slaingod

I recently purchased a new Samsung LCD for my main workstation. It’s a little smaller than my last, weighing in at 40 inches versus 42 for my old monitor which is now downstairs. The big new thing about this monitor compared other LCDs is that it has LEDs for backlighting rather than the typical florescent tube. This means it runs cooler but more importantly has much better black levels. And I can confirm that they really are pretty awesome. You really do notice it on titles playing and fade in on intros like the Lord of the Rings.

There is one crippling flaw in this TV though: the lack of DPMS, otherwise known as Display Power Management Something, which is what your computer uses to turn off the monitor when it goes to sleep or when your screensaver turns on, etc. That in today’s age a TV that can be connected to a computer does not have this functionality is a travesty. For power savings and environmental concerns alone this should be in every TV/monitor sold today, but the various revisions of the Energy Star requirements continue to let HDTV’s that aren’t marketed as computer capable to slip through the cracks. It is the one horrific blemish on an otherwise stellar monitor.

I did a great deal on it though, only paying $1400 delivered. The new models were coming out but none of the new models delivers LEDs for backlighting at the size that I need. Plus the one great thing that started all this was that my old monitor had a slight but noticeable dark line running down the middle that was driving me batshit.

So it’s pretty sad: I just got voice-recognition software but I’m trying to come up with things to say. I guess the first thing I can do is do a review of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. So far so good though there have been a few snags. Remembering punctuation is one of the hard things to get down. There are couple of gotchas if you use it on a computer with Comodo Firewall that you should be aware of. The NaturallySpeaking executables tried to interact with every other executable on the system and one really annoying problem was that when the executable tried to access the keyboard somehow locked out all the other keyboards attached the system. I finally figured out that I could control alt delete and things would come back. It may make sense to just bite the bullet and set the Dragon NaturallySpeaking executables as trusted.

Getting set up I spent about an hour reading dictation to improve my recognition statistics. I have to admit it was kind of fun reading Kennedy’s address as one of the options. It really brings home the fact that you don’t do a lot of reading and speaking at the same time in your general life, or at least mine, especially text that you’re not necessarily familiar with. But practice makes perfect and after a while you sort of get into a groove. I’m still not the point where trusted to really capture all of my thoughts as I speak them without any kind of delay, but I’m getting there. I do tend to mumble a little bit in my normal conversation so I have to be a little extra careful with my diction.

I could really see this becoming useful if I am able to incorporate it more into my daily life, particularly with my coding. There are a number of tools out there to help coders use voice-recognition, but I will have to see if they have anything for Ruby and/or ActionScript that is worth the effort to get set up, or possibly integration with TextMate. By TextMate I mean of course the E text editor on Windows, a sanctioned clone of TextMate, with all the bundles etc.

That’s it for now; I’ll keep you posted. In the grand tradition of all voice-recognition reviews, this review was done using voice-recognition.