Development

On the 7th of July 2022 I had the privilege to present my work (about transcribing voice messages in Signal Desktop) at the Common Voice Community Call. We talked about how to modify Signal Desktop in order to have it transcribe voice messages fully offline, without sending the message to any third party. There’s a nice bonus at the end: a live demo on the Coqui STT WebAssembly bindings, transcribing an audio file completely offline, in the browser!...

Let’s face it: if you’re reading this, chances are that you are receiving the dreaded voice messages more often than you would want. I like the romantic feeling behind voice messages on Instant Messaging platforms: you can feel the nuances of the sender’s voice, quickly deciphering their mood. However, as you start receiving voice messages more often, that romantic feeling will collapse under the weight of a stack of these:...

Recently, the Mozilla Firefox build interface, aka mach, was enhanced with a great feature for Windows developers: the ability to generate Visual Studio project files. Such project files are not maintained in mozilla-central, hence the need for a way to generate them. Thanks to the awesome work done by Gregory Szorc, generating project files using mach is as simple as issuing the following command: [bash] ./mach build-backend backend=VisualStudio [/bash] The solution file will be available in your object directory, under the msvc folder (i....

Lately I’ve started contributing to Mozilla Firefox with some patches (yay! It’s an awesome project… consider contributing 😉 ). It was a good excuse to practice with Mercurial, the distributed revision control software used by Mozilla. I’m mainly a Git user and I have to admit I was a little puzzled at first and had to adapt to the new workflow. In this article I will try to answer some of the questions I had during my learning phase....

I’m having a lot of fun these days with my Raspberry-pi! Since I’ve already built my own tool chain to cross-compile from my Windows plus Cygwin machine and setup my IDE to compile and debug my software using it, I finally started to compile some projects. Unfortunately I had to face a couple of problems: how to make the ./configure script use my tool chain to generate Raspberry-Pi binaries in cygwin?...