The following are a list of some really cool Text-to-speech (TTS) engines available (for testing) on the web:

If you encounter issues with WinAMP not reporting the length of the song in the playlist, it is very likely that the mp3 is corrupt. However, in some cases, this could be due to a bug in WinAMP (I'm using v5.34) disliking unicode characters in the ID3 tags. In my case, an mp3 with the artist's name tagged as Dvořák - diacritics and all and especially the caronned (sic) r - was not gettings its song length displayed next to its title.

Removing the diacritic would have "fixed" the problem. But, I actually left it as it was.

Just now, I came across the phrase "in flagrante" while reading a review of Paris Hilton's album Paris. You might ask what the fuck I was doing reading a review of an album by the embodiment of idiocy, immaturity, marketability and a whole host of STDs, but that's a discussion for another day.

Anyway, the sentence in question was the following:

What a wonderful week this has been! I've done fuck-all in terms of work because I discovered that there is a bounty of Nodame Cantabile out there to slake my thirst. Firstly, there appears to be a sequel (set in Paris) in the works set for release in October. This led me to the Manga (which I'd thought had ended along with the anime) where I found that there was an entire archive set in Paris for me to read ...

I came across a neat service named Cryocopy earlier today. What it essentially does is mimic the service provided by archive.org except for the fact that Cryocopy does it on demand instantaneously and saves a screenshot to boot.

To quote:

CryoCopy is a web archiving service that allows manual caching of Internet pages, fully saving them both in HTML and in bitmap (PNG) format. This is done almost instantly upon request, not days or weeks apart, like with other services.

Here's a little sample for those of you who aren't familiar with QI - a BBC show - which is like a no-holds-barred trivia show with comedians (and comediennes I suppose).

Part 1:

Part 2:

If you follow the posts on this site, you'd have noticed my issues with the recent Hardy upgrade. While I thought they'd been fixed in my fstab, this was apparently not the case. When I rebooted the machine next, I couldn't even get to the shell as I encountered the message - Unable to execute /bin/sh - Permission Denied.

I've just finished reading Old Man's War by John Scalzi - a science fiction novel in a similar vein to Joe Haldeman's Forever War.

Today's Song Of The Day is a cover version by John Hammond of the Tom Waits song Shore Leave, from the latter's excellent album Swordfishtrombones. The song is off Wicked Grin, a collaboration between Hammond and Waits and is IMHO one of the few songs where the remake has just as much character as the original even though the arrangement is quite drastically different.