Child's view

[yesthattom]

I got email from a friend who said...

My daughter Maddy (16) got an Apple iBook this past weekend. We’ve been having trouble setting up the wireless connection, so I opened up a “terminal” window and typed commands. Maddy was intrigued. I typed a command and got an error message back. Maddy said, “Did the computer just talk back to you?”

I said, “yes.”

She said, “This is like having an IM conversation with the computer!”

Comments

[ckd]

Heh. Better yet, "man say" and play with that. (Useful for "make bigthing && say 'compiled okay'")

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Our developers have used this command to announce the startup of various daemons on our production servers. I had to get it into the requirements doc for the next release that the software would not "speak".

In the meanwhile, "say" is a symlink to "echo"

[kitschparade.livejournal.com]

ha. occasionally i use it to bother trey in the next room (why shout at him when i can have "agnes" do it?). it's entertaining, but, yeah, not so much for production use.

[ckd]

There is the story of a person who was using Timbuktu to control their work Mac from home (in the pre-X days) and accidentally ejected the Jaz disk they were using. They went into TextEdit, wrote "please push the Jaz disk back into the drive", and used the Mac's text-to-speech feature to say it in hopes that someone was within earshot.

It worked.

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

Crap! I've had OS X for almost a year now and never looked that up.
Right now, I have my desktop talking to my cat.

   say "m'rowp"