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 . . .

The Following video walks you through the multiple methods required or available to insert an image or a picture into a MindManager Pro 7 Topic.
As you could see in the video there are multiple ways to insert a picture into a topic. There is one method that I did not cover. You could add the image to your image library and then open up the library and insert the image into a topic from the library. This is usually only practical in circumstances where you plan to utilize that same image many many times.

If you would like to see a video of the steps required for adding an image to the library, drop me a comment and I will add it to the rotation very soon. In fact you can leave a comment for any video requests and I will do my best to cover them in short order.

Here’s a quick little video tutorial that will show you how to shut off the spell check option in MindManager Pro 7.

MM Pro 7 has been upgraded to the new Microsoft Office 2007 standard and the ribbon makes navigating options very fast and easy. However, it is a little tricky to find a few of the more obscure but very necessary options in MindManager Pro 7.

Why would you want to turn off spell check in MindManager Pro 7?

I often times need to shut off the automatic spell check option before I take a screen shot of a mindmap. I do not want to see the little red squigly lines underneath names that are not in the spell check dictionary.

I installed MindManager Pro 7 from Mindjet last night and the installation went off with out a hitch. I’m running Windows XP Home Media center on a Vista capable machine (haven’t installed Vista yet, I’ve been delaying due to QuickBooks 2006).

I put together a video to offer up a demonstration of the installation and my initial impressions looking at the software once it launched. I will follow up with many more videos on the use of MindManager Pro 7.

I have also been toying with the idea of a series of tutorial videos showing users how to perform the same task in 3 versions of MindManager:

• X5Pro
• Pro 6
• Pro 7

Mindjet would love to have you purchase the latest version, and it probably will be the best place to start for new users. That said I run all three versions myself to get special capabilities offered by each (although I suspect I may not need to keep Pro 6 now that I have Pro 7). Never the less, I would like to share the tutorials for all three versions.

I put together this short video to show that it is possible to record your screen and audio while simultaneously dictating with Dragon Naturally Speaking 9.

I should point out that my first attempt at this took about 4 minutes and my video software crashed at the end. I do not think that had anything to do with the combined requirements on my system. I’ve seen the same video software crash for no reason without anything running. It crashed during the compilation process and not during the recording.

Verizon pulled off a coup d’ etat over its rivals Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint by securing an exclusive but limited time partnership with YouTube.

Verizon Wireless will offer YouTube videos through its subscription based V Cast Service.  V Cast costs $15 per month or $3 for a single day.  This signals YouTube’s first foray into an agreement with a wireless carrier and will put Verizon and its customers ahead of the pack as long as they can hold onto the exclusive arrangement.

YouTube was created with a model that provided access to anyone with internet access and providing an exclusive offering even in a mobile setting runs counter to the key elements that made it popular in the first place.

It also remains to be seen whether or not this exclusive arrangement between Verizon and YouTube (owned by Google) will extend over to GoogleVideo, which used to be a competitor of YouTube prior to the acquisition.

It might also signal to other video providers such as MetaCafe, Ifilm, Brightcove and Microsoft that there is no time like now to provide a mobile solution.  In fact if competing services offered up a world wide video service to all wireless carriers it could trump Verizon and leave Verizon holding a very expensive YouTube of funny amateur videos.

The new version of Camtasia is out and it is packing a very useful punch.  Camtasia is a full motion screen recording software that can allow you to record presentations, narrate a recorded presentation, provide a training video or a mobile training video in an MP3 file.   Camtasia 4 is the latest version of this software from TechSmith the same company that has also created the very popular SnagIt screen capture software.

Camtasia Studio 4 is now designed for mobile sharing.  You can rapidly make a screencast presentation and distribute it to mobile players including MP3 players and iPods.  Its even integrated with Screencast.com’s hoting service, which can provide built in RSS and ITunes subscriptions capabilities.

You can create essentially a subscription link for your workers or students to subscribe to lectures or training videos and watch those videos from the internet or from their Video iPod.  It also provides integration into Flash Projects for easy web deployment of videos on your website.

The Wall Street Journal ran a nonchalant 6 sentence article(B5) about copyright claims filed against the Google Video Service today on 11-9-06.  The Claims were disclosed by Google in its recent quarterly report filed the day before.

Certain entities have also filed copyright claims against us, alleging that features of certain of our products, including Google Web Search, Google News, Google Video, Google Image Search, and Google Book Search, infringe their rights. In addition, our planned acquisition of YouTube may also subject us to additional copyright claims upon the closing of the transaction. Adverse results in these lawsuits may include awards of damages and may also result in, or even compel, a change in our business practices, which could result in a loss of revenue for us or otherwise harm our business.

Google not being a company about disclosing any more than necessary remained true to their tactics and did not reveal the source of the claims.

Speculation

This raises the specter that the YouTube purchase will be a large target for additional claims.  Google is no stranger to copyright claims and has fought them on almost every major service they have offered from Web Search to Google news to books and images.

Additional story were some what delayed(showed up several hours after the WSJ hit the streets) in catching on but they did catch on and speculation has questioned whether Google has established a ‘$500 million YouTube defense fund‘ which was promptly rejected by Google’s Chief Executive.