Showing results for 2018
Placing Outbound Calls Using Amazon Connect API & PHP
Amazon Connect is the AWS answer to costly contact center telephony platforms. There's no upfront costs and overall usage is EXTREMELY cheap when compared to legacy telephony platforms - you essentia…
Consuming RTSP Stream and Saving to AWS S3
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…
Using AWS Rekognition to Detect Text in Images with PHP
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…
Converting text to speech with AWS Polly
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…
WordPress Plugin Recommendations - 2018 Edition
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 conf…
Using Natural Language Processing (AWS Comprehend) to Analyze Text (Cardi B Lyrics)
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 rea…
Automatically Creating Lightsail Instance Snapshots
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 ta…
Using AWS Lambda to Send SNS Topics in CloudWatch
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 milli…
Publish to AWS SNS Topic With PHP
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 ser…
WordPress Blog on AWS for $5
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 p…
Indexing my movie collection
#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 …