Interrupt-Driven

In one of todays featured articles wikipedia.org explains the so called “heavy metal umlaut”
(link). Böse!

Chris sent me this link that morning. It’s a cpu load monitor which uses one of these battery self-tests as a display device. Great stuff!

Comic Cosmos together with Cinemaxx Darmstadt is showing a series of mangas. I will most probably
skip the “Shaolin Kickers”, but the rest of the films looks promising to me.

Besides some stories read by humans gutenberg.net also hosts a great number of audio books which were produced using a text to speech processor (link).

Perhaps i’m just playing the woman but for me the quality of these recordings is hard to bear. I can’t image that someone is really listening to this stuff. Mind an example? Listen to this sample from Mary Shelleys Frankstein
(link). What’s the point in distributing these files in the first place?

Project Gutenberg has several audio books of
Sherlock Holmes stories online (link).

• The Sign of Four, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Valley of Fear, Arthur Conan Doyle
• A Study in Scarlet, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Last Bow, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle

The sound quality of the files i’ve sampled so far is quit good.

The University of Minnesota provides audio files of their lecture “Studies in Narrative: Science Fiction and Fantasy”.

If you’re into Sci-Fi or Fantasy it’s definitvely interesting stuff. The first two lectures discuss the origin and history of Sci-Fi. The next two lectures are doing just the same for Fantasy. It’s also tried to define the borders between theses two related genres. The fifth lecture starts a treatment of the classical Sci-Fi theme of utopian/distopian societies.