speed reading
By anders pearson 01 Mar 2004
Trevor Smith wrote a neat little java applet to help people speed read Cory Doctorow's "Eastern Standard Tribe". Joe Gregario does a good job explaining what it's like to use the applet.
i thought it was a pretty cool idea, but its potential was limited by being a java applet. i immediately wanted to be able to use it to read any text file or webpage. i also wanted to be able to stop in the middle of a book, close the browser, and resume in the same spot days later.
so i wrote up a quick python app that let me do just that. feel free to grab the code. it's pretty rough around the edges and the interface is ugly (especially the fonts), but it should be pretty straightforward. the html parsing is not guaranteed to be flawless; it just extracts all text from the <body> of the webpage and displays it. so if there's weird stuff like inline javascript, that will get displayed. i haven't tested it anywhere but on my linux box, but it should run on any system with python installed. if you can or can't get it running on windows or OS X, let me know.