Author: Michael G

The Drop Times is delighted to announce that we will be media partners for the forthcoming DrupalSouth 2023.DrupalSouth is Australia and New Zealand’s regional Drupal meeting.

The fifth RC build for the FreeBSD 13.2 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, powerpc, powerpc64, powerpc64le, powerpcspe, armv6, armv7, aarch64, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.

GNU a2ps is an Any to PostScript filter.  Of course it processes plain
text files, but also pretty prints quite a few popular languages.

For more information, see https://www.gnu.org/software/a2ps/

This release is a minor bug-fix release; no pressing need to update unless
you’re affected by a bug it fixes (see the end of this message for details).

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz
  https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

b2ae4016b789a198c50a2f1dc0fefc11bda18ebe  a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz
0A6B4OtNy/LUlj2J4d8rtm9x5m1ztBUsQ8+YOOaq98c  a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz

The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg –verify a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC]
        2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44  9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230
  uid   Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
  uid   keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>

If that command fails because you don’t have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the ‘gpg –verify’ command.

  gpg –locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org

  gpg –recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230

  wget -q -O- ‘https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1’ | gpg –import –

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg –keyring gnu-keyring.gpg –verify a2ps-4.15.3.tar.gz.sig

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.71
  Automake 1.16.5
  Gnulib v0.1-5892-g83006fa8c9

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 4.15.3 (2023-03-26) [stable]
 * Bug fixes:
   – Fix fixps to use GhostScript’s ps2write device instead of defunct
     pswrite.
 * Build:
   – Fix a problem building PDF version of manual.

Modders can change many things inside their favorite games, but dialogue from professionally voiced characters hasn’t been one of those things—at least until recently. AI voice generation could open up new modding avenues for some games, as it has already done with one Fallout 4 mod package. They’re not just new labels on existing dialogue, either. RED, created by NexusMods user ProfMajowski (and first seen by us at PCGamesN), says it used ElevenLabs voice AI to generate its more in-character lines. The results can sometimes “sound a little ’emotionless,’” the creator writes, but “otherwise they basically sound like the real thing.” Nothing your character can newly say now will change the game’s mechanics or reactions, but it should sound a bit more in character. I’m not down on “artificial intelligence” as a matter of principle – quite the opposite. This story right here is a great example of how AI can be used in productive, interesting ways that truly make something possible that either wasn’t possible before, or was simply entirely unrealistic. Spoken dialog is hard to record for a whole slew of reasons, from cost to finding enough quality voice actors to the time it takes, and it’s usually only the biggest studios that have the ability to add it to their games. Even then it’s often a struggle, from bad voice acting overall to large role-playing games where e.g. the main quest is beautifully voiced, but side quests are either entirely unvoiced or clearly rushed by some cheap interns. Thanks to technology like this, even small indie studios or mere mod developers can add something meaningful to their work that up until recently simply wasn’t realistic. It will make games meaningfully better – especially once technology improves a bit more and developers become proficient with it – without the need for hype.