Category Archives: technology

Fun with Pandanet

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“I could disguise myself and play…” Hikaru thinking of some way to play without anyone knowing his real name and age (he was just starting 7th grade so people would be excited if they saw him winning at Go all the time). Luckily he discovered the Internet, where nobody can see that you are a dog. Or a boy who gets advice from a 1000 year old ghost.

Since I am not doing anything impressive anyway, I may as well tell you the truth. I have been spending some time lately on Pandanet and the associated IGS – Internet Go Server.

The Internet Go Server is a surprisingly entertaining place, but I am not good at explaining it.

The place is still very much like it was in the anime Hikaru no Go, “a wild and woolly place where pros amuse themselves under assumed names, top Asian matches are mirrored in real time, and there’s always something exciting going on”, as the American Go Association puts it. Actually it is not entirely lawless: You have to register under a name and verify it by email to be allowed to play, although guests can (and do) watch. I registered my nick (Itlandm) after one of my earlier re-watches of Hikaru no Go, possibly even the first time.

The web site has news related to the server and official events being played there. It also has answers to frequently asked questions, and a section that teaches the basics of Go / igo from scratch. It is detailed, friendly and quite likely the best introduction to Go that I have seen. It teaches an intuitive approach: “Don’t you get the feeling that black controls a larger territory now?”  The concept of territory is central to this particular approach, taking the game back to its roots as the ultimate strategy game as a birds-eye view of a battlefield. The website aims to teach you enough Go (or igo, as it is commonly called in Japan) to start playing after ten “days” of lessons. There are only 5 rules in Go, so you’d think you could just jump right in, but you will feel a lot more confident once you learn basics like how to count territory and how to make shapes that cannot be destroyed. By the end of the course, you should be able to play the IGS robots, and then other players.

***

The ladder of kyu and dan: The heart of Pandanet – IGS is the server where you can play ranked games against others from all over the world. I am not sure how the ranking was established originally, probably with the help of experts. In real life, professional Go players need to play matches against those on the next level above them in order to gain a rank. The professional levels are called “dan”, and the amateur levels are called “kyu”. In practice, many amateurs these days are strong enough to play at the lower dan levels, but once you get to 5-dan and above, there are only a few players on IGS and people tend to follow their matches closely. I saw a 9-dan player once, but he was just watching. In real life, a 9-dan professional could make a pretty good living from his skills.

On the Internet Go Servers the ranking is done differently these days. (I base this on the website, since I am not playing yet, just watching.) By default all matches in the main hall are ranked, even if you play 3 levels above or below your level. Games are considered equal if you play with the proper handicap (a combination of extra territory points and extra starting stones for the weaker player). If you win an even game, you gain 100 points. If you lose, you lose 100 points. But if you play a stronger or weaker player without handicap, the points vary based on the level difference. If you play against a stronger player, you get more points for a win but lose less points for a loss. The other way around if you play against a weaker player.

It is the sum of these points that decide what rank you are, or in other words your strength at Go. The line for increasing one level or half-level is higher than for decreasing, so you won’t keep changing levels up and down several times a day merely by winning and losing every other time. You need to consistently play better to gain a higher level.

The rank numbers are a bit strange in Go. The highest kyu level is 1, and there is no limit to how bad you can be (although as mentioned, the IGS stops at 17 now). But with dan (the system used by professionals) you start at 1 and in practice stops at 9. On the IGS, 10 dan is the maximum, but I have only seen that one 9-dan player so far. (Even though the names are the same, the actual professional dan levels are separate from the rating used on the Net and amateur tournaments. They should be vaguely comparable, over time. In practice, pro levels are noticeably higher, since it takes far longer to rise in the formal hierarchy of professional play. Even if you were a 7 dan amateur, you have to start as a 1 dan pro.)

If you know your strength from elsewhere, you can start with a provisory level. That way you won’t have to play hundreds of games to reach your correct level, and it is also more fair to those who play you. Otherwise a lot of people will lose points playing against what seems to be an equal player, but who is actually much stronger. Of course, if you are bluffing, it will become obvious pretty soon. But I just saw a provisory 6-dan, and he has a healthy ratio of wins, so that saved a lot of irritation for other people. Conversely, I saw another player who had several hundred more wins than losses. Either he has improved greatly from he started, or left a trailed of devastated opponents.)

Of course, if I ever get good enough to play against humans at all, I will have to start at the Beginner Class, which is below even 17 kyu.  Games here are not rated. But before even that there is a room where you can play against robots. I wonder if I will ever get beyond that. My Galaxy Tab beats me handily at its easiest level, so it does not look good for my future as a Go player! Perhaps that is a good thing, all things considered…

Chunks of memory

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Your personality doesn’t matter. This is a skill you can learn.

Extreme feats of memory are possible when we remember large quantities of information as one unit, because we have spent so much time with it. We all do this.

I know I have written about this before, already back in the original Chaos Node, where I read about it in an issue of Scientific American. Recently I read about the same thing in the book Talent is overrated. For instance, chess grandmasters could glance at a chess board and later reconstruct it exactly, something no normal person could do. From another ancient board game, Go (or Igo), I know that high-level players not only remember every move of a match, but can often guess how a match has progressed even if they arrive late into it, possibly even at the end. For someone unfamiliar with the game, this seems like magic. And yet we all do the same thing.

Neurotypical humans store incredible amounts of information about the people around them. Not only can they recognize a friend at a glance after several years, they can also keep track of the relationships between everyone in a village: Who are second cousins with who, who are friends, who are enemies, who are in love with who and who were in love with their current enemies years ago. Nobody finds this remarkable in the least, but it is really amazing.

Likewise we are very good at categorizing things. Or dogegorizing, I guees: Even children can usually tell cats and dogs apart, although small children have trouble with really small dogs which may be labeled cats. Even though there are so many different dogs and breeds of dogs, people have this internal concept “dog” which kind sums up the essential elements of doghood and which they remember as a unit, even after many years.

In the same way, if you grew up with your mother, when you think “my mother” you actually remember thousands of things, from how she looked at various ages to details of her behavior and relationships. You don’t consciously think of all these details every time you see her name, but if someone were to say something untrue about her, you would recognize it immediately.

In other words, all of us have the ability to remember very complex things as 1 unit.

Our short term memory is very limited, usually we are able to remember around 7 units of information at the same time. The actual number may vary from 5 to 9 and can be increased with rigorous training. It is the number of digits you can remember while walking from one room to another without repeating them in your mind. But if those digits are familiar, the number suddenly increases dramatically. For instance, to me the 6 digits 271258 count as 1 unit of information: It is my date of birth in the format used in this part of the world, ddmmyy. So I would be able to remember 6 more digits while leaving the room. Yes, strange as this may seem, I have an average short-term memory. I have tested this.

***

The computer language Forth caught my attention toward the end of high school. It was little more than a rumor back then, some new-fangled invention from the States. Personal computers were something hobbyists built themselves, and pitifully weak. A corporate mainframe at that time was perhaps a match for a smartphone today. OK, perhaps a little more. Let’s say a smartphone next year. But only a few years later, I had my own personal computer, weak though it was, and was programming in Forth.

This particular computer language had a peculiar structure. The basic language was very simple, consisting of a stack for data and a set of basic “words” that were coded in machine language, either directly or with an assembler. These were very simple commands which would be defined differently from computer to computer because of the hardware, but which (ideally) had the same names and function on all computers. But this was not what fascinated me. Rather, you could define new words by combining the old ones. The new words could be used in the same way to combine into more words. By keeping the definitions short and simple, the risk of errors was greatly diminished, and it was easy to test the new words right away. Yet there was no obvious limit to what you could do. There was very little overhead in having many levels of definitions.

The reason this appealed to me is that I am a verbal person. I think in a very similar way to this computer language, building new concept from existing concept. As long as I keep it simple, I can trust the knowledge I build from basic, and I can test it.

***

When you spend a lot of time doing something, whether it is programming or chess or surgery, you acquire what is called “domain knowledge” within that area. And when this knowledge becomes a part of you, something as natural to you as cats and dogs and family and friends, you begin to be able to think of it in chunks. The chess player can remember every piece on the board because not only the pieces are familiar to him, but the possible configurations too. He has seen them many times: When this particular group of pieces appear on this part of the board, it means certain risks and opportunities that are very real to him. He has no need to memorize this particular picture: He has seen it before, repeatedly, and it has meaning to him.

When I learned to read, I had to learn the alphabet like people did for generations before me. I hear that this is no longer considered very important, people start looking at words as pictures right away. But words still consists of letters, and sentences consist of words, paragraphs of sentences and so on. When you remember a poem or a particularly moving passage from a book, you don’t try to recall each individual letter in turn. Like the programming language, the “primitives” – the basic components – soon become buried in higher-level structures. Reading and writing are themselves everyday examples of structured knowledge. And as with the programming language, there is no obvious upper limit. Scholars will hold entire books conceptually in their mind – not word by word probably, but still in a very real sense whole books – and compare them to arrive at a higher meaning from the way the books agree or disagree. If we were wiser and lived longer lives, who knows what we could achieve?

Humans, it seems to me, are not proportionate to the savanna or the shores from which the “naked ape” emerged, but rather proportionate to the infinite. As better men than I have noticed, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe may be that it is so comprehensible. At least now we know a little bit more about ourselves as well.

The power of the Internet

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Rising in strength every year, thanks to the Internet. Well, it could happen.

As mentioned recently, I am watching the anime Hikaru no Go again. It is quite inspirational. My favorite is episode 15, where Hikaru learns about the International Go Server. (The real IGS is almost exactly the same as portrayed in the anime, although given the age of the anime, not to mention the manga it was based on, I am not sure which is the original – the real one or the one in the anime.)

Halfway through the episode, we get a rare glimpse of an American in America, talking to his mother on the phone. He explains that yes, the Asians are leading, but America is getting stronger because of the power of the Internet. (This was no doubt scripted at a time when Internet was more common in the US than in Japan – it is almost certainly the other way around now, with the class division in the US being far greater. I doubt there are people in Japan who don’t have Internet at home unless they have made a decision to live without it. Or even on their phones, for that matter.)

The IGS is indeed an amazing service, allowing people from all over the world to play against each other. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, you should be able to find someone around your own level. As mentioned in my previous post, I can now connect on my Android tablet. I don’t actually play though, because I suck so dramatically at this game that I might well lose to a dog. Every dog has its day, after all. Also, for some reason the Android client does not recognize my account, so I can only log on as guest. Still, I can watch all kinds of matches, at any time of they day or night. I have even seen professional players there sometimes.

***

The Internet may have made Go players stronger, but what about the rest of us? The Internet has been called a “wonder of the world”, but that is too weak, I think. The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the ancient wonders of the world. Knowledge from several different civilizations were brought together, from all over the Middle East and even from Greece, for scholars to study. But compare it to today, when even a child can access the wisdom of not only every civilization now existing in the world, but many ancient ones as well. Knowledge far beyond what anyone could absorb in a lifetime. We might as well try to drink the Niagara Falls.

Even if you are not able to spend a penny beyond whatever the Internet access costs you (and I believe many public libraries let you use it for free), you could download hundreds of thousands of free books (although most of them are free because they are old so the copyright has expired). Actually I am pretty sure it is millions, but seriously, do you expect to have read 10 000 books by the time you exit this life? Well, it happens. I think I know a couple people like that, but then I know some pretty weird people. Now say 100 000 books. Let us estimate a literate lifespan of 80 years, how much would you need to read to get through 100 000 books? 1250 books per year. If we generously allow for a day off every four years, that’s 1250 / 365, or 3.4, almost three and a half books a day for 80 years. And there are several times that in just free books on the Internet.

Of course, the free books are probably not the ones you most want to read, although it happens. And some of them may be in foreign languages. Oh yes, you can learn foreign languages too. Some of them at least for free, and at a level decent enough to start conversing with native speakers – also on the Net, also for free. Failing that, there are various programs for translation, although they really struggle with languages that are far apart, like Chinese and English.

If you would rather increase your knowledge by listening, several universities have started posting lectures on the Internet. There are also many YouTube clips of a scientific nature, although I admit finding them can be a bit of a “needle in the haystack” experience. And there is TED, where popularizers of science throw out revolutionary new ideas for the world to consider.

I have sometimes thought that if a smaller country with its own language(s), such as my native Norway, really wanted to grow to amazing power, it would make its higher education available on the Net in the national language. Books, lectures, the whole thing, allowing any citizen fluid in the language to educate themselves further and further and further. These days, the most important capital of any nation is the minds of its people, after all. I imagine streets thronged with polymaths, cafés frequented by towering intellects, parks where erudite sages take their walks. And then I come across the comment section of any except the most esoteric web sites. Oh well, it was a beautiful dream while it lasted! ^_^;

And with that, off to watch another episode of anime, brought to me by the amazing power of the Internet!

Brainwave entrainment and sleep, again

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Open your mind and let the New Age of Technology in! Messing around with your brain waves may sound scary, but that’s what they thought about flying too. And before that, running faster than horses. If God wanted us to go beyond our limitations, He would have given us the ability to create!

An online friend complained about insomnia again, so I hurried to recommend delta brainwave entrainment. This little masterpiece of modern science can replace up to 2 hours of sleep with half an hour of entrainment. Beyond that, you run into rapidly diminishing returns – it is not possible to replace sleep entirely, not even if you use several different frequencies of brainwave entrainment. Still, it is pretty impressive.

Unfortunately, it turns out my friend had experimented with brainwave entrainment in the past, on my recommendation, but experienced side effects that were worse than her lack of sleep. Even 10 minutes of delta entrainment caused blurred vision, sometimes migraine, and once she even experienced a seizure afterwards (although it is unclear whether this actually came from the entrainment). Unsurprisingly, she then gave up on the project, despite observing the almost magical effects of the technology.

It is more the rule than the exception that you will experience something when you first start using brainwave entrainment, especially if you start with delta, which is the slowest brainwave frequencies and only dominates naturally during our deepest sleep. So yeah, expect the unexpected. But for most people, the side effects are pleasant or just plain weird. Pain or neurological distortions like blurred vision or temporary loss of short-term memory are rare and typically symptoms of excessive use. The only permanent damage I have heard of is one user who got tinnitus, ringing in the ears. Given the thousands of users of brainwave entrainment, it is as likely as not that the fellow would have developed the problem during the same time period regardless. But who knows. Still, the odds are pretty good that you will benefit, and it is very unlikely that you will malefit, as it were.

Still, I recommend the LifeFlow approach of starting with a more accessible frequency. The LifeFlow program starts at 10 Hz, which is similar to a beginner’s meditation, or the relaxed feeling of lounging in a Stressless chair. It is recommended to use this for 40 minutes a day for two months before moving on to 9 Hz, a slightly deeper form of alpha wave, similar to what you experience the last few minutes before falling asleep. It continues this way down to 1 Hz, which is solid delta and comparable to deep sleep. During a night of sleep, you are unlikely to have delta after the first two sleep cycles unless you are a child. A sleep cycle is 90 minutes, and consists of several phases, so few adults and virtually no elderly get as much as 30 minutes of it naturally. Children do, however, and I don’t think delta entrainment is useful for them. They should get the opportunity to sleep naturally.

As I mentioned, the value of delta entrainment in connection with sleep is that it provides a type of brainwave that we need but which we don’t get much of as we grow older. Sleep consists of four phases, but two of them are particularly important. Deep sleep with delta waves is one of them. The other is REM sleep, or intense lifelike dreaming. Delta occurs naturally only at the beginning of the night, while REM increases gradually with each cycle through the night. Again, children have more of both, elderly less. In fact, elderly often go nights without delta at all, but also have less REM. Their dreams are often so prosaic that they wake up thinking they have not slept at all, despite snoring loudly!  When humans – and even animals – are kept awake for a long time, they catch up by having more delta and REM sleep the first night they are allowed to sleep again. This is a pretty good hint that these sleep phases are particularly important.

We don’t know any way to induce REM electronically. Sex will do it in rabbits, or so I have read. But delta waves we can create with precise sound patterns. All you need to do is close your eyes. You don’t even have to think about England. As long as you refrain from intense, primal emotions – fear, anger, lust or disgust – the entrainment will work its magic. You can even worry a little, if you feel the urge, just don’t panic.

But to reduce the risk of creepy side effects, I recommend starting with lighter frequencies (alpha or at least theta) and perhaps even shorter time spans in the beginning. Notice that most side effects are actually either pleasant or just psychedelic, but they are still distracting. The less you think about the experience, the better really. Just close your eyes, relax and let the sound wash over you.

I have an MP3 player with delta tracks beside me on my bed. That way, if I go to bed early enough to not fall asleep instantly, I can spend the time relaxing with delta waves. It is pretty nifty. I am a lot more awake at work than I used to be – I used to need to nap twice or thrice during most workdays, although my naps were brief – and I can now work full days instead of 90%. I still have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and perhaps I will for the rest of my life, but at least now I can do something to reduce the impact on my life.

I should admit that I am not sure it all comes from the brainwave entrainment, I made other changes in my life too. I learned laws of the mind from Happy Science and started to read esoteric books of timeless wisdom by Christian and near-Christian philosophers during the same time frame. It may even be a combination of several of these. Perhaps the passing of a couple years count as well, midlife changes and all that. But from a scientific point of view, when it comes to the effect on daytime sleepiness, brainwave entrainment is the main suspect.

A bit more enthusiastic than me, this fellow LifeFlow user escaped psychiatric hell by the power of brainwave entrainment. There are a number of such stories among the LifeFlow regulars.  His review is here at MeditationStars.

 

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 – part 2

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“If you don’t listen to everything, you won’t understand anything.” When dictating, speak in statements, or at least phrases. Don’t stop randomly, for instance between “the” and noun.

I have now had the new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple days. With my throat condition, that probably corresponds to a couple hours for those of you who talk a lot. I intend to use Dragon to dictate this entry, but I I will still need to make corrections. Perhaps you won’t, if you are a native English speaker without too much accent or dialect.

I am impressed by how quickly  Dragon has adapted to my voice.  It certainly happened much faster than with any earlier version. In all fairness, I also have more experience with Dragon now. For instance, as I mentioned in my previous entry,  I have made sure to perform training at different times of the day and at the beginning and end of a “speech”.

(I actually dictated the previous paragraph without making any corrections, but that’s not the rule for longer paragraphs yet.)

*** 

A problem with browsers: I haven’t heard about this from anyone else, but I have found Dragon to operate erratically in text entry fields in browsers. This could be a serious drawback, considering how much time we spend on the Internet these days, both at home and in the office. At first I thought the problem was only with Opera, which is my browser of choice. This program is not explicitly supported by Dragon, and in version 11 the text field where I write my journal was marked as unrecognized. While I could try to dictate there, the result was usually pretty bad. In version 12, Dragon alternates between “unknown text field” and “normal mode”. If I dictate while in normal mode, it seems to work well enough. If it is in unknown mode, I can usually just wait and it will switch to normal mode  after a few seconds. Even so, the hotkeys don’t work, and corrections  frequently mess up the text a little. So for longer texts,  I tend to use the DragonPad and just paste the result into the browser.

Unfortunately, I have similar problems in Internet Explorer when using Google+. Again, this may be a problem with that particular application – even typing can sometimes be sluggish in Google+ – but there are tens of millions of people who use that application frequently. Then again, it might be just me. Since I am one of the first to actually buy the product, there aren’t much in the way of reviews for me to compare with.

Is this a big deal? After a few days, you would probably not need to make corrections every time you post. A more serious problem might be if parts of the text are missing because you dictated while it was in “unknown field” mode. Again, this could be peculiar to my computer – there certainly doesn’t seem to be any problems in the demonstrations on YouTube. (Then again, they use neither Opera nor Google plus.)

***

 I haven’t had any problems with other programs. Dragon works beautifully with yWriter, the program I use when writing fiction. It seems to work fine with all kinds of notepads, whether plaintext or rich text. The commands for opening programs, switching between programs or clicking on buttons work as expected. And the on-screen help which came with version 11 makes it unnecessary to memorize the handbook with its dozens and dozens of commands. I am sure there are a number of features that I am never going to use, but better that than the other way around. And in version 12 you can even turn off features at a very detailed level if you’re afraid of activating them by mistake or if you simply need more speed.

You guys, I really feel like I can’t get across how smart this program is. When I first tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking approximately a decade ago, I compared it to a drunk and homesick high school exchange student. I compared version 11 to a native English speaker with a college education. But version 12… It is like a professional secretary with a genius IQ. Oh, it still has problems now and then, but it has only spent a couple hours with me, and there are several sounds in English that Scandinavians of my generation simply cannot pronounce. I am not sure any of my English-speaking readers would be able to understand me that well after listening to me for a couple hours.

Because I have spent decades mostly in silence, I cannot dictate a long entry like this without taking breaks. My voice simply dries up. If not for this physical handicap, I would be sorely tempted to do exactly what Nuance proposes in its slogan: “Stop typing, start talking.” It really is that impressive.

The Dragon has landed!

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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 became ready for download today for us  existing Dragon users who had pre-ordered. I’ll come back to the installation shortly.

For those who do not know, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a voice input program for the Windows computer, and the leader in this category. It takes dictation but also allows you to open programs, search the web, compose mail and edit existing texts without using your hands. As such, it solves an acute problem for those who don’t have hands or can’t use them. For us who have hands, it is most useful for dictation. It is fast and, with a little practice, amazingly accurate. The new version claims a 20% increase in accuracy, putting it well above 99% accuracy with 15 minutes of training. In practice, it takes longer, but the program keeps learning the more you use it. When you see an experienced user work with Dragon 11.5 (the previous version) it is “indistinguishable from magic”.

Installation:  The download link from Nuance arrived by email before I woke up in the morning. A separate mail also contained link to the training video. While I am personally a fan of reading, the training video will surely be welcome by dyslexic users, another core customer group. (The program can also read text out loud, even text you have not dictated.)

The download process proceeds in several steps. You first download a tiny download manager program. It does not really matter much where you save this, it is very small. This program must be run to start the main download. The main download is a compressed file, but still close to 3 gigabytes. This must again be unpacked to a larger set of files before the actual installation. During the unpacking process, both the compressed file and the unpacked file take up space simultaneously, and that’s before the actual install into the Program Files directory. This program is not recommended for people with small disks!

It is recommended that you back up the compressed file so that you can install from this if your computer suddenly crashes or if you simply decide to buy a new at some point.

The download went without glitches, but the install itself caused me some trouble. A ways into the installation, the program warned me that several processes had to be closed down before it could continue. Three of these were unknown to me, and did not appear with the given names in Windows Task Manager. I had to break off the installation and reboot the computer, then run the install again. The install did not automatically resume, and if I had not taken note of where the unpacked file was saved, I would have had to restart from the compressed file. I would recommend you reboot your PC before you start downloading, and not start any unnecessary programs until after the install is complete.

After installation, the software offers to let you register the product online. There is also an online activation which is necessary to continue using the program. The registration and the activation are unrelated tasks.

As a user of version 11, I had my existing program removed automatically and my user account upgraded to the new version. This takes some time even on a fast computer. New users will be led through creating an account instead, and the system checks the quality of your microphone input before asking you to read a text to attune the program to your voice and reading rhythm. You can skip this step and train the program by correcting mistakes if you want. New users also get an offer to let the program read through their email and documents to adapt to their vocabulary. This is a separate task from adapting to your voice. Again, you can skip this and just train the program through use, if you are impatient, but there will be more errors during your first few days of use if so.

Accuracy training: Since Dragon was complaining about my microphone, I bought another, an analog headset to replace the digital USB headset. I established a new user account and started over from scratch with the new hardware. This microphone passes Dragon’s test with flying colors, but the new account doesn’t have any of the accumulated experience with my speaking. Newsflash: It certainly wasn’t useful right out of the box!

My experience is probably not typical, since I am a foreigner to the English language and also have a chronic problem with my vocal cords – my voice grows “rusty” many times faster than a normal human – but I think we should still consider this. After all, most people aren’t native English speakers, or if they are, they have dialects or accents. And your voice does change with use even if more slowly than mine. And my experience is that it takes several hours for a new user before Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 becomes truly useful. So don’t buy this program an hour before you need it. Set aside a couple days at least to become good friends with it before you start working together.

Not only does your voice change after you have used it for a while, but it is also slightly different from morning to evening. So it may be a good idea to do some reading training at different times, to help the computer get familiar with your voice. It is not necessary to read all the way through the exercises, you can click finish at any time. Also, try to make sure that you read the exercises in the same way that you speak to the computer when you dictate. For my part, I have found that I have a tendency to speak faster and in longer stretches when I read something, compared to when I dictate my own thoughts. For some reason I also tend to read louder – perhaps a habit from my school days? We used to be required to read aloud in class.

Features: The previous version mostly improved the user interface, introducing context-sensitive help in the form of the “Dragon Sidebar”. It also expanded support for more programs, and the engine was made more efficient. Version 12 has very few changes in the user interface; it supposedly includes 100 new features, but I don’t expect to need more than a few of them. Most of the development this time seems to have concentrated on the technical: In addition to the improved accuracy, the program also runs much faster, especially on new computers where it now takes advantage of multicore processors and extra memory. Additionally, even the home version can now take advantage of mobile phones as microphones: If you have an iPhone or an Android smartphone and it’s on the same Wi-Fi network as your computer, you can dictate to your smartphone and have the text appear on your computer screen!

One feature I thought was included in the home version, but which evidently isn’t, is playback of your own dictation. On the other hand, the program includes an excellent synthetic voice which can read what you have dictated (or any other normal text). This will begin to come in handy when the accuracy approaches 100%. Dragon doesn’t make typos; when it makes a mistake, it writes valid words, usually words that make sense  next to each other, but not the words you intended to say. We who have been typing for decades, will naturally look for typos when we proofread our text. It is all too easy for us to overlook that a wrong word has been used, such as “is” instead of “isn’t”. But chances are we catch it when we hear it out loud!

That’s all for this time, but I hope to be back with glowing praise when the accuracy approaches 100%. ^_^

 

Comics on tablets?

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An old acquaintance recently wrote about his experience with reading comics on the Nexus 7, the new 7″ tablet from Google and Asus. There was some discussion of the topic, and I bought a number of cheap comics to read on my own Galaxy Tab 7.7, which has the same screen resolution and only marginally larger screen.

The result is quite readable as long as I read a single page at a time. It has a problem with double pages – I have to zoom in and drag the picture to see all in a readable size. This is easy to do, but it does break the flow a little.

I kind of wish this technology had existed back in the time when I bought several times my own weight in comic books, back in the original Chaos Node. While I was never one of the true obsessed collectors – I just enjoyed reading the comics – there were many, many bags of comics that I carted off to the used-book store when I moved from there. And still there were several crates left. And when I moved again, I got rid of some more. And again. Now I have one cardboard crate worth of physical comics left, and if I live to move another time, there will probably be only a dozen books or so left.

If I had this technology, I could balance all those hundreds and hundreds of comics on two fingers. It would not have impacted moving at all, would not have taken up valuable space in my apartment. But on the other hand, I would not have been able to give them away and hope that some curious kid could enjoy them after me. So I guess all things have their price.

Speaking of price, even though I did not buy the newest comics (which are more expensive) and even bought some on sale, I just don’t find comic books worth paying for anymore. Well, obviously I did pay for them, but I bought them under doubt. I have more entertainment than I need. I don’t have unlimited time. To pay money to waste my time … well, I don’t feel like I need another way to do that right now. That part of my life is fading, like other parts have done before. I don’t really expect it to come back.

But there are worse things young people can do than read comics.  And there are worse ways to read them than on a 7″ tablet.

I bought mine from Comixology, which has an app that let me both buy them and display them. I can read them on several different devices at no extra cost. There are surely other ways as well, but I am not really going to study it any further than this, I think.

 

Dragon 12 is coming!

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Nuance Communications will once again show you the great power of science! Be happy, you!

And by Dragon, I mean Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the speech recognition software that not only takes dictation but lets you control pretty much any aspect of your personal computer. Well, as long as you use the most common software, at least. It lets you say things like “Search the web for Princess Bride” (which will, in all likelihood, be interpreted by any nearby humans as “Search the web for Russian brides”) and your favorite search engine will appear in your favorite browser with the requested information, at the speed of thought. Well, unless you have the newest computer like I have, it may be at the speed of very slow thought, but I never said otherwise, did I? ^_^

Dragon 12 is not actually out yet, it won’t be ready for download until August 9, but I have already pre-ordered it at half price as an existing customer. (And in Euro, even, which is already ridiculously cheap compared to my native currency, the Norwegian krone.) I would not take the chance of forgetting to order it while it is still cheap. Although it does not feel as I am going to forget it in less than two weeks, I probably will. The power of Now is strong in this one. Or it may be the first shadow of Alzheimer’s, the two are hard to tell apart.

In the meantime, I have Dragon 11, which is also pretty good. But while people who work at BBC may get 99% accuracy out of it, that is not the case for a foreigner to the English language such as I. So the 20% increased accuracy of Dragon 12 could be helpful. Other reviews of Dragon 11 indicate that the accuracy is more like 96% right out of the box and 98% a couple weeks later, improving rather slowly after that. Still not bad. I mean, 50 words is like a modest paragraph. Only getting one error in a paragraph is pretty good. If version 12 can improve on that with 20%, so much the better.

Of course, the errors you get with speech recognition are different from the classic typo. Typos usually consist of transposing two characters, or getting a character too much or too little. Speech recognition errors tend to replace one word or phrase with another, and with today’s highly advanced artificial intelligence, the replacement phrase will probably be grammatically correct. Mine likes to swap “they” for “I”, and is also particularly fond of the phrase “naked English speaker” (which I am not – I am not even a native English speaker).

By coincidence (if such a thing exists), I recently gave in and installed my version 11 on the portable computer. (I still don’t know when I’m going to fix the big desktop – probably not until the summer heat is over.) It works surprisingly well, considering that I no longer run it from a SSD. Hopefully the new version will be able to continue to use whatever data accumulates in the meantime. (Remember, the program gets better and better the more you use it.)

And hopefully I will still be around in August so I can give you an actual review of Dragon 12. Or you may want to buy it yourself. I don’t know how well it fares if children are screaming in the background, though.

Samsung mobile MTP device

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This post is for other people who, like me, can’t connect their Samsung Galaxy Tab or phone to the Samsung KIES. It may also affect other programs that try to transfer files between the phone and the Windows computer.

When the tablet was plugged in, a process began on Windows to install 3 different drivers at the same time. The middle of these, called MTP, failed after a fairly long time (3 minutes?). The same happened when I used the KIES option for solving connection problems. It tried to reinstall, but again the MTP failed.

What solved it for me was to (turn off the Galaxy), remove the SIM card, start the Galaxy and connect the cables again. This time there appeared a window with 4 installs, all of them successful. I could then connect to KIES as well.

Ironically, the only reason I did all this in the first place was to check for software update to the unit (Galaxy Tab 7.7) which was supposed to be upgraded to Android 4.0 (“Ice Cream Sandwich”) by now. But there was no update.

In contrast to this, I upgraded my Galaxy Note over 3G network when it got Ice Cream Sandwich a few weeks ago. But I read today that this won’t work with the 7.7. I wonder if that is true. It seems that different things work for different people.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

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It is rather bigger than a mobile phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 with its AMOLED screen is much clearer and more vivid than ordinary screens, although this picture taken with flash does not really show either of them at their best.

Yesterday during the lunch break I went to buy the Galaxy Tab 7.7, in my humble opinion the best tablet / datapad available at this time. On my way, however, I thought of the poor starving children in Africa, and turned aside. I was almost back at the office when I realized that Samsung almost certainly does a lot more for Africa than I ever would even if I tried. Which I don’t, at least in an economic sense.

Today I actually bought this thing. It is sleek and lightweight, even though it has a back plate of light metal instead of the plastic that Samsung normally uses. Samsung has taken some flak for the “cheap feeling” of their plastic chassis, even though it certainly withstands more falls than even the Gorilla glass used in the front. I honestly don’t see their or most gadgets surviving any treatment that would break the usual lightweight and durable plastic. But this is their showcase product, it seems, so they threw in the metal plate. Luckily it is thin enough to add very little to the weight. Compared to the original 7″ Galaxy Tab, the 7.7 is noticeably lighter and very comfortable to hold for reading.

The crowning piece however is the display, using the AMOLED technology which delivers unparalleled vivid colors and the blackest blackness available in any screen today. It also seems to be gentle on the battery. The resolution is 1280×800, which may seem like a modest upgrade from the 1024×600 used in all their 7″ tablets, yet is the same as their 10.1″ Galaxy 2 and with a better display. The new iPad (3) has it beat on screen resolution, but is (at least for now) not available in one-handed size.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is definitely one-handed most of the time for reading. It is not too heavy to hold in one hand, although you will need another hand to actually use it for anything more than reading books. It is incidentally a beautiful e-book reader, the black of the letters very black and the sepia of the pages very sepia. Well, that is how I like them. Your pages may vary.

I generally use the tablet in portrait mode, although if you use it to watch movies or look at pictures you will probably hold it in both hands in landscape mode. Because of this preference, I use SwiftKey 3 instead of SwiftKey Tablet 3 as my keyboard. It is not free, but very affordable. (Actually I use the 3 Beta today, but by the time you read this the final version is on sale. If you read this the first week, it is at half price, but it is well worth the price of a couple hamburgers anyway.) SwiftKey Tablet is made for typing with two hands, and has the keyboard split with half on the left side and half on the right. This is an abomination in my sight and looks just unnatural. Then again I have used QWERTY keyboards since I was 6 or so, so it is almost up there with potty training when it comes to ingrained attitudes.

The tablet comes with Samsung’s own TouchWiz shell on top of Android “Honeycomb”. To be honest, I don’t see this as much of an improvement. Android 4 “Ice Cream Sandwich” is better than any of the two, and if I feel extremely energetic one day I may root the tablet and install unadorned ICS on it. For the most part, however, I don’t spend a lot of time in the operating system, but mostly use it to start the apps I use regularly.

The apps I use regularly are not the ones that come pre-installed from Samsung, although I do use the ones that come from Google. The “improvements” from Samsung are as usual nothing of the sort, in my opinion. I would rather they did not waste any of the tablet’s 16 GB on this, but I am not all humans in the world. Still, I think we can agree that Samsung comes at this market from the hardware side. Their software does not have the power to rouse men’s heart that Apple’s has.

Be that as it may, I soon downloaded my usual apps and got “productive”. If this is your first time using a tablet after you are familiar with smartphones, you may be looking for the menu key, either in hardware or on the screen. There does not really exist such a thing in Android 3, but clicking on the status display bar in the lower right will reveal the setup choice for the phone as such, while individual programs usually have a visible menu symbol in a corner, typically the upper right (although Spotify uses the upper left). Legacy apps from smartphones may have a menu symbol in the lower left row along with the back, home and task manager soft keys. And some few legacy apps may not work properly if at all, but this is rare.

One thing that did not work properly was connecting to an old SparkLAN WX-6615 wireless router at work. At a distance of two fairly thin walls, it was easily good enough for the Galaxy Note and an older, cheaper LG phone, not to mention two laptops I have tested it with. But the 7.7 timed out loading even fairly simple web pages, and had to try multiple times to get new email. So that was a bit of a letdown.  It really made me wonder whether I have got another “Monday machine” – remember, generally it is the customer who does quality control beyond turning the machine on to see that it boots up – or whether the Galaxy Tab 7.7 generally has worse Wi-Fi receptivity than anything that has been made the last five years. That seems unlikely for a high-end product designed to show off Samsung as the new hi-tech leader of the world.

I switched to 3G from my phone provider (the model comes with room for a SIM card) and it worked beautifully. But when I switched back to Wi-Fi, the problems returned. Next I enabled ad-hoc wireless hotspot on the LG and placed it mere inches from the tablet. This time it had no problem connecting and loading. And then when I turned off the hotspot on the LG, the tablet automatically remembered the wireless router and reconnected to it, without stopping by 3G. And now it loaded web pages quickly, even playing YouTube with only a short buffering. Clearly the problem is not with the Wi-Fi hardware, then. I don’t know whether this problem will happen with another Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, or even with another SparkLAN WX-6615, not to mention other Wi-Fi sources. But it is definitely worth mentioning, in case someone searches for a similar problem in the future.

Because I totally write this to inform and entertain, not to show off my living in the zeroth world or anything. That’s not something I am proud of. It is accidental, not essential, as the ancients would say. Of course, the ancients did not have as many gadgets as we have. That may be why some of them became wise eventually.