Discover Speechify: Enhance Your PDF Experience

With Speechify. I can multitask and boost productivity with natural voice capabilities. I cannot say enough good things about Speechify. I've scanned most of my books over the years and I have saved them, as well as thousands of articles, in Dropbox (as pdfs). Now, with Speechify everything in my vast collection can be read out loud to me as I'm working out, cooking, cleaning. It's as if everything I own as a pdf can now be a podcast. You can also have Speechify read a live web page.

Further, they offer dozens of natural sounding voices in various languages. I've been listening to articles in Spanish (at slightly reduced speed) and it has been very helpful for improving my Spanish. I'm not making any commission for this recommendation, but I wanted to share this because I just discovered Speechify and it is a game-changer for me. Maybe some of you are looking for this capability on your phone or laptop. If so, consider Speechify. It's not free, but for me it will totally be worth $140/year.

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In Praise of FoxTrot Professional Search Software for Mac

I have sometimes struggled to comb through several decades of legal research (as well as science and philosophy research) on my iMac 4tb hard drive. I've used Apple Spotlight's multi-faceted document search function over the years and it is often quite helpful. Today, however, I learned about FoxTrot Professional Search. It is incredibly powerful, allowing you to pinpoint documents, images, spreadsheets and mail in dozens of ways, including proximity searches and tailor-made search strings with exceptions. You can apply complicated search requests to multiple indices on your main HD, as well as external drives (I've got another 3+ TB of data on my external drive. I've been exploring the parameters of FoxTrot for a couple of hours now and I highly recommend it. $100 per workstation. I hope this helps somebody out there . . .

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Dealing with Microsoft PowersHell

Why, one may wonder, would I be delving into something that ubiquitous Microsoft decides unabashedly to call PowersHell? To start with, and in full disclosure, they capitalize it as PowerShell, a new and improved version of the command line interface that we old timers sometimes still call the DOS prompt. But why would I use this, when the Gooey does so much? It has to do with too many cameras and too many memory chips. You see, I just went on vacation, a two week, 3,550 mile drive to Yellowstone, the Tetons, and many places in between. I brought home over 4,000 snapshots and video clips taken with 4 cameras. Why would anyone need 4 cameras? Well, I have a SuperZoom 12Mp, and a pocket camera (the SD1100 that we've raved about), and my new Droid. That's three? Well, I also got a back-up SD1100, that I've also rigged up with my first to use as a stereo camera. So with three of the four cameras all of the same brand, and so many pictures, eventually the 8 character file names (the first four of which are fixed in 3 cameras at "IMG_") began to overlap. And when I filled up a memory chip, each camera decided to reset to IMG_0001, so I have many overlaps in the lower numbers. Very clumsy. Also it is hard to match up the images from the left and right cameras (each eye stored in its own folder) without looking at each enlarged, and the Windows Photo Viewer doesn't let me look at two files from different folders side-by-side. So I decided to rename all the images to use longer names, and decided to use the picture date and time to rename them. My former XP machine had use a nice re-namer that would do this. But now I have Win7, and the old Win95 app won't run. But I keep in mind that "Every O/S Sucks" So I Googled for a new renamer that could handle the task, and stumbled on to this post: Rename multiple files as “Modified Date/Time” using cmd or Powershell. Yee, I thought, Haw! Why install another utility when the O/S does it for me. But it can't be done with the old command line. One has to figure out how to use the new, powerful, dangerous PowerShell. I could have just used the code snippet in the Super User post linked above. But I wanted to, a) Know how it works, and b) Do it a little differently. So once I returned, I did some reading, and playing. But after a minimum of profanity, I got it working on a test folder, and then ran my new script on all my files. Now I can tell at a glance when each picture was taken, and therefore easily glean the where and why. Just for a laff, here's a bit about the code name Microsoft used while developing this new shell:

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A Subtle Change to the Way the Web Works

A recent article on ZDNet, 10 things you should know about HTML5, brought to mind the good old days. I wrote my first web site in early 1995, back before there was a World Wide Web Consortium, before there were hundreds of thousands of web sites, before Internet Explorer was even a gleam in Bill Gates' eye, and HTML 1.0 had recently been ratified. I had to manually install a TCP/IP stack in DOS (underlying Windows 3.11), and bought a book on the proposed HTML 2.0 standard to use with my purchased 3½" disc of the new Netscape 2.0. Yes, I wrote my first several sites using Notepad, before moving up to the superior Notepad++. Netscape had some good debugging tools built in that IE never felt the need to mimic. The first deficiency that I noticed in the HTML standard was that there was no graphical mode. They had no way to draw a box, a line, a circle, or any graphical image except for the img tag to import Microsoft BMP and CompuServe GIF files. The open JPG standard was just coming out. I couldn't believe it. The HPGL vector language seemed pretty standard to me back then, and has since become the universal vector drawing protocol in plotters and such. But somehow the designers of the new, image-based World Wide Web addition to the Internet had no apparent plan to explicitly support graphics. Sure, one could buy Flash and embed it as an object on a page. But it was expensive, clumsy, and not widely deployed back in the 300/1200/2400 baud world. But now, only sixteen years later the W3C is finally putting together the new HTML 5.0 standard, including both vector and video graphics as part of the basic language! Because of the now-entrenched nature of Flash, that isn't going away quickly. After all, many web sites still use the CompuServe GIF 1989a (formerly proprietary) image format. But Flash or DivX or QuickTime will no longer be necessary to build fully graphical web pages.

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Die, Caps Lock, Die

One of my peeves against propagated obsolete legacy is the caps lock key for computers. I hate it. In the 32 years that I've been using computers, I don't think that I've ever hit it intentionally. It is where it is because typewriters used it to mechanically lock down the shift key. But I have yet to meet anyone who types in all caps, except to indicate online screaming. Even then, it isn't hard to hold a shift key with a pinky while typing with the other 9 fingers. But now there is a fix! In every version of Windows since W2K, there is a secret patch that lets you convert any key to another. I've chosen to make CAPSLOCK into a simple shift. If I really need to lock caps, I can do it through software, or convert another useless key (e.g. scroll lock) into caps lock. I found the magical tool in JohnHaller.com's Useful Stuff essays: Disable Caps Lock. It's a simple registry tweak that he found at annoyances.org (where they have full technical details). Just download and launch the tweak. You get warnings, But it works! Just follow the directions and you'll never be bothered by caps lock again.

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