RasterWeb!
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“I sometimes feel that in our quest to make things easier for the dumb people, we’ve made things harder for the smart people.”
I know that making things simple and easy to use is a good thing, but when it takes options away from the people who have great ideas, that’s not good. The closing and locking and restricting in the name of “progress” or “quality” is often a lie, and it’s one I really don’t like to see
The idea of KidsCamp is to have kid-friendly activities within a BarCamp event. Since BarCamps are often on the weekend, some of the people who attend have children, and may prefer not to abandon them in favor of BarCamp, so are seeking ways to get them involved. There’s also the idea of getting kids interested in technology, and how we could foster such a thing.
At BarCampMadison3, Scott Fradkin led a discussion about this topic. I sat in on it, as did Bob Waldron (and at least one other person, though I didn’t get his name.) We talked over the idea, and Scott got “elected” to explore it more and try to do something for the upcoming BarCampMilwaukee5.
Here is the audio from the session. (There’s a part in the middle of this audio file where the fire alarm went off. We had to leave the building for 10 minutes during that time. I cut that out because it was most unpleasant. If the topic seems to veer in one direction quickly, that is probably why.)
You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)
(Related: See the mention of BarCampMilwaukee2 and “Popsicle Sticks 2.0” in this post.)
Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed. I’ll add in more BarCamp stuff as I get it all edited and published.
I read a description of a piece of software and someone used the phrase “mostly open source” which I found interesting… So I asked the following question via Twitter…
How do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”?
gregtarnoff @raster They started using open source code, until they got to a point where using it meant they couldn’t make money off it. →
genehack @raster I read that as “we have no idea what we’re saying but think this advances our agenda” →
mattress @raster You can alter the parts that are superficial →
tomhenrich Partly super-uber-top-triple-secret. RT @raster: how do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”? →
I know I’ve spent time in the past arguing what constitutes “open source” and I probably won’t do that here again. At least not right now. I mean, I figure if you make your code available under an open source license, then it’s open source. There’s a whole series of follow-up questions such as: Are you a good steward of the code? Do you manage the community? Do you accept code from others and roll it back into the project? Those could all be considered parts of being a good “open source citizen” but really, the code, available under an open source license, is what probably makes something open source.
(In other news, the tweet quotes included with this post are something I’m working on to make it easier to reference tweets back on my own blog. I’ve wanted a tool similar to this for years now and haven’t seen one that does what I want. I’m sick of just using screen shots and typing things into the alt tag. There’s got to be a better way, or I’ll try to make one.)
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a toaster
sits alone
atop a counter
where nothing goes
…
oh toaster
you look so lonely
won’t you warm up
this waffle…
just for me?
I recently worked on a project that required making audio files out of text files, which is something I’ve done before, but haven’t done regularly since 2000 or so when I was making cassette tapes of web pages. There’s a simple way to do this using Mac OS X.
Open you System Preferences and go to Keyboard and select the Keyboard Shortcuts pane. Click on Services and scroll down to Text until you see Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track and check that box.
Now open TextEdit and select some text and control-click (or right click depending on your computer input device) and you’ll see a contextual menu item for Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track. Select it.
Now jump over to iTunes and you’ll see the track. It’ll be called Text to Speech.
In iTunes you can highlight your track and select the File menu and then Show in Finder (or just hit command-R) and the Finder will open the folder containing your file. It’s an MPEG-4 Audio file (also known as an AAC file) with an m4a extension.
ITunes can obviously convert the file to an MP3 for you, but if you want another format (like OGG) you can use Audacity. You should be able to do whatever you need to do with it from there, (And that whatever you need to do with it bit was the deciding factor for this specific project.)
I was really hoping to use an existing test-to-speech API on the web to automatically generate the audio. Google has an unofficial Text-To-Speech API (go on, try it.) Seeing as it’s “unofficial” and didn’t work in the way I wanted to use it, and there is an awesome group where people ask about APIs and ToS and no one answers, I skipped it.
AT&T also has a great text to speech demo online, which clearly spells out how you can’t use it, which is quite helpful. (Basically you can’t use it for anything public or commercial, which sucks, but I’m glad they come right out and say it.)
There are other options (almost all commercial) including services like iSpeech, which I may look into. There may be some open source text to speech options, but as to how good they are, or how easy they are to get up and running, that is yet to be seen… or heard, as it were.
(Note: I’ve got a follow-up post coming about Mac OS X Text to Speech via the command line.. stay tuned!)
