I have been conducting a few tests today with the Jing Video Capture tool from TechSmith.  I learned about this in September at the Podcast and New Media Expo, TechSmith had a great product and I didn’t need to be won over with advertising pens.  (note, it took me a few attempts to figure out how to install it on my machine running XP Media Center)

I noticed that when my microphone was set to red in Dragon Naturally Speaking, this seemed to turn off the microphone for Jing too.  Dragon Naturally Speaking does not normally have universal control over the microphone for other applications and I routinely shit in and out of it with other voice programs or recording programs.

I’m going to attempt to embed the video I created and published to TechSmith’s site, Screencast.com.

Here is the text I wrote with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 during the test (not very polished, but it is what it is)

This is a quick experiment to see if I can use Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 at the same time that I’m using Jing. Jing is a video capture software program from TechSmith.

The first time I tried this program I had the microphone for Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 turned off and I attempted to record sound with the video. The sound did not work on the video capture program. This time I have the microphone on for Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I’m wondering if there’s an incompatibility with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Jing.

As you can see Dragon NaturallySpeaking doesn’t like to spell the word Jing very much.

Note, I to get the actual video installed, shared on this blog, the steps were not obvious and I had to backwards engineer some code.  I suspect that this will be an area that I will focus my initial efforts to figure out the best way to apply the use of this tool.

Page Popularity for Site: 25% [?]

Quest to Build an Entertainment Empire

I am on a quest to build an entertainment empire.  The world of entertainment cannot fulfill the demand for programming on TV.  Most every network rely significantly on reality TV and the quality of entertainment has dropped dramatically. 

Consumers meanwhile have developed more sophisticated tastes and demand better entertainment.  So I’m working to grow and entertainment empire that can fulfill that demand with hundreds of thousands of writers and actors and comedians and musicians.

2 Point 4 Children Case Study

I’d like to give you an example of a great British televeision program that was taken off the air after running for about eight years.  The show was called 2Point4 children and it aired from about 1991 until 1999.

I know of the show because a good friend of mine married one of the actresses from the show.  Her name now is Kim Dodge and she goes by the nickname K T Dodge and even has a blog of the same name. 

K T Dodge is Kim Benson from 2Point4 Children

On the show, 2Point4 Children she was known as Kim Benson and worked as a British Comedy actress for many years playing on Grange Hill in the late 70’s and working on many more shows since.

Today, many TV shows end before their time, due to the fact that the writers often times extinguish their effort on working the same material.  I believe that with an army of many more writers from all around the world, shows could enjoy a much longer life span and characters such as Kim Benson’s Christine could even be expanded out more to get people interested in the different angles and twists that character development could take when a cadre of writers really puts their best foot forward.

Kim Benson as Christine - A Character that Could have Been Developed More

Kim Benson appeared as Christine starting in season 2 and running through the end of 2Point4 Children, but those appearances like many other actors and actresses on the show could have been grown out even more, developing a number of twists and plot opportunities that a typical linear television program has been limited to in the past.

That linear thinking surrounding television programs is rapidly going to come to an end as more people demand more television programing of high quality.  Developing television character universes following characters like Kim Benson’s Christine and others from 2Point4 Children will enable multiple groups of writers to work on the same universe of related shows, co-mingling ideas and plot opportunities and greatly expanding the potential of a television franchise.

Example of 2 Point 4 Children Excerpt (doesn’t included Kim Benson’s Character)

Page Popularity for Site: 29% [?]

Last weekend I had the opportunity to talk with the developers of Snagit at the Podcast and New Media (Video) Expo in Ontario California.  This was my second year attending the show.  Next year it is growing up and moving to Vegas.

Anyway, I learned about a simple new screen capture program that TechSmith  (the makers of SnagIt and Camtasia) are working on.  Its a free software called, Jing.  It is like a super light and simple version of Camtasia.

You can snap screen shots, or capture video and upload and share it fast. 

Think screen capture mixed with YouTube, but faster and easier than both, oh and very very very basic and simple tools.

The Jing download is simple too, just 4.4mb and you are ready to run.

The .NET Problem

Jing requires a .NET installation on your computer to run.  I have .NET, but its installed on a separate machine.  When I attempted to run the installation, it died on me. 

So tomorrow, i will try and get VB .NET installed on this machine and then attempt to get Jingy on my machine.

If that doesn’t work, then I’ll try and contact the developers again to see what gives.

In the mean time, I’m diving back into my stack of work, as I attempt to catch up with a backlog of new business and projects.  I might as well mainline diet coke at this point or maybe get a diet patch for coke or something.  Anyone have a spare caffeine patch???

Page Popularity for Site: 13% [?]

I attempted an experiment on Sunday.  I wanted to see if I could drive and write with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 at the same time. 

Safety was my primary goal, so I utilized a hands free microphone, similar to one that I have for my cell phone.  I strapped my laptop down to a table top attached to the passenger’s seat and powered my laptop with a DC converter.

Here’s a video of the mobile transcription experiment as well as some of the results:

Here’s what I initially wrote as I got started

I am getting ready to take off in my van. I have Dragon Naturally Speaking preferred 9 running on my laptop which is strapped down to a table top attached to my passenger seat.

I’m backing out of my driveway right now looking backwards what you were going to be very careful.

I kind of look at this like I’m dictating what I’m doing to get warmed up before I start writing a few e-mails.

Alright I’m headed down the road, I just turn off my wireless on my laptop. I figure there’s no reason to confuse my computer while it attempts to transmit to a WiFi router that’s not there. I’m going over a set of railroad tracks right now(note that didn?t get transcribed correctly so I had to edit it ) I was curious to see how a shaken up computer tends to work with Dragon Naturally Speaking, and all in all it didn?t do bad.

So I’m heading to a client’s house to help them establish three things:

1. An e-commerce website including a business front contact information policies such as privacy policy returns and warranty policy and more
2. A shopping cart
3. And a professional business blog which they will use to provide tutorials for the products that they sell (they offer a wholesale storefront for remodelers and in addition to everything else they’re going to show visitors how to install some of the products they sell, make repairs or even maintain DIY equipment and tools.)

So I loaded up my car with all the essentials, my laptop, my projector, a TV tray to put any of those things on if I need extra space.

As I am driving on the road, I realize that I forgot a couple things like a blank CD or blank DVD, I plan on recording a few videos of the tutorial that I’m going to create for them and I want to give them the DVD at the end of it so that they can go back and watch lessons over again if they need a reminder on any of the things I will be training them on as we establish their site. This will also establish a good record of what they did and why they did it in case they need to make a change in the future.

For more Dragon Naturally Speaking articles, videos and tutorials.

Page Popularity for Site: 15% [?]

For several months now you’ve been listening to me reading some of my words about Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 9. In the early days I took a typing test of Dragon NaturallySpeaking just a few days after I’d taken it out of the box. At the time I attempted to take that typing test under fairly good conditions.

There wasn’t much background noise, no distractions and everything was just about right. The computer was nice and cool and freshly rebooted there weren’t a lot of other programs running either. Well today I wanted to test it again under tougher conditions.

So I took my laptop outside, where was about 94° outside. I was standing immediately underneath a ceiling fan blazing on high, there are lots of external noises around kids playing outside dogs barking and various other items. I had a mess of programs open on my desktop including Firefox which had been running all day and is a notorious memory hog.

So I went and found my infamous British typing tests. These are a PHP-based typing test. It’s not java like many other online typing tests, and it allows me to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to read the words of the test and have a transcription automatically created in a box that is then checked for accuracy and speed.

Typing tests in general are set up in a way that forces typers to try and use all of their fingers on many different keys. So they tend to use atypical words with atypical sentence structure. For the test I took, the words in the sentence structure, were very unfamiliar to me.

In fact you could say they were foreign to me in most cases. Some some of those words may have been old English, or possibly Scottish or Yiddish for all I know. but they definitely weren’t easy!

So here’s the video I put together to show you how this all transpired and how well it worked. As I warmed up to the typing test, I eventually hit a top speed that was higher than I’d seen before.

168 words per minute with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Preferred!

but wait until you see the other issues I ran into . . .

Page Popularity for Site: 19% [?]