Who the hell would be crazy enough to buy this? Shaking hands with my friends? How did that reach the top of the pile for v1 must have...

Who the hell would be crazy enough to buy this? Shaking hands with my friends? How did that reach the top of the pile for v1 must have features? I’m more concerned that this would “Memorizes your kitchen inventory..”.. “Memorizes your clean home layout”. Go on, cyber overlords. Take everything.

Direnv - and reinventing the wheel with envloader

I hate having to do this. But I have.

I’ve made ANOTHER tool to load up your env vars in a terminal. Why? Because I had a mare getting direnv to work on my specific Windows machine. It was really due to the way our office locked down the way a users $PROFILE works - that is it puts everything on OneDrive and there was a ton of admin issues getting it all working correctly. So, stupidly, rather than fixing that properly I found it (more fun?) to build a cross platform simplifed direnv tool.

So its called envloader, FInd details here and how to use.

In short Let’s imagine your directory - or one above it - has a .env or a .envrc file. It might look like this.

MICROSOFT_TOKEN_TRANS="token-for-trans"
CONFIG_ENCRYPTION_KEY="RqliKRLnkQxTOzgx_molctcWXM_alqSaNYVxCTBjma0="
SIMPLE_VAR=hello123
JSON_VAR='{"name": "test", "value": 42}'

This is common syntax for dotenv and direnv, but it won’t work as-is across all terminals. You need a tool to convert it properly for your shell. direnv IS your tool of choice, but if you like me, you cant just get it working - or the numerous other tools out there like it and you spend too many hours fiddling to get them to work (because you have a Windows machine which has really tight admin rights on it) you could try this little tool I’ve made..

Install on Mac/Linux

brew tap willwade/envloade
brew install willwade/envloader/envloader

or Using Scoop

scoop bucket add envloader https://github.com/willwade/envloader
scoop install envloader

then in a terminal you can run envloader and press enter. It will find a .env or .envrc and convert the lines appropriately for your shell.

e.g.

envloader

Make your life a bit easier and write an alias in your env - details here

I haven’t gone to town building lots of neat integration tricks - and unlike direnv it DOESN’T autoload on entering/exiting a directory. But running ‘envload’ now does the trick just fine for me. Maybe for you too.

So we built this aacprocessors library. Intention was to read and manipulate any AAC software. Its not ideal but just made a new method just...

So we built this aacprocessors library. Intention was to read and manipulate any AAC software. Its not ideal but just made a new method just for the grid right now.

def replace_cell_with_xml(
    self,
    gridset_path: str,
    target_caption: Optional[str],
    target_action: Optional[str],
    new_content_xml: str,
    output_path: str,
) -> None:
    """Replace a cell's content with a new XML fragment across the gridset.

    Args:
        gridset_path (str): Path to the original gridset file.
        target_caption (Optional[str]): Caption of the button to replace.
        target_action (Optional[str]): Action command of the button to replace.
        new_content_xml (str): New XML content for the cell.
        output_path (str): Path to save the modified gridset.
    """

So search for a action or a cell label and it will replace all buttons tin the gridset with the xml of the button you replace it with.

For a demo see https://gist.github.com/willwade/26a1327c4e130b6afa36977fc129e09b

Really this needs more thought and a way of mking this across all AAC file types. I’m thinking a ‘replace_cell_with_raw’ method for sql or filebased systems. Its quite a bit different for sqlite systems though as they abstract the button logic from the content. Needs more thought

If anyone out there is a python dev - and wanting TTS support in theri code - I’d love someone to help roadtest this python library. I...

If anyone out there is a python dev - and wanting TTS support in theri code - I’d love someone to help roadtest this python library. I think its probably the most extensive TTS wrapper accessing pretty much every online and offline TTS engine… in a nice unified way.. AVSynth on MacOS is what I really want testing due to the mad way we create a swift bridge.. I feel its going to break.. just how and when?!

Adam did this marvellous reprint of the poppy mini trackball for a client needing a chin controlled trackball. This modification stops it...

Adam did this marvellous reprint of the poppy mini trackball for a client needing a chin controlled trackball. This modification stops it falling out. It’s a win as the designs are all open source. @PKL@mastodon.social

ploopy.co

Want to access Panels editor in Mac? Access it here /System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app...

Want to access Panels editor in Mac? Access it here /System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app

Pin it to your dock (saves you opening in rather wierd way via system settings) or

ln -s "/System/Library/Input Methods/Assistive Control.app/Contents/Resources/Panel Editor.app" /Applications/Panel\ Editor.app

Been working with Sherpa-Onnx TTS a lot over the last year. It’s a nice project to make a onnx runtime for lots of different...

Been working with Sherpa-Onnx TTS a lot over the last year. It’s a nice project to make a onnx runtime for lots of different languages and interfaces. Just whipped together a Gradio demo to show all the voices and hear them - most notably MMS Onnx models Sherpa-Onnx Demo

Great episode on TTS on the BBC www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/e…

Great episode on TTS on the BBC www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/e…

Monkey Management

Following on from “Ask Advice, Not permission” See also “Monkey Management”.

Monkey Management ideas aren’t new (eg see this which quotes it as being from 1975). It’s basically describing the problem of how unsolved problems of employees are pushed upwards causing the “monkey” to jump on a manager’s back. This increases workload for a manager and makes focus difficult. This piece nicely discusses the issue in the view of Product management.

From Monkey Management:

Despite the complexity, monkey ownership continues for Product. It is your circus, but not your job to train monkeys.

Monkey management is effective when there is organizational complexity. It has two critical benefits. The first is time management and the second is creating high agency staff who are able to deal with problems autonomously.

If you understand whose back the monkey is on, you can understand the art of time management and delegation.

A comment from HN

The reason monkey keeps jumping around is because there are ZERO directly responsible owners of the delivery of the cross-functional outcome for the business.

In my company, we have PM, Sr. PM, Director of Product, VP of product - interfacing with Designer, Sr. Designer, Design manager, Sr. Design manager, director of design - interfacing with Eng 2, Sr Eng, Eng manager, Sr Eng manager, Eng director, Sr. Eng director, Eng VP.

Nobody can tell who owns the final decisions, decisions cannot be bubbled up, every management chain is only focused on their own goals. There is no decision-making structure at all. Inevitably projects get delayed or there are unaccounted issues. Then each management chain stack ranks their reports for not achieving goals - never once accepting that the empire structure never made any decisions when it was necessary.

The empire structure has to go. It is dysfunctional, doesn’t work, and only causes grief to everyone involved. Tasks are unnecessarily hard. It is easy to do. Just make your highest paid people directly responsible for outcomes. Give them the freedom to pull people from various org functions to get a project to success.

Ask for Advice, Nor Permission

From Ask for Advice, Not Permission

The problem with permission is that you are implicitly asking someone else to take some responsibility for your decision. You aren’t inviting them to participate in its success — permission is hardly seen as a value adding behavior — but if it goes wrong you might end up involving them in the failure: “Hey, I asked that team and they said it was fine.

and

Advice, on the other hand, is easy. “Hey, I was thinking about doing X, what advice would you give me on that?” In this instance you are showing a lot of respect to the person you are asking but not saddling them with responsibility because the decision is still on you.

Its a great read. Whats interesting though is what happens when it goes wrong. From HN

“…and when someone asks for your permission (probably because you’re in the person’s management chain), one response could be: “you don’t need my permission, if you think it is a good idea after getting input, go for it. If it turns out to be a bad idea, share your learnings so we don’t repeat the same mistake.””

Published our py3-tts-wrapper python library finally this week. Should power a lot of funky things. Supports all the major TTS engines...

Published our py3-tts-wrapper python library finally this week. Should power a lot of funky things. Supports all the major TTS engines online and new ones offline. Use alongside this app to see what voices are available (API here)

Sometimes you have to do the hard graft as nobody else wants to. huggingface.co/willwade/… - all ONNX models of the Meta MMS Text to...

Sometimes you have to do the hard graft as nobody else wants to. huggingface.co/willwade/… - all ONNX models of the Meta MMS Text to Speech models (code: github.com/willwade/… - and all suitable for sherpa-onnx)

Poor Henry

Poor Henry

I made a quick video demonstrating our relaykeys dongle-dongle setup. I’m pleased we did this—it makes the headache people have of...

I made a quick video demonstrating our relaykeys dongle-dongle setup. I’m pleased we did this—it makes the headache people have of pairing devices, etc., go totally away, and we can also use it on things that don’t support Bluetooth well.

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (and I was completely clueless) “Lawyers, as they should be, are often about risk...

After my dad died, I ran and sold his company (and I was completely clueless)

“Lawyers, as they should be, are often about risk mitigation for both sides. But it’s important the parties in the deal be clear on what is valuable to them or understand how big the risks really are so that neither side gets bogged down in details or risks which are unimportant or have a low probability of happening.

Orion – From idea to launch in 45 days

Orion – From idea to launch in 45 days

This is just the most awesome radiolab episode. I can’t believe I have missed this one. It’s about Emilie and path through...

This is just the most awesome radiolab episode. I can’t believe I have missed this one. It’s about Emilie and path through rehabilitation. I can’t even start to explain the aweseomeness of this. Just listen radiolab.org/podcast/f…

A lot of dictation tools takes a little while to get used to as you have to mentally prepare what to say. I’ve thought for a long time...

A lot of dictation tools takes a little while to get used to as you have to mentally prepare what to say. I’ve thought for a long time that for the population we see a lot who need these this is a skill that is pretty cognitively difficult. Aqua Voice is a new solution to this.

Aqua Voice feels as natural as talking someone at a keyboard. It writes what you say, but it also does what you say.

We achieve these interactions using an ensemble of models fused together in a way that allows them to understand your intent, not just what you literally said.

Examples

Remember that the meeting is on Thursday. - Friday, Friday.

->

Remember that the meeting is on Friday.

(Implicit Correction)

It looks neat. $10/month. See the video demo

I’ve often pondered on a deceloping a rotary encoder with a push down action as a technique for accessing our auditory scanning app echo....

I’ve often pondered on a deceloping a rotary encoder with a push down action as a technique for accessing our auditory scanning app echo. One day we might do it and if so I’ll look at this project.

GitHub - carlosefr/spinner-mouse: Arduino-based USB rotary controller for arcade Arkanoid, Tempest, etc. github.com

Reader: github.com

Also

• Rev-O-Mate www.tindie.com/products/…
• Smartknob github.com/scottbez1…

Inclusive sans. Brilliant name. You had me at “character level”. Excellent font. Particularly like the nod to the minority languages...

Inclusive sans. Brilliant name. You had me at “character level”. Excellent font. Particularly like the nod to the minority languages close to home for Olivia; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.

I was inspired to create a typeface that was truly legible at a character level. While some typefaces had been created in the same spirit, I wanted to create a font that was more contemporary and usable as a text typeface for all types of use.

Inclusive Sans — Olivia King oliviaking.com

Reader: www.oliviaking.com

Iterative rapid development Part 2 (aka Judith Part 2).

So sometimes.. just sometimes.. a couple of months works pays off. Or I guess we could frame this post around successful product development - keeping the end user the focus of your development and involving them at all stages of your development cycle is key. We are proud to shout loudly about this.

So two months ago we saw Judith. Technology has not been successful for her before. (You can read more why in my previous posts). So we rapidly developed a SwiftUI app that was unique in its operation - you dragged from one letter to the next. Trying it with Judith we still had a problem - positional errors and missing letters were high. So we then rapidly worked on a “correct-a-sentence system” and settled on using a Azure OpenAI API (GPT3.5) and then developed our own custom model alongside this (needing something that worked offline and privacy first was key (NB: The videos is this offline model - Not GPT). A few iterations of this and its correcting as good as GPT 3.5 83% of the time.

So two months later, what does this all mean for the end user? They can now write on technolgy to communicate for the very first time. Happy - well so far yes. But long term AAC use is complex and not just down to the technology. So lets be curious and proud at the same time. There is more to do

• Small tweaks in the UI
• Its correcting a bit too much at times - sometimes adding more grammar changes than I would like - and equally dangerous - losing words. To fix this we could further train our custom model.

and then more I’m sure the next time we review this cycle of the iterative development cycle.

What does this process look like overall?

We follow the double-diamond development cycle. It’s a pretty common approach yet following it is not always easy.

So lessons so far?

• Iterate Fast: Rapid prototyping and adjustments are key to finding viable solutions for complex, unique solutions. There is a much longer tail to development for solid, reliable products but getting somewhere fast helps to see whats important.
• User-Centric Design: Keeping the user at the heart of all stages of development ensures that the technology we develop truly meets their needs. Its not always easy but it can be done. Its important to do this as part of a team though. It can so easily be lost as to whether you are getting carried away or whether you are on track. We pride ourselves on at Ace Centre being a transdisciplinary team where never one person sees the whole picture.
• Continuous Learning: Every challenge presents a learning opportunity, pushing us to constantly improve. And heck - its good fun too seeing big gains.
• Passion and Persistence: A keen interest in making a difference and the drive to keep pushing forward are indispensable.

Cognitive effect on breaking sitting time

Many years ago, I worked with my colleague David Porter at Oxford Brookes on a study looking at the effect of supportive seating systems on attention in children with Cerebral Palsy. Although we never managed to get it published, I felt it was a useful piece of work and we must redo it one day. But It takes a ton of work to get work like this published (The short story? Supportive seating looked like it helps children attend to the task (and get better scores in games! ))

So I’m thrilled to see this research looking at the effect of physical exercise on cognitive function in young people with cerebral palsy out there. www.degruyter.com/document/…

Big high fives to everyone involved but particularly Dr Shelly Coe, RNutr, FHEA - it’s a great piece of work. Proud to have worked with the team from Oxford Brookes University MOReS group (& other awesome folk like in particular for my bit like Dominika P. ).

If you’re interested, a version of the flanker test that is in the paper is here: flanker.willwa.de (although my personal favorite game that I’ve done for similar work is snap snap.willwa.de - it’s a bit more fun). Kudos to the team for their hard work in getting this over the line!

This is truly marvellous. “Assume that I can. So maybe I will”. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%;...

This is truly marvellous. “Assume that I can. So maybe I will”.

www.youtube.com/watch

Objectified. "if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself."

Objectified (2009, 75 minutes) is a documentary film about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

It’s a great film (and free to watch from March 14-17!) but in particular, I love this quote from Dan Formosa, Design & Research, Smart Design, New York (around 6 minutes in)

But really our common interest is in understanding people and what their needs are. So if you start to think, well really, what these guys do as consultants is focus on people, then it’s easy to think about what’s needed design wise in the kitchen, or in the hospital, or in the car.

We have clients coming to us and saying here’s our average customer. For instance, she’s female, she’s 34 years old, she has 2.3 kids.

And we listen politely and say, well that’s great, but we don’t care about that person. What we really need to do to design is look at the extremes, the weakest, or the person with arthritis, or the athlete, or the strongest, or the fastest person. Because if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.

View it online at www.ohyouprettythings.com/free

Back to the 90s with my retro dataset of SMS, TXT abbreviations.. huggingface.co/datasets/… Maybe of use to someone out their...

Back to the 90s with my retro dataset of SMS, TXT abbreviations.. huggingface.co/datasets/… Maybe of use to someone out their creating a GEC model ;)