Voice recognition

When I worked at Apple, I worked on the speech recognition software that was part of the Mac OS.  I never really did use it at home, as the recognition was never all that good, and you needed a noise cancellation microphone.  Also the size of the dictionary of the recognized words was pretty small.

I have just started playing with the voice calling on the Motorola E815, and I am extremely impressed.  I was assuming that I would have to record a voice utterance for each phone number that I would want to dial with my phone, but that is not the case. 

I accidentally pushed the button on my headset while I was driving, and I heard a voice that stated "Say a command".  It looks like you can say commands like:

"Call <person name>"

This is pretty cool, especially since it went through the whole address book to determine the dictionary list that can be spoken.  It looks like this phone is using speech recognition technology from VoiceSignal.

Saving money with hybrids

I have been wondering if hybrids really save any money.  The last time that I filled my tank, I calculated that I got 25 mile/gallon on my 93 Nissan Sentra, and that in city driving, with me driving aggressively with the flow of traffic.  I am sure that I could easily get 30 miles a gallon in city driving.

A bureau cheif for the Wall Street Journal did the calculations, and determined that you will not be able to recover the extra cost of the hybrid in gas savings or in government subsidies. 

I would claim if you want to save money and save gas, you should buy a older 4 cylinder engine.  If you did that, you could uses some of the money that you saved, and add the extra features that you would get factory installed in the newer cars.

Technorati Tags: hybrid

Using two Harmony remotes

We got a new TV, so I wanted to reprogram our Harmony Remotes.  I logged onto the web site and made the changes, and then updated the Harmony 880 remote.  Everything worked fine, so then I updated the Harmony 688 remote.

At that point I noticed that the keys that I had mapped to the Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down keys, did work.  It looks like this was caused because the Harmony 880 has ˆ and ˇ keys, while the Harmony 688 has 'Pg -' and 'Pg +' buttons.  When you connect to a remote that has doesn't have a key, the you configuration loses the settings for those keys.  So then when you connect back to the remote that has those keys, the settings are gone.

You would think that the settings on the web site would contain all of the remote key mappings, regardless if the last connected remote actually had the keys

Technorati Tags: Harmony Remote

WDS

This weekend we set up our new TV, and while we were doing this we decided to get rid of the tower that contained most of our AV equipment.  I use to keep  our Apple AirPort Extreme on top of the tower, and used it to extend the range of our wireless network.  It had been connected to the wired network.

It was necessary for me to find a different place for the base station, that is out of reach of the kids hands.  The only other place is on top of armoire, but there isn't a network drop there.  I decided to set it up using WDS.  It was a little tricky, as the main base station is a Linksys WRT54GS.

X11 though ssh in Tiger

Today, I had ssh'd into a a server and I tried to launch a X11 program, and I got this error message:

X Error of failed request: BadAtom (invalid Atom parameter)

It looks like that Mac OS X 10.4 includes version 3.8 of OpenSSH.  This new version defaults to using untrusted cookies for X11-Forarding.  This can be worked around by using 'ssh -Y' instead of 'ssh -X'.

[via macosxhints Forums]

Technorati Tags: X11, ssh

New print server

Last night I was very frustrated.  I just realized that I wasn't able to print.  I had this working before, where I had cups installed and was able to print to two printers connected to my server.

This was working until I upgraded to cups version 1.1.23.  The packages were built for Fedora Core 4 on the 9th of August.  This is very frustration since other software doesn't have this compatibility problem when upgrading.  For example, my configuration has not broken when I update my apache http server versions.

I decided that I didn't want to do deal with the configuration issues with running cups on my server, so I decided to get a consumer print server.  I bought the Linksys PSUS4, as it also has a 4 port switch.  The only problem with this is that Mac compatible right out of the box.

fixing problems with Cisco VPN client

Sometimes when I switch networks, the Cisco VPN client doesn't initialize properly.  The only way that I had gotten this to work, was to disable and renable my network ports.

These commands were sent around a while ago, so I wanted to post them here.


sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart


This has fixed all of the problems that I have had since.

Technorati Tags: VPN