Piotr Machacz @pitermach@dragonscave.space
- Website
- https://piotrs.site/
- Github
- https://github.com/pitermach
I'm just a blind geek who's main hobbies include sound design, accessibility especially of games, podcasting, books and movies/TV (mainly SCI-Fi and lit RPG), and programming. Regularly do let's plays with @talon as @pg13lp. Game database editor and newsposter on audiogames.net. Most of my sound design work can be found on currentlyuntitled.design and various games.
Joined Aug 2018
Pinned post
I finally decided to move here, so I figure it might be worth a new intro since I have more room here. Hi, I'm Piotr. I'm a bit of a geek, so most of what I'll be posting will be tech related, very often with an emphasis on blind accessibility since I can't see myself. I'm also a huge gamer, so game accessibility is of particular interest. I often stream games with @talon as @pg13lp. I also love anything audio production related, especially sound design. I've done audio for a bunch of games, IE most of @talon's, but I also created a lot of notification and UI sounds under CC attribution with a few friends on currentlyuntitled.design. If you need custom audio for an app or game feel free to hit me up! Other than that I really love anything SCI-Fi, LitRPG, retro tech, and more things I didn't think of when writing this lol. #noxp #introduction
Piotr Machacz
boosted
To give you an idea: there's a Tegra 2 chip that's used as management, and composes lyrics and video on screen. Which loads up and initializes the custom sound board. Now, karaoke still uses General MIDI, because it's the obvious way to do this. So, do you think they'd just use Fluidsynth or even Timidity? Of course not, CUSTOM HARDWARE MIDI SYNTH BASED ON ROLAND'S CHIPS! IN 2014! WITH SOUNDFONTS!
Microphone echo and effects? Hardware.
Do you like Hitachi SH2 chips? THEY'VE GOT 2!
Think they're just dumb online-only boxes? Nope. FULLY OFFLINE. ~3TB of MIDI + music video data that gets synced every once in a while!
Those machines have a front panel. Think they just wire a display over LVDS? Hahahaha. No. Custom board that's running Android, which is connected to the main Tegra chip via USB and Ethernet. Oh, and as for the video data, THERE'S A HARDWARE OVERLAY CHIP TO OVERLAY BOTH SIGNALS TOGETHER! JUST FOR THE FRONT PANEL DISPLAY! AAAAAAAA!
Microphone echo and effects? Hardware.
Do you like Hitachi SH2 chips? THEY'VE GOT 2!
Think they're just dumb online-only boxes? Nope. FULLY OFFLINE. ~3TB of MIDI + music video data that gets synced every once in a while!
Those machines have a front panel. Think they just wire a display over LVDS? Hahahaha. No. Custom board that's running Android, which is connected to the main Tegra chip via USB and Ethernet. Oh, and as for the video data, THERE'S A HARDWARE OVERLAY CHIP TO OVERLAY BOTH SIGNALS TOGETHER! JUST FOR THE FRONT PANEL DISPLAY! AAAAAAAA!
Piotr Machacz
boosted
A friend of mine living in JP managed to get a pretty good deal on 2014-era karaoke machines due to COVID, and reverse engineered them.
It's nuts. SO nuts. Japanese engineers lived up to their name. It's so incredibly overengineered hardware, I can't hate them in this day and age of software. EVERYTHING is done in hardware.
I'm in awe. And they're not online-only junkboxes either, they're proper offline-only devices.
It's nuts. SO nuts. Japanese engineers lived up to their name. It's so incredibly overengineered hardware, I can't hate them in this day and age of software. EVERYTHING is done in hardware.
I'm in awe. And they're not online-only junkboxes either, they're proper offline-only devices.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
example of anti-user (even though it's a very narrow scope of users) behaviour from discord:
they're enforcing their underdeveloped slash command system, and later plan closing content of all messages from bots; all that being discussed behind the curtains and not with the real devs. before that they introduced real ID verification (!!) for bot devs for no good reason
https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c78100287f1
and this already caused developer of discord.py to resign (which a big loss for python community) :\
Piotr Machacz
boosted
it's sad that discord has set monopoly of community chatting solutions
because now they're free to do all the anti-user shit possible
nothing in this field really comes close, unless you want to make huge compromises
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Just found out about a new OBS plugin that lets you capture audio from only a specific application rather than the system as a hole. Could be very useful even if you don't plan to record video or stream. https://obsproject.com/forum/resources/win-capture-audio.1338/
So Apple's taking advantage of the bigger Watch screens to put a proper keyboard on it. This is great, but also I really feel for Flicktype even more now.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
FreeTube, a privacy focused Youtube client is getting accessibility updates
Bored of Youtube constantly tracking you? Annoyed of the cookies banners and slow website? And the Google's more and more invasive methods of verifying age for watching videos?
FreeTube is an open-source, privacy respecting Youtube client for Linux, Mac & Windows.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
Hassle-free interface, no adds, local history, subscriptions and last video position saving are just some features it provides to help you enjoy Youtube privately, without sending your data to Google.
Connecting over VPN or Tor is also supported, so you can watch completely anonymously!
Until recently, FreeTube was a great app, but with somewhat difficult accessibility making it hard to control.
Fortunately, after opening an accessibility improvements issue on the project's GitHub, one developer jumped in and did a really great job on this, making the app far better usable than it used to be.
1/4
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Digital Music Creation, Software, Rant
Oh and don't even get me started with their whole DRM crap. Create an account here. Create an account there. Download this downloader. Download that downloader. Install this license manager. Install that license manager. Use this license download manager downloader manager utility application downloader manager. This is such a mess. This whole thing. It's all so awful. iLok. Pulse. Native Access. All horrible. This is so incredibly broken it's not even funny anymore. It makes me want to cry and laugh and cry and laugh at the absurdity of it all. It's just truly impressive that people think this is OK. Oh it isn't. It's far from OK. I just do not have the words to express how not OK this is.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Digital Music Creation, Software, Rant
Native Instruments makes some of the absolute worst software on the planet. Komplete Kontrol is such unbelievable garbage it's incredible. Do they ever actually use this? Does anybody even test this stuff and will it ever get fixed? Things not showing up, things showing up but not loading, every single time I add something to Kontakt or Komplete something goes wrong. Every! Single! Time! It's always a struggle. Native Access is no better. Seriously I just dont' understand how it's even possible to create software that works as badly as this whole suite. It's almost like they design it like this. It's almost like they intentionally ruin this whole thing. Figure out how to make it as frustrating as possible. There wasn't a single time I set out to do something and it just worked. Sure, the plugins themselves are OK. They work. But anything to do with managing them? Installing, configuring, setting it up... I just cannot understand.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Since I was in the right frame of mind to do it, I finished removing and dumping the ROMs from another piece of avionics I had laying around - an AlliedSignal Mk VII Warning Computer 965-0876-040.
These were used with a NEC uPD7759 speech chip in master mode, so it took some work to get usable audio out of them... ended up writing a custom ADPCM decoder based on the MAME sources.
Raw dumps and decoded audio are also attached. There is 3mbit worth of data but the speech chip can only address 1mbit at a time, so the host CPU is bank switching what the chip can see. As a result the audio is split into three different banks.
If you see an inaccessible plug-in and want to check if it uses Juce, press NVDA+f1 when the plug-in is focused and look if the window class says juce. Jaws probably also has a way to get this. On a Mac, you can run strings on the plug-in binary and Pipe its output to grep and look for juce that way.
What this means for you is that if you find a plugin that's not accessible, but uses juce which is extremely likely, you can now reach out to the developers and ask if they'd be willing to upgrade the version they're using. Now that it's not a development feature it's more likely they'll do it.
I just became aware of the fact that version 6.1 of Juce, which is a UI library often used to develop audio plugins, is now officially released as stable. THis version is particularly important because it includes screen reader support. https://juce.com/discover/stories/juce-6-1-released
It’s not often I have to admit the next version of JAWS will do something interesting, but the idea of panning the voice to one side and other audio to the other with one key is kinda cool. Plus there are some useful braille changes for multilingual users. https://blog.freedomscientific.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/FSCast203Transcript-August2021.html
There goes the one thing that made Windows 11 look kinda interesting.
---
RT @xdadevelopers
Android app support in Windows 11 delayed, likely until next year https://www.xda-developers.com/android-windows-11-delayed/
https://twitter.com/xdadevelopers/status/1432689709252231178
I saw this months ago as a huge Twitter thread but it just came up again in video form in my YT. THis pour man's adventure with getting a Del desktop, trusting the brand thinking it would just work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR25BVBsuS0
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Ubuntu users, please take note, and boost if possible, this bug report about installer issues with Orca. The OS installer is the first thing many users will experience of an OS, and since, for better or worse, Ubuntu is the "flagship" end-user-facing Linux distro, accessibility should be kinda important. I know, volunteers and accessibility don't pay the bills and all that. Whatever. I'm done discussing that, I'm tired of excuses. Below is a link to the bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/1941003
#TIL it’s not just English language sites that use accessibility overlays, because I just saw AccessiBe in the wild on a Polish site. What’s even funnier is that the site is blindness related and the overlay doesn’t do Polish so you get random English controls everywhere.
Piotr Machacz
boosted
Sure, it has a blind protagonist, but it's a woman for a change, and she's pretty likable and well voice-acted. Sure, it's your usual "press up, left or right to slash" game, but it's one done right. And the story can't compare to any AAA games, but sometimes simpler indie things are more than good enough.
If this were a video game the price would be a little steep, but for an audio game this is fair enough. There's only so many people that buy those, after all; my toot will no doubt be shared around the Fedi a little, but when I've tried to introduce non-blind players to audio games in the past, almost nobody tried them (and those were free!) So I'll definitely be buying this one myself, because the developers did their best and deserve the support.
2/2
- Website
- https://piotrs.site/
- Github
- https://github.com/pitermach
I'm just a blind geek who's main hobbies include sound design, accessibility especially of games, podcasting, books and movies/TV (mainly SCI-Fi and lit RPG), and programming. Regularly do let's plays with @talon as @pg13lp. Game database editor and newsposter on audiogames.net. Most of my sound design work can be found on currentlyuntitled.design and various games.
Joined Aug 2018