For me, Reading anything on monitor is laborious task and needless to say, that it puts lot of strain on my eyes, due to glare emitting from the screen. Most importantly, it restricts me from doing any other tasks. All this changed, when i found CoolSpeech approximately 4 years ago, initially i was apprehensive, that it may sound like a robot but my doubt was put to rest when i tried it. It is a program, which reads out text that we copy to clipboard(it holds information between the copy and the paste operations) or it reads loud as we type anything/anywhere. It also does other tasks:
- Scheduling a task, such as, reading from a file(text, docs, Htmls) at a particular time or reading news from internet(using urls) at a particular time etc.
- Converting text file to wave(sound) file.
- Announces time & date (half) hourly in different styles.
It is available with different male & female voices but among them, which sounds exactly like human voice and that i like most is "Adult Male 1, American English".
This program has increased my productivity and this voice has been my companion for countless insane late nights. I still remember, the day i got this program i downloaded Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen from Project Gutenberg site and listened to it nonstop(because i was fascinated with this story, since my school days) and then i had listened to one of my favorite book 'Underground' by Suelette Dreyfus, its a fascinating book must read by everyone, Even if you are not associated with computer world (hacker's in particular). I was so trilled, that i haven't slept for two days without finishing reading (listening) to these 2 books and next i had read all (i think) works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Considering my limited time, without this application i can't follow all blogs that i subscribe to or read journals i'm interested in.
Chess has been part of my life and love. Well this statement should not be interpreted as to think that my playing strength is at Master level but i'm just a club level player but one doesn't need to be a master to enjoy beauty of this game, in which we experience all emotions of life (trust me otherwise people won't stare at 64 squares for more than 6 hours straight). Problem was i didn't had human opponent to play with, i don't like to play with computers because they mathematically calculate moves and no excitement there, which we get, when we play against human. Internet has lot of chess servers, popular among them is ICC and yahoo but ICC is paid one and Yahoo has lot of cheaters and with poor rating calculation algorithm. Finally 5 years ago i found FICS and other than chess, it has many interesting things to offer me, like, channels on various topics to chat and i can meet people from all over the world, with different backgrounds, participating in team tourneys(which lasts months) where i made lot of good friends. Thing is FICS is telnet based server, so in initial days there weren't much options when it came to GUI interface(though there were decent ones like winboard & thief). For this reason, One of the member of FICS 'rraf' has wrote Babaschess and it is more flexible because of its customizability and its complexity has been encapsulated by its simplicity. It has been great help to me. You can see below, screenshot of my screen with Babaschess running. Click on it to enlarge.
Babaschess Screenshot
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