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That was the first test. Nothing spectacular and the audio could have been better. I have to figure the audio out a bit more as I fine tune my recipes for nocturnal web cam tests.

The thing is that I do a lot of work with technology, including video conferences.  Now, at night if I run my normal web cam, it doesn’t pick up my image too well, because it is dark in the office.  If I turn on too many lights, it will be a bug magnet.

So a year or two back we had some break ins around the neighborhood in our old house.  I happened through Sam’s Club one day and bought a security camera with night vision capability for $40.  Its been sitting in a closet ever since.

But this evening, I am going to try and connect it up through my web cam connections and see if I can use it for a night vision web cam.

I’m sure there will probably not be too many people in need of this type of setup, but if it works, I’ll let you know!

Its this type of weird stuff that makes my job fun anyway and it sure beats the conversations I used to have about budget software, ERP systems, etc. when I worked as a finance manager. ….

In fact on some nights, you may even need two.

The trick is that you can’t put these in the actual office area.  You need to station them about 20 - 40 feet away so that when they draw bugs to them, they do not draw bugs in a cloud around the zapper and you in the office!

I’m actually looking at possibly installing a second bug zapper some where near my office soon.  The current bug zapper zaps a lot of bugs.  Every morning there is literally a pile of dead bugs below the zapper, but I need just a little bit more to keep my work area cleared out of the biting little buggers otherwise I will unjustly enrich the pharmaceutical companies buying up bug repellant and bug bite medicine…

Life could be worse but right now it is good!

It came with 1 gig of ram and the hard drive spun at 5400 rpms, which was slower than my previous laptop, which I had upgraded to 7200 rpms.  I always meant to upgrade the hard drive but just never had the time or extra few bucks to get to it.

Well, last weekend, my computer finally hit the 111 gigabytes full level and the computer wasn’t running right in my Dock-Office (Dockffice) because temperatures here are in the 90’s.

I’ve been doing more and more video work and that just fills up hard drive space very fast.  I hit the road and headed to Office Depot when I picked up a flyer offering a clearance deal before they reset for back to school stuff at twice the price.

I made it there and picked up a new router and wireless card.  Its a 1 gigabyte linksys router and card.  Then I headed to Best Buy where I picked up a 7200 rpm 200 gigabyte replacement drive for my laptop along with a 1 terabyte external western digital hard drive.  I intended to get the networkable drive from western digital but opted for the $140 cheaper drive that plugs in via usb. 

Next time the networkable drives drop in price, I’ll buy a 1 or 2 terabyte drive and then connect my existing 1 terabyte drive to that future drive and have 2 or 3 terabytes of space on my network.

I also picked up a high speed laptop cooling base station thing, to keep my laptop cool while it runs in my dockffice desktop (essentially a high top stocked bar).

All said and told I have a great deal more capacity and even more speed than I had before, which is definitely helping me get and keep things organized while I work more efficie ntly and effectively.

It has been a long time since I was impressed with a hardware buy ( I seem to recall with awe buying a 100 megabyte hard drive about 12 years ago thinking that was amazing). 

Now I have more space on my computer arrangement than I my entire company had working in a high rise in Atlanta including 30 some laptops and 3 servers running a $100 million dollar distribution business (owned by crooks in China that I turned into the IRS but that’s another story . . . .  ;)  ).

I’m sure this space will seem like a drop in the bucket after my video production moves to hi definition and I start working with multiple video inputs plugged in to a HDMI switch output to god knows what.  Maybe I’ll have to rent an exobyte (no idea how to even spell that ) from Google located in their new server room on the dark side of the moon operating at close to absolute zero temperatures or something.

During that time I came to like Skype a great deal more, especially the video call capability.

However, it has also been a little problematic.  I sometimes lose sound or video for no reason and feel like I have to live in the Skype Options box, to keep the thing running properly.

The point that I am trying to make is that Skype is fantastic (and cheap) but it is only as good as your computer acts on your computer’s worst day.  That means that if you want to live by Skype, you have to be prepared to die by skype whenever and where every your computer might take a dump on you.

Rant Follows

I do not know why but for some insane reason, my computer likes to automatically change my microphone to mute from time to time without telling me.  It also likes to lose track of my video camera input as well.  Its one of those asinine problems that is about as fun to deal with as going to your doctors office and reading an obscure medical journal on lipovox reviews or something else almost useless for your day to day life.

Yet, I am hopeful that I will be able to reinitiate my work with the site and finish the new site before too much more time passes.  I have actually had several good weeks back-to-back so my spirits are high due to the progress I have made for others, but somewhat dampened in that I have not made progress for myself.

This might seem like a bit of a contradiction as the work I am doing is for the customers of my business.  However, the subtlety here lies in the fact that once I finish the site upgrade, I will be able to support more customers and support all of them more effectively.  So essentially, much of the work I am doing today is being done with more difficulty than would be needed had I finished my upgrade.

That sense of continued inefficiency is the aspect of this situation that troubles me a bit even when other things are going so well.  To put it into a bad analogy, it would be like a doctor prescribing Phentermine weight loss pills to a weight loss patient a week before providing liposuction surgery.

	Andrew Ian Dodge is a 37 year old American expat living and working in London. He is a writer, author, novelist, blogger, political consultant  (his full time work) and the lyricist/frontman for Growing Old Disgracefully.
Website(s): www.andrewiandodge.com www.disgracefulmusic.com Profile: Andrew Ian Dodge on LinkedIn	He has been writing mythos stories for many years and has written an Idiots Guide to the Mythos.

Here are Andrew’s initial impressions of MacDictate along with some Screenshots of the User Interface

I have been asked to review MacDictate and use MacDictate to write my review . Now I bought MacDictate for my father but it is becoming rather useful for me as I am going through chemotherapy and have suffered from painful fingers. This affliction meant that I was unable to type anything longer than a sure I am chat. I was interested to see how easy it would be to use this sort of programme for someone who writes as much as I do.

I have been planning to buy MacDictate for my father who is not as good a typist and is rather sick of his hunt and pecking. I was surprised and pleased that MacDictate was so easy to set up. Now it might be rather unfair of me owing to the fact that I have both radio and podcasting experience. In fact I have been both behind and in front of the microphone many times. One learns very quickly to speak clearly if one is trying to get a point across on radio or television. It also may help that I have a so-called transatlantic accent which has a limited amount of regional dialect.

The package is quite an impressive one including a microphone headset and the software. The programme is rather easy to install and the training mechanism does not take too much effort to get right.

This does not need spending hours and hours training the software and you can get right to work fairly quickly.

My experience with such programmes goes back a few years and I’m impressed at the improvements made in MacDictate for the Macintosh with the Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition engine. Now I’ve only had it for a very few days and have yet to fully use all its varied abilities. However initial impressions bowled from installation and initial use a very good indeed. From these initial impressions I would recommend this to anyone in need of a decent piece of dictation software.

….

so there are some initial glimpses of MacDictate.  We hope to have some video capture of the program in action before too long.  We are also chasing down a story about video gamers using dictation to capture their moves, cheats, and conversations for publication when gaming on platforms such as the PS3 and XBox 360.

It was the Sling Box, and it basically lets you watch movies on your TiVo from anywhere in the world if you’re connected to the Internet. Back then I saw the technology I thought that it was executed very well and look pretty cool, but I couldn’t envision the practical use.

Sometimes you just have to let a technology sink in within your brain and give yourself time to envision a use for it. That’s kind of way it is for me with the Sling Box. More and more of my mobile computing is un-tethering myself or my office and for my home and I’m starting to see the uses of potentially having a connection to movies or news recordings on my TiVo.

In part this is probably due to the fact that I do a lot of work with news and media need to stay in touch with things. It definitely has something to do with the fact that I have a WiFi office on a fishing dock and also because I use an air card quite a bit these days as well.

Back in January I couldn’t envision watching TV for my computer very often. But now it seems like every time I turn around I think of a new use for such technology and it makes they consider or reconsider other technologies that I have rolled my eyes at in the past because I wasn’t quite wise enough to figure out a good use for it.

I haven’t purchased a Sling Box yet, so I’m not going to be putting it to the test probably before the summers out, but I have seen that the prices are coming down rapidly. If you take a look at the Sling Box on buy.com its featured in their weekly sale, you can see that the price is coming in under $200 now down from almost double that price not so long ago.

And consumer-electronics terms, that is a good sign that the product is popular with people and that they were buying enough of the product so that the overall cost of manufacturing can come down and the subsequent cost of sales of the product can come down as well.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see this product offered as part of a basic cable lineup package sometime next summer. Dish network already offers its as an accessory, but is not a standard item yet maybe someday and maybe then I’ll pick it up.

If I haven’t purchased at all ready.

I compared several different tools and pulled the trigger on CSS Menu Writer a Dreamweaver extension.

To make a long story short, the software did not do what I expected nor did it do much of anything the way I expected it to do it!

That said after essentially walking through one user issue after the next all week long, by the end of the week, I had figured out how the tool actually works, and I had conceived a way to achieve my goal anyway, even though the software isn’t actually designed to make things such as I wanted, easy.

Fortunately, I have some strengths in working with content management systems and databases, and so I was able to compensate for the software programs shortcomings and still use some of its capability to achieve the same result.  So now, I am back off to the races to work to finish migrating the site over into the new system and make up for the week I lost with the wisdom that I gained.

One of my primary goals is to have the new site up and tuned heavily before August when I will fly out to LA and Vegas for back to back conventions.  By the time those events come around, I want to insure that my website is reliable and make the least of my worries be the search for some good hotel deals.

I’ve been using PaperPort 9, that came with my amazing Brother Printer, copy machine, scanner and fax with a feeder tray.  Plus, I had a lite version of OmniPage that has served me very well over the years when I needed to convert a lot of paper text into something machine readable.

So these good programs are not my work horses.  I do not turn to them every day like some programs, but when I use them I use them heavily and they save me a lot of time and even more money.  For me an average single usage of OmniPage can easily cover the cost of the software.

PaperPort is similarly useful as it enables me to easily (very very very easily) manage a library of PDF documents, including bills and receipts and things that would have been kept in paper files without taking up all the space.  Plus, the information is at my finger tips when I need it!

Well to make a long story a little longer than short, today I’m finally upgrading my work horses.  Its been 2 versions with PaperPort and 3 or 4 with OmniPage. 

There are two reasons why I’m making the move:

1. The price is right (I’m getting PaperPort free with my purchase of OmniPage Pro (the big full version)
2. OmniPage offers the ability for me to take a picture with my camera or even my phone, and have that image converted into a text document with their optical character reader.

That last point is the new functionality that I need.  When I have loose documents, OmniPage running with my normal scanner and the document feeder is awesome.  But when I have a page in a book, folder, or some other bound or abnormal item, or even an image on a White Board!, well then having the ability to take a picture and have it converted to text will definitely be worth the money of the upgrade, not to mention the major increases in accuracy that the program has gone through since my last purchase.

That money I save will not necessarily line my pockets are encourage me to go buy a new car or gold cufflinks or something, but every little bit will help me keep my prices low and competitive and that means more business for me over the long stretch.

OmniPage 16- Best OCR Software

Mobile post sent by 001brettbum using Utterz.  Replies. ]]> http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/31/mobile-computing-the-set-up/feed/ http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/27/powering-wifi-router-with-air-card/ http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/27/powering-wifi-router-with-air-card/#comments Tue, 27 May 2008 20:57:47 +0000 BrettBum http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/27/powering-wifi-router-with-air-card/

Mobile post sent by 001brettbum using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

But these days laptop memory is cheap,cheap cheap!

If you have a laptop there is no better time to max out your ram memory and wash down those memories of expensive ram with a beer.

I’ve loaded my laptop up with 4 gigabytes for next to nothing.  Now, my XP laptop will only recognize 3 gb even though the hardware can handle 4gb, but at about $20  - $40 at Buy.com, who really cares! 

Max it out and forget about it.  It is then just one less thing to worry about when you are running to many applications on your computer.  If you have Vista on your machine the OS can recognize a lot more RAM too.

These days it costs less to fill up your laptop with RAM whether or not it is on sale or not than it is to put a half tank of gas in your car.

Besides with the money you save from running a faster machine, you might then be able to invest that money in gas or even in going mobile completely and picking up an aircard.

I’m finding this to be an extremely useful way of identifying gaps in content, classes, tutorials, tips and tools along the way.  Plus, I’m using a number of the ‘good idea’ maps that I’ve built over the last couple years to fill in some of those gaps.

There is definitely something positive about finally turning potential good ideas into kinetic published content for people to actually use kind of like a travel guide to navigating the internet and building an internet based business..

The conference will be hosted and led by Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D. and his professional team of preeminent visual mappers who include: Adam Clayman, Stephanie Diamond, Chuck Frey, Arjen Ter Hoeve, Kyle McFarlin, and Wallace Tait. His assembled team comes from such areas as banking, psychology, manufacturing, business management, marketing and college teaching.
The conference will be held on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth which is centrally located in Morristown, New Jersey, in close proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport and to Manhattan via New Jersey Transit.

Assistive Technology

I do not personally know if I will be attending or not as I have a slightly competing conference on the other side of the country the weekend before.  However, I would like to meet the speakers, several of whom I’ve known through various mindmapping communities for sometime, but never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

But as these things go, you can’t always make every conference that comes along.  If you are going, or thinking about it, please drop me a comment or an email.  If I can attend (time permitting) I will and don’t want to miss out on something good. 

Gathering together a large number of visual mapping gurus together in one hall has to be a powerful thing, who know what they might conceive, figure out, map out, plan, create, build or fix as a collective, could be finding a solution to oil prices, world hunger, time travel, or maybe something simple like the cheapest and fastest route to and from the airport in Morristown or maybe something kind of odd like charting out the path to creating weight loss pills that work or a list of foods that will increase longevity.

Its hard to say what will be in the ethos, but with so many people that have the ability to think and build together in a visual mapping context, there can’t be too much of a limit on their result.

I mean that mosquitoes to the light analogy in the nicest possible way. 

Instead of spending $20 - $30 per person to get into a movie theater (not counting gas), you can have your friends and family over for an outdoor movie this summer.

Its relatively cheap and easy to setup with most of the things you might already have, if you have the key ingredient of a projector.

Here’s a few shots of our last party.  This was actually put together for my Son’s 8th birthday party.  We had lots of chairs and a few people brought some of their own.  (lots of soccer parents)

Rear view of screen. note the cargo net and the dark sheet behind the main screen sheet do not have to be perfect, they just help the white sheet to reflect the images from the projector as opposed to allowing the light to pass straight through the sheet.

What you will need for a Backyard Movie with a Projector

• Very Large (bigger the better) white bed sheet (thread count doesn’t matter much)
• Very large (same size as the white sheet) dark bed sheet (blue or black are best)
• A come along ratchet or pull tie down strap set (possibly a couple of these.
• Clothes pins(20- 40)
• Clothes line or some other tip of rope thin enough for a clothespin to hold
• Surround sound system
• DVD Player
• extension cords, and surge protectors
• A Hand full of rugs (to be used to cover cords so people do not trip)
• Some sort of candles, oil lamps, etc for light and for repelling bugs
• bug spray
• blankets
• lots of chairs
• A Movie
• Bonus Items
• A flexible cargo net (this is for helping to hold the sheet if the wind picks up
• a ladder with a platform step on the top large enough to hold the dvd player and projector
• popcorn
• drinks of your choice (alcohol or not depending on your parties preferences or tastes.  We’re not talking a knock down drag out boozer of a party sending half the party to the klink or drug rehab after, but a beer or glass of wine while watching a movie under the moon and stars can be a nice touch. )

There’s a lot of good information on the site, but there is some information that is now a bit dated from the days when Softduit focused on selling software and providing direct Business Development services.

The software sales business could not continue when we could no longer offer the best buy on software with MindManager products.  We were priced out of that market.  Fortunately, in the Business Development area we evolved very quickly and specialized in a number of areas that rapidly filled the void.

It was fun working with MindManager as a trainer when development was still speeding along with the product, but as its evolution has slowed down, the need for training on the products seems to have decreased.

Last week I mentioned my plan to pick up a 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook external hard drive.

Well they are on special right now at Buy.com.

I’m still holding out for the device that I can connect to my network through the ethernet and then connect to 1 terabyte of space via my wireless router from anywhere in the house or login from the internet while traveling.

The drive I’m referring to is the World Edition MyBook.

That said, paying $199 for a 1 terabyte Western Digital MyBook is a steal compared to the rates I’ve seen at office stores and even online.  I think that price is good until Friday, the 16th if I understand Buy.com’s weekly specials correctly.

Voice Transcription with MP3 Player Voice Recorders

Next up, I’m also going to be testing out Creative Zen MP3 players and their ability to record voice notes which can be transcribed with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.  I’ve been working with a Creative Zen V this evening, trying to figure out the file conversions first.  It records in 32 bit WAV and it needs to be 16 bit WAV I believe, but there’s something else that I’m not getting quite right.  I think maybe I need to also convert Stereo to Mono and something else.

Then this weekend I will be test driving a regular Creative Zen (the video, picture and MP3 player).  This is a 4gb and newer than the Creative Zen V.  I looked originally at Wally World where they were $120 in the store ($10 cheaper online) but only $90.99 at Buy.com plus they give you a $10 rebate that was not available at Wal-mart, so you can get a 4GB Video MP3 Player Creative Zen at Buy.com (technically better than a 4gb IPod if you follow CEA reviews and awards) for about half the price of an IPod and $40 less than you would pay at Wally world.

They offer talented individuals or parents of talented kids the opportunity to network together at a professional level, develop their skills and build out their portfolios and offerings.  Think of it as a LinkedIn for entertainers or parents of future entertainers.

Now, I like the concept that Gonnabe offers up for a couple of reasons. 

1. They facilitate people to work together and grow together.  Too often creative types are pitted against each other in a zero sum game that does not benefit consumers.
2. They are utilizing web 2.0 concepts of bringing people together to reduce costs and increase speed and efficiency.  Instead of say parents having to cart their kids off to LA, they can conceivably make forward progress without having to relocate or travel.
3. This encourages the masses to improve their skill sets. 

That last point is very important.  In an American Idol type of contest, they essentially weed out creativity and originality as they race to identify a single person that can win a popularity contest, so that a record company can then control a limited resource in a single artist.

Under this methodology, many artists can network together, improve themselves, their skill sets and offer up more very good content without people being subjected to a monopoly on the artist or their performances.  This increases both the quantity and quality of entertainment and media and that is a philosophy that I tack after as well.

I had 6 documents (recordings) that I needed to have transcribed.  I opened up Dragon Pad (the Word Pad like program that comes with Dragon Naturally Speaking).  I then used the Transcribe Recording program to select MP3 sound files of my voice one at a time and have them transcribed into text within the same document.

It was a slightly repetitive process as I do not have a batch transcription capability with my version of Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.  (this may come with the mobile version, but I can not attest to that).

The interesting thing that I learned

After completing 6 transcriptions, with the text transcribed onto the same document, I was able to go back and select text from any of the 6 transcriptions and play back the voice file that went with the transcription. 

Plus, I could even correct that text to help train my computer for greater accuracy.

Finally, the original MP3 files did not have to remain on my computer.  I was able to play back the voice with the text, even after I had removed the original MP3 file from my computer.

The MP3 file was actually on my pocket recorder stored in flash.  I disconnected the card from the USB and could still play the file back.  This signified that the transcription process actually copied the sound file into or with the dragon pad document.

How Long does the Sound File stick with the Document?

The sound file and ability to listen to the voice with the play back function remained until I closed the document. I tried saving the document, closing the document and then re-opening the document in Dragon Pad.

Once it was reopened, I could no longer listen to the voice file that went with the transcribed text.

All in all I was impressed with this functionality as I tested it and learned some of the new boundaries.  Its not a deal maker or breaker for this software, but under certain circumstances it is useful to understand.  Its not so great that I’m going to call up my futures broker in the middle of the night and go long on Nuance stock or something.

However, if you ever run into a situation where your computer crashes and a document gets closed down prematurely, it would be my advice to simply run the original voice file through the transcription again and start over again if you need the ability to go back and compare the text to the original voice file.

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.

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.

When I use Windows media player from Microsoft or Picasa from Google, those programs are smart enough to go out and search my hard drive for all file types that can be used with them.  MindManager which is a software program that has a proprietary file type is not even smart enough to go find its own files that it creates.

That is a severe problem for users of the software that happened to store the files within sub folders other than the default file folder set up by MindManager, My Maps.  This means that you had to go find every folder that you stored a MindManager map within and link it manually into the program so they can then find your MindManager mindmaps and make them readily available for you within the MindManager program.

This is extremely tedious and time consuming and even worse if you happen to have a hard drive that’s a hundred or 200 or 500 GB in size and you’ve got multiple file folder structures.  I like to keep all of my files for a project together with in one folder instead of putting say the word documents for a project in one folder in the MindManager files for the same project in a different folder.  This makes it easy for me to find and organize files on my computer and it also makes it easy for me to share those files or folders with other users on ever need to either e-mail, file transfer, or upload them to a server somewhere.

But when I organize my files the way that I like to MindManager gets lost, and I tend to lose the maps I’ve created with MindManager.

My request for Mindjet working on version 8 of MindManager

So I have a simple request for the Mindjet team developing MindManager version 8.  Please build a simple little hard drive search engine that can search my computer and find all of my MindManager maps.  It should be too hard to utilize this type of search or index type of program.  They have been around for years and there’s lots of different companies and develop them for their own tools as well as generic tools. 

They are not as old as Roman Columns as technology goes but in the world of software they might as well be that old.  Even columns get an upgrade every now and then, ex. see fiberglass columns.

I really like this widget functionality that Revver offers. It enables you to put videos into a play and then run them in a sidebar or other location. But I didn’t even know myself that there was an error until I was trying to show someone an example of one of the videos.
I could see the thumbnails, but was not aware that the videos weren’t playing. When I initially installed them, I installed the widgets one at a time, testing the videos after the install. So the videos initially worked on the first widget, and only broke or stopped working after I installed the second widget.

Fortunately they are all working now. Hopefully the article above will help other people avoid this issue on their own sites. It might even offer up a benchmark for other services like Utterz to benchmark off of this type of thing.
Mobile post sent by brettbum using Utterz.  Replies. ]]> http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/05/example-of-revver-multiple-widget-404-page-error/feed/ http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/05/backup-your-bookmarks-in-firefox/ http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/05/backup-your-bookmarks-in-firefox/#comments Mon, 05 May 2008 16:59:46 +0000 BrettBum http://www.softduit.com/mavenmappersinformation/2008/05/05/backup-your-bookmarks-in-firefox/ Last week I was in a hurry and made a rookie mistake.  I was working on a project and needed for some weird reason (using a software program that is not compatible with Firefox - . . . MindManager. .   aahemm. ..  ) to get a copy of all my Firefox bookmarks into some strange and weird program called Internet Explorer 7. 

I had not heard of this program which devotees sometimes call IE7, but I needed to find a way to import in a copy of my Firefox bookmarks, so that I could then use some special function in the desktop software program that I was working with on this special project.

The Problem - I lost my Firefox Bookmarks!

So after I imported bookmarks into this IE7 beast, I noticed about a day later, that I had lost about 80 percent of my bookmarks in Firefox.

Why 80 percent and not 100 percent?

I have no idea.  For some reason the bookmarks in about 100 folders that I had were deleted from Firefox.  They still exist in Internet Explorer which imported them but they were stripped out of Firefox.

So the quick lesson I learned from this, is actually one that I learned a long time ago with IE 6 (yeah I actually had used this beast before, but tried to block it from my memory).  You need to back up your Favorites and Bookmarks to separate special files and folders on a regular basis.  If you add lots of bookmarks often, then you may want to back up more often, if not, maybe quarterly is good enough.

How to back up Firefox Bookmarks

This is pretty easy.  Just go to the Bookmarks button on the Firefox menu, click on the Bookmarks manager.  This will open up a new window and you can now select the export option under the file menu of the Firefox bookmarks menu.  Make sure you send it to a safe place!

The problem takes place when I attempt to export a mind map to Word.  I choose a template from Words standard templates.  The problem is two fold.

1. No matter what template I select, the formatting fails to apply correctly a large portion of the time.
2. Sometimes even when the formatting looks correct, the paragraph styles that show up in word are still listed as MMtopic 1, mmtopic 2 etc. as opposed to Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 or Normal as I set it up to export.

Something seems to be breaking down, but when I open up MindManager version 6, and export the same exact file, it works just fine.

I’ve been experiencing this for a while now (a month or two), but it wasn’t until I got into a mind map intensive amount of work that I was able to confirm that there really was a problem.  As I confirmed it, I was not able to get any screen capture video yet.

This week, I hope to do just that.  Once I have it, I will then begin the troubleshooting process and see if I can eliminate the problem by running a repair or just reinstalling the program all together.

I’m hoping to get to this either tomorrow or by Thursday.  I’ve got some mundane things to take care of first, running some errands to get a camera lens repaired, and pick up some pet and dog supplies.  Plus, Tuesday I have to cover the local election here in North Carolina for my other work.

If you have experienced similar problems, I’d be interested to here what you have run into, and whether or not you were able to solve the problem, and or how. 

Laughlin River Run Fire on ireport.com (CNN)

Just as the Laughlin River Run was winding down yesterday afternoon, an unexpected brush fire quickly flared up directly across the Colorado River from Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort.
At approximately 2:30 PM Sunday, smoke and flames were observed near the river adjacent to the Riverside’s Arizona parking lots and camping area. Within minutes several acres had been consumed.
Patrol boats quickly converged on the blaze, as Bullhead City Police Officers detained and handcuffed a male near the scene of the fire.
Within minutes, units from the Bullhead City Fire Department arrived, and began an intensive effort to contain the blaze.
Fire containment took fire units nearly an hour, which consumed several acres of brush, and threatened dozens of vehicles near the river.
Officers removed the detainee from the area, and an investigation into the cause of the fire is now underway.
In 2008 was the 26th annual Laughlin River Run event bringing bikers, vendors and rock groups together for a four day festival. In 2002 more than 100 bikers were involved in a riot and brawl with guns and knives on the casino floor in Harrah’s. Three people died in 2002 and more than 35 were charged.

After I get the video uploaded, I’ll get back to my normal articles for this site. Especially, as I prepare to cover some new uses of MindManager as it relates to web design and SEO marketing. Sorry for the break in normal articles, I’ll get back to the normal stuff and not delay you with off the wall tangents, news stories and stuff for things like acne treatment or things that do not relate to mindmanager or dragon naturally speaking.

……
serenity now

So in the meantime, I’m trying to wing it by using my laptop as a cell phone. I have an air card and I have skype and I have some very large headphones with a microphone. So that’s my cell phone now. Its kind of like using a furnace filter for air cleaners as a sun glasses UV filter. Just not the same.
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