Recurse Center, 2014-07-20

21 Jul 2014 | categories: [ recursecenter ] python raspberry-pi

Saturday & Sunday

During the weekend, I had this idea of building a personalized “radio” for myself using a Raspberry pi. The idea is to have a service where all my bookmarks, and feeds are accumulated to, instead of eating up valuable browser tab real estate. And then, I could use a Raspberry pi to randomly play content off of it, based on a theme.
I worked on getting things together for it, during the weekend. The project is more like a “thing that needs to be done”, rather than something that puts me out of my comfort zone, atleast as far as I can see. So, I’m just going to work on it as a background thing, between other projects, etc.
Festival seemed OK initially, while I was trying things out, but when I actually used it to read me a blog post, it was really terrible! I tried demos of a few commercial tools, and they seem much better than what festival had to offer. I wonder what it would take to get Festival, up there. I tried using Google’s translate service’s tts (unofficial API) and it seemed so good! But, it limits each request to 100 bytes, and the audio will have to be downloaded via the Network.
Madhu pointed me to MaryTTS, which seemed to be an active project and it seemed to be much better than Festival, though not as good as Google’s tts. I’m going to try getting it to run on a Pi, next.

I don’t really know what I’m doing to work on, today. I have been playing around with the Pi, for the past week-ish, and it has been fun! Kyle and I will probably work more on tweaking it, to get it to work the way we want it, for the party!
I also did a little bit of Julia with Sean, and it was fun. I may try playing around with it, a little bit, but not sure what to work on. May be continue working through the think-complexity book using Julia?
Or jump into something I totally don’t know about, inspired by listening to Julia Evans’ podcast for Ruby Rogues. I just got this idea of trying to write a window manager to understand how X works, and what wayland is… I could try porting dwm or i3wm to Julia.
There’s a whole new bunch of excited Hacker Schoolers in the space, and its very exciting!