LOUDBIRD

What is it?

A Python script that reads tweets aloud.

Wait... What?

Using whatever local voice synthesis you have available it will read the tweets from whatever sources you provide. It keeps track of what's been read and will read new tweets since last time run. The idea is that you could fire this off from a cron job (or whatever local crap your OS provides) and it runs periodically to check for new tweets.

Erm... why in the world would you want that?

Well, I don't know why you would want that (freak), but personally I find shit like FloridaMan pretty funny and yet can't bring myself to constantly recheck twitter every few minutes to get a chuckle. What I really want is someone to read it to me, and since Nick Offerman isn't available, I wrote this instead.

Okay, so how do I use it?

Configuration

First, you need to configure it. You can either make the config file by hand, or run it with 'genconf' to generate a default config, or just run it and watch it fail (it will generate a config as well). The preferred way is 'genconf':

   ./loudbird.pu genconf

If a config file is already there when genconf is run, it will be backed up.

The config file has two sections:

[twatter]

This section is the general configuration of the Twitter interface and the underlying speech synthesizer. Your app and oath keys go in the appropriate key settings. The 'rate adjust' setting is used to slow down or speed up the rate of speaking.

[following]

This is where you list the Twitter accounts to follow, The format is one account per line, with either the ID on the right of the equal sign or a negative number to indicate how many to go back from the top most tweet.

So, if I was following FloridaMan and criswell (me), and I wanted to have loudbird start at the 10 most recent tweets for each, my following section would look like:

   [following]
   _FloridaMan = -10
   criswell = -10

Running

Once you're configured, simply run loudbird.py. It can bde run manually, and/or run from cron (or whatever).

   ./loudbird.py

Loudbird will automatically update .loudbird.conf with the most recently read tweets for each user. This means you really shouldn't update the 'following' section manually any more (unless you wish to reset it). So in our example above, after running a few times it might start looking like this:

   [following]
   _FloridaMan = 38171627181
   criswell =  8384741111

Each subsequent run of loudbird will only read those tweets that are new since the last run. If no new tweets can be found, it will not read them.