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ahmed (@PickledJones) profile picture

ahmed

@PickledJones

Building things, breaking things, figuring things out in public

Joined March 2026
  • Tweets74
  • Following155
  • Followers34
2Media
Photo by ahmed (@PickledJones)Photo by ahmed (@PickledJones)
anyone else got back into swimming as an adult? it’s actually such a peaceful form of cardio
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measured OpenRead's Kokoro engine on my M4, CPU only 5m08s of audio took 1m34s to generate, including the word timings. about 3.3x real time. that's a chapter benchmark though. I haven't timed a full book or measured battery use yet.
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took the experimental Qwen controls out of OpenRead on iPhone, Mac and the web Kitten Mini is still the default, and Kokoro is optional. I've added a Kitten TTS 2 beta too. more voices, but longer playback still needs fixing.
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noticed OpenRead was getting "read" wrong in "I read it yesterday" lead, tear and close had similar problems, so patching one word wasn't going to help. I've added a step that uses the sentence to choose the pronunciation. if it's unsure, it keeps the old version.
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someone asked how EPUB chapters worked in OpenRead and it was just one long reading so I added a contents list and chapter buttons. it keeps the chapters when you save the book or back it up too. that's merged now
OpenRead chapter picker showing three chapters, with A place to return to selected.

ALT OpenRead chapter picker showing three chapters, with A place to return to selected.

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when you're taking a shower and Claude code asks for permission
Image from Verse 👾 (@AmbroseAbaasa)
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apparently a visible cancel button is still an unsolved engineering problem
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vibe coding is being told 'fixed it' in increasingly confident paragraphs
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ahmed retweeted
Sean (@Seanwvibedev) profile picture
Sean
@SeanwvibedevNov 2
Don’t start a business if you’re afraid of rejection and don’t have an unbreakable mindset.
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OpenRead started as a browser extension. I've got it running on iPhone, Mac and Android now too. voices run on the device, and full EPUBs with chapter navigation are in. Apple builds are in private TestFlight. Android is still a dev build. getopenread.vercel.app
OpenRead — Your words. Your rhythm.

OpenRead — Your words. Your rhythm.

Free, open-source reading support. Natural local voices for Safari and Chrome on Mac.

getopenread.vercel.app
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ahmed retweeted
Paul Graham (@paulg) profile picture
Paul Graham
@paulgOct 26
We're about to enter a period where not reading or writing becomes as ubiquitous as smoking once was. We can hope people will eventually realize this is bad for them, as they did with smoking. But this is far from certain; the cost may not be as obvious.
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running a reading app locally has a cost: setup. OpenRead downloads voice models and uses a helper on your Mac. your text stays on your device. would you accept more setup for local processing, or is that where you'd stop?
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What are you building this week? Drop it below. I check every reply.
Image from Martin (@martin_valchev_)
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apparently everything needs a monthly subscription now so i spent 10 minutes vibe-coding a free alternative meet OpenRead. a reading companion for Mac with: natural voices word-by-word highlighting PDF, EPUB & web support optional local AI runs locally. no accounts. no subscriptions. 10 minutes to get the basics working. obviously took longer to turn it into something worth shipping. makes you wonder what we're actually paying for. anyway, it's free and open source. getopenread.vercel.app github.com/ahmednajaf/openre…
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