build an engine that basically will crawl through the Internet looking for downloadable MP3 files of different archival broadcasts, not only from English sources, but from other sources such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Norway, and Sweden to name a few.
These are particular areas where I don't have a great deal of broadcasts, particularly from the Second World War, but also other periods as well.
It won't download anything that's copy-restricted, but if the MP3s are there and even if they are in the languages of non-English archives, I have very carefully constructed the engine to get them.
It's quite a challenge because there is so much material available, but I put in some limits, for example, such as not getting news real audio because that is fairly easy to get, telling the engine that I only want broadcasts two minutes in length or above.
What also has become painfully apparent is that there is so much archival audio from many nations, especially Australia, that have not been digitised and put online.
Admittedly, funding constraints to digitise old hard to copy formats, copy restrictions, which I think are ridiculous after 80 years and the sheer volume can make it difficult, but I do think it's rather sad that it's only a fraction online of what is truly available.

there is an open-source program called voice studio, and it's kind of the same premise as ElevenLabs, except that it's all local.
Obviously, that means you won't get the same results, but some of the cloning is pretty good, but unfortunately, it only accepts files up to 15 seconds, which to me is ridiculous, because it doesn't capture the nuance of a voice, but in saying that, a couple of the voices I have tried have come across quite well.
It seems you can only do one file per voice.

@FreakyFwoof having an interesting situation with Codex, and I’m wondering if you’re experiencing it.
with responses, VoiceOver is saying clickable after each line that it reads.
any Ideas, how I can fix this?

I have tons and tons of audiobooks that I've downloaded over the years.
Some have been copied really well with each CD as a track, others have each CDs tracks in folders, some have just got every single three-minute track with poor numbering.
I wonder if anyone would be interested if I sat down and made an audiobook binder that could deal with all of these situations.
And in my case, create M4B files or any format you like.
Batch binding books in a single job.
I'm seriously thinking about vibe coding an app that can do all of this stuff.
I would love to bring DRM removal capabilities in, but because of the legality, I don't think any model would help me vibe code this and I sure as hell couldn't do that on my own.

@FreakyFwoof sorry to be a pain but what is that eleven labs program you made called? i thought i had it downloaded but i can't find it.

codex has a nasty little habit that rears its head sometimes, especially when you're trying to create public facing documents, at least as a blueprint.
If you give it some rules for the document that you're creating, such as don't use this particular wording or don't put this particular punctuation here, sometimes the prompts that you have created end up in the public facing documents.
Happened to me a couple of times, and it can actually be a very serious security problem because occasionally, my own system paths have made it into changelogs and I have had to move like a bitch to correct them.
I love vibe coding, I've created what I think are a couple of good little things with it, but my God, you have gotta be on top of things.
I don't know much about coding, so I'm sure there are probably things I'm missing, but at least in the document sense, I really have to watch it and keep reminding myself to go through these documents with a fine tooth comb.

I had to laugh at some comments on one of these articles talking about AI glasses such as the Meta smart glasses.
A lot of Australian councils are banning them from certain places, but giving exceptions to blind people such as myself, who use them to help us out in public.
I don't want to be filmed constantly. seems to be a constant refrain here, and for those in the back, I'm going to say it again, the glasses are not constantly making a fucking video feed! Not every single person who has these glasses is making pornography with them.
Another comment that made me burst out laughing was, these glasses should only be given to people with a doctor's letter explaining why they need them.
That's not even worth responding to.
Now I don't know about cheap glasses that might not have lights to let you know when things are being filmed but the meta glasses have a nice big light that says hey, guess who's getting recorded right now.
For those who want prohibition on importing the smart glasses? Get fucked. No way known should this ever happen.
What's going to happen to the blind people that do wear these glasses in places where they have been banned? Are they going to get even more stigma? Are they going to get abused for wearing these so-called porno glasses? I'd love to see someone try that on me.
One thing's for certain, we're probably never going to get the live AI mode down here now.

@JonathanMosen I’m really curious to know, and you’re the first person I can think of to ask this question, can blind people use 3D printers accessibly?

Public freakouts unleashed is one of my favourite channels on YouTube because it shows public confrontations, but I cannot fucking stand that they censor the language.
i get that The channel is monetised, but if you’ve got two people going at each other and swearing their heads off, it kind of ruins it when the words are missing.

I don’t know why, when I import videos recorded on my Meta glasses, that they are being saved in quicktime format, but it’s really irritating.
They used to save as MP four format when I would import them onto the Mac and I much preferred this.
I wonder if it's got something to do with the five minute recordings. Now finally available in Australia.
Also on a side note, I'm getting increasingly pissed off that we still cannot use live AI down here.

I have seen a few people record bootlegs of shows using an IEM Receiver connected to a digital recorder.
I wonder how the fuck they get a hold of those without being a member of the actual crew of the band?

IEM stands for in ear monitor for those who are wondering what the fuck I’m talking about.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@prism/117064560254754630

I love this cover very much.

Dear Apple, kindly don’t fucking turn on file vault even though I’m having a little play around with the latest beta of mac 27 Golden Gate.
if i want file vault enabled, I’ll do it myself.

One thing I’ve always wanted to try but they just don’t seem to be in australia are hot pretzels.
You can get the cold ones in packets but I’ve always wanted to try one of those from a pretzel stand.

At last we can do five minute recording on the meta glasses in Australia.
Now all we need is for live AI mode to finally come down here.