Archive for September, 2025

James Webb Space Telescope (now actually sung) and Seddit 1.4

Posted by Angela Brett in My Software, video on September 26, 2025


In my last post I gave lyrics to a parody of an Arrogant Worms song about the James Webb Space Telescope, and an update to my text-to-speech focussed Reddit client Seddit. I also said two things that turned out to be false:

  • Joey and I will probably sing this parody, but it will take more mixing and video editing than our usual songs.
  • This completes all the major features I have planned the app — I have other ideas for improvement, but I don’t think they’re essential. I’m hoping that the next update will be simply to remove the text saying I’m looking for a job.

Well, the other night Joey asked if I wanted to sing the song, and I said, “Okay! I should change into a more space-related shirt first” and then Joey produced two James Webb Space Telescope T-shirts out of nowhere, having secretly ordered them previously. So we changed into the shirts, and then we sang it, directly into a camera together, with no warmup or practice, and Joey trimmed the ends and put the video on YouTube. I had thought we’d sing our separate parts, get them perfect, then mix them, and make a video with some relevant educational images. Instead, here’s an imperfect but pretty good recording already!

I know where I made a mistake, but I’m not going to hang a lampshade on it so you’ll notice.

As for Seddit, well, not only did I not get the job I was hoping for when I wrote that, I also decided to update the app to use the new Liquid Glass design language that came out with iOS and macOS 26. I found and fixed a few other issues along the way. Here are the changes in Seddit 1.4:

  • Features
    • Added support for liquid glass appearance in iOS/macOS 26
    • Moved playback controls to a liquid glass overlay so you can see more content around the edges
  • Bug fixes
    • Made sure compliments purchased on the Support Seddit screen are always shown in the same order
    • Made the Voices Settings screen on macOS show which voices are Enhanced or Premium (I also filed bug FB20362911 with Apple about this, because there’s some system behaviour that’s inconsistent between iOS and macOS)
    • Fixed an issue introduced in Seddit 1.2 whereby posts whose comments are not all read would be shown as read instead of partly read

You can get the latest version for Mac, iPhone, or iPad on the relevant App Store.

On the subject of songs and liquid glass, check out this song by James Dempsey about liquid glass:

Thanks to Seattle Xcoders, I was lucky enough to have seen the live debut of this, and another performance of it, which I recorded but don’t have permission to share yet.

I haven’t actually had any legibility issues with liquid glass though — and if I did, I know I could always turn on Reduce Transparency.

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James Webb Space Telescope (Arrogant Worms parody lyrics) and yet another Seddit update

Posted by Angela Brett in My Software on September 15, 2025


This is to be sung to the tune of Big Fat Road Manager, by The Arrogant Worms:

Giant rocket to the sky
Not many people really know why
It’s gotta stay cool as the stars parade
It’s got a gold coat and some doped ass-shades

It’s the James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope!

It beat a hurricane and lots of delays
(James Webb Space Telescope)
Refused to fail in three hundred ways
(James Webb Space Telescope)
It had a long time and a lot to do
(James Webb Space Telescope)
On its way to Lagrange point two

It’s the James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope

It found a new moon and some old black holes
(James Webb Space Telescope)
A planet circling a mate of Sol’s
(James Webb Space Telescope)
Its pictures show 8-pointed stars
(James Webb Space Telescope)
That’s how you can tell they are

From the James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope

You may wonder why the space telescope’s so far
That way it can block the heat from our Earth and Moon and Star

It sees through clouds in infrared
(James Webb Space Telescope)
Back through time as the wavelengths spread
(James Webb Space Telescope)
So far back that now it sees
(James Webb Space Telescope)
Light from earliest galaxies
As our James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope

It’s still our James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope
James Webb Space Telescope

∎

Recently I remembered that I’d started writing this parody back when the James Webb Space Telescope launched. So I filled in some of the gaps, and then watched this excellent documentary about the telescope to fill in some more:

I found out about that documentary from NASA’s Curious Universe podcast, which I found out about from NASA’s Houston We Have a Podcast podcast. I recommend both, but especially the latter.

I considered saying it had ‘huge-ass shades’ as a reference to the ‘big fat ass’ in the original lyrics, but then I discovered that the sunshades were coated with doped silicon, and I couldn’t resist making a reference to the phrase ‘dope-ass’ while also doing the xkcd 37 thing. They are ‘ass shades’ in a sense, because they’re behind the telescope, i.e. on the side it’s not looking towards.

I’ve put links in the lyrics to some of the things where I could find a specific-enough link. The hurricane referred to is Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas while the JWST was undergoing testing in a cryogenic vacuum chamber. As you’ll see in the documentary, it was a nail-biting time! The next line refers to the 344 potential single-point failures during launch and deployment which there wouldn’t have been a way to recover from. Really there were a lot of nail-biting times. But it all went well!

I linked to NASA’s explanation of Webb’s diffraction spikes, but I think this diagram from wikipedia also shows it very well.

Joey and I will probably sing this parody, but it will take more mixing and video editing than our usual songs. On the other hand, I can hear Joey singing it in the other room as I type this, so it might be ready fairly soon.

In other news, I’ve released version 1.3 of my text-to-speech-focussed reddit client for macOS and iOS, Seddit. Here’s what I changed:

  • Added ‘Go to currently speaking item’ button in the toolbar, so you can quickly find the post or comment that’s currently being spoken, e.g. to open links or open the post in a browser to respond
  • Enabled the ‘Settings…’ menu item and standard Settings window style on macOS
  • Added headings and other changes for improved navigation of posts and comments using VoiceOver or Switch Control.

This completes all the major features I have planned the app — I have other ideas for improvement, but I don’t think they’re essential. I’m hoping that the next update will be simply to remove the text saying I’m looking for a job. 🤞🏻

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So I leave my bags behind (Galilee Song parody, now actually sung!) and another new version of Seddit

Posted by Angela Brett in My Software, video on September 2, 2025


Hey look, Joey Marianer sang the parody song lyrics from my last post! Check there for the lyrics and the aviation incidents referenced.

There are some more song parody lyrics, but first, a word from my sponsor: me. Just like last time, I’ve released a new version of Seddit, my text-to-speech-focussed Reddit client for macOS and iOS. This has a feature I’ve wanted to add for a while — the possibility to select multiple voices, and read each user’s posts and comments in a different one. The variety makes it easier to keep paying attention when listening for a long time, and having each user consistently use the same voice should make it easier to follow conversations.

I made some other changes in this version too. Here’s a full list of them:

Features

  • Added the possibility to have each user’s posts and comments spoken in a different voice
  • Added settings for whether to read out the subreddit name, and date and time for each post.
  • Added the option to load no comments — this was for Joey, who wanted to try listening to short story subreddits while obeying the “don’t read the comments” rule of the internet.

Bug fixes

  • Fixed a bug whereby turning off the ‘Say “Link” instead of reading out URLs’ setting would not work
  • Fixed a bug where comments that weren’t loaded would be read as “comment by unknown user” Comments that aren’t loaded due to the comment depth settings are also no longer displayed.
  • Fixed a potential crash when opening the app if posts had been deleted on another device

On the subject of text-to-speech, nine or ten years ago I read a book and a bunch of papers on speech synthesis in order to write a term paper for my Web Development for Linguistics degree. The term paper was longer than the text of my thesis, because my thesis also included source code for a web site and a Mac app. Anyway, from this book I learnt about PSOLA (Pitch Synchronous Overlap and Add) which is used to change the pitch and duration of sounds for text-to-speech, as one might do to change prosody, or create a robot choir.

Newer voices don’t use PSOLA so much, as (to put it simply) they have more samples of actual speech in different situations, so they don’t need to modify samples for the sake of prosody. Note, this is ‘newer voices’ as of a decade or two ago; I don’t know whether the latest crop of ML-based voices do things the same way. Anyway, I assume this is why the newer macOS voices don’t support the TUNE format I used for my robot choir.

At the time, I wrote an utterly silly partial parody of Lola, by The Kinks, about PSOLA. I thought maybe I’d finish it or maybe even make it less silly[why?], but I never did, and now I don’t remember enough about how PSOLA works to fully understand what I originally wrote. So here is that draft. It really doesn’t scan, but I hope it doesn’t scan in amusing ways:

I was trying to synthesise some prosody,
but my source and filter were mixed up just like granola
G-R-A-N-O-L-A, granola.

So I found a new way to make it sound rad
It’s called pitch-synchronous overlap and add, that is PSOLA
P-S-O-L-A PSOLA. Pso-pso-pso-P-SOLA.

Well I didn’t want to sound like a smallpox blight
So I really took care with my to get my epochs right
for PSOLA. Pso-pso-pso-P-SOLA.

If you’re not dumb then you’ll soon understand
How I speak like a woman then sound like a man
It’s P-SOLA. Pso-pso-pso-P-SOLA. Pso-pso-pso-P-SOLA.

[It doesn’t look like I wrote anything for the bridge (is that a bridge?) of the song, so just pretend it keeps going roughly like before]

It was used to make synthesized speech sound natural
But now there’s some super-sized features that fill that role-uh
R-O-L-E hyphen U-H role-uh

So that’s my guess if you’re wondering why r-
ecent voices don’t sing in my robot choir:
No PSOLA.

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