A quick tribute to my dad, original Hax0r.

There was a period of time from Thanksgiving to Christmas when I wasn’t contributing the same amount of literary/journalistic content that I usually do, and it wasn’t because of the holidays or anything. It was because my dad passed away.

My mom died when I was only seven, and my dad and I never had the best relationship, partially due to the fact that our communication skills are shit, partially due to the fact that he was doing clandestine government work throughout the cold war and was sort of limited in what he could even talk to me about.

I never knew much about my dad because he had top secret clearance and couldn’t tell us much about his day-to-day work in the bunkers of Aberdeen Proving Ground or his four-day stints at the Pentagon once a month. One time when I was a kid, I asked him what his job was like, and he said, “You know everything you read in science fiction stories? It’s all real, and that’s what I do.”

I believe my next question was something to the order of, “You work on jetpacks!?”

I had never even seen the above picture of him until yesterday, and it made me wish we could have made it to the level where we could speak to one another as gearheads, because this is goddamn cool. I’m dating the picture around ’76 by my dad’s appearance and by our family’s location at the time.

He was totally going for the “Meathead” look.

Rob Reiner...Not my father.

I believe machine in the picture above is a Commodore because I zoomed in on the placard on the left, and it looks like it says “CBM Termicare.” I’ll continue looking that one up.

But the real sci-fi shit my dad was working on was ARPANET. Long before the term “Internet” even existed, that was a major part of his job…check this out:

This article is from 1980…so this is in the period of time when it was still ARPANET, before it got turned into MILNET, when the packet-switched network was still a new concept, and there were only 100 something nodes in the entire Internet.

What he was researching is anybody’s guess, though. The only thing I know about this is that he once gave us a full-sized injection molded replica of an AK-47, and two smaller calibre replica handguns from his lab. Once he came back from one of his weekends at the Pentagon with a gasoline-soaked russian tank driver’s helmet. My stepmom says those monthly trips actually took him places like Cuba and Russia during the Cold War, and I know he went to Panama and Germany in the 80′s. I may never know exactly who he was watching.

He was a spy, after all…and an Internet espionage pioneer. Pretty cool. I just wish we could have talked more about his work when I had the chance.

I’m not visually impaired, what’s TalkBack good for?

When we first saw Android 1.6 (donut) long long ago, we heard about the accessibility features afforded by the text-to-speech engine made by SVOX.  By default, your donut device doesn’t have the speech libraries loaded, and you have to add them yourself.  Eclair-based devices such as the Motorola Droid, however, come with the speech function fully loaded and ready to rock.

To turn it on, go to Menu> settings > accessibility, click on the “accessibility” checkbox, and then click on the “TalkBack” checkbox.  A warning box pops up telling you that it will read things such as credit card numbers aloud and that it “may be able to collect the data you type, ” so be careful..

When you have TalkBack turned on, all it really does is verbally tell you where you are, such as the home screen, sub-menus or URLs.  It also reads pop-up messages and warnings, but that’s the limit of it.

But I started thinking the other day that maybe TalkBack could come in handy if I could highlight text and have it read aloud, sort of like what you can do on many Kindle books, and what you can do with Speech in OS X.   Since I have to edit other people’s documents for work, I’m always using speech.  I even have a macro set up to highlight all text in this one field and automatically launch the voice reader.  So yeah, I thought it would be cool to have TalkBack read my Google News or Techmeme headlines to me as I’m driving or walking the dog or something.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a solution that doesn’t require the installation of another application.  I try to highlight and copy text with menu-e on the Droid, which then copies my selection to the clipboard.  But then I have no access to the clipboard to read my selection.

So what the hell…I downloaded Talking RSS Reader by Google Engineer Stephanie Doyon, which integrates with Google Reader.   It doesn’t use the nice built-in Android reader voice, but the Linux text-to-speech voice which I now equate with the dumb smiley face on the OLPC “Speak” program.  I got my niece an XO-1 for Christmas last year, and she spent quite a lot of time playing with the Speak app, making it just go “fhfhahfhfhehehehehnfmsisisisioep” and such…over and over and over.

This is the guy I picture reading my RSS feeds in Talking RSS Reader. Or more accurately, I picture him reading every single bit of text in every article in my feed in order.  When you use this app, half of the time it’s going to be saying things like “image link, image link, image link,  image link, image link”  and other such useless info that I don’t want to hear. It’s the worst in blogs because it reads all the usernames, link names, comments, and stuff.   Talking RSS reader is free and alright, but it’s better for reading the full text of articles in sequential order rather than just reading headlines.  I want something that will just speak all the headlines to me in a clear voice, and have speech recognition so I can say something like “read that one!” and it will stop its listing and drill down into the article I chose.  That kind of app would be awesome for commuters, and I guess I have to continue my search.

Talking RSS reader crashed on me quite a few times when I was playing with it, but it didn’t ever throw up an error message.  The app just silently closed, which I guess is kind of less annoying, but still bad.  I won’t uninstall this yet, as I intend to use it in the car, but it’s really not quite what I had in mind.