Dragon Naturally Speaking for Power Blogging Content Creation
Need a Faster Way to Share Your Ideas with Your Readers? Here’s How.
Are you a blogger? Do you love writing? Chances are if you are reading this the answer to both is yes. The one drawback of being a traditional blogger is that we have so many ideas we want to share with our readers, but limited time to type them all up and get them published on our blog.
Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard is a voice recognition software that takes the things you say and converts it into text. Think about the possibilities and the amount of content you could create as a blogger by being able to “type” at upwards of 150 words a minute. That’s a LOT of content!
Voice recognition software has come a long way and Dragon Naturally Speaking constantly scores as some of the best software for this job, as outlined in this NY Times Review of DNS10 article.
Using voice to type software would allow a blogger to cover more topics and even produce transcripts for multimedia content that is already on their blog like videos and podcasts. The biggest drawback I run into as a blogger is not having enough time to share all my ideas because of the work involved in typing up new articles everyday.
Whether you are blogging as a hobby, or attempting to utilizes the medium for business, voice to text programs like Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Preferred will allow you to make the most of the medium and provide an in-depth resource to your readers.
The key to being a successful blogger or business is to constantly watch the latest trends in technology and use them to make your projects run smoother. If you have not already experimented with voice recognition software you should definitely give it a go and see how it changes the way you do things.
You might just find a revolutionary new way to share ideas with your readers.
How to Install Programs in Kubuntu Linux
Installing Applications on Kubuntu Linux – The “Easy” Way!
Hey all. Today’s guide is going to cover how to install programs in Kubuntu Linux. This is very important for someone who is new to the Linux operating system because it allows you to install the programs you need to work on your computer.
As I have mentioned before I am gearing this series of articles towards people who are new to Linux and need guides on how to perform basic functions. There are a lot of guides out there that cover the advanced features of Linux but not many that will walk people through the basic things they need to know to get started.
(This guide pertains to using Adept Manager in KDE on Kubuntu, this information will not apply to all versions of Linux)
For this guide we are going to be working with a program called “Adept Manager”. Now if you are new to Linux (like me) and you are coming over from a Windows System (like me) you are probably used to working with EXE setup packages and the “Add / Remove Programs” manager in control panel.
Adept Manager is similar to “Add / Remove Programs” in some respects and working with it can have the same feel, although Adept Manager actually gives you much more control over what applications you are installing or removing.
The first thing we need to do is open the program. It can be found by going to the following location:
K Menu > System > Adept Manager – Manage Packages
When you click on this program you will be prompted for your root password. Go ahead and enter your password and the program will open.
Once the program opens you will see a list of available software you can install onto your system. A really nice feature of Adept Manager is that is allows you to search for a program name, so instead of needing to scroll through the list you can use the “Search” feature at the top of the list.
For our example let’s install a program called “GIMP”. Gimp is an image manipulation program similar to Photoshop that allows to create and edit graphical image files on your system. This can be very handy for designing images for websites, editing digital camera pictures and just passing the time when you are bored.
Now let’s type “Gimp” into the search window at the top of Adept Manager. Once you have typed the program name Adept Manager is going to bring back any instance of the keyword in program titles and descriptions.
When Adept Manager is done searching you should see a list of several programs. The GIMP installer should be close to the top of this list of programs.
If you are unsure of what each item is your can check over to the right column where it will give you a description of what you are installing. In this case we are going to select the package that just says “Gimp” and you can see by reading the description that this is “The GNU Image Manipulation Program”
Once you click on the package name you will see two buttons, “Request Install” and “Details”. To install GIMP you will want to choose the “Request Install” button and then you will notice the information in the “Requested” column change, letting you know this program is going to be installed once you apply the changes.
Now would also be a good time to look at other packages and their descriptions to decide if you need install anything else that will go along with this program. For the sake of our example you should be okay by just selecting Gimp.
Once you have your programs selected you will want to go to the top of Adept Manager and choose the “Apply Changes” button. (with the green check mark)
When you click on the “Apply Changes” button you will see Adept Manager connect to the internet and download the program/s you requested. Once the files have downloaded Adept Manager will proceed to install them on your system. If you would like to see exactly what it is doing you can click on the “Details” button for more information on what is going on in the background.
Once the files have been download and installed Adept Manager will take you back to the programs screen, and you should now see the status of the program you selected set to “Installed” (displayed in green). Anything that is not on your system will reflect the status “Not Installed” (displayed in blue)
Once Adept Manager has finished installing the program you can go to your K Menu and check out the new software you installed. It will usually be organized under the appropriate menu for the type of application you choose. In this case since we chose a graphics manipulation program we would want to check under “Graphics”
K Menu > Graphics > GIMP
Now you can see that when you click on Gimp, the application opens and you can now use your new software.
Congratulations! You now know how to install programs in Linux (Kubuntu). There are actually other ways to install program in Linux by downloading Linux based versions of programs, or using command line methods but for the sake of simplicity this is the method we are going to cover today.
Now let’s say you accidentally installed a program you don’t need? Not a problem. Go back into Adept Manager, and removing the program can be done is much the same way as installing an application.
In Adept Manager do a search for the name of the program you want to remove and you should see it come up on the list of applications. You can verify if the program is actually installed on your system or not by checking the “Status” column. If the status is “Installed” you know that you have found the correct program.
Now click on the package name as if you were going to install it and you should see that one of the buttons now says “Request Removal” and you will see the status of the “Request” column change to “Remove”.
Once this has been done click the “Apply Changes” button at the top of Adept Manager. Now once again you will see a prompt that looks very similar to the installation procedure except this time once it finishes, the unwanted software should be removed from your system
Grats! You should now have a much better understanding of the main purpose of Adept Manager and how to install and remove programs from your Kubuntu, Linux system.
In this guide we have really only covered the basic functions within Adept Manager so feel free to explore and check out other options and menus that it offers you. The best way to learn about something is by exploring it, and since the purpose of these guides is about learning Linux this will provide you the most benefit.
As always thanks for checking out Pseudorant and please recommend us to your friends! We appreciate the support and having readers motivates us to strive to improve the site for everyone. Thanks again!
More Reasons Why I Hate Microsoft
Microsoft Reaches out from Beyond the Grave!
Woo, early morning blogging. Well more trouble with Microsoft. I’m sure people are shocked to hear that.
I got a call from my customer about another issue she was having with the new computer I built for her. Any Microsoft Works documents she was opening were causing the system to hang and displaying that they were around 32,000 pages long. Even though I know these documents were about 3 to 4 pages tops.
I checked online and could not find any information on the problem. Of course Microsoft does not have any documentation on this issue. I tried to repair Microsoft Works, I changed the installation of Word manually to include all the program conversion filters, and even tried installing Windows updates to see if this would fix the problem.
Nothing did. So on top of these documents displaying incorrectly, they would actually try to print 32,000 if you selected to print them. I did find out that these documents would open fine if you opened them through Microsoft Word, they would not open however if you choose the “open with” option.
My client needed these documents in a rush so I decided the best course of action would be to just convert them all from WPS format to DOC format so that they could be opened in Word by double clicking on them. This would be the easiest option for everyone, or so I thought.
After looking online I finally found Microsoft’s answer on how to convert the WPS files to Word format.
Opening each one individually and selecting “SAVE AS”!
Wow… Once again Microsoft you have left me speechless. It seems to me, a Monkey with a catapult and a bucket of poo, could come up with a better solution than this.
So I spent the next hour and a half converting her 315 WPS files to DOCs. Yes there may have been a better solution, but after having already spent 8 to 10 hours troubleshooting “Windows” problems that had nothing to do with the system I built, my patience was wearing thin.
So after all the shenanigans I went home, had a few beers and played with Kubuntu some more. I learned a couple new things last night with help from my friend Joe, and I will be posting them in a follow-up guide very soon.
Until then thanks for checking out the site, I appreciate the support!
