When designing the blog, WordPress came with the tools I needed for article-based content, but it did not cover how to create many links and display in a short, updated manner. I go over how I added it on with just a few plugins.
JSpeex is a Java implementation of the Speex codec. By default, Java ships with either no encoding or the venerable G.711 encoders. However, if you want to store a bit of a larger data set, well, you’re out of luck. This is a problem for me, as I wanted to store a lot of spoken data in a little space. Luckily, the Speex codec is right for that, but it wasn’t as easy to get it into my project as I wanted.
WordPress is an awesome tool for blogging. It is extremely feature rich out of the box, is complemented by a swath of plugins for any functionality it doesn’t have, and if that still isn’t enough it’s possible to edit and tweak down to the smallest detail to make it absolutely perfect for what you have in…
Thanks to the Nokia 6, I am now in possession of a Google Assistant phone. This gave me the perfect foil against the upcoming Cortana and Siri speakers: if you have an assistant with a screen, how different are the answers to one without, even though it’s the “same” assistant? I expected that the audio…
The Nokia 6: Amazon Edition is here, right in time for Prime Day. Unfortunately, for me, the Prime Day deals were less-than-impressive, so I entertained myself instead greatly with unboxing, looking at, and gathering first impressions of the Nokia 6 handset. Not just any Nokia 6, but the Nokia 6 with Amazon Ads Edition. I’ll…
The total eclipse passed through the continental US today, with an estimated 7 million people travelling to view it. Now that it has passed, we can look at a historical indicator of where it was viewed from, by means of traffic. Spontaneous traffic jams seem to mysteriously correlate to the path of the moon.
There has been previous work on automatic colorization of images, a fairly impressive process that takes a black and white image and converts into a colour one. This uses DNN’s and their ability to guess at probable outcomes based on massive amounts of trained data. It’s pretty cool, but it can sometimes go wrong —…
Motherboard recently ran an article discussing how lobbyists for telecom companies were arguing that the vulnerabilities in their networks due to the aging SS7 protocol weren’t that bad. Well, spoiler alert, they are that bad. The (overly) simplified statement is, anyone with access to the SS7 network can redirect any telephone number, practically anywhere in the…
VentureBeat has a piece on the upcoming Nokia 8, HMD’s flagship entry. It lists the customary high-end specs expected; Snapdragon 835, 4gb RAM, 64GB flash, dual camera, and higher end version available for more moolah. The piece also cites an unnamed “Scandinavian Retailer”, the source of which appears to be an entry a few days…
The unfortunately beleaguered headset maker Facebook Oculus made the news at Bloomberg for a rumoured wireless headset that, according to the outlet, would define a “new class” of VR headsets that is neither a phone nor just a PC display. Unfortunately, while it may indeed serve to advance the VR space, it’s neither first nor…
When running TensorFlow using the official binaries, something that will happen more often now that macOS builds no longer support GPU off the bat, is the recurring and annoying warning that it could be running faster if it were only compiled with some more CPU flags. This seems ominous — keeping track of all the…
Previously, I’ve covered both DNNs and voice assistants. Today, I look at a different use case for DNNs: generating source code from images. A tantalising proposition for sure, but it is ever so slightly hamstrung by the fact that DNNs do not understand what they are doing.
IBM’s Watson Speech-to-Text comes with a built-in profanity filter. Unfortunately, Dick Van Dyke, a name that is the bane of profanity filters everywhere, apparently, has ended up on the wrong side of the censoring wall once more.
Davey Alba at Wired muses that we are headed towards a “splinternet”: an internet that is different depending on the country of origin. There are two unfortunate realities to this. First, this is already true, in his own acknowledgement. Second, it is inevitable. What’s worrying isn’t that there are different internets; it’s that there’s a max-censored one.
A recent paper from Microsoft Research, Azure and John Hopkins University discusses the issues of troubles of grey failures. This is a type of cloud failure under some discussion, that I treat as follows: A grey failure is a problem that is affecting one or more applications deployed on a platform, that is detectable by those…
