Writes a young friend in Norway: "I just wanted to give you a tip about a set of programs called the Festival Speech Synthesis System, that I use for reading articles, particularly LRC ones. Since articles tend to be lengthy, especially some of your ones (Not that they're not good - quite the opposite, they're excellent), I don't often either find the time to read them or feel like reading large texts, I use Festival to read it for me. I have wireless headphones, so I can walk about in the house, doing all kinds of other things (i.e. eating) while listening to the article. It's very clear and concise, but often sounds very dull and 'linear'.

"Still, it's a great tool for those of us who really can't spend an hour every day just reading. I use Debian GNU/Linux with the K Desktop Environment, and my RSS feed reader (Akregator) has support for it. I just thought you might recommend it to your readers... I'm not sure how well it works on other operating systems, but it works very well on GNU/Linux, and hardly consumes system resources at all.

"Here's its Wikipedia page."