Posts Tagged ‘system’
Software That Doesn’t Require Your Fingertips
I have been writing a lot about Dragon NaturallySpeaking Software lately. I absolutely love how it saves me time writing posts. If you see the post before this one, it is almost 700 words. I used the software and with editing (mainly because I decided to reword things), it took less than 10 minutes. This software is a bloggers dream. Life is so much easier when I can write a 700 word post in the little bit of time I catch here and there during the day. The best thing is that I am not the only one who thinks so:
Drew of the BenSpark has put together a great little video demonstrating Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Drew has been blogging for quite some time and he might just be one of the best mobile bloggers that I know. He is probably more famous for his picture a day work as he is an excellent photographer. But I can’t help be amazed at how much content he creates and the high level of quality in that content.
He’s definitely a blogger that employs best practices when he finds them. And based on this video, it looks like he might see some potential in Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Now I am not trying to put an endorsement in Drew’s mouth. Time will tell, but I do think he is off to an excellent start.
You’ll notice in his video, that the sound quality of his video is excellent. That’s actually an important aspect for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I don’t mean that you need good video quality or sound quality in a video to make Dragon NaturallySpeaking work. However you do need a good microphone, and it should be a noise canceling microphone at that. The better the sound quality, and the better able your microphone is to remove other background noises, the better your system will be able to recognize the words that you say as fast as you say them and transcribe them accurately.
Now Dragon NaturallySpeaking comes with a noise cancellation microphone that works very well when you buy it out of the box. Drew is working with a download version that does not come with a microphone, and so he had to supply his own.
As I write this article, I am using a wireless headset microphone from Logitech. I’ve been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for almost two years now, but I’ve just recently untethered myself from Dragon NaturallySpeaking and started using a wireless headset microphone with noise cancellation capabilities. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 does have the capability of working with Bluetooth wireless microphones, but my particular microphone runs on 2.4 GHz wireless technology. Now if you live in a household or work in an office environment where there are a number of systems or phones or microwaves, you may experience some interference with this particular headset. In that case, you will probably be better served with either a Bluetooth headset or a headset that is capable of being plugged directly into your computer through the microphone plug or through USB. I don’t have that issue, and so I do get excellent quality with little to no interference at all.
So if you take an interest in Dragon NaturallySpeaking and want to try it for yourself, I highly recommend that you get a boxed version of the software which you can order from Nuance online. You can even get a good deal on a Bluetooth wireless headset and a bundled option from Nuance. If you’re looking for entry level pricing, you can start using the software and get a headset microphone for as little as $99.
To put that in context, I’ve taken three typing classes over the years to boost my typing speed and spent essentially three semesters practicing at typing. It wasn’t the only thing that I studied, but I spent a lot of time building up my typing skill. With Dragon NaturallySpeaking, you can invest $99, invest an hour installing the software (I’m being very conservative with that time estimate) and as little as 10 minutes training the software to recognize your voice before you can be off and running typing at 150 words per minute!
That is pretty amazing, and well worth the value of $99. Not to mention if you spend a little extra and get a wireless headset microphone, you can pace around your room or your office, you can exercise, or do a number of different things other than sit at a computer desk staring at your computer all day long. 
$99 basically gives you your freedom,and who wouldn’t want to type at 150 WPM for $99?
Best regards,
Brett Bumeter
www.softduit.com
My name is Brett Bumeter, and I wrote the article above and 4 1/2 minutes. The article is about 659 words long, and that translates into 144 words per minute. Add in two minutes for editing, and that’s still 100 words per minute!
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Vista and Updates
For any of you who I normally drop Entrecards on, I missed you all yesterday with all my blogs. The first time I attempted to drop, the entire system was down. When I tried to do it last night, I messed up big time.
During the day yesterday, I had downloaded a Windows Update. All day long, it kept wanting me to reboot which I did not want to do. I went grocery shopping last night, and while I was gone, my laptop rebooted itself. When it did that, it installed the updates. I think it installed Service Pack 1 for Vista. No biggy, I thought. Boy was I wrong.
The updates took over an hour to install which was the time I needed to drop my cards. Trust me, a lot of swearing was going on here. The crazy thing is that I think my laptop is slower now. Aren’t updates suppose to make it faster? Needless to say, I apologize to anyone I missed dropping on yesterday.
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Bluehost Woes
I am seriously upset/angry/frustrated, and I am not sure what other emotions I am feeling either (and no this isn’t about those cicadas that have decided to leave their casings on our swing sets). Instead, this is a post about my hosting company. I have talked a lot of great things about Bluehost. They have always done right by me until now. I sat through the CPU issues last fall that all of us Bluehost users were getting and being told by support that it was us and low and behold it wasn’t us. It was Bluehost.
Over the last several weeks, I have been dealing with Bluehost’s ticketing system and phone support. I have been getting CPU errors daily. Since I monetize my blogs, it is very important that they do not go down either for 5 minutes or for 5 hours. It is seriously frustrating. I have gotten to the point that I can read the Bluehost Error Log and CPU exceeded logs better than their support people! My frustration lies in that their support is a lot of times less than helpful.
I’m sorry, but I expect your phone people to know more than me. I also expect them not to have to refer me to the ticket people who take days sometime to answer their tickets. Also, if they don’t know what the problem really is, they shouldn’t be upselling me to the $20 a month plan. When I ask if I’ll still get CPU errors since the problem wasn’t fixed, I don’t know isn’t the right answer. I expect that after 3 weeks we would figure out what the problem is. I expect your ticket people to read my prior tickets and know that what they are telling me, I ALREADY DID! (and not close said ticket). I expect that when you need my license to give me permission for SSH access that the uploader thing works, so your customers aren’t waiting for a week with nobody telling them that you couldn’t open the file I sent!
Granted, along the way, I actually had some extremely helpful support people who forwarded me links and documents to try. However, my problem still isn’t fixed. My sites are still going down daily. At least the phone support person today was kind enough to tell me how to send in my ticket and have it escalated. Whatever my issue is, the phone person couldn’t even access my file manager without crashing his computer. I am running 6 WP blogs, so it isn’t like there is anything that is all that labor intensive or any special programming involved here.
I seriously could use some help here Bluehost. I really want you to come through, but it isn’t looking promising. I really need somebody to tell me why all my CPU errors look like this: used 1.06 seconds of cpu time for php5 or this: used 0.75 seconds of cpu time for /ramdisk/bin/php5 or this: seconds of cpu time for PROCESS : php5. If anybody can tell me how to fix this, I would appreciate it. In the meantime, I have started looking at other hosting companies, because I can’t let this go on to much longer. You are costing me money.
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