Comet Lulin Comes Closer

Comet Lulin will be on its closest approach (.41 AU) to earth on 24th February. It will not be much bright though (Max. magnitude 4.0 - 5.0). Still on a dark sky you may be able to spot it as a white splotch against the black sky. Look for it in the constellation Leo [skymap]. It will lie only a few degrees from saturn. The comet actually looks green through powerful telescopes. This is because, its gassy atmosphere, of the size of Jupiter, contains cyanogen(CN) and diatomic carbon(C₂), both glow green in sunlight.

eSpeak Speech Synthesizer

eSpeak is a open-source text to speech engine that comes with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It can read text files or stdin inputs.

To invoke it open a terminal and type

$ espeak

Now each line you enter into the prompt will be read aloud.

Create Your Own Font

You can turn your own handwriting into a font with this free service at yourfonts.com. You can print the templates they provide and fill them up by hand. Or if you don't have a printer, you can edit the templates using some image editing software. After you are done with the templates, scan and upload them to their website. Within a minute you will have your font ready to download.

Well, the fonts generated in this way may not look good until you fine tune them with some font editing software.

To install this font in Ubuntu linux, copy the ttf file to the .fonts directory in your home folder.