Saturday, August 24, 2013

Lesson 8 - Badgers

This one was a bit challenging, as we had the lesson just before bedtime and we were both very tired. Even though during her violin lesson a bit earlier she had said "I don't want to play violin, I want a computer lesson"...

So, we created a new file "vkp" (shorthand for viikonpäivät) and wrote all the weekdays there in Finnish. Vim was very easy this time, but typing all those words was challenging. Yet we triumphed. We used both the "o" (new line) and "a" (append) commands this time.

We used cat to print out the file contents, then piped the output to say to hear the computer speak out the weekdays. That was a bit disappointing, because the English voice is really really bad at speaking Finnish. I wish there was a way to get a Finnish voice on a Snow Leopard Mac. But I guess there isn't. Maybe we'll install Linux next time. I heard there's a Finnish voice there.

We googled for badger and watched the video. Then we practised the badger dance while brushing teeth.


3 comments:

  1. function sano { mplayer -really-quiet "http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=fi&q=$1"; }

    sano "Jos ei ääkkösiä lasketa, tämä kuulostaa aika lailla suomelta."

    (Adapted from http://findingscience.com/linux/os_x/2010/11/28/os-x-say-command-on-linux.html )

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  2. Not bad! Works on a Mac too, after "brew install mplayer".

    sano "Ääkkösiä kun vielä sais viilattua:) Voiskohan putkittaa sedin läpi?"

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  3. I got my Mac to talk in Finnish by downloading and unzipping this http://espeak.sourceforge.net/download.html.

    There is binary called `speak` that you can use. Something like `speak -v finnish "Toimii myös putken läpi"`. The voice is very artificial but the sounds like Finnish.

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