[lug] Sean's geek travels.

[Chris Riddoch]

Sean Reifschneider <jafo at tummy.com> writes:

> Hi, I'm Sean and I'm a geek...

(all-together-now:) Hi, Sean!

<snip>
> To make a long story short(er)...  I now have a delightfully mounted
> laptop, connected to a camera pointing out the front window.  About once a
> minute, while I'm in coverage and driving, an image from the front of my
> van gets uploaded to the web.  I don't yet have a GPS so you can tell where
> exactly I am.  I'm writing journal entries to keep my location logged and
> some additional information.

Very cool! Why, if I had a car...

> So, if you're interested in seeing my travels, check out
> http://www.shaggginwagen.com/

Seems to be http://www.shagginwagen.com/

> The main page has a picture of the laptop mount.
> 
> You can now start changing your bumper-stickers to read "Log out and
> drive"...  I'm working on combinations of speech or morse-code feedback,
> and some sort of single-hand entry system to make it so I can type and/or
> get data back from the computer without ever having to look away from the
> road.  Too bad the twiddlers aren't very good.

I'd suggest looking into some speech recognition as well. A few
well-placed microphones can pick up the background noise in the car,
and others in the sun visor can pick up your voice and more background
noise. A Simple Matter of Programming can pull out the difference
(actually, this is sounding remarkably like a project others are doing
where I work, http://cslr.colorado.edu/)...

And then you use CMU Sphinx (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/) to
run the speech recognizer.

For the cases where speech recognition causes you problems (all
windows down, 75mph, nearby foghorns) you want to have your keyboard
remapped to the right-handed Dvorak layout
(http://home1.gte.net/bharrell/kbdtxt.htm).

For speech generation software, you'll want Festival
(http://www.festvox.org) and a decent natural language generator,
like... um... well, I guess it's time to start another
project. Usually NLG is domain-specific, so you'd naturally want to
know ahead of time what topics it'll be able to handle, unless you
want something like Eliza that'll just persistently ask you what you
think.  ("What's the next street I need to turn on?" "How do you feel
about the next street you need to turn on?")

You'd probably want to have enough discourse and pragmatic processing
to distinguish between your cursing at the computer and cursing at
other drivers, though.

Then you'll have a proper computational linguist's shagginwagen. Heh.

Um... I should go sleep.

-- 
Chris Riddoch       | epistemological
socket at peakpeak.com | humility