One of the interesting side effects of playing around with Doubletalk on my cardputer and retroreader is that I've had to decouple the audio output side of things from the speech generator. This means that with a bit of experimentation on my part, I've been able to take first Byte's 22 khz monologue voice and make it speak using Doubletalk's pipeline. Effectively rendering a 22khz Doubletalk.
it almost sounds like blasphemy. I don't know why RC Systems chose to stick to an 11khz 8-bit voice, they used the first byte data in their hardware. Whether the 22khz was a later update, or they knew they'd be lacking memory or something to run it, I dunno.
Either way, it's working on my cardputer right now and will be coming as an optional variant to the retroreader after my vacation next week.

Only now are the people I host things running on PHP getting in touch. OHMYGOD! Panic! How do we make it safe?
I tell them they don't need to worry, their version is patched, and they're all "But half the government is down! How are we safe and still running!??!"
And what I want to say is your little 4 user tool isn't anywhere near as big as the government and was offline for a couple of minutes in the early hours already and nobody noticed.

A: How's the diet going?
B: Not good, I had eggs for breakfast.
A: Scrambled?
B: No, Cadbury.

I'm sorry, what?! This reminds me of Dawn French's 'Royal Correspondent' character.

(earliest known source: _middleEarth X account)

your feedback is important to us, please place your microphone as close to your speaker as possible

When Stephen Baum retired several years ago, and I'm sure many of you know the name, Kurzweil 1000, a program I absolutely loved and probably used even more than JAWS or NVDA, was no longer updated. It was effectively discontinued, much like OpenBook. I was pretty much convinced I'd never see another Windows program that could fill the K1000-shaped hole in my life. My experiences with QRead, Bookworm, and a couple of other applications taught me not to expect anything to be Kurzweil 1000. Then Paperback came along. At first, I thought it was just another short-lived project fueled by a developer's initial enthusiasm. But I'm genuinely happy to say that Paperback has brought together the best parts of Kurzweil 1000 in a modern, compact package that feels right at home today. Just like K1000, Paperback lets you create bookmarks and notes, and even transfer them to another computer. You can now also export them as HTML or TXT files in the latest development release. It supports a wide range of formats, and when it comes to navigating through books, it actually goes well beyond what K1000 offered. Its ability to recognize scanned PDFs is surprisingly accurate and useful, too, especially for a feature that's still relatively new. Sure, it doesn't connect directly to a scanner. But these days, far fewer people need a dedicated scanner to digitize physical books than they once did. It doesn't have a built-in dictionary or Wikipedia access like K1000 did, either, but in this day and age, those aren't necessarily features you can't get from other tools. And here's another thing I really appreciate: unlike K1000 and pretty much all its competitors, Paperback doesn't insist on converting every book into its own proprietary format. It reads the original book and cleverly stores your bookmarks and notes separately in its own format. After all these years, it's quite something to find a Windows reading application playing such an important role in my life again. I honestly didn't think I'd feel that way about another program after Kurzweil 1000. Welcome to my reading life, Paperback. You've got some pretty big shoes to fill, and you're doing a damn good job.
@TheQuinbox

I've learned a new word today. putyraceous. I'd forgotten the delight of scrolling through word meanings, finding linked words, looking them up and so on. There's something ineffably retro about having a little doodad with buttons that is a distraction-free thing doing a job all its own. I was transported back to my primary school days there for a minute.

The cardputer now has a working voice recorder, basic text file and MD document reader, unit converter, monotone music composer and of course a dictionary. Combining the free Wordnet and Mobi Thesaurus packages into a unified dictionary app gives me 3,017,562 combined definitions, WordNet synonyms and Moby associations.
Each definition sense (that is volume as loudness versus volume as an amount of something), can optionally display Synonyms, Antonyms, broader or narrower terms, related and derived terms, pertinence and entailment, causes and attributes, and topics, Regions and usage.

That's a heck of a lot of data. You can turn the bits off you don't want, of course.

Flash cards is another one I want to solve, they come up a lot in education, and then I need to consider the more fun bits of life: games. The Language Master's word games were an amazing time sink.
I am literally in awe that something that costs less than a big pizza with extra toppings can do all this stuff.
I left it powered on after work yesterday and when I came back to my desk 15 hours later, the battery was about half. That's idling, but on, with no power saving code. Obviously I can put a sleep mode in there to broaden that, and given there's no current real time clock, using the power switch doesn't lose you anything.
You could seriously take this thing to school and use it for a little bit each day and have to charge it perhaps once a fortnight. So cool.

Today I tried to explain Mastodon to Summer's vet. I told her that Summer has friends all over the world.
The vet asked what she does that is special.
I said that I'm not sure that she does anything more special than other happy dogs.
I said that we share photos of her doing everyday dog stuff. Usually she is smiling though.
She asked if Summer's friends know how sweet and soft she is. Extremely huggable.
If they didn't know this fact before they do now.
The three of us watched the sunset from our new deck this evening.
Now we are passing it on you, our dear friends, because we can.
Thanks to everyone who makes Mastodon available and easy to use so we can share Summer kindness far and wide.

huh, okay

@The_Tiny_Kitten @jane_jordan Not everyone wants to read every time someone makes a trip. It got annoying with diceworld and all the other games that allow this. And now people will be able to post this without even a hash tag unless people think to do it. Unfortunately, we as a community or whatever you want to call us seem to do this kind of thing with games and such.

I think PHP probably has to bring forward the release as cyber vendors who have advanced notice told customers details so now everybody is running around with details.

There’s probably a conversation to be had about cyber vendors effectively reselling open-source project intelligence for profit. I don’t think it is great. Protecting the ivory tower sucks.

Another cardputer update. the mic isn't genuinely this hissy; my laptop has a very noisy fan.
Basically in the attached I explain how I'd like to 3d print a replacement key assembly for the unit, with tactile f and j markings, and consider designing a larger enclosure for the unit as a whole to provide a bigger keyboard. We're not talking a lot of money here at all, so I'll be poking various blind organisations to see if they'd like to support it.

So after determining that the Cardputer had enough power and memory to run a speech synthesizer, will it serve as a spiritual successor to my old Talking Lm6000?
Well, you be the judge.

While you were sleeping, #windEnergy reached 42% of the National Grid's electricity demand. https://winderful.uk

My mate had a big gong in his bedroom.
"What's that?" I asked.
He said, "it's a speaking clock"
"How does it work?" I asked.
He picked up a hammer and hit it, and two seconds later a voice came through the wall shouting,
"For fu*k sake! It's half past two in the morning!"

Right, do it from the web. never mind.

Hmm. My mastodon client didn't like attaching that audio. Naughty

For those interested, here's how the keyboard is arranged.

Now I've got it talking, it would make an excellent modern replacement for the language master. I wish I had some contacts in a dictionary company or something, because for this price, you could give every text-to-speech using schoolchild one of these things and they could, like me, look up any English word, read about how to write properly, play a few games.
All before having to learn a screen reader or heavy operating system.
What a dream.