Twitter is probably the most up-to-date source of both the most useless as well as the important issues of the day; it’s like a thousand free radio stations where some broadcast nothing but ads while the rest have schizophrenic DJs and reporters. So… it’s not like a radio station at all. But I still find this tweet-speaking radio to be an awesome mod.
The not-radio was made by Sean Hathaway, who calls his device “Volume and Noise.” It has a wooden case from an antique radio but its innards and display have been upgraded with equipment like a newer amplifier, an Arduino microcontroller and a meter that shows the number of tweets per minute.
It filters tweets based on user-defined search terms and then converts them to speech using synthetic voices. In the video below Volume and Noise is tuned in to political search terms. I like the addition of static and tuning sound effects.
I wonder if it would be possible to order it to make a voice command that tells the radio to save or mail a link to the tweet it just read. That way it would be even more useful.
[via MAKE]