New Good and Geeky Book – SteadyCam Volt – New Amazon Echo

The Good And Geeky Week

I’ve been determined to get finished with the latest Good and Geeky book Dictation Expert Mac and iOS and I have made great strides with it during this week. I’ve made four videos to be included in the book which is about getting good with Mac and iOS dictation. I use dictation extensively and only use the keyboard when I really have to. If my wife’s asleep in the room next to my office I use the keyboard so I don’t wake her. She would definitely hear me talking to the computer as she’s light sleeper and the rule goes that if you have a happy wife you have a happy life. When you have a book of 30,000 words it’s inevitable there will be some grammar mistakes and one or two spelling mistakes. There doesn’t tend to be too many spelling mistakes because of using dictation for writing. DragonDictate is a far better speller than I am. Even so, it’s necessary to read through the writing to make sure that it all makes sense. It’s also necessary to rearrange paragraphs and chapters to try and make it as coherent as possible. I’ve got to the point now where got past the release candidates for the book. This is the process where I export out of Ulysses as an EPUB and I really through in iBooks. I also open it up in the Kindle Previewer application. The Kindle Previewer gives me a look at the book in the Mobi format and it also will give me a file I can send to my iPad for another read through. It’s quite possible to get completely sick of the work in progress when you have to read it so many times. I keep telling myself it’s going to be worth it in the end. So I published the book on Amazon and I will do a promotion next week to launch the book.

Get the Book for Free

For the second week the book is available I’m going to make it free. This is in the hope that readers will leave a review of the book on Amazon. The standard price for the book is going to be around about $3.99. If you’re standing on the fence as to whether you would like to use dictation instead of typing the book could help you decide. In the book I talk about whether it’s worthwhile spending the money on the best dictation software which is Dragon dictation from Nuance. I compare it with Siri dictation on the Mac and on iOS, Google typing, and a transcription app called Just Press Record. There are also online services where you send your audio to be converted into text. One way of using Dragon dictation is to use the transcription facilities. Personally, I prefer to dictate directly into the receiving application on my Mac – TextEdit. I like seeing the words appearing on the screen as I say them which gives me the opportunity to check it as I write. I like being able to make corrections using my voice as I go. The accuracy of the dictation using Dragon is excellent and I don’t have to make too many changes. One of the reasons it’s so accurate is because it learns from you as you have the speech converted into text.

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SteadiCam Volt

I received the SteadiCam Volt and because of spending all the time working on the book I haven’t had the opportunity to properly test it out. I spent a few minutes with it giving it a quick run through with the balancing followed by a walk around the house filming things. It is kind of fiddly to get the balance correct, especially side-to-side. Getting the phone positioned in the centre is necessary to make sure the picture is level. Once the SteadiCam Volt is switched on the electronic balancing assists the manual balancing achieved with weights. I watched a couple of videos on YouTube where people have shown some pretty impressive video clips with people walking and even running and still managing to have smooth video. During the next week I have family visiting and I’ll probably have plenty of chance to test out the new video possibilities using the SteadiCam Volt. There’s also a connection on the stabiliser to use a Go Pro camera so that will have to be tested as well. The only thing with the Go Pro is that the audio recording is pretty poor and I’ll need to set up separate audio capture.

Looking forward to the release of the new Echo from Amazon

The new version of the Echo is being released on the 31st of October and will arrive at my mother’s house the day after. Then I’ll have to wait for it to arrive here in Spain. The Echo devices are still not available here in Spain. All of the services are in English and I don’t suppose they expect many people here in Spain speak English. I will be bringing the Echo Dot into the office and I’ll put the new one in the living room. I’m toying with the idea of trying out the £3.99 monthly subscription music service. It only works per device which is why awaiting for the new one to arrive with the better speaker before I give that a try. I’ll give it a month or two and see how much I use the service. Similar services for music are working out at around about nine or ten euros per month.

Amazon Echo Pro