I saw the funny command line interface to speech at Nerdlogger. Try this to play some tunes:


say -v Cellos "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo"


If you are brave enough, copy’n'paste the snippet below, replace USER and PASSWORD with your twitter account and it will read out loud the latest tweets of your friends.


curl -s -u user:password http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml | grep "<text>\|<screen_name>" | sed -e 's/&#228;/ä/' -e 's/&#246;/ö/' -e 's/&#252;/ü/' -e 's/<text>\(.*\)<\/text>/\1 from /' -e 's/<screen_name>\(.*\)<\/screen_name>/\1. . . . /' | say


Still a one liner

What do you need to make one?

• A wetsuit
• Velcro
• A sewing machine

I got my material from a shop that sells surf equipement. They were so kind to give me three old surf jackets for free. Some zippers were broken or a bit rusty but the neopren was fine.

I don’t own a sewing machine but my mom has one.

How to make a MacBook sleeve

First choose a jacket that has a back big enough to cover your MacBook.

Cut the the complete back out of the jacket. It has to be big enough to form an envelop for your notebook. After that it is easier to adapt the neoprene to the needed size.

Use chalk and a ruler to mark the size on the neopren. Then use sharp scissors to cut it to the final size.

Now it is time to sew it together. I must admit, that I don’t have any pictures from the actual sewin, as my batteries were discharged. As already stated, I don’t know how to sew, but my mom is very skillful and did the most of the work.

But I have some tips for the sewing, that I remember:

• You sew the envelope inside out. The wetsuit has two sides, the slippery outside and the inside. So there is no problem that the fabric does not get transported while sewing.
• Try to sew round corners. Otherwise you will end up with a notebook sleeve that has kind of ears.
• You may need an additional special fabric to sew it together when you sew the velcro. This fabric is needed to guarantee the transportation of the fabric while sewing. Otherwise your neoprene will end up warped.
• The velcro on the upper side is not sewed but glued only. Until now that wasn’t a problem.

Links

• Neoprene Laptop Bag at Instructables
• Laptop Bag at Instructables
• Laptop Sleeve from a FedEx Envelope at Instructables
• Surfcenter Lübeck, they donated the wetsuits, thanks for that.

More at Flickr.