You ask, "How do I listen to War and Peace, while I'm Jogging"?

Good question. Here's how you do it:

1. Be on a Linux system, to make the following easier
   
2. Go to the Festival web site, and download and build a copy of their speech synthesizer
   
3. Go to the Project Gutenberg site, and download "War and Peace"
   
4. Split the text of the book into chapters, using something like the following csplit command:
   
   
   
   • csplit blkhs10.txt '/^CHAPTER /' {66}
     
   
   
5. For each resulting text file, who's name will be something like xx00, xx01, ...
   
   
   
   • Change the name of the file to xx01.txt
     
   • run: festival/bin/text2wav xx01.txt -o xx01.wav
     
   • run: notlame xx01.wav xx01.mp3 (I forgot to mention, you need to download notlame)
     
   
   
6. Run out and buy a decent CD player, that can play mp3 files
   
7. Burn all of the mp3 files to cd
   

Or, automate the process, by using the following "make" entry, in a Makefile:

%.mp3 : %.txt
~festival//bin/text2wave $< -o $*.wav
notlame $*.wav $*.mp3
rm $*.wav

and then run the following foreach loop, in the c-shell:

foreach i (xx*.txt)
make $i:r.mp3
end

Just like blogging is personal publishing, audio blogging, is personal radio broadcasting. For example, check out here

Here's how to perform dull, repetitive tasks, such as washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom
and mowing the lawn, and avoid being bored. In fact, you'll look forward to these times.

1) Get one of those remote ear phone do-hickies that is normally used for watching TV without
disturbing your spouse.

2) Take the thing down to your basement, and plug it into the audio output of your pc.

3) Cruise over to someplace like wbur.com, and either fire up a live audio stream, or troll through the
archives until you find someting good.

4) Slap on the old earphones.

5) Go perform a dull repetitive task.

I know it's not rocket science, but boy is it fun.

I suppose you could use this for listening to music, so suit yourself.

One variation of this that I've tried, with dismal results, is to download a book by Charles Dickens from the Gutenberg project, and use the Festival speech synthesizer to have it "read to you". The problem is,
it's real hard to understand what they're saying, unless you've already read it.

For the past several months, I've noticed a couple of personal trends:

1) I'm less and less patient with passively tuning in to a media provider, such as a radio, and simply accepting whatever programming they throw at me. I'm much more inclined to find ways of queuing up exactly what I want, like an archive of On Point while I'm washing the dishes. If I felt I could afford a TiVo, I'd definitely be on board with that, but for now, I'll content myself with streaming audio from the web.

2) I'm trying to get myself geared up to be more of a producer of content, rather than a consumer of content. To wit, my first feature film, "Orange Alert", playing on a DVD near you. To other wit, this witty blog.