Jules Jones

I'd been getting pretty fed up with the Bluetooth microphone, which was included with the Bluetooth edition of Dragon which I bought back in 2008.The Bluetooth didn't fit me very well, and as it was an over the ear Model rather than a headband model, tended to drift out of alignment. Consistent microphone position is actually very important for recognition, so using Dragon involved much fighting with the software correcting the recognition errors. I still found it very useful for some things, most notably entering data into LibraryThing, but failed to get around to reinstalling it after I had to reformat and reinstall Windows last year.

The headset I was issued with at work to use with Dragon as part of my return to work support turned out to be much, much better. By the end of the first day, the error rate on the copy at work was already as good as on the copy at home, which by then I'd already been training for over a month. Some of that was obviously just down to the computer at work being much newer and therefore higher specced, but within a few days I was sure that some of it was the headset. So I went ahead and ordered one to use at home.

What I actually ordered was the stereo version, because I thought that would be slightly more comfortable to wear than the mono version that I had at work. I dithered a bit, because I was concerned that using a stereo set might block out outside sounds, such as a phone ringing elsewhere in the house. But I'm glad I went for the stereo version, because they are slightly more comfortable to wear, at least with reading glasses on, and they're not designed to block out outside sound.

The headset in question is the Andrea NC185 VM USB, which includes an on-board sound card in the USB dongle. Andrea also do a companion piece of software which you have to download from their website rather than it being included in the box. Weirdly, while I didn't need to install it on the computer at work to get the headset to work with Dragon, I did need to use it on the ThinkPad before I could get the sound levels adjusted to be compatible with Dragon.

One doesn't expect to have to install drivers for something like a mike. Once I'd got past that little hurdle...

Even with having to set up a new input device on my Dragon profile, it was, out of the box, a clear improvement over the Bluetooth. I would very much benefit from buying a new laptop with the muscle to run Dragon at speed, but the fifty pounds invested in this headset makes it feasible to put off the laptop replacement for a while. The Bluetooth is still going to be useful for travel purposes, because it's much smaller and easier to pack, and it has the obvious advantage for some uses of not tethering me to the computer (although the Andrea comes with an 8 feet cable). But the Andrea is my primary headset from now on.

The other advantage of the Andrea is that the software comes with a sound recorder, which might come in handy as a substitute for a dictaphone. More later on why that's of interest to me.

Well, re-release of something that's been out of print for a while. Just been given access to my account on Musa's manuscript management database, which has a proposed release date in November for And if I offered thee a bargain. This is just a short story, but given that my last release was in August 2008, I'll be glad to have something coming out this year.

I've had to stop work on writing Taxman because of the RSI (Dragon is not really suitable for writing fiction), but I'm now slowly building up my time on the keyboard, so hoping to get back to that in the next couple of weeks. Definitely not going to have the draft of that finished any time soon, alas, but still hoping to have a finished draft before year's end. On the other hand, if predatrix feels up to working on the Ipswich novelette, that means that I don't have to do the typing on that...

1) Zeborah noted in comments to my previous entry about the Mouse Grid that you can also control the mouse by saying "move mouse up", etc, and that you can change the speed by saying "faster". I tried it and it works. As she said, this is also incredibly tedious. Poking about in the options, I found that you can actually change the default speed for the mouse to move. They've actually picked a good speed for learning with, and I'm going to leave it on the slow speed for now, although I will probably change it to a faster speed once I'm used to it.

Which way is better depends on how far the mouse is from where you want it to be and how finely you need to control it. For some things I'm finding that the best way is to actually use the mouse grid to get approximately in the right place, and then use the move commands to place the cursor precisely. You use the "cancel" command to clear the mouse grid and leave the cursor where you'd moved it to.

2) I didn't note in my previous post about the Dictation Box that the other big advantage of using it is that you don't have to manually select all, copy and paste in order to copy the text you've just dictated into the target window. There's a single word transfer command, which makes life much easier.

Turning off Protected Mode seems to have worked. So now I'm busy working my way through the user guide, learning about some of the tools and commands I don't remember using before. I think one or two of them may actually be new in Service Pack 1.

For future reference, Service Pack 1 seems to work better with Dreamwidth, or possibly the other way around. But the command "open Dictation Box" is useful for quickly dictating text with all the standard Dragon commands available when you're in a window that's not entirely compatible with Dragon. I'm just testing that now.

You may well get (very slowly) spammed with the book log today as I practice using Dragon for more than the odd bit of entering books into LibraryThing. :-)

I wonder how many obscene words are in the built-in vocabulary? Because it will probably have learned a few new ones by the end of the week. So far using it to navigate around the desktop has been less than successful, ranging from general flakiness to closing the entire Mozilla when all I wanted it to do was switch to the next tab. Oh, and the microphone randomly switches off in software.

But for the absolute pinnacle of bloody annoyingness, we must go to its refusal to be open at the same time as its PDF manual. I have no idea what the problem is other than that this is the 2008 version of Dragon, and I'm running the latest version of Adobe Reader, so it's possible that something new in Reader isn't compatible.

In spite of all which, I am so glad that I have Dragon, and I am already used to using it, even if I haven't used it for a while and can't remember most of the commands. This entry has taken about 10 minutes to dictate, and a lot of muttering while the microphone was off, but it might well have taken me 10 minutes to type it, given the current state of my hands.

Apparently I have not needed to use Dragon since I rebuilt the laptop software install last year. Because I've just had to install it, not having done so at the time...

Probably easier to re-train from scratch than dig out the old training files. But either way, it's a job for tomorrow. It's taken all evening just to install it, register it, and download and install the service pack. Note to self, in future do not wait until you actually need it before installing it.

Wordage was non-existent for a couple of months, what with Christmas, more than the usual number of migraines, and a bout of flu. But I started back on Taxman last weekend, taking the running total from 25195 to 25392 on Saturday, and to 25618 on Sunday. I had to stop there because I had a very bad flare-up of the RSI and staying away from the keyboard for a few days was a Really Good Idea, but got back to work today, and it's now at 27034. Not all of that is new words, as some is a copy-n-paste of a chunk from the notes section and then re-working, but there are still at least a thousand new words in there.

My arms ache again, so time to stop for the night, and I'll probably be limited during the week, but it's definitely flowing for now.

Tried installing Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 today. It looked okay until it got to the registration (which asked for a load of personal data then informed me that registration had not been completed). And then it refused to start the programme up on the ground that C:\windows\speech\speech.dll had version 4.04.2109 installed and version 4.04.2512 was required. It further informed me that maybe rebooting the computer or reinstalling Dragon would help.

Tried both those options. More than once. No, they did not help.

The Nuance website had nothing. Tried Google. Eventually found this forum post, which explained what the issue was:
Nobrainer forum
and went and retrieved the required Sapi 4 speech files from the downloads section of the Nuance website (they own Dragon). It appears to be working now. Am *not* impressed with the not-help message in the software, and the not-help on the Nuance website.

Off to train my Dragon now.

After months of being okay, something went ping in my wrist this morning. My typing's shot, and I need to restrict how much I do. I'm not deliberately ignoring anyone...

Spent a couple of days assembling Ikeaware, moving boxes out of the way to have room to put the Ikeaware somewhere, emptying some of the boxes onto the Ikeaware, and then rearranging the remaining not-empty boxes into a tasteful pattern that allows us to reclaim our living space instead of climbing over boxes.

The Good: the flat looks like a flat again instead of a self-storage unit, and I have my ergonomic workstation set up again after some months of the laptop keyboard and screen.

The Bad: I'm going to *need* the ergonomics. I buggered my wrists while wielding the screwdriver. That's starting to feel a little better already, now that I've stopped the screwdriver abuse. *But*, and this is a very big but, in the last couple of hours I've done something or other which was the last straw as far as my shoulder's concerned. And past experience suggests that it's going to be sore for at least a few days.

The Ugly: I've got a presentation to prepare on the Day Job side. With Powerpoint, which I have no experience of, neither that nor its OpenOffice clone. Much mousing. Much clicking. Not happy...


Add to this the joy that is discovering that my arms are suddenly getting shorter at an alarming rate (or in other words, my very intermittent need for reading glasses is suddenly no longer that intermittent). I am *not* enjoying this introduction to the joys of middle age.

I might get back to writing the Lord and Master sequel at the end of the week. Or I might not. It depends on how many other bits of my body go on strike this week...


(ObPlagiarismReference: this post alludes to a film title. I'll let you work out which one.)