Google Cloud

Duel stack life - exchanging momentum for speed

The need for speed - analysing the speed differences in AWS vs GCP

James Montgomery

5 minute read

TL; DR I knew duel stacking this site would introduce some challenges. In this case, I found myself chasing speed demons at the expense of a focus on other project time. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it - however, there’s a lesson in there. Multi-cloud thoughts This site is a project which began on the one hand as a reason to explore the GCP Firebase hosting product. Extending it to AWS has added a dimension to it whilst still being relevant to the project itself.

TTS project update 1 - adding texture to my generated speech

Introducing a pool of voices and choices in rate of speech, pitch and volume gain.

2 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’d like to share an update on work to address some of the limitations in my text to speech project for Elite Dangerous.. Namely: Single voice is used for the synthesis; and Pitch, tone and emphasis are unchanged from defaults. If you’d like to see the result of the work so far, here is a brief overview video, I’ll describe how we got here below:

Google Firebase with a side of AWS Amplify

Dual hosting a Hugo static site with two of the largest CDNs in the world.

4 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’ll discuss a rabbit hole that I went down with only a thin excuse as the reason. And here it is, a Reddit reply to a shared post from this site: I can’t view on my desktop because your site is blocked on my network. Sorry The rabbit hole in question? Dual stacking this site across Google and Amazon infrastructure. Introducing AWS Amplify I first read about Amplify in this blog post.

Google Cloud Text-to-Speech with PowerShell

A guide for using PowerShell with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API.

6 minute read

TL; DR In this post, I’ll walk through the basics of using PowerShell to interact with the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API. Partly a documentation exercise and somewhat a guide I’d like to have been able to read when I started on my Elite Dangerous Google Cloud Text-to-Speech project. As such, we’ll start with a basic script to produce an audio file and explain how that works. Later I’ll walk through some parameters of interest to affect the response.