Space Station captures the lights of Belgium and Holland from 250 miles up

A night-time view of a western European panorama from the International Space Station reveals city lights from Belgium and the Netherlands



 

iTunes MAC & iTunes PC not equal to iTunes iPad

So the wonderfull world of "comliant to this & that" on the spec sheet vs. reality set in again. Now this might be down to lack of product knowledge as well but so you learn.

From the little Apple experience I gained so far I could really say in a "pure" Apple eco-system everything works brilliant and as planned, but trying to add 3rd party or other service to this ecosystem seem to be problematic.

iTunes for PC & MAC have a feature for "Shared" resources



 

whereas iPad/iPhone itunes does not let you choose your itunes library. You always need to connect to your Mac/PC (remote) itunes and sync with your ipad.

So the feature called iTunes Server does not mean you can assume it can stream to all Apple type devices.

So in my instance where I enabled the iTunes server on a QNAP NAS the Workaround:

Use the QMobile application provided by QNAP to remotely play the music library on the iPad.

QNAP iTunes Server dying

Testing a few mp3's on the NAS to iTunes PC worked 100%, after transferring my complete collection the iTunes server kept on dying via the web interface. So it was back to the old trusted CLI via ssh and fault finding:

Firstly to check if the iTunes server process is running or not:

ps | grep mt-daapd

And to find the command options:

mt-daapd --help

To start the process manually:

mt-daapd -d 9 -c /etc/mt-daapd.conf -f 

with

-d 9 setting the debug level to 9

-c to use a spesific configuration file

-f to run it in teh foreground allowing you to see the debug messages in real time.

running this will halt on the reason for the iTunes server to fail.

if the error is with .m3u files

this can be fixed by changing a line the qnaps /etc/mt-daapd.conf

turing: process_m3u 1 => process_m3u 0

In my instance a single mp3 file caused the process to stop, I corrected the mp3 id tag 

Restarted the service and everything worked like a charm

Open Source speech recognition - help needed

Most acoustic models used by 'Open Source' speech recognition (or Speech-to-Text) engines are 'Closed Source'.  They do not give you access to the speech audio and transcriptions (i.e. the speech corpus) used to create the acoustic model.

The reason for this is that Free and Open Source ('FOSS') projects are required to purchase large speech corpora with restrictive licensing.  Although there are a few instances of small FOSS speech corpora that could be used to create acoustic models, the vast majority of corpora (especially large corpora best suited to building good acoustic models) must be purchased under restrictive licenses.

How can you help ?

Record yourself reading some text, and upload your recordings to VoxForge using: http://www.voxforge.org/home/read

 

QNAP NAS

So I took the plunge and migrated from an pc based NAS device (OpenFiler)  to a QNAP NAS TS-412.

I am very impressed with the device build, really a solid design and after upgrading to the latest firmware it detected a 3TB Western Digital drive without any problems.

The device is extremely silent - to compare: the DVD player playing a DVD is making more noise than the NAS :-)

So I guess the next few blog postings will have something to do with services and applications on the NAS as and when I enable them.

Current firmware version: 3.5.2 Build 1126T