I wanted to stream and record my home security cameras to the cloud for three reasons: 1) if the NVR is stolen, I’ll have the footage stored remotely, 2) (more realistically) I want to increase the storage availability without having to add hard drives, and 3) I want to increase the ease-of-access for my recordings. […]
A couple years ago, I tinkered with a solution to use a webcam to capture images of receipts, covert the images to raw text, and store in a database. My scrappy solution worked okay but it lacked the accuracy to make it viable for anything real-world. With AWS Rekognition launching since then, I figured I’d […]
I wanted to try my hand at using the AWS Polly text-to-speech service. Polly offers several different voices and supports multiple languages, most of which sound pretty good, especially if you use SSML when passing text. SSML is where the character of the speech (rate, tone, pitch, etc) come into play. See here for more detail. […]
I’m not an optimization expert nor am I a WP power user but I have been using the platform for over ten years. I have a strong preference for plugins that are lightweight, easy-to-implement and configure, and have a clean removal (plugins which leave artifacts are a huge pet peeve of mine). Here’s a list […]
Humans spend a lot of time reading, analyzing, and responding through text (emails, chats, etc). A lot of this is inefficient or not for pleasure (such as the amount of payroll companies spend to read through feedback emails or the amount of time I spend sifting through Outlook each day). Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), […]
Given the target audience of Lightsail, I would expect UI-based functionality for automating snapshots and other common tasks; however, this doesn’t exist. Creating snapshots is an important task – I create snapshots before I make any major changes and every few days. In the event I screw something up or if something happens to my […]
AWS Lambda enables you to run code without managing a server. You simply plop in your code and it does the rest (no maintenance, scaling concerns, etc). The cost is only $0.20 per 1 million requests/month and the first million requests are free each month. In the previous post, I setup an SNS topic. I’m extending […]
Simple Notification Service (SNS) is a handy AWS product which enables programmatic publication and subscription to topics. They can be as simple as email or SMS or involve more complicated services complicated like Lambda, SQS, HTTP, etc. The write-up below walks through the process end-to-end from installing the AWS PHP SDK to publishing your first message […]
I’ve been with multiple webhosts over the years (DreamHost, Host Gator, Site5, 1and1, SiteGround, and I’m probably forgetting a few) and even ran a reseller of my own for a several years. In the past few years, large groups like Endurance International Group have been gobbling up mom-n-pops operations like Site5 and Host Gator and […]
#FirstWorldProblems – having so many DVDs that you forget what you already own and end up buying multiple copies of the same movie. While 126 movies isn’t a massive collection, it’s enough for me to sometimes forget what I have when I’m pillaging the $5 bins at Best Buy and Target. To solve for this, […]