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General Software Discussion / Announcing SpaceMan, my new Alexa skill
« on: January 22, 2017, 01:19 PM »
I've just published my first Alexa skill. If you've got an Alexa Echo device, and have any interest in space exploration, I think you'll find it interesting.

Spaceman is a free app for your Amazon Alexa device. I created it because I've always had a deep interest in space exploration, and building a way to keep informed of news in this area, and even inspire curiosity, seemed a good exercise for me to teach myself the technology behind Amazon Alexa and AWS Lambda functions.

It currently provides information to you about:

  • Phase of the moon
  • Scheduled rocket launches anywhere in the world, both past and future
  • Asteroids and other objects passing close to the Earth, for dates you request

To get a quick overview of the current news, just say

Alexa, ask Spaceman what's up?

But Spaceman also understands dates, so you can ask about other days you're interested in

  • Alexa, ask Spaceman what's up tomorrow?
  • Alexa, ask Spaceman what's up next Tuesday?
  • Alexa, ask Spaceman what happened yesterday?

Date ranges will work as well. And it can be future or past

  • Alexa, ask Spaceman what happened between January 1 2017 and January 10 2017?
  • Alexa, ask Spaceman what's happening from today to Friday?

Typical output is like (spoken, of course)
News for Saturday, January 21, 2017
SpaceMan
This is a waning crescent moon.
==================
Date: Saturday, January 21, 2017 12:42 AM
Status: Success
Name: Atlas V 401 | SBIRS GEO-4 (SBIRS GEO Flight 3)
Location: Cape Canaveral, FL, USA
==================
8 objects are passing near the Earth. None of them are potentially hazardous.
The nearest will pass by us at a distance of 26.7 times the distance to the moon. It will be traveling about 9 thousand miles per hour, and have a diameter between 48 and 107 feet.
More information is available at http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=3704156

You can get the skill from here:
https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Wuestefeld-SpaceMan/dp/B01NCX6VF7/

More info about it here:
https://sites.google.com/view/spacemanforalexa/

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General Software Discussion / Amazon Alexa tips and skills suggestions
« on: December 05, 2016, 02:01 PM »
I just came into possession of Amazon's Alexa Echo Dot. Being a nerd, I was happy to play with it. And just a couple of demos to my wife: "Alexa play James Taylor" and "Alexa play Bach", and she was sold on it. I thought I'd share my experience with it so far:

  • Its speaker is crappy (although the one in the full-size Alexa is supposed to be pretty good). You really need to hook up a bluetooth speaker to it if you want to use it for music.
  • While not bad, it does take some getting used to before you'll be comfortable with the phrasing of some commands. But most of them are fine.
  • I've been using it a lot for music, between the built-in support for Amazon music (via Prime membership) and iHeartRadio. What you can get to for essentially free is pretty impressive. But my wife keeps telling it to turn down its volume. I tried "Alexa ignore volume commands from Cathy, but that didn't help  :P
  • It has a built-in weather skill, but if you want something more local and specific, look at the "Big Sky" skill.
  • One of the use cases I wanted to cover is maintaining a grocery list, since it's sitting on the kitchen counter. The skill "Our Groceries" seems to be a good way to accomplish this.

Anybody with more Alexa experience have anything to add to this?

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General Software Discussion / Beware of download sites
« on: January 12, 2015, 10:54 AM »
How-To Geek has an interesting cautionary tale.

We installed the top 10 apps from Download.com, and you’ll never believe what happened! Well… I guess maybe you might have a good guess. Awful things. Awful things are what happens. Join us for the fun!

We’ve been railing against freeware download recommendations for years, and recently we taught you how to test any software safely using a virtual machine. So we thought, why not have some fun and see what really happens if you download software like a regular clueless user might?

For the purpose of this experiment, we’re going to just click through all regular installation screens with the default options using a fresh virtual machine. And we’re going to install ten applications from the most popular downloads list. And we’re going to assume the persona of a regular non-geek user.

HTGFreewareCaution.jpg

Why do nice things always have to go to crap?

EDIT: changed title of thread to not cast aspersions on all freeware

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General Software Discussion / Tool to facilitate transcribing speech
« on: December 21, 2014, 08:37 PM »
My wife is working on transcribing her father's memoirs - he recorded about 39 hours of cassette tapes, which I've digitized for her. She wants to get it all into text. I'm looking for ways to make the job easier.

The obvious solution is something like Dragon software's speech-to-text. But the catch is that the speech is in Mandarin, and so far as I've been able to find, there's no software available to turn Mandarin speech into text.

Short of that, though, can anyone suggest a tool that might help her get through the audio more systematically? Since she's constantly listening to a minute or so, replaying it maybe a couple of times, and then proceeding to the next chunk of text, I think that the beginning of any tool might simplify this looping process.

Another usecase is for when she encounters something she doesn't understand, frequently a name that she doesn't know how to write (Chinese is funny with not being able to write a word if you've never seen its character). She needs to remember these spots and go back over them with her dad, so he can tell her the right characters to use. It might also be useful to store numerous bookmarks for the file, facilitating this process.

Anybody have suggestions I could pass on to her?

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Living Room / Best Roku channels?
« on: October 25, 2013, 12:40 PM »
I've had it [1], I'm cutting the cord and switching to Roku. We've had conversations here before about the best Android apps, etc. Roku has a similar thing they call "channels", which are mostly portals to VoD content or livestreams, but are also sometimes apps.

So, for any other Roku users out there, what are your favorite channels?


[1] I've been a DirecTV subscriber since they started, but we're not able to use it in the new house. We're now using TWC, but their prices are much higher than they originally lead you to believe, their customer service's badness is the stuff of legend, and their DVR boxes are poor and have intentionally crippled functionality.

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