Saturday, July 26, 2025

Transforming Audio Notes: From Dream to Reality with Python

Behind the Build

Since publishing my first post about building the first few phases of a dream pipeline that would take me from scattered voice memos to organized, searchable writing gold—automatically, intelligently, and painlessly.

What I Dreamed Up: The OG Pipeline

Back then, my INTP brain was overflowing with “what if?” questions:

What if every voice note could be auto-transcribed, tagged, and logged?
What if I could summarize every idea with GPT, then file it by chapter, theme, or scene?
What if Notion, Bash, Whisper, and Python could all just talk to each other—and do my organizing for me?

I mapped out an ambitious, multi-stage pipeline:

Stage 1: Auto-transcribe, clean filenames, audit everything, summarize with GPT
Stage 2: Sync with Notion, merge in handwritten/typewritten notes, tag and organize
Stage 3: Index and search in Notion, tie it all together with Zapier and APIs

I imagined a world where I could just record, and the system would do the rest; and as any builder knows, the path from idea to execution is always a little messy.

From Voice to Value: Building My Whisper + Notion AI Pipeline

When Voice Became a Workflow

On any given day, my INTP brain brims and overflows with cool ideas to streamline apps, tools, workflows, and User Experience across virtually every product or tool I touch.

I can't help it. It's an innate curiosity to understand how things work, what makes systems go, and how to make them go better.

For some, it's philosophical questions that keep them up at night (What is the meaning of life? Where do thoughts go?). For me, it's the idea that won’t let go—the one that whispers, "This could make that boring/repetitive process so much better."

Often these ideas stem naturally from the many side projects I dive into.

Photo by Polina Zimmerman

One of those ideas sparked while writing my book—a passion project I’ve been developing over the last year using the notebook system popularized by Mary Adkins and The Book Incubator. Like many great authors—Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, JK Rowling, Stephen King—I draft by hand.

But being an INTP means my thoughts fire off in a thousand directions, often showing up while walking my dog or driving.

I voice-record myself dictating story beats, scenes, or thoughts when inspiration strikes. That, combined with 40,000 words scattered across apps and platforms created a monster.

To make things work for me, I often voice record myself dictating parts of my book using Google Recorder when the spirit strikes, or in Notion, or even in the form of messages I send myself via Slack. What an editing nightmare!

From GNOME Lockout to XFCE Rebirth: How I Rescued My Linux System and Built My Own Toolkit

📌 TL;DR

After a GNOME session failure locked me out of my Ubuntu desktop and left me trapped in TTY purgatory, I rebuilt my system using XFCE. I didn’t stop there — I automated the post-install process, hardened the environment, and published the toolkit on GitHub.

This is how I reclaimed control and made it portable for Future Me (and possibly, for you).

🔥 1. The Breakdown

My system booted straight to a black screen. GNOME was toast. No desktop. No cursor. No shell.

Just me, a blinking login prompt, and the cold comfort of TTY3...

I could log in… but I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t want a Band-Aid. I wanted the cure.

So I decided to rebuild my desktop environment from the ground up.

🔧 2. Enter XFCE (My Minimalist Sledgehammer)

I chose XFCE for one reason: it works.

It’s fast, stable, and doesn’t get caught up in the GNOME/Snap drama.

Here’s what I did:

Purged GNOME, GDM3, and all the loopback snap devices clogging up my mount table
Installed XFCE and its essential packages (xfce4, xfce4-goodies, lightdm)
Locked in the session default using .dmrc
Cleaned up the login manager so LightDM wouldn’t try to load a ghost session

Within minutes of logging in, XFCE reminded me what a functional desktop is supposed to feel like.

🛠️ 3. Building the Toolkit

I didn’t just fix it — I turned it into a repeatable system.

I created:

postinstall-finalize.sh: Hardens the system with UFW, ClamAV, smartd, Psensor, suspend rules, and more
bootstrap.sh: Instantly pulls and runs the setup from GitHub on any machine
.dotfiles.dmrc: Ensures LightDM loads into XFCE every time — no more login roulette
A GitHub repo to house the whole damn thing and help anyone else in the same mess

🔗 GNOME-to-XFCE Rescue Toolkit on GitHub

⚙️ 4. What It Automates

XFCE session lock-in
UFW firewall (deny incoming, allow outgoing)
ClamAV antivirus with weekly scan scheduling
smartd disk health monitoring
XFCE suspend/power tweaks
Autostart setup for tools like Stacer and Psensor
Clean break from Snap loopbacks and GNOME overhead

I call it minimalism with teeth.

🧭 5. For Anyone Else Stuck in TTY Hell

Don’t reinstall.
Don’t rage-quit Linux.
Don’t think you have to keep living in GNOME’s shadow.

You can purge it. Replace it. Harden it, and make the system yours again — on your terms.

🧪 Want to Use It?

Here’s how to bootstrap a clean, hardened XFCE rescue:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/catatwork217/gnome-to-xfce-rescue/main/bootstrap.sh
chmod +x bootstrap.sh
./bootstrap.sh

Want to clone it manually instead?

git clone git@github.com:catatwork217/gnome-to-xfce-rescue.git
cd gnome-to-xfce-rescue
chmod +x postinstall-finalize.sh
./postinstall-finalize.sh

💬 Want to Contribute?

Fork it. Break it. Rebuild it.

Add your own flair, or just keep it bookmarked for the next time your display manager betrays you.

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Sparks & Self-Belief TL;DR - How a Quirky Kid Became the Gal Who Builds Stuff

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

That question used to coil around my spine every time I grabbed a screwdriver. It echoed back to a certain family gathering: five relatives, one oak coffee table, and me—eye‑rolling, ready to move the thing already. I marched backward, table in hand, straight into a doorway too narrow by an inch. Cue the cousin’s smirk:

“It helps to not be stupid.”

For years I let moments like that shrink me. I was the kid who made her own drum and got labeled flighty, weird, too loud, too much. Then grad school handed me a word—neurodivergent—and fifteen years later I realized it wasn’t a handicap; it was my upgrade patch.

How I Work (and Why It Matters)

My sparkle: Wonder + Invention.
I ask “Why?” until the paint peels, then MacGyver a new way forward.
My grind: Tenacity + Galvanize—I’ll finish and help the team rally, but expect odd tools and loud playlists.
My flop: Discernment + Enable—I tend to 'go underground' when I'm in the zone, and may miss a detail... or twelve.

Mapping those geniuses flipped my script from “hard way” to “my way.”
I’m not a mis‑wired dreamer stuck in a 'doer' role, like in Lencioni’s book; I’m a tech‑minded Product Owner who automates workflows, scripts servers, and, yes, builds laptops for fun.

Receipts, Please

2009 - Swapped a dead SATA drive in my Dell XPS. No workshop, just YouTube and stubborn joy.
2018 - Dual‑booted Ubuntu's Disco Django distro, and wrote gnarly bash scripts to tame Wi‑Fi, spun up a personal backup server.
2022 - Successfully ran Linux Ubuntu + Windows 10 OS on my Lenovo Yoga C390.
2025 - Provisioned an Ubuntu 24.05 VM, learning Docker + DevOps on my own box.
Just completed! Built a DIY Framework 16, and configured it for dual‑booting Linux Ubuntu 24.04 LTS + Windows 11, color‑coded USB‑C cards and all.

Every project proves: when I lean into Wonder + Invention, I ship. When I try to copy “normal,” I stall.