Friedbeef’s Tech

Just want to give a shoutout to my lead sponsors TechCzar.  As you may know from previous posts, they help translate this blog into multiple languages, and bear a good amount of the costs needed to run this blog - and for that I’m very grateful.

In other related news, I’m pretty happy that local Malaysian superstar tech blogger LiewCF has just joined the TechCzar network, and they are translating this work too!  This will make for even more good content for the ever growing international tech community.

Check out TechCzar for some good tech reading today, and thank YOU readers for stopping by and making all this possible.

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We’ve previously taken a look at how to read Wikipedia on your iPod, but what if you wanted to listen to specific articles from Wikipedia rather than read them?

Pediaphon is a free service which translates Wikipedia articles into synthesized computer speech in the form of MP3 files.  This makes it easy for you to grab any article you want to delve into, and listen to it on any music player, mobile phone or directly from your PC. 

How did I like it?  Well for short articles, I found it reasonably useful.  For longer articles…. well, maybe it’s just me - but Pediaphon’s synthesized voice isn’t exactly the most pleasant sounding voice to listen to!  Nevertheless, if you feel like some quick e-learning on the way to work, give it a shot.

• Bonus Link #1: If you liked Pediaphon, you’d love this post on 20 unconventional ways to use Wikipedia
• Bonus Link #2: Want to read Wikipedia on your older iPods rather than listening to it?
• Bonus Link #3: If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, use iPodia to optimize viewing of Wikipedia

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We’ve previously discussed ways to convert Text to PDF, but what if you wanted to do it the other way around? 

Typically, copying and pasting directly from a PDF file will result in messy globs of unformatted text, making it barely feasible large sections of text. 

PDF Text Online is a free web based service which helps you extract the text, and even reformat it so you can paste it neatly into Word documents and still preserve a lot of the original PDF formatting. 

Simple simple problem?  Simple solution.

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