As Roberto blogged about how he converted his blog into a blog/podcast hybrid using Talkr, I thought I should tell you about a well-hidden, half-finished feature in Akregator: Basic Text-to-Speech support.

To use it, you need kttsd installed and set up, which does all the heavy lifting for Akregator.

After you have got it running, start Akregator and enable the speech toolbar (Settings->Toolbars->Speech Toolbar in the menu):

Now, just select the articles you want to have spoken and click the parrot to enqueue and play them.

Isn't that great? All the people on PlanetKDE are podcasting to you now!

As it turned out yesterday, even ferrets like KDE:

But unfortunately they make KDE apps crash sometimes, so KDE can't be certified as ferret-proof yet. Which brings us to the fact, that the research field of animal-centric computing was neglected for too long. What tremendous opportunities we have here! Just compare the numbers: There live trillions of animals on planet earth, where the homo sapiens population is ridiculously small. You can't seriously talk about world domination if you don't take this into account.

And yeah, know your user!

Ok dudes, now I finally started a blog at kdedevelopers.org. Working on Akregator, a tool that many people read blogs with, I am not really an early adopter when it comes to blogging myself . Well, there is the Akregator blog where we blog from time to time what's going on in Akregator development, so check this out if you're interested.

I look forward to the NL-PIM meeting taking place next week in Annahoeve, Netherlands. It's the first time I actually meet the PIM people. In the last days we were thinking about adding more sophisticated search and filtering functionality to Akregator (maybe using something similar to the labels in GMail). So the challenge is to come up with a concept that is a) powerful and b) easy to grok and use. It might also make sense to have a KDE-wide solution for KDE4, instead of an isolated Akregator-only "we do it all the other way and confuse people" approach. Labels could be stored using Tenor (still waiting for the prototype, Scott ). I will discuss this on the PIM meeting (having usability people there is really a good thing) and hope that things get clarification.

P.S.: Tomorrow my CVS/SVN account gets one year old. Time for a little birthday party