Last month I picked up a little hard drive, and it has rapidly become my favorite new electronic gizmo.  Its a hard drive and that may not sound glamorous or even as fun as GTA IV, but it just might be.

Its a 320GB Western Digital hard drive.  Its completely powered by USB, so I do not need any extra power cables or anything.  Its just a little longer than my Treo 700 and its half as thick!

This drive works with USB 2.0 and the drive is fast.  One of the things that I like about it is that its easier to add on to a laptop than doing a hard drive upgrade.

My current laptop has a 120 GB hard drive, and its pretty much full with pictures and video (from all of the tutorials and Camtasia videos that I create.

Upgrading a laptop hard drive is expensive and a little tedious.  But you can just plug in and play this micro monster.

Plus, its generally cheaper than upgrading your laptop hard drive too.

This only costs $135 at Buy.com for example.

Other Sizes

Now, I needed a lot of space because of my video work, but you can get smaller sizes (for less money too).   The 160 GB version from Western Digital is featured as one of Buy.com’s weekly deals with free shipping no less at a total of $79.99. 

Its the same size in physical dimensions and looks the same as well.   Or the in between size is 250 GB and costs about $113.  Color is not important for me, but if you are looking for color, they come in just about everything under the rainbow from black, red, blue, yellow, orange etc.  If you want sturdy and tough, there is a titanium cased version that typically costs an extra $10.

Now if you go looking for these, they are in the ‘My Passport’ Line.  There is also a ‘My Book’ line as well.  The My Passports are the thin little USB powered hard drives.

When You Need a Terabyte Drive

The My Books are named because they are about the size of a thin Harry Potter Book, but they have the added capability of being able to hold up to a terabyte of data and they can be configured to run on a network all by themselves.  I’m looking at getting one of those terabyte drives next.

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I have a Sony IC Recorder ICD-UX70.  It is not sold to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, but works just fine.  It cost me $100.  For $200 you can buy a Sony Recorder that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 software, and I consider that a great bargain.

I bought my software, Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Preferred, over a year ago and bought the recorder later.  In total I spent $150 for the software and $100 for the recorder.  Total $250.

Since the Sony IC recorder doesn’t come made for DNS 9, I had to do some trial and error testing to figure out the best settings on my recorder for Automatic computer transcription.  (I recorded something on my sony recorder by speaking into it.  Then ran the mp3 file it generated through Dragon Naturally Speaking 9, which transcribed my voice into text.  You can see the results below for each of the recording quality settings on my Sony IC Recorder.

This is the original Text that I read aloud:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the most accurate speech recognition product Nuance has ever developed - delivering up to 99% accuracy! Dragon NaturallySpeaking Professional 9 is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

Here are 4 quick tips to duplicate my results or just get good results for every day voice transcription. 

1. If you run a file through transcription and it seems to get it dead wrong, or if the first few words are incorrect, try running the file from the beginning all over again.  Sometimes your machine just needs a fresh start at a transcription. 
2. Hold your MP3 recorder a couple inches to the side of your mouth.  I hold mine with my right hand to the right side of my mouth so that it doesn’t pick up my breathing too much.
3. Plus, when creating a voice file that should be transcribed, I try to allow 5 seconds of silence at the beginning of the recording to give my computer time to start the transcription process.
4. Set your microphone sensitivity to low

This is the Transcription results at 5 different quality settings. 

Note. I have not trained the software to work with my digital recorder.  I did not make any effort to correct the transcription.  If I had subsequent transcriptions would have substituted the word ‘nine’ for the number 9 for example.

ST - 192 kbps - Very Accurate, bit rate might consume too much memory, but fine if you will sync up file on rapid basis (37 seconds 887 kilobyte file size)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuances ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

 

STSP - 128 kbps  - Very Accurate, Recommended, also good for Podcast quality (37 seconds 589 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate speech recognition product nuance has ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on the job.

STLP - 48 kbps - Decent and definitely workable (36 seconds 218 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate recognition product new one is ever developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals who once worked faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome on the job.

SP - 32 kbps - Not Optimal, but could be better (35 seconds 141 kb)

Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the most accurate beach recognition product and once is never developed-delivering up to 99% accuracy!  Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional nine is the ideal solution for busy corporate professionals want to work faster or organizations looking to keep people with disabilities, such as carpal tunnel syndrome, on-the-job.

LP - 8 kbps - Not Recommended - Barely Functional (34 seconds 34.7 kb)

Him in an in him or over and and and and or allowing for which you will will work for your or should look to the work of the to him or her on.

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