Cloud Gaming - Part 1: The Proof of Concept and The Plan

Cloud gaming. Everybody's doing it. NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft, Sony... you get the picture. Big tech companies are doing it. Am I willing to say it's the future of gaming? Not quite, but it is an interesting service that clearly has a market. I wanted to see what it took to build a service like this in the cloud as well as the bandwidth it required to play things at a higher resolution, framerate, and quality than my computer.

Headless Raspberry Pi Stream Youtube Streamer

There are many reasons you'd want to stream to Youtube from a Raspberry Pi. With the camera attachment, you can watch over anything with great clarity. My friend wanted to set up a camera to watch over his hedgehog - mostly for fun - and chose this system to do so. In many of the solutions I've seen to now, it simply offers a command line interface from which you can start streaming. What I intend to do is far more simple to use.

Journey Into The Home Automation Sinkhole

Home automation. There have been many products, ecosystems, and clouds pushed over the years that claim they are The Best™ at automating your home. Recently with the wave of IoT devices, companies big and small, foreign and domestic, real and fake have been clamoring to get into the home automation space. This leads to fragmented homes with multiple devices running across multiple apps on your phone. If you decide to lock yourself into an ecosystem, it's expensive to get out. Hell, it's expensive to stay in some ecosystems (*cough* nest *cough*). But, the real question here (at least for me)... could we build a better smart home out of 'dumb' electronics or make electronics that are smart and extensible. Of course we can. Companies don't because they wouldn't make money that way.

A File System Using Google Docs As The Disk

In today's episode of "Why the hell would you even want to do this?", I'd like to show off a software-only file system I wrote in Google Apps Script that uses a Google Doc as its disk. That's right. This is one of those "because I was bored and because I can" type projects. It has no real purpose and probably isn't a good file system implementation. But what can I say? I'm not a file system engineer and making a file system to be written to a Google Doc is stupid.

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 4

In this exciting episode of "Making a Smart Speaker", we'll work on the AI that will do our bidding. We're already using some massive neural networks and pretrained models just do do voice recognition, but here is where we get to be creative about our AI. What do we want it to do? How freeform should we allow input? And, most importantly... how the hell are we going to do hotword detection?

Making a Smart Speaker - Part 3

The Orange Pi Zero came in the mail yesterday, so I guess we're ready to move on to the next part in the design of the smart speaker: audio input and output. We won't cover any of the intelligence behind the AI right now because all I want to do is get audio out of the Orange Pi and into the speaker at a reasonable volume, and maybe get voice recognition to work. By the end of this, we should have something that can play music files and maybe transcribe what I say. We'll see.

Writing a Discord Bot For Literally Anything

I love Discord. It is not only great for gaming chat, but it's awesome for chat in general, supporting arbitrary numbers of people, channels, and voice channels. It's really remarkable how much Discord can do. Discord, being the awesome application it is, exposes an API for you to develop bots with. These bots can do literally anything a regular user can, so we can make some great things with it. So, why don't we make all the things with it? Let's make a modular bot that has hot swappable components and can span multiple hosts monitoring multiple things. Sounds hard right? It's probably not, but as I'm writing this I haven't touched any code whatsoever.

Running CoffeeScript and Mustache on Google Apps Script

For a very long time, I thought Google Apps Script was quite useless. Then, one day, I found it useful. It's a nice little tool that's actually more flexible than you might think. I wanted to dive into seeing if I could make CoffeeScript and a templating engine like Moustache just to see if it was possible. I realize CoffeeScript is moving out of fashion, but it's still a nice little tool for making easy to read JavaScript. So, without further ado, let's do it!

What Can You Do With A Free Server In The Cloud?

I apologize for the clickbait title, but it's verbatim the exact question I asked myself when I learned about Google's Always Free tier for their cloud computing. This was a step up from what Amazon offered, because Amazon's free tier for computing only lasts 12 months. Naturally, I was really excited to have a free VM in the cloud that never had to be turned off. In this post, we can test the limits of these servers and see what you can do with them. Hopefully this can apply to developers and non-developers alike.