I've been using a MacBook Pro since starting my job at E.W. Scripps.  I've been torn about weather to use Mac OSX or Linux.  I've decided to take my wife's laptop I bought her for Christmas to work.  She didn't use it for 6 months because the power adapter won't stay plugged in.  On my desk it has no problem staying plugged in and provides a pretty quick Linux workstation.  The biggest issue is the fact that Nvidia won't release updated video drivers for the legacy card in it.  I'm running Fedora 9 on it, so compiz doesn't work.  I've installed the Fedora 8 xorg packages to get compiz working, but I'm not sure how long that will work since Fedora 10 is due out pretty soon.

Anyway back on topic.  One thing that I really like about the Mac is the text-to-speech, it is awesome.  Linux's text to speech through festival doesn't even compare.  I'm a slow reader and I think I comprehend things better when I hear them, so this is something I've wanted for a long time.  I use VMWare fusion to run Linux on the Mac desktop and I got to thinking, "I bet I could get Linux to send the Mac text to read and use it like a service".  After a little bit of playing with netcat I had it working.

Here is the portion that runs on the Mac, I put it in a file called say_listen.sh so I could run it as needed. #!/bin/sh while true; do  nc -l 1500 | say; done