I was surprised by that, too. When I went looking for a way to decode them with RTL-SDR, I assumed it wouldn’t be parsing the audio but a narrowband data stream. TIL also.

Edit: It does kind of make sense with it being AFSK encoded in-band, though, or maybe I’m just so used to it being that way. I always thought the screeches were there to demand attention (and also be something that headend equipment can pick up and respond to). So it’s interesting they’re doing double duty as both an unmistakable audio cue to pay attention as well as containing the actual alert data.

Plus there are NOAA stations all over the country rather than centralized like the time signal transmitters. It was probably cheaper to do it in band at that scale.

That’s what I’ve done for years. Makes managing things much easier, and I run multiple APs (all with the same SSID/PSK) and you can just roam to the best one. One upstairs, one downstairs, one in the weird dead zone in my office, and one on the back patio (it’s not hardwired and uses the mesh connection for uplink).

These are all old Aruba APs running OpenWRT but that’s the plan for this Cudy Model. I may pick up a few more and just replace all of my trusty but very old Arubas.

I bought this one last month when it was on sale for $39: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRK3CYY3

Haven’t deployed it yet, but it’s fully supported by OpenWRT. I would only be using it as an access point, though. My router is a USFF Optiplex with an extra NIC and runs OpenWRT.

I guess what you’re calling “toxicity” is something I’ve dealt with more-or-less successfully by just blocking and switching instances. In fact, those are so far out of my mind I forgot to include them in my “see things through the eyes of a new user” experiment (I only unblocked communities/instances for that). But yeah, considering how many people, communities, and lemmy.ml + dbzer0 I’ve had to block and how much work that was and continues to be, I guess that does speak to a bigger problem that could be solved by better modding. I would hope some of the more egregious bad behavior only gets a pass because this place is so relatively small, but I fear that’s just me being naive.

Topic areas would be amazing and a much better onboarding experience than dumping you into the community list or /all. Topics you want to see, topics you never want to see, and maybe have it build a default subscription and/or default block list for those. And maybe a better “duplicate” detection system where there’s like 5 posts for the same non-story about a rich person farting and the Fediverse breaking out the torches and pitchforks over it. At least then you could slow-boil you way to the angry stuff that currently dominates the feed and give you a chance to turn those off rather than turning you away from the platform.

I would love to try Piefed because I keep hearing that it’s basically adding all the features Lemmy has needed forever, but TBH, my instance would have to migrate to Piefed or stand up a copy. I was on .world before I moved to startrek.website and the “feel” is just so much better here (general negativity of the overall Threadiverse notwithstanding). As you said, that’s primarily due to modding and giving the perma boot to the ones who don’t play well with others (as large as my block list is here, it’s significantly smaller than the blocklist I had on .world before I just gave up it as an instance).

Even Linux took decades to arrive at where it is at today

True. I’ll admit I’m impatient (my major remaining rough edge therapy has not yet conquered lol) but every time I see a brand new account coming in with their first post bitching about getting banned from Reddit it’s just a reminder that we’re not attracting the best and brightest here but rather the ones who have nowhere else to go. And they bring that behavior here and it just seems like it takes us further away from becoming a real alternative people actually want to go to. I’m going off on a tangent, I know, so I’ll stop here.

Lol, I guess the reply still shows up in the inbox. Even if I had noticed it was marked deleted, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to recommend something Star Trek related 😆

Yeah, to pretty much all that.

My experience here is generally pretty pleasant, but it took a LOT of work blocking untold numbers of communities, users, and instances to get here. Other on-boarding difficulties aside (for less savvy users), it’s just a big ask to expect them to do all that work just to not be hit in the face with all the negativity and raging and dig deep for everything else. Reddit may have numerous flaws, but at least I can go to the front page and it doesn’t feel like I walking into the midst of an angry mob.

My two cents is basically this: We did this to ourselves here. Elsewhere, we might have blamed the algorithms for pushing rage-bait front and center, but here it’s 100% organic (unless there’s just a massive bot problem which I don’t have reason to suspect).

I started with “A Stitch in Time” but that was only because I just wanted to read it.

Here’s the resource someone shared with me for reading order: https://www.thetrekcollective.com/p/trek-lit-reading-order.html?m=1

I read several before seeing that but thankfully all the ones I read were marked as good starting points.

+1 for reading more. I took a break a few weeks ago, but I’ve been deep into the Star Trek books since last summer.

I only say there needs to be less because that’s all that seems to get pushed to the top. Ever since I saw the few posts asking how to get new users here, I’ve been trying to put myself in their shoes and look at things raw and unfiltered like a brand new user would see. Sadly, now that I’ve looked, I can’t un-see.

The rest of us just need to get on their level with all our other hobbies and interests.

100% agree :) But those don’t seem to get the rage clicks like all the bad news stuff and get buried even on scaled sort.

there aren’t other NWSL/MLS fans out here, but could you please stop doing drive-bys and downvoting all my articles?

I don’t know what either of those are, but I just went and threw some upvotes to some of your stuff because it was non-political / non-news. And one of them was highly downvoted for reasons I cannot possibly fathom.

I do! Though I’m fully a lurker there and only passively contribute with my upvotes since I haven’t biked or even e-biked in ages.

Love me some dad jokes lol. They’re about the only kind I’m good at.

Item #10: Don’t be this person.☝️

Like, wow. None of what I said has anything to do with that. This is the kind of jumping to insane conclusions, putting words in peoples’ mouths shit that turns people away.

Look at it from a new user’s perspective; someone who has not curated their feed or otherwise “made the fediverse what they want” yet. e.g. They land on Lemmy World or another big instance and their default sort is “active”. Doing that now in an incognito window, and half the front page is rage, same on the second, and the stuff that’s not are some random shitposts and Linux filling in.

Truth be told, looking at that, I probably wouldn’t want to sign up. Especially if I didn’t know that different instances have different cultures, etc.

Assuming they’re a normie (which we desperately fucking need here), I just don’t see that they’d want to stick around. Aside from trolls and spammers, the only people we seem to consistently attract here are the “Wah wah I was banned from Reddit” types and, while there’s certainly a sizable pool to draw from, I wouldn’t exactly consider them the pick of the litter for growing the fediverse.

The point of OPs post is that usage here is declining, and I am simply pointing out that I feel all the rage and politics is not particularly inviting.

Edit: And you know what? I’m just going to fucking say it. There’s too many armchair activists here who won’t let you enjoy a single moment without reminding you that something bad is happening somewhere in the world and that you have some kind of moral obligation to be angry all the time about it. And if you’re not angry all the time then you’re somehow part of the problem.

We had the same thought. Right before I saw your reply, I added some hobby communities to my comment as examples.

This place is so flooded with politics and raging over the news that I’m about to choose a random hobby community that’s active and pick up said hobby just to be able to have something besides Star Trek and Linux to talk about here lol.

Just my two cents, but there’s just no reason for people to come here when it’s 80+% political shit and rage bait and virtue signaling. Hell, I’ve got 80% of the content here filtered out as it is, and I want to be here.

Find your nearest non-political hobby community and start posting things people actually want to see and maybe we might see some growth or people sticking around. My current hyperfixation/hobby is Meshtastic, so I’ve been pretty active there lately. If that’s not your thing, then there’s:

• !woodworking@lemmy.ca
• !leathercraft@lemmy.ca
• !artshare@lemmy.world
• !gardening@sh.itjust.works !Houseplants@lemmy.ca !houseplants@mander.xyz
• !baking@sh.itjust.works
• !sewingrepairing@sh.itjust.works or !sewing@lemmy.world
• !television@piefed.social
• !movies@piefed.social !movies@lemmy.ca !movies@lemmy.world
• !jigsaw_puzzles@lemmy.world

If you’re like me and not good at any of that, tell us about cleaning your gutters or doing your laundry over in !Dullsters@dullsters.net

The point is, we need more posts about what make us happy and less about what we’re angry at (which is pretty much goddamned everything).

https://github.com/marytts/marytts

I’ve used MaryTTS semi-recently. It’s older but works well enough for my cases. I have it running on a server (locally) and my endpoints make a call to it and playback the returned audio file.

On Android, I use SherpaTTS which has good voices, but I’m not aware of a desktop/Linux option. It mentions using voices from Coqui which you linked, so I would guess that would be the way to go for desktop.

Yeah, I don’t know about pre-installed with Android that aren’t ad platforms masquerading as consumer hardware. I’d never use one unless it was supported by LineageOS or something. My comment was more “roll your own” in nature.

Maybe one of those HDMI “stick” PCs you can get? There’s x86 Android builds you can run or you can do like I did with my media PCs and boot into Openbox and just launch a fullscreen browser right to Jellyfin and control it from your phone. (My main setup uses Emby but should be able to do the same with JF).

I’ve actually got a portable Jellyfin server I take with me. Built on the OrangePi Zero 2W with a USB->NVMe acting as media storage (as well as the Jellyfin DB). It’s got several other services running as well as a second Wifi adapter so it can also act as a travel router.

For playback, I pretty much just use my laptop or phone but have thought about adding one of the “stick” PCs as a client for it.

Yep, that’s why I haven’t messed with Kubernetes either; way overkill for a homelab and especially so since I downsized due to soaring electricity costs here.

The only reason I gave up on Docker Swarm was that it seemed pretty dead-end as far as being useful outside the homelab. At the time, it was still competing with Kubernetes, but Kube seems to have won out. I’m not even sure Docker CE even still has Swarm. It’s been a good while since I messed with it. It might be a “pro” feature nowadays.

Edit: Docker 28.5.2 still has Swarm.

Still, it was nice and a lot easier to use than Kubernetes once you wrapped your head around swarm networking.