Not impressed. . .

Well, the niece and nephew (ages 19 and 20) are not impressed by text to speech, and wondered why I "chose" the male voice. They've been playing around with various versions of it on their computers for years, and it's old news to them to make the slightly robotic-sounding voice say funny things. I know it's not that new, but I think the ease with which it can be installed is a bit new, so I'm still a bit thrilled about it. And it sure wouldn't be the first time they've rolled their eyes and indicated I'm a little lame.

Wow! It worked!

and it also was pretty easy to install.

Text to Speech

I just signed up for a free account at odiogo.com that is supposed to convert my blog to speech. Any of you who know me personally know that I am interesed in accessibility issues, so I'm anxious to see if this works. I have played a bit with other text-to-speech tools, but this is the first one I've heard of where a blog can be converted. If you listen to this please post a comment so I'll know.

Open Library

Both Boing Boing and Slashdot have stroies this morning on Open Library http://demo.openlibrary.org/, a "giant books wiki" which may have half a million books eventually. Sounds like it would bring together online book content from anywhere, such as Project Gutenberg, Electronic Text Center, Digital Library SunSITE, etc. Will have to read more about it. . . .

Learning from each other

Several people have told me they've learned a few things from my blog. I'm flattered that anyone is reading it and glad some are finding it useful. I am also learning things from reading what others post, for instance roboform for accounts & passwords from Jesse's blog. Part of the whole point of us all exploring things together is to work together and help each other out. It makes it more fun, too, than struggling alone with the not-always-simple directions that sometimes seem too tedious to bother with, except for those few people with unlimited patience. (I am not among them. . . .)
An added benefit of doing Library 2.0 that I don't know if anyone anticipated is that we learn more about each other, not only the fun social things i.e. grandchildren and pets, but also useful information such as that someone knows sign language, or is a movie buff, dog expert, nutritionist, whatever. It's always nice to know someone personally who might answer a question or two.

Changing the subject, watch WYTV 33 tonight to see one of our patrons answer Len Rome's "Question of the Day". We don't know his name, but he said he'd be back to sign autographs ; )

The photo things really are fun. From reading other people's blogs, I decided to play with Dumpr.net, which couldn't be easier. I only have a few pix in flicker to work with right now, but made them both into sketches and antiqued them, also tried the distorting circle feature and the Easter egg. Silly! And it's a lot of fun to browse through the creative photos on Flickr. I have some saved into my favorites http://www.flickr.com/photos/99416963@N00/favorites/, mostly book related but there's a pumpkin one for Linda.