Notices by emmatonkin (emmatonkin@mstdn.social)

@GossiTheDog

Pallab Ghosh on the BBC just described this as "It goes down like "one small step" - a moment of history that will be remembered."

Don't see why, frankly. Rich person does stuff previously achieved by many less wealthy people, news at 12?

@pdcawley @goatsarah
Tbh I only learned that Elite was a thing fairly recently (thanks to Steam's People Who Like Stace Games Also Like function). We were more into straight up arcade types of games - Llamatron, Lemmings, Lotus...

@goatsarah @ajlanes @atomicpoet @justinto
Hm. Probably wasn't a very Radio 4 area, so maybe that's why I didn't see Archimedes in the wild, but I don't think there was a lot of software for them tbh despite their potential as a platform - people seemed pretty unsure what they were for in school, even. So I'd have thought they wouldn't be widely appealing beyond particular professional and educational use cases for that reason.

@ajlanes @goatsarah @atomicpoet @justinto
I think the Archimedes was a Thing People Maybe Had In School, whereas ST and Amiga were things people would more likely have at home. PC, on the other hand, would generally only show up if someone had one for work stuff, at which point possibly family might get to use it on the weekends.

My father bought and installed some kind of 8086 board thingy in his Atari ST (PC-Speed?) which made for an interesting frankenexperience. Iirc it ran pretty hot.

@Jeffrey
You might find something useful on
* https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/07/state-of-screen-reading-reading-on-desktop-linux/
* https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2023/06/08/screen-reading-part-2-looking-at-coqui-tts/

As far as text to speech goes, I use Piper text to speech as part of the Home Assistant setup. It sounds pretty nice to me as far as these things go. You can try different voices and languages on this page. https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

Brief discussion of piper config options setting voice speed ( –length_scale) and pause between sentences (–sentence_silence) here: https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/tts-text-to-speech-in-linux-piper/

@Jeffrey
Also, a page here recommends Piper with Orca screen reader https://www.kentoseth.com/posts/2023/dec/29/install-software-to-help-visually-impairedblind-people-use-linux/

There's a youtube video introducing the use of Orca at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI76P-KPZec - I'm not familiar with it but it looks promising.

@maddiefuzz @c0debabe @thomasfuchs @socketwench
Reminded of one time someone asked me, very innocently, what was wrong with the USB ports on their laptop, so I looked in and somehow all of the contacts on every single port had been stripped, folded sideways and down into a completely unfixable incoherent mass at the bottom. I can see how one might do that to one port without noticing but accidentally grinding every single port into a rat's nest of brokenness... that takes dedication.

@pettter @Homebrewandhacking @doot

In fairness, according to Techcrunch one person had tried a carbon fibre submersible before - Steve Fossett with Spencer Composites - but he died in an unrelated misadventure before they got around to using it. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/20/a-whistleblower-raised-safety-concerns-about-oceangates-submersible-in-2018-then-he-was-fired/