cloud

kevinmichaelloeffler

Introducing FreeTranslate- deploy a personal webpage for neural machine translation with a click!

Screenshots of the tool in action!

THE PROBLEM

The language barrier is a major problem during the COVID-19 pandemic when trying to convey critical safety and medical information and to get information to parents and students as we head back to school. Translation services are expensive and there are many communities that need services.

THE SOLUTION

Amazon Web Services has a product called Amazon Translate which is a neural machine translation service, meaning it translates text using machine learning. It is very powerful, and while it cannot replace a human translator, can help people like teachers convey meaning to the communities they work with reliably. Unfortunately this tool is intended for developers, whereas it can be of great value to people who are not programmers who could leverage its generous free usage tier, letting you translate 2 million characters per month for 12 months at no cost.

That’s where FreeTranslate comes in. FreeTranslate is a software project I have worked on that allows people to deploy a personal translation page to use these free credits by simply clicking a button. It will deploy FreeTranslate to your Amazon account and generate a personal URL just for you!

The technical details are that I have built a CloudFormation template that deploys when you click a URL on my projects page. This template deploys an API Gateway (for the webpage and sending translation requests) and a Lambda function (which does the actual translation bit). You can see a diagram from the CloudFormation designer tool here:

Diagram of FreeTranslate and what CloudFormation deploys when you click my Launch Stack button.

SHARING THE SOLUTION

You can deploy it for yourself, view instructions, and see additional pictures here!

As always, the code is open source! You can view it here.

kevinmichaelloeffler

Text to Word Search!

Try it out for free here!

wordsearchgif

THE PROBLEM

Word searches can be a great way to build a summary activity for reading a story, article, or book. However, they are time consuming and difficult to make.

THE SOLUTION

text2wordsearch uses the Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm to automatically extract the top key words from a blob of text! Simply copy the text from the article or story and choose how many words you want in your word search. Then copy the word search into your favorite word processor (be sure to use a monospace font!). The keywords selected are found in the bottom box.

The technical details are that this uses an AWS Lambda function to run the RAKE algorithm and generate the word search, ingesting the text from the web interface above which is deployed on AWS API Gateway. The Lambda function is written in Python and leverages two excellent packages: python-rake and word-search-puzzle. Because it is a Lambda function they had to be installed to a directory and uploaded as part of a zip bundle along with my function code. This zip is included in the repo linked below for you to deploy and play with yourselves!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

Try it for free here!

As always, the code is available to browse and deploy yourselves!

kevinmichaelloeffler

A novel method for preventing “Zoom Bombing”

THE PROBLEM

Zoom Bombing is exposing children learning remotely to inappropriate content and disrupting meetings so a few pranksters can have a laugh. The biggest unsolved issue with Zoom Bombing is that people are sharing links and passwords on social media in order to egg trolls and classmates on to bomb these classes and meetings. How can we share a meeting without disclosing the meeting ID and password?

THE SOLUTION

BombSquad(4)

BombSquad is a solution I built on Amazon Web Services to help mitigate the worst of Zoom Bombing. Here’s how it works:

  1. Get a Zoom meeting invitation link like normal (and make sure the password feature is turned on!)
  2. Go to www.BombSquad.us
  3. Select your meeting options- you can permanently turn off the participant microphone and camera so that nobody can reenable it by clicking the checkboxes.
  4. Paste your invitation link
  5. Get a sharable cloaked URL that goes right to your meeting!
  6. Continue orchestrating your meeting from the Zoom client like normal.

The technical details are as follows: BombSquad takes your URL, transforms it to force the user to use the Zoom web client, stores the original URL securely, and only redirects the browser to the real meeting URL if the user clicks through the sharable link you receive. The invitation link inside the window is disabled. Thus, all a user can see are BombSquad URLs! This is performed using a combination of AWS S3 and Lambda instances as shown above, making this a neat example of a serverless application– the first I am distributing publicly!

SHARING THE SOLUTION

Head on over to www.bombsquad.us and give it a try!

interface
BombSquad interface