HDMI is where it's truly insane -- yeah, let's gold-plate a cable that transmit a digital signal.
Insanity among audiophiles uses a different scale - I have an SPDIF optical HiFi cable with gold-plated connectors.(*)
I was later aghast to see two audiophiles discuss whether digital audio sounded best when transmitted over coax or optical cable - even more so when I learned they might theoretically have a point because the stupid companies who designed SPDIF had decided to transmit digital stereo without any error-correction whatsoever.
*) I had originally ordered a cheap SPDIF cable but they sent me their "high quality" cable anyway.
I use a speech synthesizer to "read" ebooks. This way I can read my ebooks while cycling, doing my laundry, playing worms,... Anything that doesn't require too much concentration.
I use the "Road Runner" speech synthesizer from http://www.ostrichsoftware.com. It is the size of an MP3 player and can hold approx. 2 MB of text. The transfer software is unfortunately windows/dos only and buggy as usual, and they have no plan of a linux port so far because "only 4 people has asked for it". But the "Road Runner" itself has an excellent userinterface and works very well.
The speech quality of speech synthesizers doesn't seem to have improved significantly over the last 10 years (I used the amiga speech device, a tape recorder and a walkman 10 years ago), but your brain can adjust to it in 2-3 hours, and then you can begin to increase the speed (Road Runner is adjustable from 150 to 600 words/minute).
Using a speech synthesizer i "read" 20-30 times as many books as before, so getting new ebooks has become a real pain. Fortunately Baen books (http://www.baen.com) has started selling ebooks at $10 for a batch of 4-5 books. They are distributed as html which I then convert to text.
I'm a bit puzzled why an ebook reader has to look and work like an ordinary book. IIRC there has been some experiments with reading text by displaying one word at the time in the middle of the screen, which gave an increase in reading speed by a factor of 2-4. Combining that way of reading with a speech synthesizer would let you "read" with a combination of eyes and ears. My guess is that this would let you read faster and concentrate better than with any other reading technology.
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HDMI is where it's truly insane -- yeah, let's gold-plate a cable that transmit a digital signal.
Insanity among audiophiles uses a different scale - I have an SPDIF optical HiFi cable with gold-plated connectors.(*)
I was later aghast to see two audiophiles discuss whether digital audio sounded best when transmitted over coax or optical cable - even more so when I learned they might theoretically have a point because the stupid companies who designed SPDIF had decided to transmit digital stereo without any error-correction whatsoever.
*) I had originally ordered a cheap SPDIF cable but they sent me their "high quality" cable anyway.
I use a speech synthesizer to "read" ebooks. This way I can read my ebooks while cycling, doing my laundry, playing worms, ... Anything that doesn't require too much concentration.
I use the "Road Runner" speech synthesizer from http://www.ostrichsoftware.com. It is the size of an MP3 player and can hold approx. 2 MB of text.
The transfer software is unfortunately windows/dos only and buggy as usual, and they have no plan of a linux port so far because "only 4 people has asked for it". But the "Road Runner" itself has an excellent userinterface and works very well.
The speech quality of speech synthesizers doesn't seem to have improved significantly over the last 10 years (I used the amiga speech device, a tape recorder and a walkman 10 years ago), but your brain can adjust to it in 2-3 hours, and then you can begin to increase the speed (Road Runner is adjustable from 150 to 600 words/minute).
Using a speech synthesizer i "read" 20-30 times as many books as before, so getting new ebooks has become a real pain. Fortunately Baen books (http://www.baen.com) has started selling ebooks at $10 for a batch of 4-5 books. They are distributed as html which I then convert to text.
I'm a bit puzzled why an ebook reader has to look and work like an ordinary book. IIRC there has been some experiments with reading text by displaying one word at the time in the middle of the screen, which gave an increase in reading speed by a factor of 2-4.
Combining that way of reading with a speech synthesizer would let you "read" with a combination of eyes and ears.
My guess is that this would let you read faster and concentrate better than with any other reading technology.
/ric