Hey all,

Just wanted to share a little idea that I had with everyone. It may sound a little wacky, but I thought it was good enough to bring to the table.

I drive to work, and it takes me around 40mins. It occurred to me the other day that this time was probably wasted, and if added up it came to nearly 7hrs a week (that's near a full working day). I thought that it would be great if I could make better use of this time when studying.

My nan has poor eyesight, and so she gets "talking books" from the library.

My plan would be to combine the two. There are some already great authors with great works here, but as reading whilst behind the wheel is at best unsafe, it would be good if the books could be recorded to CD/MP3.

Imagine the potential benefit of being able to drive to work, and before you've even arrived, you've done about half hour of studying. Over a few weeks, I'm sure you would be well ahead of where you would have been, and it would make revision a breeze.

Would be interested to hear what other people think of this, and especially from the authors regarding it's feasibility.

Listening to code examples? :)

As a follow-up - I was talking with someone recently who has bad eyesight, and they showed me - http://www.naturalreaders.com/. (I'm sure there are other products on the market too!)

For $50ish (£24.30), this software will read out anything copied into the clipboard. It will work for free, but the voices aren't so great. The best ones are "Kate" and "Paul" and samples can be heard on the website.

As an experiment, I put chapter 1 of a pdf file of a technical book I'm reading through it. This program allows you to export to mp3 and it came out at 90ish mins. I sped it up (so it would fit on a cd), and then split the mp3 into 1 minute tracks (so it's easy to manipulate) and tried it in the car this morning.

I think it worked really well. It occasionally gets confused (don't = "don-tea") and obviously the code samples aren't so great, but as a review the following morning of a chapter I read last night, I'd say it was excellent.

Just thought I'd pass that on for anyone who's interested. :-)

that's cool!