A College Assignment was Never so Much Fun

Having a Mac has its own frills and tons of advantages. What you can do is limited only by your creativity. I sure knew that, but recently when I had to submit an assignment at college, I found a cool new way to complete it using my Mac.

Now since our college does not accept typewritten assignments, I had to write it manually. After some research on the internet, I collected information and organized it in Mac's built in text editor TextEdit. After adding in my knowledge too, it started getting quite lengthy. I usually avoid printing unless it is absolutely necessary and to write looking at the Mac seemed time consuming. While trying to figure out a better way to do it, I found the Speech option in the TextEdit's Edit menu. I quickly configured System Preferences to start and stop speaking selected text by a key combination and reduced the speed at which Victoria (Victoria is  a voice in Leopard, which I felt was the clearest) would speak. And there you have it - Mac dictates and I write.

But keeping up with that speed while writing was not my cup of tea. Besides, it would either repeat the entire selected text when I asked it to speak again, or I would have to reselect the text omitting the part that I've already written. I knew I had seen a solution to this while playing around with Automator.

Command+Space > Typed "au", hit the Return key, and Automator was up and running. I created a workflow that had actions arranged this way:

• Get contents of TextEdit document
• Text to Audio file

Opened my document in TextEdit and executed the workflow and I had an AIFF file on my desktop. I opened it in iTunes and now everything seemed in place. I could see the text in TextEdit if required and had iTunes dictate to me the contents. With the media keys, it was not necessary for me to keep iTunes as the frontmost application. I could pause the playback whenever I felt Victoria was speaking too fast and could resume it with the press of a key. I could complete my assignment very quickly that way.

Completing an assignment was never so much fun :)

The Day the Mac Finally Arrived

29th July, 2008. The date will be recorded as an eventful day in my history - as the day the Mac finally arrived. It was definitely one of my happiest day. One of those when I literally shouted out "YaY!"

Not that it came to me as a complete surprise but after almost an year of rejected and postponed demands, when you finally get something you always yearned for, you do feel extraordinarily happy. I've been smiling with a smile so big, that at times I myself feel that my smile would extend out my face.

So finally, let me introduce to the world my cute little MacBook, which I got as a birthday gift on my 21st birthday.

It is a 13.3 inch white MacBook, with 2GB of RAM and 160GB of hard disk space and Intel's X1300 graphics chipset and a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor powers this beautiful machine.

As a true Apple fan, the MacBook was welcomed home with an un-boxing ceremony, pictures of which have been uploaded to Flickr.

Because I understand the value of this gift, I've decided I wont ask my parents to buy me anything, well not at least anytime soon. I'm just trying to be a good son you know ;)

All this family stuff reminds me of another promise that I made to myself -

"I'll never buy my children a Windows based PC. They will be iChildren. Smart Mac Kids ;)"

I even got a WiFi router so that I can use my internet connection on my Mac anywhere in the home. Ever since I laid hands on this beauty, I've been very happy. Mom says I'll put on weight because of that happiness. :) Well, perhaps they will never understand how it feels to free yourself from Gates and Windows. I've fallen in love with every single thing on my Mac, right from the way the icons on the dock bounce to notify you of certain events, to the screws on the sides. One of those things that I love a lot is the Apple logo on the lid that glows when I'm using my Mac.

With that and another sweet Welcome to Mr. Mac, I would end this post which also happens to be the first to be composed on the Mac.