In this previous review  of MacSpeech Dictate I mentioned there were still a few hiccups and Macspeech Dictate was not quite there yet. I promised to keep you updated when a better version came out. Well, it has and it’s fantastic. Macspeech Dictate Version 1.2 has all the features that were missing in version 1.1 - the best being automatic learning from it’s mistakes so it trains itself as you use it.

Even better, Macspeech currently have a special on. You can get 10% off your order if you use the coupon code ‘DICTATE10′.

Click here for the macspeech dictate webpage. Enter the coupon code ‘DICTATE10′ at the checkout to get a 10% discount.

Specs:

• Must have a full size keyboard at least 27cm wide.
• Screen must be 12 inch or larger.
• Must be able to run Ubuntu linux or OSX or Windows.
• Must be able to be networked to a printer
• Must have a USB slot for a USB thumbdrive.
• Must run off 12V or 240V

One month. Entries close 20 Nov.

Winner recieves a free Vanuatu Shirt posted to them. (We may even do a shirt for the best computer and a shirt for the best monitor if they are found by 2 different people)

Contribute to the search by adding a comment below!

If you go to http://agilewebsolutions.com/promo/macgems you can get 1Password for free, but you have to sign up for another product. The great thing is, some of the products you sign up for are also free. So I chose to sign up for snapfish (and received 20 free photos) and then the next day I recieved a free unlock code for 1Password. It really is that easy, and I suggest you do it before it runs out.

To make a backup of your computer that is useful if your computer crashes you need to:

1.   1. Buy an external firewire hard drive
2.   2. Format the hard drive
3.   3. Download some backup software
4.   4. Backup your Hard Drive
5.   5. Run the backup software often

Now let me explain those steps in more detail.

2. 1. Buy an external firewire hard drive You need a firewire drive because even though macintosh has USB, you cannot start your computer from a USB drive in an emergency, you can only start it up from a firewire drive.
   You need one at least as big as the hard drive on the computer you are intending to back up. Eg if you have an 200G hard drive on your imac, you should get at least an 200G for your backups. This way you will always fit your backup on the external drive.
4. 2. Format the hard drive
   Plug in your new hard drive. Run Disk Utility (in your Applications/Utilities folder). Select your new Hard Drive in the left pane, and in the Erase tab check it says ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled)’ as below, type in the name you would like to call it (eg Backup) (here it says Untitled) and press Erase. It will now erase and format your external Hard Drive ready for use and call it Backup. 

   

   If you have a large external drive, and you want to store other things on it apart from the backup, such as movies and pictures, then it is best to ‘partition’ it into two sections, one for your system backup, and one for files. To do this select the disk in the left pane and click on the partition tab. Select ‘2 partitions’ and adjust to the size you want. Again, name them, make sure they are both Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and press Partition. In the example below I have partitioned my hard drive into two, one for the backups (80G) and one for the rest.

   

6. 3. Download some backup software
   Go to http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html and download the latest version of SuperSooper. It’s free to be able to do a basic backup, or you can pay if you want extra features such as incremental backup (it’s faster, but the end result is the same). Copy Superdooper to your macintosh applications folder.
8. 4. Backup your Hard Drive
   Select your Macintosh HD in the left menu, select your new firewire drive in the right one, select ‘backup - all files’. Press copy now, go and have a cup of coffee while you wait a long time for it to copy all your files, perhaps up to an hour or so. 

   

   It’s good to select ‘Repair permissions before copying in the options tab, see below. This makes sure your OS X is functioning well before you back it up, otherwise there can be some problems.

   

9. 5. Run the backup software often
   The most important thing about backing up is to do it regularly, I do it once a week. it’s good to do a backup before you install any new software - especially system modifications or large software, in case something goes wrong in the installation so you can go back to what it was when you backed up.

How do I use the backup in an emergency?

1. Go to System Preferences, select ‘Startup Disk’, select your external Backup, press Restart.
2. OR in a real emergency when you can’t boot onto your normal OS X…
3. Press Option-Command-Shift-Delete during startup. This will bypass the primary startup volume and seek a different startup volume such as the external one.
4. You are now running from your backup, and you just repeat the sections called Format the hard drive and Backup your Hard Drive but treat your Backup as the main one and the main one as your backup. In other words, run Disk Utility and erase your Macintosh HD, then run Superdooper and backup from your Backup to Macintosh HD. When the backup is finished, select Machintosh HD, and restart. You will now be running from your main computer again.
5. You might want to print these instructions out, so they are handy in an emergency. It’s no use having the instructions on how to boot in an emergency on your computer - you won’t be able to read them. Don’t laugh, I’ve done it!

   Stay tuned for an update on how to use time-machine. 

In case you haven’t yet realised,  Apple Memory is different to normal PC RAM,  so if you go to a cheap PC shop or ebay and buy some memory it probably won’t work in your Mac.  It’s not that you need ‘apple’ memory,  but you need high quality RAM with certain specifications that are not obvious so you need to buy from someone who knows the differences.

After much trial I have found a very reliable source of Mac RAM to be crucial. (Crucial is the name of the shop).

Check them out at http://crucial.com  They even have a little program here that you can download and it works out what computer you have and then pops you onto their webpage on the page showing the memory you need to buy!

Their prices are very good too. 1Gig of RAM For my 1.67 Ghz PowerBook was only $49 US and shipping to Australia was only $25.

This Logitech presenter is great. After using the ATI remote wonder for a year or so, and a Microsoft cordless mouse also, I’ve done a bit of research, and came up with these little units as the as the best in my opinion. They are $79 at Officeworks and have all the features you need…

• a long range.
• works with keynote or powerpoint.
• the battery display indicates that the remaining battery life with little bars, so you’re not caught out with a flat battery. 
• the forward and back controls click, so you can feel that you have pressed them.
• if you have a time to end by, eg you are presenting to a group on a timetable, you can set up the timer, it gives you 5 min and 2 minute vibration warnings.
• It has volume up and down which automatically work on the mac with no setting up.
• the usb receiver stows away in the transmitter, and it all comes in a little padded pouch.
• it doesn’t need any drivers for Macintosh, it just works!

 Unfortunately, because it doesn’t need any drivers, you can’t program the keys to do what you want them to do, and the blank screen key doesn’t work. You can download the shareware program USB Overdrive to re-map the keys to do anything you want.   The side view shows volume buttons.  the ATI wonder remote is still better as a remote control for the DVD player  and itunes applications, as it has more buttons, but this Logitech unit is more reliable and simpler.

Ever since I first used Dragon Naturally Speaking Version 4 in 2000, I have been waiting for it to be released on the Macintosh.  Well  it’s finally arrived, it’s called “MacSpeech Dictate”, and it’s powered by Dragon. Unfortunately there are still a few hiccups. My advice is if you have been using speech recognition already - Viavoice or Ilisten, then make the switch - it’s an improvement. But if you are not currently using speech recognition, wait a little longer. It’s not quite there yet, and the adjustment to speech recognition combined with some bugs makes for a steep learning curve.

I was an early adopter of speech recognition. As a mac user, I purchased a PC which I used just for speech recognition! I would copy the dictated files to a thumb drive edit them on my Mac. Not too long later, Viavoice arrived on the mac, and while not as good as dragon, it was usable. I’ve been using IBM ViaVoice to dictate all my sermons for the past 6 years, but ViaVoice is frustrating. Its accuracy is not as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking and I used to spend as much time correcting the mistakes as I did dictating.

In terms of dictation and recognition, MacSpeech Dictate is absolutely fantastic. The accuracy is impressive  and it does not take much training.  In fact I think I was reading stories for about five  minutes and then I was ready to Dictate. It’s a very stable application,  unlike IBM ViaVoice which was frequently crashing.

It integrates very easily so that you can dictate into any Macintosh program. IBM ViaVoice was meant to do this but in reality whenever you were dictating into anything other than the ViaVoice speakpad it was tediously slow.

So why is it “not quite as good as Dragon NaturallySpeaking”?  A few reasons. The most annoying is that there is a bug in it so that if you correct anything with your mouse and keyboard, it gets out of sync and loses it’s place, and you can’t keep dictating. So you must dictate by commands, which is tedious to say the least.

One of my favourite features of Dragon NaturallySpeaking was the correction window where the program automatically taught itself from your mistakes. When it misrecognised a word you could say  ”correct that” and type in the  correct word, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking would automatically train itself so that whenever you spoke that word again it would get it right.  

When  Dictate  makes a mistake it just keeps misrecognizing the word, and you can’t re-train it.  The manual promises that this correction feature will come in an update - let’s hope it’s soon.   

If you have been using ViaVoice or iListen, then you will be blown away by the accuracy of dictate. On the other hand, if you have come across from Dragon NaturallySpeaking you will be taking a slight step backwards due to the lack of automatic correction, and the buginess of the manual correction.  

I had one small hiccup installing because I made the wrong selection of microphone, and I went looking on the support pages of the Australian and American resellers - none of them were particularly helpful, but I ended up finding the answer in the installation manual!    If all else fails read the manual I guess.

Purchasing.    

With Dragon NaturallySpeaking the only option was to purchase it in Australia because there was a special Australian edition which was made using the Australian accent. 

With Macspeech Dictate, the US version comes with Australian accent,  so you can buy MacSpeech Dictate from the US for about $180, $110 less than the cheapest price in Australia. 

In conclusion, it’s a very nice piece of software. With it’s current lack of features and bugs, it’s really should be a beta version. In my opinion, it’s worth $100, not yet worth $200, and at $300, I think you’d only buy it if you really needed it.

1. Go to your utilities folder.
   (Click on your desktop anywhere so that the finder is active.
   Hold down apple-shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.)
2. Open ‘Activity Monitor’
3. Press apple-1 so that the main window of Utility Monitor is open.
4. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little pie graph of how much memory you are currently using.

There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page ins/outs:’

Free tells you how much free memory you currently have, the higher the better, and
Page ins/outs tells you how many times your computer has had to slow down because it has run out of memory and needed to use the hard disk to ’switch’ some of it’s memory in our out of use. This really slows down your computer.

If the page in/out count is increasing as you watch it, this is not good, it means your computer has run out of free memory, and so temporarily is using the hard disk as memory. The faster the page in/out count is increasing, the worse the problem - your computer is struggling along and not performing as well as it could. You need more memory.

If you have had lots of free memory since the last time you restarted your machine, the Page ins/outs count will be 0/0. This means your computer had enough memory and has not run out. You dont’ need more memory.

It may be that your Pagein/outs count is high, something like 50431/10850, but steady and this and not increasing. What this means is that some time in the past when you opened a lot of programs, you ran out of memory, but now you have enough. Reboot, check the Pagein/outs count again. It should be 0/0. If it is not 0/0, have a look at it while you open a program or two and see how fast it increases, the faster, the worse your system performance will be.

Here is a screen shot of my computer. My page in/out count is quite high - 66825/697, but I still have 189 MB free, and the page in/out count is not increasing at the moment. This means that sometime since the last reboot, my computer ran out of memory, but currently it is OK. If I reboot the page in/out count will return to 0/0, and stay there unless I go crazy opening lots of programs. I don’t’ need more memory.

To quote from apple:
Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in)… Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing.

One more note: Under Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in/outs, it gives a size in MB of the amount of RAM that has been pages in or out - the numbers are smaller but the same principals apply.

• carbon copy cloner

See the entry on backups, this application allows you to make a bootable backup of your hard drive. Superdooper, a newer program, seems to be a more popular backup program and simpler to use, but it’s not free so I still use CCC.

• skype (voice over IP)

Skype allows you to speak to other skype users anywhere in the world for free over the internet. Simply download skype, create yourself a ’skype name’, this is your unique skype name, and you are away. You don’t need to pay any money unless you want to make a call to a normal phone number. If you have an imac or a powerbook or ibook you can use the built in microphone and speaker, but for better results use a headset microphone which will stop any ‘echo’ you may experience. Your friends need to have their computer on when you search for them in skype for the first time, or skype will not find them.

• textwrangler

A great little text editor, like textedit, but many features such as search and replace on multiple files without opening them, automatic formatting for html, compare two different text files and show the differences, open and edit text files over ftp, if you’re not sure why you’d need those features, stick with textedit!

• mac the ripper

Allows you to capture a DVD from your DVD drive, then view it in quicktime. Good if you just want to watch one chapter of a DVD, or if you want to watch a DVD in the car without running your laptop battery flat - it uses much less power to watch a DVD from the hard drive than from the DVD drive.

• quicksilver

Fantastic application, hard to explain how to use it and what it does, but I use it probably at least 20 times a day. It allows you to do many things at the press of a key, like a shortcut, but without you having to remember what key does what, because it guesses what you want to do by what you type in, and it learns, very clever. It takes a bit of learning, but the time you save after learning it is well worth it. http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver

• combine pdf’s

As it says, allows you to combine multiple pdf documents into a single pdf documents. For example, combine a single page pdf from pages with a pdf printed from a screenshot with a pdf from illustrator all into one document of three pages.

• Cocoa booklet

Cocoa Booklet takes a multi page pdf file (eg 16 pages long), and makes it into a booklet by moving all the pages into a different order so that when you print it double sided and staple it into a booklet, all the pages are in the right order - like Microsoft publisher does on the PC. You can reduce the size too, ie make an a5 booklet from a4 pages.

• Audio hijack

Allows you to record any sound from your computer (skype conversation, itunes song, streaming audio, movie soundtrack etc) to an mp3 file. THIS IS NO LONGER FREE.

• LAME engine for itunes

See separate entry under music, this imports your itunes songs at a better quality than the itunes encoder.

• Online Bible

A free piece of bible software, easily the most simple to use, now available for OS-X as a beta release. Does searches on words in english, or greek/hebrew. A good cross reference system. Allows you to paste bible text into any application (eg Pages) with a hotkey.

• Audacity

A full-featured audio recorder. It can record audio with a level indicator, then process the audio (speed it up, slow it down, raise or lower the pitch, compress, normalise etc) and then export to mp3 or other formats. Stick with the simpler ’soundstudio’ if you don’t need these features.