A grill powered rotisserie coffee roaster is an interesting play on some of my current fetishes. Coffee, grills and now rotisseries.
I’m fairly confident that my next project will be a custom rotisserie cooker. More details to follow.
This is a shot of my recently completed barbeque cooker - haven’t named it yet, but something with the word nuke-Q-lear will almost certainly make into the running.
I spent some time reading Dreams of Iron and Steel : Seven Wonders of the Nineteenth Century, from the Building of the London Sewers to the Panama Canal recently. The work includes a brief history of seven distinct engineering challenges and the people and approaches to conquer them. The chapter on the construction of the London sewers highlighted the debate that raged about the cause of cholera that routinely ravaged the citizens of London. One James Snow collected significant evidence that cholera was in fact caused by water borne fecal bacteria. The prevailing view of the day was that cholera sprung from a miasma.
Similar debate occurred over the cause of yellow fever when building the Panama canal.
When reading this, my immediate reaction was “how could anyone think this?”.
When viewed through this very lens, what will our ancestors perceptions be of current computing practice? What aspects will be viewed most differently? Our approaches to design? Construction?
For all the change that has been wrought in computing, what paradigm shifts have yet to occur that will render our current practice as misguided as was the presumed cause of cholera?
Are we living in a time of computational miasma?
It’s always refreshing when the Internet surprises you with an unexpected find.
When surfing for Pocket PC RSS Readers, I came across a reference to FLITE a Text-to-Speech engine based on Festival. FLITE is targeted for the embedded market and as such doesn’t offer the breadth of options that one would expect from a desktop TTS library.
It does appear that it is poised to accept voices from the Festival effort. The 8khz voice that is included is limited, but inteligible.
A pre-compiled version for the PPC with a basic GUI can be found here.
The appearance of FLITE may now facilitate moving BlogTalker to my PPC.
I’ve been playing for longer than I care to admit with automating my media collections.
My current rig is Media Center from J. River with Girder and the quite excellent NetRemote. There is a pretty active community around this tech combo and my results have been suitably impressive.
Now comes news that Vinyl, a pocket-pc + win32 server is out and FREE.
Netremote/Girder/Media Center offer flexibility to the geekily inclined. Vinyl looks like the shrinkwrap stuff that just does.
“Vinyl was designed from the ground up to take advantage of your digital music collection. With Vinyl you can remotely navigate and control the playback of your digital media collection from your Pocket PC via a beautiful user interface that features album cover art throughout.”
…
[Via Pocket PC Thoughts]
Since my last post about BlogTalker my laptop harddrive died taking the only extant working code with it. So much for backups.
The lazy web hasn’t been so lazy lately. I pinged Randy Rants about adding IBlogExtension support to SharpMT. Several hours later he’s ready to post a beta.
That got me thinking that I should put BlogTalker back together.
Here’s the first cut. Source Included.
Generous borrowing from the plugins in RssBandit.
Currently it speaks the blog entry as well as writing it to a wave file. GUI config to come to control this as well as output options, externalization or editing of the SSML, etc.
What I’d really like to do is extend the IBlogExtension metaphor such that it could iterate over a selection of feeds (or the Unread View in RSSBandit). If anyone has any pointers on pulling this off in RSSBandit, I would appreciate a pointer. That would be bossy.
As it stands, BlogTalker is a novelty, done because it could be. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Update To install, go to base directory of your supported reader (RSSBandit, SharpReader, NewsGator). Look for a plugins directory. Create it if it doesn’t exist.
Copy BlogTalker.dll and Interop.SpeechLib.dll from the bin/Debug directory into your plugins directory.
Restart your reader. Right click on an rss item and select the plugin (in RSSBandit it shows inline, in SharpReader select plugins->BlogTalker)
Tested only on Windows XP with SharpReader and RSSBandit.
Now on my to buy list…
CoffeeGeek - Solis Maestro Plus
This looks to be the king of (relatively affordable) grinders on the market.
One of my new life thoughts is that life is too short for shitty brew. I’ve converged on the Bodum Santos Electric vaccum pot. A french press for my office. The weak link remains bean prep.
Now, just when the bean/brew alignment is almost complete, comes news that unfiltered coffee may signficantly increase cholesterol. via Brian Jepson
Bummer.
Everyone who deals with communication these days experience the challenges of information organization. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s email, memos, invoices, blogs or all of human knowledge, the challenge of categorizing information remains a stout one. Jon Udell has been writing lately about Dynamic Categories. Using the corpora of blogs he subscribes to, he is providing non-linear but structured search to the content. See Analyzing Blog Content for more.
Interestingly, Haystacks - The Universal Information Client is attempting to do the same across information types. Read User Interfaces for Supporting Multiple Categorization for some interesting insights into the challenges of categorizing information. I especially like this:
[we] found that that people who indiscriminately pile paper documents do so in
order to skirt the problem of having to choose between
several potentially overlapping categories
Ever look at my desktop.
The issue of information categorization was exactly what I was trying to get at with NewsHeap and virtual folders. It seems reasonable that a periodic reclassification of blog folders is not too much work, taking this down to content requires automation. It is interesting then that Udell’s approach to content classification is pragmatic and idiomatic - what defines a book reference? An href that includes Amazon. Ubiquitous? Maybe not. Universal? Probably not. Practical? Eminently so.
See Content-aware Search for the continuing battle between the a priori vs explicit camps on information organization.
Scoble indicates he’s at the top of the Google:Offshoring search.
I am routinely suprised by how people get to manicwave. I am for instance ranked highly on the google search for the Wartsila-sulzer. One blog entry. First page on google.
I am evidently also the authority on Google:Electromagnetic Can Crusher. Number One on google.
First page on the Hair Shirt, and on and on.
Google-cred buys me props in the blogosphere but nowhere else. Go figure.
MusicPlasma graphs relationships between artists. The site features an outstanding use of Flash to provide a TouchGraph like navigable graph of related artists.
There are no links to explain the metrics use to calculate affinity, but it’s a relaxing way to while away your copious free time.
