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Nope
Authored by: babbage on Oct 09, '02 01:03:52AM
What's complicated? Follow the link and there's a binary & a manpage file, just waiting for you to download them & copy to /usr/local. From then on, they can be used the same way standard Unix cat is used -- except that with the -a flag it'll speak whatever you filter through it. Rockin! :-)

Before I went home tonight, I banged out a little Perl script that calls the fortune command every 15 or 20 minutes, reading the joke/riddle/quote aloud through this version of cat. Now if I can just get someone *else's* computer to do this on a seemingly random basis that would be great... :-)

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Nope
Authored by: evands on Oct 09, '02 02:14:26AM

Nonono, if you want to be able to install that sort of prank without the other person knowing, compiling an OS X command tool is no good - you'll want to figure out a way to run it under Windows. From there, all is simple. ;)



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Nope
Authored by: babbage on Oct 09, '02 08:41:16AM

Well no, then the tricky bit would be to get one of my co-workers to run Windows -- everyone's using OSX or Linux, and the only system speech software I know of is the stuff that comes with Macs. Now if you could pipe the Macintalk sound output to a WAV or MP3 file or something, then the trick would be to get that file to play on a remote computer. This is much more doable, provided that we can generate the files on the fly... :-)



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Nope
Authored by: aranor on Oct 09, '02 09:51:32PM

You could simply use an applescript to get their computer to talk. If you have SSH into their computer, just SSH in and use the 'osascript' command. If you don't have SSH but you have remote applescript capability, use an applescript or use 'osascript' with remote appleevents.

On a related note, I used this new 'cat' for a very cool purpose. I wrote a small PHP page that displays a text box, and when you hit the submit button it makes the computer speak whatever was typed! I tried this using
'osascript' and it didn't work because, when run from the webserver, 'osascript' didn't have access to the windowserver. I tried writing my own quick tool to do it, but for some reason speech simply didn't happen. So this 'cat' tool rocks, because now random people can make my computer speak! Of course, I need to publish my IP for that to happen, and I keep forgetting it (and I'm behind an IP mask so I can't easily figure it out). Oh well.



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Nope
Authored by: babbage on Oct 10, '02 01:00:09AM

Uhh, maybe I wasn't clear. I've got access to a Mac, as do a couple of co-workers, but the majority of the other computers are Linux. The better general solution would be to capture the audio output (something like {osascript -e 'say "hello world" ' >hello.mp3 } or... yeah, something like that) and then just push the sound file to whatever platform can play mp3s (all of 'em). Hmm...



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Nope
Authored by: osxpounder on Dec 20, '02 05:11:06PM

Your idea reminds me of a prank I pulled years ago on an OS9 user.

Just be sure that, once you get them to run the file, Applescript makes it impossible to delete. I had made a recording that played back every 15 min., and when my ill-fated user located the offending file and dragged it to the Trash [& emptied it], she was surprised to hear it 15 minutes later, chiming away.

The Applescript was written to quietly and invisibly undelete the file and return it to its original folder every time it was dropped into the Trash. Took her forever to figure that one out.

Ah, good times.



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