🎉 Hindsight is 20/20…Foresight is 2020 🎉
Happy New Year! Welcome to The New Decade!
I’m presently located in and working out of Nan Thailand until April, 2020. Sawadee Cup! During the next 4 months, I’ll be travelling to neighbouring countries and hoping to meet some of you face to face.
Complimentary Raspberry PI
To celebrate this new decade, we are offering a complimentary Raspberry Pi IMG file to any of our existing customers. Thank-you! Simply log into your user profile (https://openbroadcaster.com/pyrate-radio-firmware) , download the IMG onto a SD card, pop into a raspberry PI Ver 1-3 and you have a fully operating alert player with integrated server and media library.
https://openbroadcaster.com/diy-maker-space-broadcast-projects
False Alarm at Pickering Nuclear Generating Site
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a30501256/nuclear-alert-canada-false-alarm/
My sister’s place in Pickering, Ontario is within sight of this energy generating station. While visiting there a couple of years ago, all kinds of sirens went off in the neighbourhood, so I checked to see what was happening, No one seemed to be in a panic. Later, when she got home, I asked about the sirens and was advised, “they must have been doing a test or something” For a false alert to go out at 7:30 AM in the morning, you’d have thought more people would have taken action. It took over 90 minutes to cancel and advise there was no emergency event.
Emergency Alert Fatigue with too many Amber Alerts and people turning their phones off at night, so they don’t get woken up.
Tech Tip
What are those AWS mp3s I saw during the last round of national alert tests?
We have had a couple of inquiries about seeing a message in the player logs showing a download from AWS (Amazon Web Services). AlertReady CAP system works like this: Our OBPlayer box monitors a network feed of alerts provided by Pelmorex (NAAD). When an alert is received, it first tries to play any attached media file (Mp3), and if this file is not present or corrupted, to use onboard TTS to read out the CAP message in a computerized voice. Most of the alerts we have seen recently have been issued as Mp3 and hosted on AWS. So what you are seeing is our player downloading the Mp3 file.
Our production machines, in addition to playing indigenous language alerts, can tie in with the AI POLLY system. This is a high quality TTS engine (also hosted on AWS) that will speak out CAP alerts in natural sounding voices. We’ll be releasing this feature with our next major system upgrade later in March 2020.
https://openbroadcaster.com/OpenBroadcaster-Player-with-CAP-alerting
R.I.P. Kelly Fraser 1993-2019
The OpenBroadcaster team was saddened to hear of the passing of Indigenous singer, motivational speaker and activist Kelly Fraser, all to young at the age of 26. Kelly will be remembered for the great work she did with the revitalization of the Inuktitut language through music. We hope that many others will be inspired to follow in her footsteps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Fraser
Article from opensource.com
Open source radio system delivers emergency alerts and music to the Yukon and beyond
https://opensource.com/article/19/11/open-source-broadcasting
Advanced Google Analytics Award
Google Meta Data Certifications Basic and Advanced. Do you know where your users are coming from and what they’re doing? We can help you discover your online community
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/certificate/R_dZ6jc1Tc-Kt3VgcDVpKw
Language Revitalization Funding
The Indigenous Languages Component (formerly known as the Aboriginal Languages Initiative) of the Indigenous Languages and Cultures Program (ILCP) is now accepting funding applications for the 2020-2021 fiscal year. The application forms are included in this email and organizations/groups are required to use these templates.
Total requested amount should be between $25,000 and $200,000.
The deadline to submit your application and be eligible for funding is January 31, 2020 at 11:59 p.m. local time.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/funding/aboriginal-peoples/languages.html
Microsoft Win 7 and Server 2008 support discontinued
What this means? No security updates. I’ve heard from two different stations that have been quoted “$30K” to upgrade their server 2008 software and that’s in US DOLLARS! Recently, we did an informal survey on FaceBook to find out, on average, how long an unexpected Windows update took their station off the air. Worked out to 20 minutes of dead air each time.
With that kind of a budget, you can get a huge studio automation upgrade on a stable platform that doesn’t shutdown your station whenever it feels like it.
https://openbroadcaster.com/specials
Translation Project
Our systems presently work with English and French. We’re looking for assistance doing some simple translation for stations; Bengali, Hindi, Indonesian, Nepali, Portuguese and Spanish
We have active teams working on translations for Thai and Tagalog (Filipino). A small stipend (budget) is available, and participants will be rewarded with a fully functional broadcast automation appliance based on Raspberry Pi, which can be used to run your radio station, hold an online media library, and send out an mp3 stream for online listeners. We will also consider supporting other language groups.
https://openbroadcaster.com/opportunity
Conference schedule
January 23 – Feb 12, 2020 I’ll be visiting radio and TV stations in Bangladesh, Dhaka, Khulna and Cox Bazaar.
March 2 – 5, 2020 Asia Broadcasting Union Digital Broadcasting Symposium at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
June 3rd, 4th & 5th 2020 CJUC FM “The Juice” is hosting The National Campus/Community Radio Conference Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.