I have a shoulder related RSI and bought a laptop with a touchpad and Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional. The keyboard has a very light action which helps and the touchpad is way better than using a mouse. The reason why I got a laptop is that speech recognition works best in a quiet environment[1] and I like to be able to move around, and also, sometimes my talking gets distracting for people around me; and there is also the privacy issue to consider. Moreover, once you trained your Dragon its quite an investment, so your play machine == work machine.
I use the continuous speech program to write essays and letters etc., and for coding I use the discrete speech program together with XEmacs and lots of macros. I keep diffrent vocabularies for Perl, Java, LaTeX etc. Especially Lisp is great fun to code in with speech recognition!
This also works nicely with VNC[2], so, having to use Windows is bearable, esp since it can crash and my Linux desktops stays as it is. However, since I don't have MS Office installed, my laptop rarely if ever crashes.
I also mud with it (a great way of training your Dragon;) and all in all, I think I'm faster now than I was before I got ill, especially now that my hand has nearly healed up[3] and I can interleave a little typing with speaking where its handy.
Shariz
[1] Once your Dragon is trained, it works very well even if you have music on.
[3] I'm painfree, i.e its not keeping me awake at night anymore, _but_ if I overdo it I definitly feel it immediatly. I don't expect it to ever go away totally, but then I also think that typing a lot is unhealthy by definition -- a lot of people I know have problems, and I think that we need to get round to thinking that typing 8 hours+ a day is simply not on!
If you're still interested, drop me a line and I will try to find out how to contact the author (I got his address somewhere) so you can check with him about updating it.
Its still one of my fav games, but then again I like games that are not time dependent:-)
You forgot the third major response -- blokes who feel challenged in their "masculinity" by women who have a clue.
Btw, hostility is usually a good indicator of general cluelessness:-)
As goes, I haven't yet made a bad experience with the Linux folks, chromosome counting doesn't seem to be important with the people I know, which makes a nice change.
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I have a shoulder related RSI and bought a laptop with a touchpad and Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional. The keyboard has a very light action which helps and the touchpad is way better than using a mouse. The reason why I got a laptop is that speech recognition works best in a quiet environment[1] and I like to be able to move around, and also, sometimes my talking gets distracting for people around me; and there is also the privacy issue to consider. Moreover, once you trained your Dragon its quite an investment, so your play machine == work machine.
;) and all in all, I think I'm faster now than I was before I got ill, especially now that my hand has nearly healed up[3] and I can interleave a little typing with speaking where its handy.
I use the continuous speech program to write essays and letters etc., and for coding I use the discrete speech program together with XEmacs and lots of macros. I keep diffrent vocabularies for Perl, Java, LaTeX etc. Especially Lisp is great fun to code in with speech recognition!
This also works nicely with VNC[2], so, having to use Windows is bearable, esp since it can crash and my Linux desktops stays as it is. However, since I don't have MS Office installed, my laptop rarely if ever crashes.
I also mud with it (a great way of training your Dragon
Shariz
[1] Once your Dragon is trained, it works very well even if you have music on.
[2] VNC is great!
[3] I'm painfree, i.e its not keeping me awake at night anymore, _but_ if I overdo it I definitly feel it immediatly. I don't expect it to ever go away totally, but then I also think that typing a lot is unhealthy by definition -- a lot of people I know have problems, and I think that we need to get round to thinking that typing 8 hours+ a day is simply not on!
If you're still interested, drop me a line and I will try to find out how to contact the author (I got his address somewhere) so you can check with him about updating it.
:-)
Its still one of my fav games, but then again I like games that are not time dependent
Shariz
You forgot the third major response -- blokes who feel challenged in their "masculinity" by women who have a clue.
:-)
Btw, hostility is usually a good indicator of general cluelessness
As goes, I haven't yet made a bad experience with the Linux folks, chromosome counting doesn't seem to be important with the people I know, which makes a nice change.