Bin day is the most magical time of the week! Children of all ages cry "Which bins is it?! Oh! Which bins?" Is today recycling day? Or green waste day? Or humble landfill day? Should my food caddy go out? Gosh! Who can keep track? I mean, obviously I could look at my calendar. Or sign up for free SMS alert. Or use push notifications in their app. But where's the fun in that? "Alexa..." The code I've written uses Oxford City Council's civic data APIs - which will deal with bank holidays…
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You can now get the UK's flood forecast as part of your Flash Briefing on Amazon's Alexa. I've tried previously to create an interactive Alexa skill - it did not go well. This time, I thought I'd create an easier skill - a Flash Briefing. You ask Alexa for your daily news report and it reads out items that you've configured - news, weather, traffic, that sort of thing. For a basic skill, all you need is a tiny scrap of JSON. In this case: { "uid":…
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I've been sent a couple of Sonoff smarthome gadgets. You can read my review of the S20 WiFi plug socket and the POW in line power controller. Here's a video of me controlling them from my Amazon Alexa: The latency seems a little slow - hard to tell if that's Amazon only relying on US data centres for Alexa skills, or the connection to my home. Once set up, it works well. Oh... but the set up experience... Set Up I'll be honest - configuring a smarthome for voice control is still …
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I can now query my solar panels via my Alexa Amazon Dot Echo thingie (why so many names?). https://shkspr.mobi/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/VID_20170501_161804.webm I flatter myself as a reasonably competent techie and programmer, but fuck me AWS Lambdas and Alexa skills are a right pile of shite! Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but they're a pain in the arse to get anything done. I wanted something simple. When I say "Solar Panels", call this API, then say this phrase. That's the…
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