larrybolt

Any chance you could make an option to choose which amazon to search (amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de), I figure the API's will be the same anyway?

I've been looking into something similar a while back and here are my findings:

Continuous speech recognition will have to improve, there are currently opensource solutions with the best being CMU Sphinx [1], it does however only listen to certain keywords thus isn't capable of understanding everything you say, and it needs training. There is a Google voice Recognition API, but that's not continuous so you'd still need to listen to certain keywords and then upload the bit to google and wait for result, which isn't perfect. Recently I've come across a few sites which seem to do just that using the google voice api [2,3], but likewise far from perfect.

When it comes to responding to you there are quite some good opensource projects out there such as Flite [4], MaryTTS [5], Festival [6] and of course e-Speak [7]. They don't sound that natural, and if you're willing to pay you can get much more high quality options [8]. I know you could again use google's text2speech, but don't forget there is going to be a delay you can't get rid of.

When it comes to the whole packet together I've seen Jasper, but he has his own problems, to give an example:

"

-> So Jasper, sup?

-< “Today in news... blah blah”

(meanwhile me) NO!! STOP! STAHP!

"

Google now seems to function pretty quickly and accurately on my Moto G, but once switching apps you get stuck.

Alyt at indiegogo [10] tries to market itself as what I'd love to see...

I'm sure there are more of these projects around, but I haven't seen one yet that is actually capable of learning new things on the fly or even having a little bit of personality (why personality? Because the best GTD-tool is still a whining person reminding you about it, not a monotone computer voice that you'll shut-off anyway). I can imagine though that's going to be tough to build; with a lot of machine learning, virtual neural networks, natural language engines, lisp-alike programming language and whatnot.

When I find free time on my hands I'd love to mess around with all these components and try to come up with a solution of my own, or probably after a re-watch of the movie Her (2013) (which was very interesting just for the idea it proposed!).

[1]: http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/

[2]: https://dictation.io/

[3]: https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html

[4]: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/flite/

[5]: http://mary.dfki.de/

[6]: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/

[7]: http://espeak.sourceforge.net/

[8]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4721878/1807383

[9]: http://jasperproject.github.io

[10]: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/alyt-it-s-like-siri-for-y...

Best opensource text2speech results I've had with this blog post so far: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=751169

PS: My apologies for the very long, unstructured reply but it intrigued me and I hope someone will find this small writeup useful!

I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that.

I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.

[1]: http://hackerchat.co/

This is a very good description, thanks! I reference this quite often lately to people asking about how it's over here.

I'm still a student myself, but from the things I've heard and seen about the startup scene here, in Belgium, it's not that big as in the states.

It also seems that education is payed a lot more attention to than some other countries. Don't get me wrong, I understand the value of having a good education, but in the tech-world I cannot believe a certificate/diploma is worth more than visible passion and experience.

Apart from the slow pace at which the page scrolls back, the fact when it's doing so you cannot scroll up anymore (or down when you're at the bottom of the page) annoys me even more.

What Apple did, making scrolling behave like a sheet of paper confirmed using a rubber band, seems more natural than what this "3d layout engine" is doing. Giving it even more thought, it makes sense that even on a non-scrollable page scrolling (giving some form of input) should at least cause a confirmation that it recognised the action you preformed.

I've had this in place for a very long time, since I use vim for most of my editing/coding, but recently I've took a look at emacs. I'm far from being anywhere near proficient in emacs and my main editor is still vim. Also I don't like the fact emacs uses meta so much since on a macbook pro laptop keyboard it isn't so obvious to reach, while I did set my caps-lock key to ESC/Control, and even my tab acts as hyper when combined with another keypress.

I did however remove that binding and use the emacs commands in my terminal, because.. why not stay a fit flexible..

But that's my opinion of course.

Not so much about the service itself, but about the site.

At this page: http://www.jellynote.com/en/premium/presentation

it's nearly impossible to scroll in order to see all features, I'm using a 13" macbook pro: http://lry.be/fGL0

You can pay for ngrok though (I don't believe there was a price forced, rather donate any amount (pay-what-you-want service as he states it). And the sites not being online currently might probably have to do with inconshreveable (the author) updating it, as he stated in a tweet recently.

Also, I'm not sure but did ngrok provide the endpoint over ssl?

This looks like what ngrok/localtunnel does, but free and opensource.

I can see how this would be useful for testing across-device inside your home network, but for resolving domains for development on my macbook I prefer dnsmasq which I set to resolve the tld .dev to localhost. [1] I'm often commuting by bus/train so I don't have a stable internet connection at all time so I couldn't use xip.io anyway.

For php apps the only thing I need to do currently is make a symlink, and an apache vhost entry makes it work [2], kinda like pow! Thinking about it, I could even make that symlink step optional, or add passenger to the mix to support nodejs/rack apps.

[1]: https://github.com/larrybolt/dotfiles/blob/master/homebrew/p...

[2]: https://github.com/larrybolt/dotfiles/blob/master/apache/999...

Same like josteink said, paid repos cost money. And even if there is no description, readme or any documentation, It's still possible to find them. And they may prove useful for someone who is trying to build a similar project.

This does makes one wonder that if you need to make an app that has as little downtime as possible perhaps the best solution is to port as much as possible functionality client-side with client-side caching of data.

(theoretically, if I could cache every repo I visit using squid-proxy, even if github has an hour downtime I can still access the repo's I visited in the past, not perfect, but it's something!)

Being still a student and web developer in my free time (it's more as a hobby that keeps growing) I always find it very exciting when I'm trying to solve a problem I'm having, even if it just means learning something new because that new language/tools would make solving the problem easier.

For instance, a while back I've been helping a friend to automate filling in a form, captcha and send a request on a site which required to do it daily. The way we did it eventually was using nodejs, phantomjs as a module (node-phantom), deathbycaptcha for solving the captcha and than running it daily using a crontab. This may be a very simple task to solve, but instead of solving it in languages we knew well (like php using curl requests), we used a new language and tried to use the most easy way to do it.

Also I've been switching to managing my servers using ansible instead of shell scripts. I'll pickup cheff or puppet too some day.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is, I haven't had any challenging or really difficult problems to solve yet. Thinking about whenever that 2h I would spend writing boilerplate code can be reduced or automated, or avoided by switching technologies/frameworks. Learning about new tools and their advantages and disadvantages. Like after a good year and half of using vim talking a look at emacs. That is what to me is difficult and challenging, yet very rewarding in the end.

I know this is not exactly what the question was, my apologies for that.

I know about Kimsufi, don't know how reliable those are though.

http://www.kimsufi.com/uk/

I love how OneTab works, and it was something I used very frequently. But one day, not sure why exactly my chrome profile folder (osx mac) got corrupted. I cannot give technical details about it really, but not a single one of the chrome addons I had worked any longer. And I tried to recover the tab sessions but was unsuccessful.

If there is a feature OneTab is missing, it's to sync your tabs/sessions to a certain location. Or at least that's a feature I'd really appreciate!

Not having any experience with Haskell it's very entertaining to watch him talk about the topic. Even to the point where it seems like learning Haskell is highly rewarding.

On top of that, because he gives examples from "Fashion week", I can watch his presentation with my girlfriend who has absolutely no programming skills whatsoever but thinks it really cool! Gives a bit of perspective that programming isn't only about making boring web-apps. (Of course the game-industry proves programming can be fun, but this shows a different aspect than games.)

> Generally, web technologies have a somewhat gentler learning curve than iOS/Android

I have not enough experience with iOS/Android development to know, but I wonder if it isn't somewhat more easier to learn iOS for instance since it's just one language and IDE you have to focus on, while for web-dev you need to learn multiple languages. (Though at a certain point you'll need a server-side language to give your app the ability to communicate with a server...)

> If you're starting from scratch, learn HTML and CSS and make some simple static pages. Then once you're comfortable, learn a high level language (eg. Ruby or Python). Then learn a web framework for that language (Rails if you're focusing on Ruby, Django if Python). You'll probably want to pick up some Javascript too.

Exactly what I was thinking, but you gave actually steps.

I wonder if those games that come from steam are really native or run in a wrapper, such as cider. Anyway like you said, you can use bootcamp and most games will run pretty okay! (But not as good as on a dedicated machine with a decent graphic card of course). I've had no luck yet with running any games trough a windows vm (I've tried both parallels and vmware).

Here's what my opinion is on those questions. (I'm an Engineering student, web-developer in my free time).

1. I don't think it matters a huge deal which language you pick, as long as you choose a language that makes sense with the kind of project you want to launch. If your project is web-based (a web-app or service) you'll need to learn html, css, javascript (jQuery will get your pretty far without needing a very good knowledge of javascript and there are tons of examples you can use). But those will pretty much only help you with the front-end (so you'll still need a language that runs on the server and deals with data, sessions, basically doing stuff that cannot be done in the browser of the user.) There you can go with Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript (nodejs)... of course I could give my opinion which to start with but I'm doing this too long to have an idea how long each of them takes to learn looking at your time-frame. And if you've never done programming you'll have to take time to understand why and how certain techniques work that frameworks use such as MVC.

If your project is going to be an iOS app the most logical way to go is with objective C.

2. I've bought a Macbook Pro 13" 2 years ago, upgraded with 2*8GB ram, 120GB SSD and a caddy for my 500GB HD, and it still runs very very well for development. Mac-apps tend to "just work" most of the time, and as OSX is based on unix most of the tools that will run on a server will work perfectly on OSX. The only limitation you get from going with mac is most games don't work on OSX but that's perfect as those only distract you from learning/working.

For iOS development Xcode (which only runs on OSX as far as I know) is the best you can get and most tutorials you'll find will be working with xcode. For ruby I've heard it's a bit annoying on a windows environment but whenever you go with OSX or Linux doesn't matters.

3. I think 3-4 months isn't going to be enough, perhaps others think otherwise but I think you'll need at least 4 months to get stuff done in the language you're learning and only than you'll be able to start working on your MVP.

4. That will depend on what language you're starting out with. Something I think can help a lot is knowing someone you can ask questions to while learning/building your MVP when you come across problems you cannot solve yourself or don't know how to go on from where you're at.

It loads for me currently, after a bit waiting though, here is a mirror: http://archive.is/8WQV5

That is exactly the way I tried introducing more useful alternatives to spending time behind a pc to my younger brother and sister. By showing them how they could write mods or even complete games with programs such as Cinema4D, Maya, Photoshop, Unity...

It didn't stick very long, but I hope I had some positive influence on their life in that aspect.

It is a very interesting subject though on how developers got into development! My first programming experiences was with mIRC and its funky scripting language to make simple irc bots.

Personally, it's not that I don't enjoy gaming, but I feel guilty for the time I "wasted" afterwards. Every other activity such as cleaning up, going out for a walk or even reading a good book seems to be more rewarding and useful than playing a game.

I tend to give that as the reason I started teaching myself programming, and later I won't allow my children to waste days playing games. But let them do more productive activities on the pc such as video-editing, messing with photoshop, chatting with foreigners (the good old days on IRC..)

I love how he did the about page, it has everything I'd want to know, neatly done!

I was as well on the $5/month plan, I suspended my account for a little while due to exams, and tried re-activating it just to notice the $5 plan was gone. A few mails with support later they provided me a link to re-activate my 5$ plan. I didn't use it that much though, merely for shows in combination with showRSS.

I have had contact with the support of put.io more than once, and they were always very friendly and helpful. (even if some of the request were things such as "add play.fm support").

The big advantage over anything else I've seen with putio is that populair torrents are downloaded in a matter of seconds (due to someone else already having downloaded it) and the mp4-conversion. Btw, a small tip, instead of using the site itself for watching media which is downloaded, you can stream it directly into VLC or MPlayerX (the later also support streaming youtube video's I believe) which is very very handy!

Just noticed, there is an option for the legacy 10G $5/month account: http://lry.be/WRxO

I agree, it does what it does very very well! And it's not meant as a show-organizer.

minidlna seems like something I'm going to be looking into, thanks! And for dns, I use a domain which I manage using cloudflare and a script [1] which gets run by cron and updates the cloudflare entry every day or so. Didn't wrote the script though, found it somewhere and had to edit it a bit to work again.

Something else I have been looking into is splitting up the load, using the RPi only for streaming and xbmc; and handling downloading and NAS capabilities using a different device, such as a MIKROTIK RouterBOARD (which I'm afraid isn't going to work).

[1]: https://gist.github.com/larrybolt/6295160

I loved it! And still do, but sadly I moved to a RPi/XBMC/transmission/SickBeard/Couchpotato setup which was very easy to setup using xbian, thus not using showRSS anymore. The raspberry is a bit underpowered (according to me) though, so I'm thinking about replacing SickBeard with showRSS again. Pitty there isn't a good & easy way to do it. (not that I'm afraid of doing it all manually).

Perhaps also interesting, before using showRSS I was using TVshowsApp (http://tvshowsapp.com/).

Something I'm missing from showRSS btw, is the ability to browse trough all episodes/seasons and be able to select an episode/season to be added to the RSS-queue, so my downloading box would fetch it next time it checks the feed. But than, showRSS does one thing very well, so I'm not sure more features like that would be helpful for everyone.

Unless they use cyberbunker (http://www.cyberbunker.com/), but I doubt it.

I have to agree with that, I still own an iPod Classic Video and after 2 HD replacements and a new display (I wasn't really smart nor careful the first time I attempted to replace the HD) it still is the best Media device I ever had.

I wonder if Apple will be able to keep pushing devices of such impact out on the market.