Archive for August, 2010
Get your own Mac to sing Still Alive
Posted by Angela Brett in News, The Afterlife on August 24, 2010
Somebody on Twitter mentioned he’d like the file I used to get my Mac to sing Still Alive, so here it is. If you have a Mac, you just need to open this in any application which can view text (TextEdit, for example) go to the Edit menu, Speech submenu, and select ‘Start Speaking’. You can try different voices by changing the system voice in the Speech pane in the System Preferences. For best results, use a high quality voice such as Vicki or Victoria. Alex is supposed to be the highest-quality, but it’s a male voice, and I don’t think I’ve tried it. Voices that already have their own built-in tunes (such as Good News and Bad News) won’t work. You could also create a sound file of it using the ‘Text to Audio File’ Automator action.
It won’t sound exactly like the recording in the video I made, because I edited the resulting sound file in GarageBand to get the timing to match up with the original song. If you want to shortcut all that, or if you don’t use a Mac, you can get your computer to sing (or lip-synch?) Still Alive by downloading this mp3.
This file is released under a PleaseDon’tSueMeValve-Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license, which is explained in detail in the file itself.
What I like about Internet Explorer
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on August 23, 2010
An oddly powerful number of people liked this when I posted it on facebook, so I may as well put it here as well.
I have a few other things I will put on this blog once I get time, including the source file for the MacinTalk Still Alive, since somebody asked for it, but this will do for now. I’m also testing out the link between Twitter and WordPress, because I got tired of only twittering about goats.