Using Speech Recognition in Windows 7

If there’s one area where Windows is way ahead of every other operating system in the world, it has to be Speech Recognition. There is no other operating system that I can think of right now that has the inbuilt capability to browser websites (yeah, Windows can recognize the text in images too…) through speech recognition without having to download anything. Sure, it’s buggy, but I’m sure that voice will soon become the preferred method of interfacing with the computer along with touch.

But enough of the history and theory, here’s how you too can start using Speech Recognition to give commands and dictate to your PC.

Setting up Speech Recognition in Windows 7 – Step by step

1. Plug-in your microphone (or don’t worry about it if you have a fairly good inbuilt microphone). Your mileage may vary with Bluetooth microphones (most of the time, windows will refuse to accept a wireless Bluetooth microphone, because it just isn’t ready for that yet).
2. Click Start
3. Search for “speech recognition” and click on Windows Speech Recognition
4. If this is your first time using Speech Recognition (it likely is, since you’re reading this), a Microphone Setup Wizard will pop-up, asking you to do some stuff
5. Follow the instructions, and after your microphone is set up, Windows will walk you through the set-up process (where I’ll see how you speak and tell you how to speak to your computer). Warning: This might take 15 mins – 30 mins (depending on how good you are at reading and saying stuff out loud). But if you’re new to this, don’t worry, Windows will walk you though.
6. Try to pay attention during the tutorial, it’ll tell you everything you need to use Window’s Inbuilt Features
7. After you’re done the tutorial, just click the microphone on the Windows Speech Recognition Bar, and watch the Microphone button glow blue. Now you’re ready to speak… to your computer!

That’s all there is to it. A few words of caution though:

• Dictating to your computer might sound easy, but you’re computer certainly isn’t a human, and chances are that it will only understand you most of the time, missing difficult to interpret words.
• Be careful when you are talking to someone else and your microphone is turned on.

I find that composing your dictation in a program such as Wordpad or Microsoft Word is better than composing in a program like outlook or in a web browser.  You can compose things in Wordpad and then just copy and paste them wherever you want.

• Make sure you use the correct command instead of typing things on your own, windows learn from it and become better (hopefully).

 

And that's all there is to it! Have fun. If enough people want it, I might post an article on Speech Recognition tips later on.

How to increase the number of recent files for each Application in Start Menu

One of the new features I like in Windows 7 is being able to find the most recently used files for an application right through the Start menu. No longer do I have to open up several files I worked on recently by opening a new Windows Explorer window every time. Not only does this save time by cutting out steps, it also means that I don’t actually need to remember where I stored the file (unless if I have to transfer it to my USB or email it).

If you haven’t used this handy feature yet, try it!

Open your start menu, and hover over the arrow beside, say Microsoft Excel, and a list of files you’ve recently used will pop-up under the recent section. Neat huh?

Note: If the applications you use most recently have not already been placed (or pinned) to your start menu, simply right click on the application in the start menu and select: pin to start menu.

But the sad thing is, that if you work on a lot of files at the same time, Windows is not smart enough to show you more than a certain number of files by default (even though your start menu might have plenty of space to show it). It’ll only show a few entries. Luckily though, there is a way to tweak this.

1. Right click on Taskbar
2. Click Properties
3. Choose the Start Menu tab
4. Click Customize
5. Under the Start Menu size box, you can increase the number of recent files and number of recent items to display in jump lists to whatever you want

And that’s all there is to it. Enjoy finding your files with ease, especially if you have a messy desktop like me.

Learning to Program Python with Computer Games

While I never really bothered to learn Python (I don't really know why), a resource named Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python (2nd Edition!), has piqued my interest. The book is geared towards people who are just learning to program and introduced Python in a rather enjoyable and fun way with simple games like Hangman and TicTacToe.

What's more? The book is entirely free, and you can head on to the website and take a look at all the source code as well as download a PDF of the book. Definitely worth checking out if you're interested in learning Python or if you are interested in learning computer programming.

I can't wait to take a look through this book and learn from the interesting ideas I find. And if you're never programmed before, this book might also be a good starting point.

Searching from Firefox Address Bar (like Chrome)

While I love the concept of being able to search and access websites from only 1 single address bar, Google Chrome isn't exactly the best browser for me. There's only one reason for that though - it doesn't have the same extension support as Firefox. So Xmarks and AdBlockPlus aren't fully functional (for now) on Chrome.

But why fear when you have high speed internet and Firefox. You can almost (say almost... because you can't always search, as I mention below) get the same functionality of being able to search from the address bar (this is the place you usually type in www.google.com!) like in Chrome without having to download add-ons and other random things. Of course, given the fact that Google has no stake in Firefox, it'll still load Google owned websites, or half of the internet, really slowly. But chances are a few nano-seconds won't make all too much of a difference, especially if you are like me and love to waste time on the interwebs. Of course, you can also tweak Firefox to become an internet hog and load web pages faster.

How to enable Firefox address box search

Enabling Firefox searches is really trivial. All you need to do change certain default configurations in Firefox. Here's how to do it so that you can make Google your default search engine:

1. Open a New Firefox window (so that you can still read these instructions, duh!)
   
2. First type in about:config in the Firefox address bar
3. Yes. You're about to void the warranty on your browser install. Click on "I'll be careful, I promise."
4. Type in keyword.URL in the "Filter:" box
5. Double Click on keyword.URL in the Preference Name area
6. To use Google search (I've provided some other providers below), type in (or copy and paste):

   http://www.google.com/search?q=

   
7. Hit OK
8. Type in a search query in the address bar to check it out!
   

Now, you can enjoy your new found search-abilities! If at anytime you wish to reset your Firefox address bar, simply follow the same instructions above up till step 4, but instead of double clicking on keyword.URL, simply right click and click Reset.

Changing search providers for Firefox address bar search

In the above instructions, I provided the search string for Google. But naturally, you can do the same for any other search provider. For instance here are a few things you'd copy and paste when Firefox asks you a new value for keywork.URL in step 6 of the instructions above.

• Yahoo:

  http://ca.search.yahoo.com/search?p=

• Bing:

  http://www.bing.com/search?q=

  
  
• Wikipedia:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=

  
  
• Google's I'm Feeling Lucky Feature (this will take you directly to the first web page in a conventional Google search):

  http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I%27m+Feeling+Lucky&q=

How to get rid of the existing search box

Getting rid of the existing search box (yeah you likely won't need this anymore) is easy. Just right click near your address bar and click Customize. Then drag the existing search box in to the Options window and you're done. This will now make your Firefox look like Google Chrome!

Custom Search Providers

Creating custom search providers is easy. What Firefox does is simply appends the user's string (the stuff the user types into the address box) to the keyword.URL string value. So, all you need to do is make sure that the keyword.URL string value will cause a search query after Firefox adds the user's search strings and forms a complete URL and goes to that website. In essence, it is merely a matter of finding the keyword.URL string. To do this simply create a few different searches on your desired website and observe the changes in the URL caused by the search. So for Beyond Teck's custom (Google based search engine), every search string gets added after the "q=" part of the URL. So naturally, the keywork.URL string for BeyondTeck's search engine will be all the stuff in the URL before the "q=" part, so it will be:

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-7450531327125251%3A1037qo-kfo1&ie=UTF-8&q=

Stuff you cannot search for from the Firefox Address box

Unlike Chrome, Firefox does have some restrictions for its "search strings" or things that you can search for. Here's a little list (to be continued as I find more things you cannot serach for):

• Cannot search for things that begin with certain special characters, particularly a "/". So you cannot search for "/..com".
• You cannot search for a term that begins with "about:" because that term (as in about:config or about: or about:cache) just takes you to Firefox's advanced configuratgion/about/cache pages.
  
• You cannot search for things like "define:" because it has a colon in there

Unable to create BootCamp partition with Snow Leopard

Recently I was trying to install Windows on my Mac to run SolidWorks (yes, it's Windows Only). However, for some reason, Snow Leopard's bootcamp assistant refused to create a partition for me. It kept saying:

The disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved.

Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format it as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.

I had created a Bootcamp partition once before with Leopard so I was puzzled when something Mac wasn't working! (Okay, no, Apple's computer's are just as fallible as other computers). And there was no was I was going to go through formating the hard drive again, installing Windows would take long enough!

However, after trying several different things I was finally able to get Snow Leopard to partition the hard drive so that I could get Windows 7 to work. I'm not sure what worked, but I'm pretty sure that others are likely to have similar problems, which is why I took the time to write this post.

Step 1: Verify and Repair thy hard drive

First I put in my Snow Leopard DVD (this should also work for Tiger and Leopard) and pressed C on my Mac after restarting the computer to boot from my Snow Leopard DVD. After choosing English as my language:

• I clicked Utitilities in the menubar
  
• Clicked Disk Utility
• Selected my hard drive (Macintosh HD) in the drives list on the left hand side
• Clicked on the First Aid tab and clicked Verify Disk
• After it verified my disk I clicked Repair Disk

Disk utility then took the time to do some stuff and told me that it repaired some corrupt volume headers. And it also told me that the file count was wrong, and it repaired that as well. Then I restarted my comptuer normally into OS X, and tried BootCamp assistant again. Your quest to seek a Windows partition might here, if a mere repair disk was necessary. If not continue reading...

Step 2: Behold the power of fsck!

So after restarting into OS X, BootCamp assistant still didn't want to partition my hard drive so I tried fsck (a command-line utility to repair disks) to repair my disk drive which ultimately did the job!

If you want to read more about fsck and how to use it, you can try Apple's help page or just follow my (foot)steps. Here's what I did:

1. Restart the computer, and while it's restarting (before you get the Apple logo boot screen!) hold down "Command (or the Apple Key) and S" together to start up your computer in "single user mode"
2. Don't worry about the black text, you're computer is still ok
3. When OS X gives you a cursor and asks you what to do next, type in:

   /sbin/fsck -fy

4. Press enter
   
5. OS X will do its thing and tell you after it's done
6. Type in

   reboot

7. Press enter
   
8. Your computer will restart into OS X the normal way

Now try BootCamp again. This time BootCamp assistant should work, or at least it did for me! After looking around on a couple of forums, it seems that using a professional "disk defrag" tool for a Mac (yeah, defrag a mac!) seemed to have worked for a few people. But I personally like the free options ;).

Happy camping!