Lessons from Loni
Okay so I installed “festival” which is a speech-to-text synthesiser.
After a lot of fudgeting, I got LOTS of errors.
So Loni had me check to see if I was a “member” of the group “audio” in /etc/group
Nope, but that was easily fixable. I copied the file to a backup.
TWO RULES WHEN WORKING WITH COMPUTERS
1. ALWAYS have a path back to the way it was, before you messed it up.
2. Follow rule # 1.
Anyway, it still didn’t work. Then Loni said: “Did you bother to logout/in?”
Umm NOOOO! We also discovered that this is an easy work around for the “break timer” (if you use it) — if you logout/in it resets the timer. I have reasons to take the break. Google “Richard Nixon’s Disease.”
As I discovered, you MUST logout/in so the changes to /etc/group will take place. DOH!
Then I got an error message that I couldn’t access /dev/dsp
Okay what the hell is /dev/dsp? It’s the digital sample and recording device.
Ahh a speech synthesiser might need that!
So we ended up chmoding (change mode/file permissions).
She suggested: chmod 666 /dev/dsp
That is the first time in my life, I’d ever chmoded anything to “666!”
(Sets read/write access for everyone!)
Note: chmod ugoa+rw /dev/dsp
is also correct.
festival worked!
BTW it took a lot of schleping to figure out that the correct syntax for festival is:
(SayText “hello world”)
Yes, the parens and double quotes ARE required! And “SayText” must be mixed case!
Interesting things to try:
(SayText “nuclear submarine”)
(SayText “irish wristwatch”)
And remember: “Soylent Green. It’s tastes different from person to person.”
Wayno
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