Breezeblog

This is the first Breezeblog post  to be dictated instead of  being typed! For some time  I have Dragonrious as to how voice recognition software works but never  found anything  that worked well with the Mac. I recently got my hands on the new MacSpeech Dictate, which I’m using now, and it’s made writing … well, a bit of a breeze.  It is  powered by the  well-known Dragon voice recognition  engine and I was amazed  at how easy it was to set up and start working. It took about five minutes of listening to my voice to train it and now I can pretty well say anything, insert grammatical marks, and so on.  It still stumbles over unfamiliar words  — like breezeblock  for Breezeblog  —  but with a little work you can correct those. Not only that, but it writes a lot faster than I can type! MacSpeech also allows you to control pretty much every application on your desktop although I’m still getting the hang of that. The software isn’t cheap — about US$199,  including headphones — but I think that’s a small price to pay for improved writing productivity.  It  might not be as sexy as a secretary — but it’s a cool and clever piece of software.

Wordled: Premier Brown

If you feel like disappearing into one of those time-wasting black holes of the web, mosey over to Wordle, a fiendishly addictive little program invented by Jonathan Feinberg, an IBM software engineer. Simply enter text or random words, click ‘Go’ and watch Wordle come up with random word clouds. I created the above example by pasting the first few pars of Premier Ewart Brown’s Wikipedia entry. You can tweak colours, fonts and layout to your heart’s content. Have fun.