Geoff Arnold

Web to text to speech to CD to my mother

My mother is blind. This is a source of great frustration to her, because despite her age and her disability, her mind is as sharp and energetic as ever. She listens to the radio, and books on tape/CD, and subscribes to various audio journals; however, in many cases the only feasible approach is to ask someone to read to her. This is time-consuming and frequently inconvenient, and because she feels it to be an imposition my mother often decides not to ask.

Today we were talking on the phone, and she mentioned that she'd been listening to a piece from the New York Review of Books by Thomas Powers in which he reviewed four books about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Someone (my brother, I think) was reading it to her, but it's a long piece, so he was doing it in several sessions.

After I got off the phone, I decided that there had to be a better way. First I bought a copy of iSpeak It and installed it on my PowerBook. I gave it the URL to the Thomas Powers article, waited while it downloaded the piece, edited the text a bit to clean up extraneous navigation links and so forth, and instructed iSpeak It to transfer it to iTunes. A few minutes later I had a 55 minute AAC track in my iTunes library containing the article in OS X's Bruce voice. The quality is not wonderful, but it's quite recognizable. I burned a CD-R, and tomorrow I'll mail it to her in England.

It's no great chore to do this for my mother once or twice a month, but I wish there were a more straightforward solution. Of course I could set her up with a DSL connection, buy her a Mac mini, and set up a few Automator scripts for her, but I've tried similar approaches in the past without success. What I want is a big USB-connected control unit with a dozen big keys with glyphs that can easily be recognized by feel, and yellow on black for maximum contrast....

For family and friends only

We were babysitting Tommy this afternoon, and just after we'd fed him he seemed to want to roll over to take a look at something. He's only seven weeks, so rolling is not yet supposed to be in his repertoire.... After he'd being trying to roll for about five minutes, I decided to capture a video clip using my Treo. It's over two minutes long*, and Tommy kept going for several minutes after I'd finished. It should play in QuickTime; sorry about the quality. Check out the leg action around a minute into the clip - a natural soccer player, I'd say...!

--
* And 2.6MB in size - don't try this over a dial-up connection!

Standing in for Chris

Our grandson Tommy's christening was yesterday, so we headed up to Lynn. The plan was for Mark's sister and Kate's brother to be the grandparents (nicely symmetrical), but Chris was 2500 miles away getting packed. (He and Celeste are relocating from Seattle to the Oakland/Berkeley area this week.) So I had to stand in for Chris, which I was happy to do*. (Perhaps I should Photoshop Chris's face into this picture!) And of course Tommy took it all in his stride....

--
* The deacon conducting the christening was one of those loud, enthusiastic types that shouts out the prayers and the responses, so I didn't have to profess any beliefs that I didn't have. On the other hand, the priest who conducted the regular mass (and who appears in this photo) was a fascinating character; we had a long discussion with him afterwards. At one point when he was talking about how he'd like to conduct services, I pointed out that he had nearly 1700 years of imperial pretension to get rid of; he agreed that the problems he was thinking about really started with Constantine. Let's hope Benedict's authoritarianism doesn't squeeze all of his imaginative aspirations out of him.

New pics of Tommy

Just a few pictures of my grandson Tommy from Sunday, when I was baby-sitting. (He's 30 days old at this point.)

New pics of Tommy

Just a few pictures of my grandson Tommy from Sunday, when I was baby-sitting. (He's 30 days old at this point.)

Congratulations Kate and Mark (and Tom!)

My daughter, Kate, had her first child* this morning: Tom. He's shown here in a rough phone-cam picture curled up on his mum at 3 hours old. Despite dire predictions of a 10 pound baby, he was actually 8 lbs. 9 ozs., of which about a pound seems to be hair. Congratulations to all.

--
* And my first grandchild

UPDATE: There are some more pictures here. Enjoy.

Nuptials successfully concluded

Chris and his fiancée Celeste were married this morning in the Thomsen Chapel of Saint Mark's Cathedral here in Seattle. Their good friend, The Reverend Ann Holmes Redding (shown here with the happy couple; click for full-size image) presided. It was an intimate and beautiful service, with family and friends doing all of the readings. After lunch at the Café Flora, the newlyweds headed off to the airport in a vintage London taxi - see cameraphone pics below.

Geeks preparing for nuptials

I spent yesterday evening at the Joe Bar with Chris and a bunch of friends, getting nicely mellow and shooting the breeze in advance of Chris's wedding to Celeste today. Jon Lasser (author of Think Unix) was there; he's already blogged about it, and posted a couple of pictures to Flickr. It was a nice, low key, geek kind of evening, with talk of music, PDA software, the benefits of seamless WiFi-GPRS, Unix file system APIs, and puppetry. Oh yes, and embarrassing confessions from all of us (like Chris admitting a fondness for the music of Garth Brooks, and a certain person's recollection of a schoolday "chastity pledge"....).

(The photo on the right was taken outside St. Dunstan's church in Carmel Valley last February.)