I was seeing a lot of request timeouts in my server logs, and did a quick netstat -anlp |more to see what was up. SYN floods. Doh! I never did anything to prevent them on my web server. This was an A-number-one first thing I’d do back in the day. I mean, these were some of the basic settings I loaded into our launch scripts for HeyTell servers…but old age is what it is — I’d also neglected to disable Indexes in my Apache config.

So you’ve trained a model or two and are ready to translate, but when you start using OpenNMT-py’s translation script, you run into some unforeseen issues — for example, you’ll find it’s not a huge fan of whitespace, and it’s not really meant to translate an entire document. And for my use case, I want to actually print bilingual content to a single file in the format: language 1 string language 2 string language 1 string language 2 string What to do?

So I’m working on a little epub project tentatively called epub-ocr-and-translate (EOAT) that started out as me sharing a bunch of little scripts I was using to OCR, translate, and single-source the creation of PDFs and epubs from old public domain works in other languages. It’s kind of ballooned into a much bigger project than I originally envisioned, somehow leading me down the path of (don’t laugh…okay, fine, you can laugh, but make it quick) DIY machine translation…

How easy is it to create a basic Alexa Flash Briefing? Super, super easy. All you need to do is add the skill in their UI and provide it with a JSON or RSS file that contains what you want Alexa to say. To illustrate how easy it is and help anyone else who’s looking to create one along, I’ve made the source code of my skill, Hacker Daily available on Github at https://github.

So I finally got back to the grind and updated The Seven Minute VPN! I was inspired to update it for two reasons: We were camping at this really cool brewery…but their network blocked both port 1194 (the default VPN port) and port 22 (what!). I’ve configured most of my working systems to only allow me to connect from a VPN that I couldn’t access…so I ate my own dog food for the first time in awhile, popped open https://github.

Fixed up Radio Fun Time and now it’s Radio Time Warp!. More shows, better search, cuter icon. “Alexa, ask Radio Time Warp to recommend a radio show!”

My father-in-law bought my mother-in-law an Echo Dot for Christmas. She listens to old time radio shows from Internet Archive at night and they were looking for a way to play her shows through the Dot. In digging around a little bit, I found Alexa development was pretty easy to start goofing around with and ended up writing Radio Fun Time, which provides a voice interface to the Old Time Radio Researchers’ public domain old time radio shows published on the Internet Archive.