Objectively good
September 27, 2024
-[ Contrafibularities ]-
Vanity search bot
Keeping on top of all the places online where people might review, discuss, or complain about your product or project is challenging. For years I've used f5bot to notify me when someone mentions something I care about, on lobsters (ask me for an invite), hackernews or Reddit. For someone in DevRel, it's quite useful for discovering people who have "experiences" (good or bad) with the software you are looking after. Give it a try; it's quite good and free.
HobbySearch
This week, f5bot sent me this link which is a reply to a question in r/golang, "Looking for Go Projects to Contribute To".
Three things:
Thanks, Lucas.
-[ Create ]-
Objective quality
After taking a break from listening to podcasts for a month and then getting back into it, I've become considerably more picky in my old(er) age. If the audio production of a show is less than perfect, I'll stop listening immediately and find something else to consume my time.
I'm pretty disappointed how many "professionally made" episodes or podcasts "made by professionals" have lousy audio. I appreciate bad things can happen during recording, such as having the wrong microphone enabled or presenters having bad mic techniques. I should accept this and avoid the shows with lousy audio, right?
Well, what if it's only one episode where the show is terrible, but typically, they're OK? You could be listening to your favourite show, only to be disappointed that they put out a dud! How does one solve this?
I thought maybe it would be possible to determine "objective audio quality" programmatically. This process could be done before listening to filter out bad episodes. After all, NVIDIA has vmaf for detecting the difference between a "good" and "bad" video, so why not do the same for audio? However, they have the advantage of having access to the raw original footage for their testing. Plus, their tool is more about encoding quality, not original production quality, which I'm after.
So I did a bit of research, stumbled on librosa, then wrote some Python. I threw an episode of Linux Matters at it, and here are the results.
Loudness (dB): -26.237268447875977
Dynamic Range: 0.4037497639656067
Background Noise Level: 3406.7822754309123
Spectral Flatness: 0.025370320305228233
Speech Clarity Score (0-1): 1.0
Objective Quality Score (0-1): 0.9429075957342947
94%!
This silly script needs more work, but playing with this kind of thing is fun.
-[ Consume ]-
Fill 'er up!
I have always considered myself a "glass half full" person. I know some "glass half empty" types, though. Thankfully, Randall's new What if a glass of water were LITERALLY half empty? shows why full>empty, in every way.
DELTREE /Y C:\WINDOWS
Linux desktop developers and advocates should take on board new users' experiences. Like this chap who announced I deleted Windows 3 months ago and I'm never going back.
No, it doesn't matter what distro they chose. Yes, their experience as a whole is worth observing and learning from.
Old stuff
One year, I'll make it out to Vintage Computer Festival MidWest (VCFMW) to fondle old computers with their retro sights, sounds, and smells. For now, I have to experience the event vicariously through videos such as Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 2024 from the Computer Hobbyists 3070 channel.
There's nothing like this event in the UK. Unless there is, and I don't know about it?
-[ Comment ]-
Tip of the week
Ensure the Doctor correctly signs the prescription before taking it to the dispensary.
-[ Collateral ]-
A link or two
Thanks for reading.
-- popey
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© Copyright 2024 Alan Pope. All rights reserved
EOF