Operating Systems Note
This software will not work with any version of Windows at all. It was not written using Windows, or written for Windows. It does not use Windows programs at all. If you are an experienced Perl programmer you may be able to adapt the software to use Perl installed under Windows, but this will require some significant tweaking. Especially with the applications that "speak" because voice synthesizers are different under Windows.
On the other hand, if anybody does adapt any of this software to work under Windows, I'd be obliged if you would feed the changes back to me so I can make those versions available here too and more people can benefit from it.
Will You Help Me Use These Programs?
If you don't know anything about programming, and don't have anybody around who can help you with it, this is probably not what you're looking for. Why? Because these are not programs that I have written for the purposes of public consumption. These are programs that I have written for myself and my own situation and I am making them available in the hope that they may also be of assistance to others in some way, but I have not packaged them up as finished pieces of software, have not fully documented them, have not allowed for their use in other configurations but my own.
That said, if you have minor questions about their operation or something, I will do my best to help, but if you have no experience at all with this stuff, you're probably in the wrong place unless you (a) run Linux to start with and (b) wish to pay me money to adapt them for your situation. If you are in that miniscule category of people, feel free to contact me and I'll do my very best to help you.
Is It All Really Free?
Of course! If you want any of the software that I have mentioned here, you are most welcome and there are basically no strings attached! That's what this site and the software is for, after all, to help people.
All of my software is developed for Unix/Linux and it is all available under the same terms as Perl itself (the Artistic License) which basically means it is totally free, you have the source code so you can modify it yourself, and has no "nag screens" or limitations of any kind.
If you do download and use any of these programs, or even use them as jumping off points for writing your own software, I'd also appreciate it if you contacted me since it'd be a nice ego boost to know that they'd been of some assistance to somebody!
My Configuration
These are the programs that I use, and that my software is based around. It is possible that these programs could be adapted for other software, but it would take somebody who knew programming to do it and that person is unlikely to be me.
- Linux
- My particular flavour is Debian GNU/Linux but any flavour of Linux should probably work equally well, for example RedHat, SuSE or Mandrake (amongst others - there are literally hundreds). Other Unices would probably also work but require a little tweaking.
- Perl
- Any recent Perl version should work. I don't know exactly what version is required because I always keep up with the latest, but it'd be something past version 5 ... probably 5.6 and up? I think I run 5.8.1 at the moment. Anyway, if you have a recent Linux install whatever you have already should probably be fine. You'll need to get some additional modules from CPAN if you don't have them installed already. This is pretty simple and there's plenty of tutorials around.
- Festival
- This is the speech synthesizer I use in my projects. Many of my pieces of software "speak" because its a better way of reminding me of stuff than just printing things on the screen. It can speech in several different "voices", and at different volumes and pitches too, although I mostly just stick to the one that I find the easiest to understand. My Festival configuration file (festival.scm) is here available with other configuration files from my system.
- Pilot-Link
- This is a set of tools that I use to connect to my Palm Pilot (I call her Tik-Tok) to my desktop to back it up. I don't "synchronize" it as such because I input all the information when I'm on the Palm, and use the desktop side for read-only access to my data through the (beta-level) memunpack, todounpack and addrunpack, and the (currently-very-unfinished) calunpack programs. My pilotdbunpack programs are all freely available.
