Tuesday, March 12, 2013

text-to-speech

Buried within the docs for the Festival text-to-speech system for Linux is a mention of Klingon. Apparently, the system could be used to read things in Klingon, if only they could get a good sample of Klingon to work with. There's an honest-to-goodness request for a "Klingon continuous speech" corpus.

So, if you feel like translating something into Klingon and reading it out loud into a microphone, drop them a line.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Interm review: The Book Theif

I've been reading The Book Theif recently. Dunno if I'm going to finish it, though. "Poised to become a classic" (USA Today) or no, I really don't know how to feel about it. It's got little formating quirks that really bother me. For example, around page 49 there's this thingy:

* * * AN IMPORTANT NOTE * * *
ABOUT FRAU DILLER
She had one golden rule.
Nothing wrong with this factoid, of course. But it's offset like this, and I think it would be better put intergrated into the narrative. There's no reason it couldn't be. The book has pictures in it too, and the whole thing could just be a stylistic thing. But it's jarring and, in all the cases so far (that weren't in the prologue), in my opinion completely unnecessary.

Current Rating: 3/10 Dump it. The offset chunks are jarring and gratuitous. The message may well be good, but the writing style is off-putting.