Posts

I had some fun when I blogged about using a bot to read my blog post. While fun, it wasn’t a particularly pleasant way to consume blog content. The audio is still a bit robotic, with little care for timing, ephasis and stress on words. So in my next blog post, in which I detailed how to setup Mimic 3, I actually read the blog post out loud, recorded that and attached it as an MP3.

Yesterday I blogged about using Mycroft AI’s Mimic 3, an Open Source Text-to-Speech engine I used to generate audio of a blog post.

One thing I didn’t mention, which might be useful, is how to setup Mimic 3. It’s pretty straightforward, so here we go.

The Mimic 3 developers have some releases over on their mimic3 GitHub repo, which include deb packages. If you want the easy way, maybe use those, but I wanted to try the latest and greatest, so I grabbed the latest master branch.

Recently my Internet friend Terrence Eden crafted a blog post titled Blog To Speech which you might want to also read. It serves as an inspiration for this post.

In short, there’s a trend in blogging (and on some news sites) to add an audio transcription of the page you’re reading, usually at the top of the article. Mostly this is done semi-automatically using a bot to read in an “AI generated” voice such as Amazon Polly.

One of the things I really love about working at Influx Data is the strong social focus for employees. We’re all remote workers, and the teams have strategies to enable us to connect better. One of those ways is via Chess Tournaments!

I haven’t played chess for 20 years or more, and was never really any good at it. I know the basic moves, and can sustain a game, but I’m not a chess strategy guru, and don’t know all the best plays.

Preamble

I recently started working for InfluxData as a Developer Advocate on Telegraf, an open source server agent to collect metrics. Telegraf builds from source to ship as a single Go binary. The latest - 1.19.1 was released just yesterday.

Part of my job involves helping users by reproducing reported issues, and assisting developers by testing their pull requests. It’s fun stuff, I love it. Telegraf has an extensive set of plugins which supports gathering, aggregating & processing metrics, and sending the results to other systems.

I have so many applications on my Android Phone, I’ve lost count. Too many chat apps, multiple web browsers, tons of games, and other garbage.

However, there’s one app, which is one of my favourites while probably being the least used application. It doesn’t technically benefit me at all, but is useful to others, when I use it.

The app in question is “Be My Eyes”. It’s available for Android and iOS, and is very easy to setup. The service is aimed at blind and partially sighted people, a group of people I am (currently) not in.

Over the weekend I participated in FOSS Talk Live. Before The Event this would have been an in-person shindig at a pub in London. A bunch of (mostly) UK-based podcasters get together and record live versions of their shows in front of a “studio audience”. It’s mostly an opportunity for a bunch of us middle-aged farts who speak into microphones to get together, have a few beers and chat.

Due to The Event, this year it was a virtual affair, done online via YouTube. Joe Ressington typically organised the in-person events, but with a lack of skills in video streaming, Martin Wimpress and Marius Quabeck stepped in to run the show behind-the-scenes.

Preamble

Until recently, I worked for Canonical on the Snap Advocacy Team. Some of the things in this blog post may have changed or been fixed since I left. It’s quite a long post, but I feel it’s neccessary to explain fully the status-quo. This isn’t intended to be a “hit piece” on my previous employer, but merely information sharing for those looking to control their own systems.

I’ve previously provided feedback in my previous role as Snap Advocate, to enable them to better control updates. However, a lot of this feedback was spread over forum threads and other online conversations. So I thought I’d put together some mitigations and the steps I take in one place.

I tweeted back at the start of April that I’m moving on from Canonical/Ubuntu.

Well, I left on April 30th, have had two weeks of ‘funemployment’, and today I start my new gig.

I’m now Developer Advocate for Telegraf at InfluxData, and I couldn’t be more excited! 🎉

Telegraf is an Open Source “agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics.”. I’ll be working with the Telegraf team and wider community of contributors. You’ll likely find me in the Telegraf GitHub and on the InfluxData Community Slack!

My loft is a treasure trove of old crap. For some reason I keep a bunch of aged useless junk up there. That includes the very first MP3 player I owned.

Behold, the Diamond Rio PMP 300. Well, the box, in all its ’90s artwork glory.

Here’s the player. It’s powered by a single AA battery for somewhere around 8 hours of playback. It’s got 32MB (yes, MegaBytes) of on-board storage. Which isn’t a tremendous amount for keeping all your favourite tracks on. There’s a small LCD display for showing track details, volume, battery status and so on.