speaking xmailbox
what is this?
The idea behind this xmailbox is very simple: what about a speaking
xmailbox? So, the result is a modified xmailbox program which is able to
speak From and Subject fields from the incoming mail. The
trick is to keep a time-stamp of mailbox file (the original xmailbox
was disturbed by the speaking program accessing the file).
what you need?
- patched xmailbox source
-
python interpreter
- a piece of hw to make some noise (sorry, no link here :-)
- a speech synthesis sw (now i'm using
rsynth-2.0 on my linux box; it's good enough for me but i'd like
to try some more, so please let me know if you know something else)
Everything is platform/system independent, so if your *NIX machine has
audio capabilities you should be lucky enough to find a speech synthesis
program and start this xmailbox.
If you have a linux-box and like the easy way you can download a
binary distribution (just be sure you
have sound support in your kernel). It contains xmailbox, say and ugotmail
programs (you're still needing a python interpreter).
how it works?
xmailbox is patched and it's keeping a time stamp (after system function
call); this new time stamp is used to decide if the mailbox was accessed by
another process (i.e. reader). I tried to keep the code as simple (and
clean) as possible and I think/hope I didn't changed the
normal program flow (w/o SndComm).
The python script is used to get from the mailbox From and
Subject fields; it also advances in the file to skip old messages.
xmailbox program keeps the length of the mailbox and is passing the starting
point via argv[1].
say (from rsynth) is used to convert the text to sound; the previous
script is making some changes in strings to avoid some wrong meaning of
special chars (need some more ....). Any program can be used, the calling
format is say "what to say".
what else?
nothing left to say. I hope you'll enjoy it; at least my folks got scared
hearing someone speaking while they were working on my linux-box.
hmmm, i said what else?
ok, if you insist ... one of the (unsolvable) problems is when starting
xmailbox with some new mail. It goes through entire mailbox file; this is
not a problem if you're good behaved (i.e. move your messages from mailbox
after reading), but if you have a lot of mail in it be prepared to hear a lot.
be sure you have *mailSndComm: /usr/local/bin/ugotmai in your
Xresource .... or whatever.
Mihai Manolescu
mmihai@golana.pub.ro
Last modified:
October 06, 2003
Last access:
September 01, 2010, 09:48
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