Some misc…

I cobbled together a  speed reading mode for xemacs based on my earlier post about dyslexia. There are certainly a lot of directions this thing could go in.

Since I released that publically I also released this little per script AIM2Growl that I run in the background. It signs onto AIM given the screen name and password given on the command line and any messages sent to that screen name are then passed onto Growl (a Mac OS X utility that posts transient alerts to the user). I have many IM persona, one of them has some bots (e.g. Cornell Corona as buddies and these bots post notices of interesting things. Some of the scripts that monitor the health of my machines also IM that persona.

Since the speed reading mode only works in emacs I wanted and i wanted to be able to read postscript files I went looking for the tools to do that. txutils.el enhances emac’s view-file command to automatically convert file formats into text or html. Then you’ll need pdftotext which is bundled with xpdf.

The easy way to install xpdf on the mac is sudo port install xpdf, presuming you have port installed.