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Tuesday 25 November 2014

I speak your wait

The new monitor arrived. Well, pre-owned. It has "Property of Halesowen College" on a sticker on the back. I'm pretty sure that's not true; I'm pretty sure I'm the legal owner. Maybe I should contact Halesowen College to see if they've had a theft recently? Surely not; I got it from a reputable vendor. It's 1280 by 1024, which is a modest resolution, and it's 17 inches diagonal. But for £25, it's very good.

I connected it up to the pi, and it all worked straight off displaying the framebuffer, which surprised me, because the resolution of the monitor I had there before was somewhat less. Something adjusted itself somehow. I'm not complaining. It's including my refreshing display of outside temperature, time and the number of alerts on my monitoring system. But I've added something new - Muriel. Muriel speaks when there's more than 100 alerts, and she sounds good. I'm using Google Translate's text-to-speech thing.

mpg123 -q "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=$alerts%20alerts"

There's a choice of accents; for US, use en_us. For British, use en_gb and for Australian, use en_au. I could also have French, German, Italian and I don't know how many others.

Unlike most speech synthesisers, Muriel doesn't sound like a robot. But her inflections aren't quite right. Never mind, it's a very good attempt, and I guess they'll improve it.

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