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I enabled an addiction
Feb. 8th, 2005 11:03 pmRusset, my girlfriend, came down last week so that we could attend the Arizona Renaissance Festival Pleasure Feast. Lots of fun, more of which I shall write about later. She left Monday night, had to be back at work Wednesday night and it’s always good for her to have a couple of days to get fully back into “up all night, sleep all day” astronomer/vampire mode.
She didn’t want to leave, her preference was to read Harry Potter fanfic. Note that it was not to spend time with me, but to spend time with The Boy Who Lived. Sigh. I think I’ll just nip off and shoot myself. Well, computer geek that I am, I remembered something that she did not.
Apple OS-X has a text-to-speech program.
Her iBook was fully charged, we copied the remainder of the fic that she was currently reading into the text editor, turned on the speech program, and a large violin appeared – viola! She plugged the laptop into her car’s cassette adapter that is usually used for her iPod (quite the Apple geek she, eh?), closed the lid to turn off the screen, and a normal six hours of battery life lasted approximately nine hours, covering the entire 500 mile drive from Phoenix to Cloudcroft. She does not currently have a car adapter for the laptop, just for the iPod.
Apparently it was quite successful for keeping her alert on the drive, so that’s good. I just hope she doesn’t plan on having the damn thing talking when we hit the road together. :-) For myself, I have an oldish Nomad MP3 jukebox, it’s only a six gigabyte player but still it holds some 1100 songs, more than enough for a lot of variety whilst driving. I just listen to music and sing while driving, I’ve never gotten into the “books on tape” thing.
At least she got home safe, that was the important part.
She didn’t want to leave, her preference was to read Harry Potter fanfic. Note that it was not to spend time with me, but to spend time with The Boy Who Lived. Sigh. I think I’ll just nip off and shoot myself. Well, computer geek that I am, I remembered something that she did not.
Apple OS-X has a text-to-speech program.
Her iBook was fully charged, we copied the remainder of the fic that she was currently reading into the text editor, turned on the speech program, and a large violin appeared – viola! She plugged the laptop into her car’s cassette adapter that is usually used for her iPod (quite the Apple geek she, eh?), closed the lid to turn off the screen, and a normal six hours of battery life lasted approximately nine hours, covering the entire 500 mile drive from Phoenix to Cloudcroft. She does not currently have a car adapter for the laptop, just for the iPod.
Apparently it was quite successful for keeping her alert on the drive, so that’s good. I just hope she doesn’t plan on having the damn thing talking when we hit the road together. :-) For myself, I have an oldish Nomad MP3 jukebox, it’s only a six gigabyte player but still it holds some 1100 songs, more than enough for a lot of variety whilst driving. I just listen to music and sing while driving, I’ve never gotten into the “books on tape” thing.
At least she got home safe, that was the important part.
