Phonehead Blog

WordPress iPhone blog app

phonehead — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:39:02 +0000

If this post makes it to my blog then I’m impressed!
This is using the app from the iPhone.

Xbox RROD

phonehead — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:50:24 +0000

My son is in mourning.

His Xbox 360 died tonight with the red ring of death. He bought it from a good friend of mine eight months ago – who had had it for a year and I know it was treated with kid gloves by him. I think that is just rubbish! A peice of expensive kit – trashed after a couple of years, and whats worse paid for by hard saved pocket money.
I think anyone still in full time education should have their Xbox replaced for free if they get the RROD even when It’s out of the standard warranty- It’s not really fit for purpose!

UPDATE

Ok so happily I may have to eat my words err blog.

After a lot of feedback from people at work it turns out that Microsoft DO offer a 3 year warrany on the Xbox.

Even though it is second hand, I was able to register it and ask for a repair. So far so good I will let you know how I get on.

Update
My son is very happy, and so am I. Microsoft sent him a brand new (same spec) box by return of post from Germany.
I’m impressed!

Wishful thinking

phonehead — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 22:36:34 +0000

I’m so rubbish at getting things done!
Whilst at work I think about how I’m going to get it together and cycle to work tomorrow, carry on with tidying up my home paperwork and plan what we are going to do on holiday (at home this year) etc; but when I get home all I do is have a bite to eat and then end up watching tv. All my good intentions fall away, until the next day when I’m at work and it all starts up again. It’s partly to do with being too tired an partly just being lazy/dissatisfied. When the kids were younger I found that 8pm was the crucial time, if I could force myself to start something before 8:15 it was ok otherwise I would just veg out. In those days I was super tired. Now that the kids are older teenagers I don’t have that excuse – but I still seem to be super tired, and 8pm is no longer magical. This then means I have mediocre evenings, and fill my time with distraction tasks and end up going to bed too late as I try to claw back some satisfation from the evening.

DragonDictate Likes

phonehead — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:08:19 +0000

What I like about DragonDictate is that it shows you the words that it is processing as you speak rather than just the dot dot dot you get with Microsoft speech recognition. It’s interesting to watch as sometimes you can see it flip words mid sentence when it has worked out the context. I would imagine that the current versions are even better than this old version 4!!!

Eddie Stobart visibility

phonehead — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:39:40 +0000

When did Eddie Stobart lorries change colour? They used to be an instantly recognisable green lorry with white wording, the now they have changed to look like many other boring lorries i.e. just white but with green lettering.

Just to make sure that I’m not talking rubbish, I had a quick look on their web site. It turns out that these white lorries are for their refrigeration services. Personally I still think that’s a mistake as you just don’t notice them so much.

http://www.eddiestobart.co.uk/Services/Transport/Eddie_Stobart_Specialist.php

Commentators

phonehead — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:26:20 +0000

Why is it these days that commentators seem to think they are far more important than they really are? Today I was at an outdoor event where they were two commentators, one from the central commentary box and the other was a roving reporter if you like. They were giving interesting facts about what was going on, but every now and again they would just start having a conversation with each other trying to out do each other about what they knew about the subject, and the people involved. I’m sure it was very interesting to themselves, but for everyone else it was really annoying. Also commentators seem to think that we’re totally stupid and need have constant chatter otherwise we won’t understand what’s going on, just let the events speak themselves with the occasional interesting fact and the name of the participant.

Grr Saturday hours

phonehead — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:36:54 +0000

My fault entirely as I forgot that PC World shuts at 6pm on a Saturday, and I got there at 17:59.

I was going to get a new headset for the speech recognition stuff as the one I have has a flexible microphone arm, so this is never in exactly in the same place and the recognition can ‘go off’ at times. So I thought I’d get one of the Logitec ones that have a fixed arm as the positioning will be more consistent.

Speech Recognition office 2007, Pah!

phonehead — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:23:47 +0000

Ok so I have the new(ish) Office 2007 running on XP.

I noticed that my son was spending ages typing up his coursework, and remembered that i bought a copy of Dragon dictate ages ago (version4) and thought that this could help him out.

At that time it was just too slow on my pc (a 200mmx) but the current pc should work for speed.

After abit of hunting I found the old disks and loaded it up. To my suprise it works great in XP, and is fairly easy to train. Unfortunately it doesn’t give me the editing options I want in word such as corrections and selections.

I know that I had seen voice recognition in office 2003 (or was that office xp), so naturally I assumed that my new shiny office 2007 would have an even better version in it. Not so, Microsoft have moved it out of office as it is now in Vista. Gee thanks, I’ve upgraded office and lost features.

After abit of searching I found this post which shows you how to load up the speech recognition SDK into XP and all is well including the editing.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/moskowitz_02september23.mspx

Here is a direct link to the download page for the SDK

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5e86ec97-40a7-453f-b0ee-6583171b4530&DisplayLang=en#filelist

BBq

phonehead — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:19:56 +0000

Why do BBQ’s get to the point of being hot enough just when you have finished eating the last sausage!