Blogs
Slowing Down Flite
Festival is a “text to speech” (TTS) system. You give it some text, and it will read it back to you. Developed by the folks at University of Edinburgh the system has been refined over the years so that the sound of the voice you are hearing can be made remarkably lifelike.
It’s a good program, but it’s a substantial package and puts a good load on the system. A derivative, called Flite (Festival-lite), developed at Carneigie Mellon University provides almost the same level of performance, but is much, er, ’liter'.
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date(1) Superpowers
Image my surprise when I found a Unix command I’ve been using for years had hidden superpowers - date(1).
Aside from a few times when I’ve had to covert seconds in the Unix Epoch back to a real date and time, I’ve not really thought much about it. But I’ve recently come into a situation where I need to do a lot with dates, so I started reading and experimenting. Much to my surprise, there’s quite a lot going on under the hood with date(1).
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Two Roads in a Cyber Forest
Original Entry: Oct. 25, 2019 Update: Oct. 31, 2019 Issues with trusting icons. Update: Nov. 10, 2019 XFCE Note: This is a longer post than normal, but if you are here looking for advice on setting up a working desktop on stock FreeBSD, read on.
Project Trident’s 2020 Vision A few weeks ago, the developers at Project Trident, the excellent BSD desktop featuring the Lumina window manager, decided to move to another operating system platform.
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Getting to the Grey Lock
I run my own mailserver on the net and for some time I have wanted to get email encryption working. My reasons are simply personal education, nothing more. I have no fear that Big Brother is watching me, although I know they are. It’s more for keeping myself up to date on technology.
The two basic types are end-to-end encryption with something like PGP/GnuPG or SMIME to encrypt your messages to everyone you email; and [TLS a.
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Awe is Still The Right Word
Fifty years ago I sat in my parent’s living room and watched, along with millions, as Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Along with Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 crew made history. I was a sleepy 15 year old, but even so, I grasped the sense of how enormous a moment it was. The fact that we sent people to a place that no one had ever been seemed just incredible.
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Adventures in NVIDIA-land
Recently I’ve gotten back to my affection for Blender, the very fine open source 3D graphics and animation program. And it so happens that one of my previous projects left me with some kickass hardware to use. Now comes the challenge of getting Blender running with my collection of NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards.
Being a longtime BSD guy, I naturally thought about trying to get it working with my TrueOS Server.
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And You Can Quote Me
The last few days I’ve been in a knife fight with Hugo.
I wanted to implement a randomized quote feature on the front page. Something like:
**Quote of the Day** Over every mountain is a path, although it may not be seen from the valley. ~Theodore Roethke I tried a few things, readFile, a readfile shortcode, dynamic data files in JSON, and so on. Nothing worked reliably with Hugo server.
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Time
So, much ado about date and time stampings. The format for dates in Hugo by default is:
date: 2018-11-19T10:27:05-05:00
This date format appears to be a version from RFC 3339, section 5.8.
To generate the time on a BSD machine in this format, you’ll need to generate a custom format string for the date option. This will mean perusing strftime(3) once again, unless you can remember all those little conversion specs.
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We're Rollin'...
Get Those Dawgies Rollin’… I’ve been working on getting this blogging solution set up for several days. It’s such a chore:
Decide to use a commercial service or not (not) Decide to use proprietry software or not (not) Research the hundres of available blogging sofware projects. This is what took a lot of time. Download, install, RTFM, tryout, test, wobble, crash, repeat. I finally decided on Hugo and it’s pretty good, although it is a lot of reading and tinkering with various themes.
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