Unlike most people, I seem to be able to both stand and understand computer-generated speech.  I've had the computer read stories to me, and I've enjoyed those stories.  One thing I've always found lacking, though, was the ability to pause, rewind, fast forward, and bookmark.  I mean, come on, I'm not always going to be able to read every word of that short-story in one sitting, without going to the bathroom, getting a drink of water, or whatever.  Even a pause feature would be useful.

Finally, I found  something that does this.  Ksayit (I can't find a better link.  It's apparently a standard part of the kde3 desktop, so it doesn't seem to have space all its own on the kde website).  Problem solved.

But this is what I'm like -- once I solve one problem, I want to create a new one.

I recently got myself an mp3 player.  The Sansa c250. This is an excellent piece of hardware.  It's got an fm radio.  My favorite feature was the micro-SD card reader, so that if I wanted more music, all I had to do was buy a new card.  But for some reason the firmware they ship with it lets you take advantage of nearly none of its features.  It can't read about half the id3 tags I throw at it, so almost half my music is "untitled artist" "untitled album".  Every time it turns on, it spends about five minutes updating its catalog.

Fortunately, the open-source community came to the rescue and gave me RockBox, an open-source firmware for it.  RockBox transformed my barely-working mp3 player into a powerful, portable computing platform.  I can play doom on it, fer chrissake.  No joke.  I can play videos.  I can play more reasonable videogames.  I can play oggs.

Of course, now I'm thinking "Hey, I have something in my pocket that I can program."

So here's what I want to do:  Write an application for RockBox that will read text files that I put on there, and allow me to pause, rewind, fast forward, and bookmark.

It already has text-to-speech on there (for reading the menus), allowing me to choose which engine I want:  Festival,  eSpeak, and I think one more.  So really, it's just a matter of writing a UI for it.  Let's see if I do it!  I hope I do.  I would exercise more, and read more blogs if I could do both at the same time.