Conkey VS soundfingerprinting

Most of my programs were written for my own use, including:

• A keyboard layout to type numerous non-English letters, punctuation marks and mathematical symbols, originally for Windows but subsequently ported to Linux and Mac [https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey]

• A ‘sound change applier’ for my hobby of language construction, to simulate the process of historical sound change [https://bradrn.com/brassica/]

• A small browser extension to save the full text of all webpages I visit, and a local client to search the database [not open-sourced, apologies!]

The first two have gained a few other users since being released, but I’m pretty sure I’m still the one who uses them the most!

I made my own crossplatform multilingual layout [0]. Although it’s based on QWERTY, it shouldn’t be hard to remap the Linux and Mac versions to any other base layout, since they’re autogenerated from the Windows version.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

The biggest one for me is undoubtedly my custom keyboard layout Conkey [0], which I use constantly (including for typing this very comment). I hate the way the base US layout tends to get distorted in other keyboard layouts with good support for non-ASCII characters, so Conkey had the explicit goal of retaining that basic unshifted layout. I’ve also ended up porting Conkey to Mac and Linux — and given that I’m slowly switching from Windows to Linux, at least the Linux ports have ‘scratched my own itch’ too, which is nice.

Also, I made a utility to archive the full text of every website I view and store it in a SQLite database for searching. It’s proven pretty useful when I want to find something I saw a while ago and then forgot. (I haven’t attempted to open-source it, though — it consists of three entirely separate components, two of which were a pain to set up. I must try to get it into a more usable state one of these days.)

What else… my sound change applier [1], perhaps? Not that I use it very much, because I only need it on those occasions when I want to do some conlanging, which I haven’t had much time for recently. Actually, sound change appliers strike me as being very much a ‘scratch own itch’ type of project in general… sometimes it feels like every conlanger has written their own, and no two can agree on a nice design. Everyone just has their own unique preferred way of doing things.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/bradrn/brassica

For a ~50-year-old program, Emacs’s support for multilingual input — and really, it’s all-round flexibility — continually amazes me! For myself I prefer my own custom keyboard layout [0], because it works outside Emacs too, but I’d happily use Emacs’s own input methods if that would be sufficient.

(In fairness, I have found one weak spot, namely font support… I’ve used ‘unicode-fonts’ [1] with some success, but reportedly it doesn’t work with the latest Emacs. Ah well, it’s at least fairly rare that this becomes a problem in practice.)

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

[1] https://github.com/rolandwalker/unicode-fonts

To port my keyboard layout [0] to OSX, I used ‘osxkb’ [1], which outputs an OSX keyboard layout bundle given a simple textual specification file. It was originally created specifically to port Conkey to OSX, but should be entirely usable for other purposes as well.

[0] https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey

> But instead, we're dealing with Latex - a language that overcomplicates the most basic features such as fonts, tables and special characters.

I can’t really argue with the rest of your post, but in my experience this is incorrect. Fonts and special characters are both trivial if you use XeTeX, and tables, though slightly clumsy, are still pretty easy. As an example, see the documentation I wrote for https://github.com/bradrn/Conkey, which makes extremely heavy use of all three features. (As documentation for a keyboard layout, it uses characters from pretty much every corner of Unicode, and accompanying tables of many shapes and sizes to show how to type these characters; I needed to use Gentium in order to render all these characters, with Times New Roman as a fallback. I found that LaTeX could ably handle all of these complecations.)

Started 10 years ago as an open-source project, building an algorithm for audio fingerprinting. Added a commercial offering, selling storage built specifically for audio fingerprints, targeting enterprise customers. Since the offering was too technical (it's hard to sell solutions to problems that are too narrow and domain-specific), pivoted to more "business-oriented problems". This last year's pivot is a chance to finally grow. Running a business in single-player mode is, at times, too stressful. Aside from the technical part, which I very much enjoy, I need to wear marketing, sales, and customer support hats.

[1] - https://emysound.com

The OP said elsewhere they are using this[1] library, which allows you to specify minimum seconds to match, so you'd presumably set it to match 20 seconds or whatever minimum length podcast commercials usually are.

Most other audio fingerprinting libraries I've seen allow you to specify min/max time, as well.

HTH.

1. https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting

My goal for the next year is just to work fewer hours. Covid pushed my work habit to the extreme, and I need to rebalance.

1. Read more books, less social media/news.

2. Spend more time with my friends. I haven't seen some of them IRL for more than a year.

3. Exercise more, play tennis with my daughter, spend quality time with my kids.

4. Spend more time with my parents. They've become visibly older in the last years, an observation that scares me.

5. Focus more on marketing for the businesses that I've bootstrapped. All the shiny new features that are developed are not as important as getting more people to use your product.

6. Promote open-source project to 1k GitHub stars[1]. I know it isn't very meaningful, but it's just nice to receive a bit of recognition from the community.

7. Enjoy life, don't stress about all the little things that happen along the way.

Happy new year!

[1]: https://github.com/AddictedCS/soundfingerprinting