Make an RSS Feed Reading Alarm Clock

Male: Tom, what is up man? Tom: How is it going? Male: I have got a huge problem. This morning I woke up, my alarm I had to go to work, it is horrible, not the work the alarm. Dude, this thing it just beeps. Tom: That is the point that is an alarm man! Male: No, no, no what I am saying is like 2005 and my alarm is just beeping. So I figure out to take a break from packing Gibson and put together an alarm clock on my computer. Tom: Okay, wait you are going to do this thing…the whole music thing and I wake up on my music that is really cool man. Male: Oh come on Dude, you really think I will do something that lame? It does play music but it is way better than that. What do you do after wake up? Tom: Coffee, breakfast, Male: e mail? Tom: email news, Male: Gigs, last thought, you know checking out [Voice Overlap] Tom: Yeah, yeah definitely Male: So, why not just lay in bed and listen to your access feeds and what we are going to here with some Pearl Anns, some BB scripts, we are going to hacked together a little batch file that will do these all four, so you play a little MP3 to wake us up and then, bam! Get to lay in bed and listen, so it is more associates. The listening part I am using the Microsoft text speech engine or you could use Festival LAN, Linux, or Mac, or whatever Tom: Because TDS is built in dot net, so… Male: Right. Tom: Right. Male: Well, you know, it is built in the windows and this will work on ‘98, ’95, whatever. Sure on ‘95 please just you know. I am sure there is a Linux sister out there. So we will head over the speech and on text speech. I have downloaded an additional voice and Michelle, she sounds… Tom: Well she sounds greater than Microsoft. Male: Way better, the Sam sounds horrible; I do not know why they even have to put that in there. Okay, so now what we are going to do is we have got the alarm batch file opened up here. Tom: Alright Male: And you know it is a good morning and then it runs this pearl script, and what this pearl script does and it modifies a little bit this is a RSS HTML 5 and it is going to download the RSS feed from digg and then append it to alarm.txt. Tom: So, it got... Male: Right it does the same thing to the slash to RSS speed and then appends it here you know after saying this are the slash [Voice Overlap] Tom: But, on hold on a sec, when you get an RSS, you get XMLs. You get all the nodes and stuff. Male: What this pearl script is actually doing is converting it to a format where it can actually be read by our text speech engine, it is not actually HTML, you can script the HTML so… Tom: It saves all the tags out. Male: Right, yes, pretty much. Tom: It is awesome dude, it is really cool. Male: So, you know it goes to then there is boing boing and then we delete any alarm file that was there from the previous day. And then we run this also in DVs scripted found text a wave and you give it a text file that you want to convert and then 35, this is the option that makes it 44.1khertz stereo16 bed sound file and wave and then we delete the alarm text, since we do not need that. Then, we go ahead and start the alarm in M3U. Now, the M3u is really simple, here we go. We have got…I will just type it. Yes, I mean that is just you r basic M3u that is a play list and then it will run itunes and with this media player and win amp, which is my favorite. So, let us go ahead and give it a shot. Tom: Alright Male: What I am going to do is schedule it using at so we schedule at let us say 6:30. Tom: But all this command and this stuff can we do on a gate way Male: Yes, you can do the same thing you do on the command line, just by heading over the control panel and scheduled tasks and same exact things we do… Tom: They got the same way that you do in music, but [Voice Overlap] cool. Male: So, we are going to do at 6:30, every Monday Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. We are going to run alarm\ alarm\.that, here we go. So, it is scheduled…let us go ahead and run it. Tom: Alright Male: So, I am making our announcements, Tom: The access feed