Turning a bucket of MP3s into a podcast

I wrote a Python script, s3cast, to convert an Amazon S3 bucket of MP3 files into a podcast feed. You see, there is a satellite radio show that I really enjoy called The Saturday Night Safety Dance with DJ Bueller. It’s one of the few shows on Sirius XM that they don’t allow you to … Continue reading Turning a bucket of MP3s into a podcast

Using Star Wars Biomes as a Screensaver

This past week, the Disney+ service released Star Wars Biomes and Star Wars Vehicle Flythroughs. They are both wonderfully relaxing ambient background videos, in the same vein as their Zenimation. The vehicle flythroughs take you through the Millennium Falcon and a Star Destroyer. The Biomes take you across the surface of six planets. The Biomes … Continue reading Using Star Wars Biomes as a Screensaver

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this $NOUN

For the last couple of years, I’ve been using AWS Lambda to make Twitter and Mastodon bots. (Full disclosure: I work for a company that got acquired by Amazon a few years ago.) It’s more reliable than running them on a random box I own (for instance, like I have to do for Video Glitch … Continue reading It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this $NOUN

Diving Into the Origins of “Peanut Butter” [Updated]

No, not the creamy or crunchy sandwich spread that rhymes with “gif.” I’m talking about a more obscure usage of the term that you won’t find in your Merriam-Webster. You see, there’s a podcast I listen to, Do By Friday. They “challenge yourself, challenge your friends” every week. The hosts perform a task, watch some … Continue reading Diving Into the Origins of “Peanut Butter” [Updated]

Building Lambda Binaries in the Cloud

I needed to build some binaries for a specific version of Linux. Because manually building in a VM is for chumps, I automated it in the cloud. It’s effectively two clicks (plus some confirmation steps). This post will touch upon a couple of difference services, then tie things together toward the end. But first a warning: … Continue reading Building Lambda Binaries in the Cloud

Building the AdjectiveNounBot on AWS

Long ago, during the wild times of the 2004 internet, I ran a site of web experiments called Adjective Noun. The site’s header had random (but curated) pairings of adjectives with nouns, each coupled with a clever stock photo. Some of my favorites were “Dumb Snowman” (sitting in front of a fire) and “Mysterious Clock” … Continue reading Building the AdjectiveNounBot on AWS

Video Rekognizer

This year at Amazon’s re:Invent conference, Rekognition premiered as a new service. It is a “deep-learning AI” service that performs image recognition on pictures you show it. It provides labels of objects and concepts it finds in the image. It can also do facial recognition. Hitting the Rekognition API is only a few lines of … Continue reading Video Rekognizer

NES Sprite Display

Let me tell you a little bit about a project I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. The NES Sprite Display is an Arduino-based program to display assorted NES-era game sprites (primarily Super Mario and Zelda) on a large 32×32 LED matrix. It looks a little something like this: The inspiration for this project came … Continue reading NES Sprite Display