Sunday, December 25, 2011

Windows Vista asking "press the configuration button on the access point"?

WOW, reason 9,746 to move to Linux. My parents have a laptop with
Vista on it. Not a big deal, should do normal stuff and not require
much attention. I set them up with anti-virus and the UAC prevents
them from doing anything too silly without seeing the "oh noes!"
pop-up. I figured they were all set.

Well, come to find out, a well-intentioned person "helped" them with
their home network and computers (they have some apples too -- I wish
it was the fruit). The wireless network was WEP with the default SSID
and they were having problems adding a new laptop to the wireless. My
father didn't know what the passphrase was to the router and asked me
for some help resetting it. I easily hit the admin web page for the
router and guessed the password. I set the network to be WPA2-PSK and
gave it a nice passphrase they could remember, and proceeded to write
it down on the router for them. Tested the connection with my wife's
smart phone and the apple laptop.

Before I left my mother asked me to set the wireless network for her
laptop... her Vista laptop. (sense of dread yet? I should have felt
it). The kids were feeling tired and the wife wanted to get home to
get ready for Christmas morning. How hard could this be? The goofy
laptop detected the wireless network, I clicked to join it and the
crazy thing said "Press the configuration button on your wireless
access point."

It might as well have asked to pet my giraffe. WTF? At the bottom
there was a link to manually enter the PSK in case I could not find
the button.. thanks, I am an idiot and can't find a button? I entered
the PSK because pressing a button on a wireless router was dumb, silly
and for stupid people who waste their time. The problem is that then
Vista had a problem and couldn't connect to the wireless. Maybe I
typed the PSK in wrong.. multiple tries and it would not work! I had
looked at the router, it was a Netgear. (sense of dread yet? I should
have felt it).

Come to find out there is a crappy thing Netgear calls WPS or Wireless
Protected Setup. This "security" feature lets you press a button and
have the Vista device negotiate a WPA passphrase with the router.
Dumb! The problem is that WPA is crap and WPA2 is where the cool kids
hang out these days. So this crap will not work with Vista as it is
WPS-aware (although Microsoft is always blazing new trails of
stupidity and dumbness and calls it "Windows Connect Now").

Now I am looking at a Vista Home Basic laptop that needs Windows
Connect Now disabled. Google tells me that I can disable it with a
local Group Policy (yay!) but the Local Group Policy Editor does not
work on Vista Home Basic as GPOs are disabled on it (boo!). I found a
xlsx spreadsheet with mapping between GPOs and their registry keys
(yay!) but am not sure how to deciper the registry entries on the
spreadsheet (boo!).

They look like this:
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!EnableRegistrars,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!DisableUPnPRegistrar,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!DisableInBand802DOT1Registrar,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!DisableFlashConfigRegistrar,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!DisableWPDRegistrar,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!MaxWCNDeviceNumber,
HKLM/Software/Policies/Microsoft/WCN/Registrars!HigherPrecedenceRegistrar

Who names this stuff? My main issue is what does the Exclamation
point mean? Are those end values binary values, empty string values?
Who knows. I also disabled the Windows Connect Now service and hope
that does the trick. We will see...

What crap... time for bed.

If you are a lost soul and wondered about this, please comment below..
Any fixes are appreciated!

Monday, December 19, 2011

More booting USB drives with ISO images

So in a previous post (Linux bootable USB Drives )I discussed making USB drives that booted directly from a ISO. I first wanted to mention that I find this very useful when I want to install a new distro of Linux and do not want to fight my way through burning a CD or solving the mystery as to why uNetBootIn does not work for me in Linux. In theory, all I have to do is drop a new ISO in the thumb drive and reboot! How simple is that?
Not simple enough as to immediately after posting that I tried to reinstall my computer with the latest official version of Linux Mint12. When I dropped in the new ISO and rebooted I was greeted by:
"ERROR 60:File for drive emulation must be in one contiguous disk area"

I immediately invoked my Google Genius and started searching the web. Apparently booting from an ISO requires that the ISO be a contiguous file and is sensitive to FAT's issue of fragmenting files. The web offered the options of running windows tools to defragment the file, so I tried Contig.exe(Contig.exe). Maybe it does not work on linux, maybe it does not work with Wine, maybe I am a bonehead. I could not get it to actually fix anything as I ran the tool and then rebooted over and over. The real issue was that I had backed up a few files on the thumb drive then deleted the old ISO then added the new one. The thumb drive was actually fragmented, so I moved off all the files and then moved them back and it worked! So if you try the method in the previous post and you get a ERROR 60, try cleaning the thumb drive and then copying the files back.
In my haste in getting the files back together for the drive, I managed to edit the menu.lst too many times. I messed it up hard. When I was back and booting to the thumb drive, I started getting another error:
"Unable to find a medium containing a live file system" at a "(initramfs)" prompt.

Now what? Well Google told me that there are issues with people's motherboards where the thumb drive must be plugged into a port that Linux can see without extra drivers. Linux must also need to see the hard drives so if you have SATA on an unsupported 6meg connection, youmight need to move it to a 3meg connection. There are also problems on some motherboards where the SATA is in IDE mode and must be changed to AHCI mode. My problem was none of these, my problem was my Menu.Lst. I had goofed and put a space on the line that reads:
"kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casperiso-scan/filename=/mint.iso splash quiet --"

The space was after the "iso-scan", so if you have a problem like Idid you can save yourself a few hours and check the syntax closely. I hope this helps someone someday!

Friday, December 16, 2011

Automate Cisco ssh connections with plink in Windows

So, you are a hard working nerd and have a windows computer to manage
routers with. You also have a lot to do and would rather automate
some stuff with scripts. I can help you learn to use Plink to make
simple batch files to automate work!
*(unlike most of my other posts, this one is for the Windows universe
and does not cover use of plink or scripting in Linux)

Plink basics:

Plink is part of Putty and available at
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html (don't
download it from other places, this is the official location). It is
the command line interface for Putty and can be used in scripts. Be
sure to download the installer or the zip with all the files as Putty
is a great tool if you ever SSH, SCP or connect to network hardware in
general. The "latest development snapshot" is what I used for this
post, as things might change in the future and bugs be introduced or
other issues that would alter the information in this post -- please
use the stable release if you are timid.

Plink.exe is simple to use, but I have had problems with it and Linux
machines ("server refused keyboard-interactive authentication" issue).
That is why this post is all about Cisco, I have not had problems
there. An example to connect to a Cisco device is: c:\putty\plink.exe
cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD! where the user name is "cisco" with a
super secure password of "P@55W0rD!" connecting to a Cisco device with
an ip of 192.168.0.1. This command should get you a ">" prompt on the
device.

Scripting:

Wait! How to I script this? How do I get enable access? To do much
else you need to make a command file.

A command file is just a text file with the list of commands you want
to run, in the order you need to run them. Here is an example
(command.txt):

enable
3N@b73
show clock
show mem
show cpu
exit

If I were to run: c:\putty\plink.exe cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD!
-m command.txt then I would get the memory and cpu statistics
displayed on the screen. If I were to redirect the output to a text
file with a "double waka" (>>), like this: c:\putty\plink.exe
cisco@192.168.0.1 -pw P@55W0rD! -m command.txt >>
router_utilization.txt then I could have a text file with the date
and time, memory and cpu statistics. If this command were in a batch
file that was scheduled to run periodically then it could keep a
running log of the device.

For extra credit, how might we get this script to run and check stats
on different devices? If we make a separate file called "devices.txt"
that contained the IP addresses of the devices we need to monitor like
this:

192.168.0.1
192.168.10.22
192.168.10.24

Then we could run this command (provided that the account name,
password and enable password were the same on each device):

for /f %i in (devices.txt) do c:\putty\plink.exe cisco@%i -pw
P@55W0rD! -m command.txt >> device_utilization.txt

(if you put this in a batch file, be sure to use "%%i" and not the
"%i" as the batch will strip the single percents)

Enjoy!

Monday, November 28, 2011

Linux bootable USB Drives

I have a problem, I am not the proper combination of crazy/sexy/cool
to get the common tools for making bootable USB drives to work. I can
get uNetBootin ( http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net ) to work from
Windows, but not from Linux. As I have ditched Windows, having to use
windows to get the latest Linux distro CD image to boot from a USB
drive is... dumb.

I tried a bunch of tools and only succeeded in pulling out my
remaining hair. Then I found this article:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick and way,
way, way at the bottom of the article it has "Create Bootable USB
Manually". The manual process looks complex with extracting files
from the ISO and other business. As soon as I was happily taking
notes on how to follow this procedure I got to the part titled
"Simpler way using the ISO file"...

OMG! You can boot right from the ISO file itself?

So here is the process to create a bootable USB drive for a Linux LiveCD:

1. Download a LiveCD iso file. I chose Mint Linux 12 (it is my
favorite distro so far).
2. Download and extract Grub4Dos (
http://download.gna.org/grub4dos/grub4dos-0.4.4-2009-06-20.zip ).
3. Grab a junky USB drive with ~1 GB capacity and format it with FAT.
Pay attention to the device node of the USB drive.
4. Drop to a terminal window and run the following from the Grub4Dos folder:
#bootlace.com /dev/sdb (if your USB drive is at /dev/sdb!)
5. Copy grldr from the Grub4Dos folder to the USB drive.
6. Copy the LiveCD iso file to the USB drive. Pay attention to the
name of the ISO file.
7. Create a "menu.lst" file on the USB drive
The menu.lst file should look like this:

title Mint12 x64
find --set-root /mint.iso
map /mint.iso (0xff)
map --hook
root (0xff)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/mint.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/mint.iso splash quiet --
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

(it is one line starting "kernel" and the new line starts with "initrd")

8. You might need to change the Title to match your distro
(optional), replace "mint.iso" with the file name of your LiveCD iso,
and open the ISO to check for the name of the /preseed/.seed file
(ubuntu was "ubuntu.seed" and mint was "mint.seed").

Your mileage may vary, but I was able to use this to install Mint 12
on my laptop. When a new version comes out and I want to have a USB
drive that can be used to install it, all I have to do is replace the
"mint.iso" file with the new iso and I am all set.

This is the easiest way to get a bootable USB drive with a ISO... even
easier than actually using uNetBootin!

Friday, November 25, 2011

I am sorry Fire Fox, but I did try.

So I re-installed my computer over a week ago. I had been running
Ubuntu for a month and then thanks to the frustrations with Ubuntu
11.10 I went to Mint Linux (yeah, I used Linux full time for a month
and became a distribution snob in that amount of time.) The install
of Mint 12 went well and I really liked the layout and features (too
bad I really liked Ubuntu 11.04 more but I guess there is no going
back there).

Mint 12 claims support comes from, in part, the use of "Go Duck Go" (
http://duckduckgo.com/ ) as the search engine. I figured that while I
was trying Mint 12 that I would go all the way and avoid Google Chrome
and Google.com. It was very hard to break the habit. I almost fell
off the wagon several times the first day. After a few days I started
to work things out and enjoy the Google-free experience.

I don't like the idea that my web searches provide me results that are
based upon my geographic location and how often I visit specific
sites. Google tunes itself to provide results that are slanted toward
what it determines is your tastes. If you visit Fox news often and
perform a search, the results might be more along conservative lines.
If you visit Mother Jones and Huffington Post then the search results
might be more liberal. I consider myself very independent politically
and I don't like Google acting as a proxy to censor and spin the
world's news by various political groups. Sometimes I want to know
what Glenn Beck has to say and other times I want to know what John
Stewart has to say. I don't need Google deciding if I am 49% liberal
that day.

So, Go Duck Go is good, it is like google circa 2006 or so. You
search and you can guess that a similar search performed by another
person will yield similar results. So I used Go Duck Go a lot. The
problem is that I have become a Google power user.

I love to search from the browser bar. Firefox has mixed results with
that. I search images and videos and Go Duck Go has mixed results
with that. When I start up my browser and it just sits there waiting
for me to type the URL for where I want to go, I hate it. I have
become used to the Google "Most Visited Places" page. I just was
uncomfortable in FireFox, like a pair of pants or a sweater that were
just too tight in the wrong places. Today I gave it up and went back
to Chrome.

I want FireFox to be a success. I don't think Google dominance over
the web and phones is any better than a Microsoft Dominance (or Apple
dominance). I wanted to say that I switched back from Google to
FireFox just like I left Windows, but while I could leave Windows and
not look back (I love Gimp, Libre Office, Blender and have already
ditched NetFlix) -- I could not leave Google.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Thanks for nothing Adobe.

So Adobe is offering Flex to become open source (
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/11/15/1538209/adobe-to-donate-flex-sdk-to-open-source-community
) when they themselves admit that HTML5 is a better option.  So, Adobe
is basically abandoning Flash just after they added a 3d graphics game
engine and a bunch of zero-day vulnerabilities.  In looking back, the
lack of Flash was supposed to be a bad thing about the iPhone/iPad and
that Apple was wrong to think that Flash was unstable and bloated.
Then more features were added to Flash and it became unstable and
bloated on Android and Blackberry platforms.  More recently Adobe
killed Flash Lite so there would be no expectation to see Flash on
lower end devices, now Adobe is killing Flex.

I loved Flash.  I should preface that, I loved Flash the application
and not the plug-in.  I loved making cartoons and drawing with it, the
vectors in Flash were better than in Adobe Illustrator and the fact
you could animate and program with it sent me over the moon.  As I
became a web application developer, I saw the programmer oriented
nature of Flex to be very exciting.  With a MXML file I could write an
application that compiled into a SWF and could be used right away.
Flex was very exciting for programmers to make web applications that
didn't look like a programmer made it.

Then the dark days came.  Adobe bought Macromedia and didn't invest in
Apple, almost expecting Apple to roll over and die.  That was a bad
bet to make as the iPhone was about to become the most powerful
web-enabled tool ever.  Since Flash didn't run well on any Apple
device, ever, Steve Jobs hated Flash -- and now by proxy Adobe.  As
web pages worked to become more iPhone friendly the first thing to go
was Flash content, and in it's place HTML5 content supported by Webkit
in the Safari web browser.  As people invested in HTML 5 and fled the
old, old days of mandated IE 6 support, they realized HTML 5 was easy
and cool.  Suddenly it came to be understood that many of us were
using Flash to bring modern content and designs to IE 6 and now that
IE 6 was not the compatibility goal we became free to the new
possibilities of HTML 5.

Adobe dug in their heels and insisted the whole "HTML 5" thing was a
fad and that Flash was here to stay.  They pushed Android to use
Flash, they touted Blackberry Playbook's ability to run Flash...
(yuck)... in the end they are betting on a dead horse.  Flash will all
die and go away.  It will become irrelevant but not because better
solutions came along but because Adobe was dumb and tried to bring a
knife to a gun fight.  Had Adobe immediately re-tooled Flash to
compete and be compatible with HTML 5 and the associated technologies,
had Adobe taken Apple's distaste for Flash seriously, had Adobe
believed that if Steve Jobs says something is buggy, bloated, slow and
unstable -- it was... Had Adobe done anything different then we'd be
talking about how cool it is to run flash applications on Android,
iOS, Wii, XBox and everything else.

Instead we are talking about a half-hearted attempt to revive a
technology that held so much promise had it not been under Adobe's
control.  Open Sourcing Flex will not do anything.  Adobe had proven
their hate for Open Source when they killed off Air for Linux (another
promising technology for rich desktop applications developed in
Flash).  The Adobe Flash builder (formerly Adobe Flex Builder) remains
closed source and overpriced as a plug-in to Eclipse (they charge
money for an Eclipse plug-in!!).  Adobe turns to Open Source like a
guy asking a girl out on the night of the prom, it is just insulting
that Open Source would be their last choice when they have done little
to nothing for the movement in the past.  If they were serous about
Flash, they would Open Source the Flash Plug-in and then maybe get
back some stability.  Saying that Adobe is committed to Open Source by
giving away a mechanism to compile Open Code into closed (and buggy,
unstable, bloated, insecure...) plug-in bytecode is not helping
anyone.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Graphic Designers WAKE UP!

The Huffington Post has a logo contest. They are "crowdsourcing"
their logo design ( http://huff.to/p2cYht ). This is wrong! (
http://bit.ly/p8FEqy )

This is called speculative work, and it is wrong ( not just me saying
it, http://bit.ly/ocT9KO ). This adds to the mindset present in most
business students that creative people are a dime a dozen and need to
have business type people "manage" them. After all, no business
student would go out and set up a corporation in a contest but one
would figure graphic artists would line up for the chance to "win" the
opportunity to provide a logo (and "get credit for it, of course").

Imagine going to a doctor and telling them they have an opportunity to
"win" the chance for them to perform an appendectomy, for free (but
get credit for it, of course). A mechanic to compete for the chance
to fix your car for free, but get the credit (of course).

But compelling graphic design, creating a logo to represent all the
work of a popular web site, is work that they should pay nothing for.
I would argue that a graphic artist is every bit as skilled as a
mechanic yet a mechanic can charge an hourly fee without people
raising an eyebrow.

If photoshopping a logo was just as easy as that, then I am sure some
MBA can powerpoint up a OK logo in a few minutes.. then they would
have the crap they deserve and the price they are willing to pay.

Bing/Yahoo Search Effectiveness: Hype or Truth?

I use Google for everything -- almost a literal statement.

Prior to Google I used to have to write things down, remember things
but typically would forget things. Now we have Google. If you have
an inscrutable error message when you use Railo to call a Python
script calling a Mappoint COM object, you can Google it (rather than
paying for incident support from Railo and Microsoft and then have to
listen to them blame each other and then Python). If I want to
quickly know how much $47 in Canadian dollars is in US Dollars I can
search "47 CAD in USD" and know vs the old days where I would have to
call a bank or look for the exchange rate and do the math myself.
Google has made itself the center of the internet and have become rich
via ad revenue in the process.

As Google is the top dog, many others are trying to bring them down.
Google's main competition is Bing. I honestly never go to Bing (as I
never go to Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail or use Internet Explorer). I was
actually surprised to find out that Bing did offer a lot of the
features that I have come to count on in Google. If they are truly at
least equal, the remaining question is how equal are they?

Recently Experian Hitwise recently announced that Bing/Yahoo is more
efficient than Google ( http://bit.ly/mT5Qzc ). Can this be true? Is
Bing the better search engine? Is there an anti-Microsoft bias that
prevents habitual Google users from enjoying this "decision engine"?

Experian Hitwise defines a successful search as a search that results
in a user clicking a link to search results. So, if we are to accept
their methodology and definition, Bing searches result in the user
following a link to a web site more often than via Google. If Google
users do not follow a link on the results page, then what do they do?
Google visits must result in secondary searches or the user just
closing the tab more often than via Bing or Yahoo.

As a big, big Google fanboy I have to admit that I have had search
issues with Google for the past few months. While I don't know if
this report counts Google Calc queries or when I search something just
to find out the proper spelling, something subtle has changed, but I
don't get the results I am looking for like I used to. The above
example of the Railo/Python/Mappoint COM issue, I could not seem to
get the right combination of quotes and keywords to get the results I
needed. In Google's defense, Bing was of NO help either -- but the
Experian report didn't go into details about if the users then went to
Bing and were able to search and click a link. I was a user who
searched and searched again and added to the number reported. It
seems that if you are searching for something rather unusual but have
a more popular keyword in the search field, that popular keyword will
override the entire search. For example, if you were searching for a
scientist's paper who just happened to be named "Miles Kardashian" you
will never find him by name.

This is less a "Bing is superior" and more of a "Google fails to
provide results from time to time". I will still use Google as I was
able to eventually tweak my search query and get my results and that
would be a total mystery in Bing (plus I am still VERY angry about the
crappy Bing ads Microsoft put out).

Friday, April 22, 2011

End of Flock

Flock ( http://www.flock.com/ ) was a web browser ahead of its time.  It sought to be social before Twitter, Facebook and even MySpace.  In the age of blogs Flock was able to make posts from within the browser as easily as one might click "like" or "share" on a modern web page.  There was a time before "like" and I think Flock was a big reason why we have things like Twitter and Facebook.  Back then who could have imagined that the future of the web would be locked in content on just a few web pages when back then it was the wild west of blogs and user-owned sites.

These days, the process of buying a domain name, getting hosting and setting up a blog are totally alien to the average Internet user.  Can you imagine if each Facebook or Twitter user had to do that?  Services like Blogger simplified blogging and the process of posting to blogs was further simplified by Flock.  We now have an age where even blogger is too complex and inaccessible for modern users.  Even if such technologies were just as simple as Facebook or Twitter, between competition in the plugins added onto modern browsers and the use of mobile devices, a browser like Flock didn't stand a chance.

I used Flock for a long time.  I saw a lot of promise when it was first introduced to us.  I wish each developer well in the future, they have my thanks for a great tool and my admiration for such forward thinking (I'd love to pick their brain to learn what they think is the next big technology!)



Wednesday, March 9, 2011

DIY audio books with text to speech for free

So, recently I heard of plans for Guillermo del Toro to make a movie of HP Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness".  This news took me to google to find any Public Domain HP Lovecraft stories.  Specifically, HP Lovecraft stories published before 1923 are public domain.  The others might have to wait to be in the public domain in the United States thanks to the US Copyright acts of 1976 and 1998.  For example, "At the Mountains of Madness" was published in 1931, so the copyright should expire in 2026 -- only 15 more years.  Lucky readers of this in Europe can consider any of Lovecraft's work to be public domain because in Europe the copyright for a work is limited to 70 years after the creator's death.  Lovecraft died in 1937, so his work would have entered European public domain in 2007.

My desire to read his stories is limited by my time to do so.  With kids and work and everything I need to do in a day, I don't have the time to sit and read much of his work.  I am not a steady customer of any audobook service, so I decided to make my own audio book as read by a computer.  To do this I used ESpeak ( http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ ).  Just download the program by clicking the link at the top of the page and downloading "espeak" compiled for Windows about at the center of the following page (not espeakedit that is a different program).  Once downloaded, unzip the file and run "espeak-setup.exe" (simply hitting "next" at each step will be just fine for this process.)

Once installed, get the text you wish to turn into a audobook.  Project Gutenberg ( http://www.gutenberg.org ) is a great source for public domain texts, but I chose to get a Lovecraft story "The Rats in the Walls" ( http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.asp ).  You can either download the text as "txt" files or select the text from a web page and paste it into notepad and saved as a text file. 

Once you have a text file ready (be sure to look the file over for stray text if you copied it from the web), open espeak (it should be in your c:\program files\espeak\TTSAPP.exe ).  The interface is simple and does not offer much feedback when you are actually creating the audiobook file, so as you go through this process the program will seem to freeze but that is the application creating the audobook file.

The first setting to address in the TTSAPP program is to select a voice.  To get a feel for the voices, leave the text "Enter text you wish spoken here." in the main window and hit the "speak" button.  I suggest you use the "Microsoft Anna" voice, but test each one and decide which you would want to read a whole story to you.

To create the audiobook file, the first step is to use espeak to create a WAV file of the voice reading the text.  To do this, hit the "Open File" button and select the text file you wish to be read.  Once you are ready to have the voice read the text into a file, hit the "Save to .WAV" button and select a location to save the wav output file.  At this point the system will freeze.  The recording appears to occur near real time, so if this is a long story then the TTSAPP program will be  running for a long time.  Once the file is done, TTSAPP will pop up a message that it is complete.

Now you will have a decent sized WAV file, about 10MB per minute of audio.  This must be compressed before you put the file in an MP3 player.  The simplest way to do this is to import the WAV file into iTunes and then right click the file and hit "Create to MP3 version".  

If you don't have iTunes then another option is use Audacity ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ ) and LAME ( http://audacity.sourceforge.net/help/faq?s=install&i=lame-mp3 ).  Install Audacity and then download and install LAME into the LAME folder in the Audacity program files folder.  Once Audacity and LAME are installed and the WAV file is complete, open Audacity and use it to open the WAV file.  If you are feeling extra nerdy, you can split the WAV file into sections to make it easier to listen to.  To create a compressed MP3 version of the WAV file just hit File, Export and MP3 files in the location with the name of your choice.  Audacity will prompt you for the metadata for the MP3 file, this will be helpful if you plan to use this MP3 in an MP3 player.

Now you can enjoy your favorite public domain texts as read by your own personal robot!  Enjoy!


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