Category Archives: review

Sims 3 university, 4: Juice, bonfires, comics & sexting

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life

“Vo gerbits!” The school cheer has returned!

Much like in the supposedly real world (if such a concept is even applicable to university life) the academic progress is not the only thing on most students’ minds. This is good, since if you take a light course load, you have all evening to explore the campus and surrounding area, meet interesting people and send them text messages of varying content.

(On a related note, I recommend buying a better bed as soon as you can afford to, since sleeping better means more waking time to have fun. The “meditative trance sleep” lifetime happiness reward also helps with this, but you may not have the life experience for that as a young adult. A sleep elixir from the chemistry set (Generations expansion) can cut down your sleep to a couple hours, whereas the Energy Drink from Mixology (Late Night expansion) can keep you running for much longer while tired.)

The students tend to at first fall into three distinct categories: Nerds, jocks and rebels. As a rule of thumb, the nerds tend to study science, the jocks sports, and the rebels art. But this is not absolute, and certainly not a requirement for your sims. Your status with each group depends partly on befriending and spending time with its members, but there are also activities that can gain status in each group. For instance, I discovered by accident that reading comics will give you crazy high status with the nerds. The first half a dozen comics I read gained me a reputation level each. I am not sure what the corresponding actions are for the other groups.

The jocks in particular are generous in inviting people to their bonfire parties, so this is a good chance to spend time with them. There is usually a keg of “juice” present, and getting “juiced” at the party will give you bonus rep with the jocks. Kissing, making out and having woohoo (sim sex) during the parties also appear as opportunities to gain reputation with them. Stereotypes? What stereotypes?

The rebels live on the edge of the law or just outside. Tagging walls, painting streets, inciting protests and selling exam cheats all bring the acclaim of the rebels. A less dangerous (but nauseating) opportunity is to root through dumpsters. This will occasionally appear as an opportunity, so wait until then. You must know some rebels first, but they are not hard to spot. (For one thing, the caste of a sim appears if you hold your mouse pointer over them…)

Over time some non-player characters gain levels in two of the social groups (or “castes”), while over the course of a generation there appears more and more locals who don’t belong to any group at all. I am not sure if the castes die out eventually when the playable sims ignore them, but there seems to be a marked reduction. Then again this could be a side effect of the StoryProgression mod that I use, which causes students to have more normal family lives, falling in love and marrying and having children. You’d think their children would pick up the social group of their parents, but it does not seem like it.

Gaining lots of influence in a group can give you new opportunities, in extreme cases unlock a new career. A high reputation can also give you an added personality trait. Unfortunately you cannot pick this – it is either the group trait or a random trait. (In contrast to the extra trait you get from completing your first major, you can choose that freely.)

Intertwined with this social life is another form of social life: Social Networking over the smartphone. Your trusty old cell phone has been upgraded to a smartphone, and there are a number of new options. At first these are pretty limited, but after surfing the Net for a while you unlock the first level of the Social Networking skill. There are also books to buy (or borrow at the library) which let you improve fairly rapidly in the skill. I find it ironic that these are physical books. On the bright side, if you (the player) have shelled out the 500 sim points for a MultiTab tablet, you can read e-books on it. And of course you can improve the skill by use.

From the start you can surf the net, text people you know and stream video. Soon blogging becomes available, and once you get blog followers you can beg them for help financially or academically. Followers are easily lost again, though. Later on there are more features, like the SimFinder app that lets you find a potential friend or date based on their personality trait, gender and age. Unfortunately, it seems this feature is local, so while on campus you won’t find people in your hometown or the other way around, much less the three foreign countries. I guess technology dictates this limit. You cannot even send text messages to your friends back home, although strangely you can still call them.

Most of the new Social Networking skills seem to be added for realism and have relatively little influence on your life, although the SimFinder is really handy if you are looking for that Special Someone with a particular personality. Of course, the ideal person may not exist, but you should come a lot closer than trial and error. And there is a mysterious power for the accomplished Networkers, to alter the relationship between other sims.

While social networking is not particularly tied to campus, college sports are performed in the sports hall and out of sight. These are very exhausting, so I recommend going there fully rested if you want to get home without falling asleep. On the bright side, they give you rapid advancement in the jock group, as can be expected. For a more controllable (and visual) sport, try the flying disc (basically a Frisbee). It can be started and stopped at any time, and while it is exhausting and makes you sweaty, it is also more fun to watch than the outside of a sports hall. And you can break it off at any time and get a shower before you collapse in bed. Not least, you can take it with you home from Uni and play with family and friends.

The kicky bag / hockey sack from The Sims 2 makes its return, more colorful than ever and just as fun. Sporty sims are likely to play with it on their own. Like the discs, you can snag a couple of them for free at orientation to bring home to your family after each semester.

Things to bring with you to college:
-A deathflower, if someone in your family can grow them. The grills and bonfires can easily get out of control, and it may take a while for the firesim to get there.
-A week’s supply of Sleep Elixir from the chemistry set (Generations expansion) if someone in your family has the skill to make them.
-Relevant skill books your family may possess. It seems like learning skills is faster in University generally, and skills related to your major is the most powerful form of studying.

Have a nice trip, and don’t stay up too late the night before finals!

Sims 3: University, 3 – classes and study

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life - sleepy students

Luckily morning classes are fairly rare…

Now that your sim is in the new and exciting world of Higher Education, it is time to attend class, study hard and make sure to graduate with the highest grade. After all, your future income depends on your success! Luckily, in The Sims 3, you have all the time in the world, or very nearly so. Your sim does not age while in university, and if you studied diligently in your youth and then picked the lightest course load, you should be able to breeze through the semester.

Each semester is one week, or nearly so. You arrive on Sunday, and go home late on Saturday. However, the study progress bar is only active from your first class on Monday to after your final exam on Friday (typically at noon). This is the time range in which it makes sense to study.

When you arrive at Uni, your first day will be spent getting settled and going to orientation. Your academic progress bar will not be visible until your first class, on the second day. Classes usually begin at noon, but some classes begin at 8 and some at 16 (4 PM). If you have taken on the challenge of a double course load, classes will not collide, but there won’t be much time to recharge between them. Pretty much run from one to the other. (This is where having bought the MultiTab gadget comes in handy, as starting to listen to a Tabcast gives an instant joy boost. Craziness drink from the Mixology skill (Late Night expansion) will also keep you from crashing your fun bar by working hard for two lectures in a row.)

Now, assuming you started with a normal course load, you should be fine no matter what. Since last we spoke, I have sent an almost completely unskilled Sim to Uni, and he still pretty much breezed through it. The academic bar starts at half full, and sinks very slowly as the hours pass and your sim begins to forget. But even listening normally during lectures will be enough for a passing grade and then some. If you actually read in a textbook occasionally, so much the better. You can also read on your smartphone for a quick boost. Each major also has its own special skill object (like a sketchbook for art) which you get for free when you arrive, together with textbooks. I don’t think even Norway coddles its students that much!

Perhaps the best way to increase your grades is to improve the relevant skills. When you do the aptitude test, you can see which skills belong to which major. Some are obvious, like painting and guitar for Art. Some not so much, like Mixology for Business. But raising your skills will now automatically improve your grades, and pretty fast too. In fact, you may want to keep your sim in check if they love raising their skills, so you don’t use up all this skilling in one semester. If you know your sim is crazy about a skill, this is one of the few times it might be an idea to take a double course load, especially if this is a skill that you can raise by having fun, like painting and guitar.

My recommended study activities, in order:
-Classes. You are only allowed to skip one, and not the final exam on Friday.
-Skilling, because you will need those skills in your job.
-The dedicated skill object. Even if your skill is maxed, using this will still raise your grades.
-Textbooks or smartphone.
-Study groups, a bit of a hassle for the player to organize.

Perhaps it is just because I am new to the expansion, but I found double course load to be the upper limit. You can pile on even more courses, but that just sounds foolhardy. After all, you don’t age while studying, so you can safely return to learn more another week. And there are many other things to do on campus. More about that next time, hopefully!

Sims 3: University Life, 2 – preparations

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Screenshot Sims 3

If you want to get the most out of your higher education, you should make sure to study while you are a teen. Although it is not necessary to take it to extremes…

Unlike in The Sims 2, you can no longer send teenagers to the university: You have to wait until they become young adults. And even then, it may be a good idea to wait a bit, or at least not take it all at once. You can now stagger your semesters throughout your sim’s life, and there are benefits and drawbacks to consider.

But before you get that far, be aware that your simulated children can still prepare for college by increasing their skills and getting good grades. In fact, if you are really nuts about college, you may want to pick the right traits for their scholarships. Yes, personality traits now influence what scholarships you get. Want to study arts? You may want the artistic trait, or the virtuoso or even natural cook. The scientific studies call for handiness, and of course if you want something sports related you want to be athletic. In practice, these traits won’t be necessary unless you go to college really early and are broke. Skills alone should give you both scholarships and study credits (so you don’t start with an empty study bar).

The requirements are not so bad. I started with a teenager in a new neighborhood, and after a few years as a young adult she got more scholarships than she needed for tuition. In fact, she came home from Uni with more money than she had before she enrolled. She hadn’t maxed all the relevant skills either, but she had made a decent progress during her teen years.  (I have bought the official MultiTab gadget, which helps quite a bit with learning and fun; but on the other hand, sims born in-game can begin learning skills early on.)

Children as well as teens and adults can now get a bonus moodlet from having studied enough. There are new ways of studying too, which we’ll hopefully get back to next time.

Before enrolling in college, make sure to take the aptitude test. It is necessary to get scholarships and study credit. But you can also take it just to see what you need to work more on. It gives a detailed breakdown of your strengths and weaknesses for each major. The test is part of the university package you get from the Llama mascot shortly after the game starts with the new expansion. It is probably a bad idea to delete this.

The benefit of going to Uni right away is that you will jump into level 4 of your first job, if the degree is relevant for the job. But even if you get your degree after you have started working, you should be promoted accordingly (I have not tested that, but the game says so) and you will definitely advance faster at higher levels (this I have tested.)

Note that you can return to Uni later for another major if you decide to change your career later in life – or if you just enjoy streaking, juice parties and unethical experiments on plants, sims and combinations of the two.

How long time you want to spend on campus is largely up to you. You can take one or two semesters at a time, then you must return home. But you can enroll again at once, although you should probably consider going through your inventory and see if there is something you can leave at home.

Time does not pass on your home lot while you are away. (It uses the same mechanics as World Adventures, for those who have that vacation-oriented expansion.) It is possible to send one sim from a household to university and let others stay behind. Since there is a drive from your home to the point of departure, you will need to get a babysitter if you leave small children behind. But your family does not age while you are away.

On the other hand, the people in University town do age while you are home. Or perhaps that is the work of the Story Progression mod? I don’t think so, though. It makes sense that they should age with you. They didn’t do that in The Sims 2, though. Then again, nobody did, not even your neighbors.

I recommend starting with the minimum course load the first time. It is surprisingly hard even for a genius with maxed mixology skills to max the study bar with double course load, while it is quite easy with just one. And there are plenty of things to spend your time on. But try with 1 semester and a minimum number of study credits the first time, and increase later if it seems too easy.

As for the things to do in college, we shall hopefully get back to them next time.

Sims 3: University Life, overview

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Screenshot Sims 3 University Life - jogging female student

Run – don’t walk – to buy the new expansion pack for The Sims 3! OK, perhaps not, but it is a backpackload of fun.

I have to admit that University was my favorite expansion for The Sims 2, but I know this is not a universal view. So I may be biased, but hey, it is my site and my review, so. Let me say it from the start: Sims 3 University Life is my new favorite. It has pretty much all the things that made the original cool, only more of everything. It does not add quite as much to the game, in terms of careers and advantages, but still plenty enough that your sims might want to go to university even if you had no other reasons. I hope to convince you that there are plenty of reasons.

So you did not play The Sims 2: University? What’s this all about?

The Sims 3 is a “life simulator” game. Like the two previous games, it lets small imaginary people go about their lives in your computer, and you can either watch them, help them or hinder them. For each version, the sims (the simulated people) have become more intelligent and more complex. Hopefully you already have The Sims 3, since it is a requirement for all the expansion packs; this is the 9th.

The purpose of going to university in the world of the sims is much the same as in the real world: Broaden your outlook on life and become a better, wiser person. Get a better paid job. Find a cute person to share your future with, or a lot of cute persons to share your present with. Get away from mom and the neighbors and experiment with things that would give them a heart attack. Meet people who share your interests. Overcome fears and insecurities. Have fun, lots and lots of fun. Any one of these, or several of them, may seems a compelling reason to go to university.

In the real world, higher education is becoming painfully expensive, at least if you don’t live here in Norway where most of it is tax-financed (and much of the tax is on the oil industry). As usual, Sim Country is more like Norway. There is a tuition fee, but is rather moderate. If you have decent skills before you go, you could easily get more in scholarship than you pay for a semester. Be sure to take the aptitude test first to get the scholarship.

What is new from The Sims 2: University?

Much like the base game itself, University Life has expanded the details. But there are also some fundamental differences.

-University is now for adults. No more sending teens to college. All adults, even elders, can attend. In fact, it may be easier to study if you have some work experience. Skills and work experience contribute toward scholarships and study credit. Be sure to take the aptitude test before enrolling, to get these bonuses.

-You can take several majors, one after another. As a result, you can spend a considerable time in college if you want to catch them all, or if you just want to live half a century longer. (You still don’t age while in University.)

-You stay in University for one or two semesters, then return to your hometown. You need to enroll again for the next year. This breaks up the stay at Uni, lets you exchange things in your inventory at home, and allows you to stagger your University experience throughout your adult life. But if you want to return to Uni immediately, you can just enroll again. Oh, and you can also work on several  majors before you complete any of them, if you for some reason feel the urge.

(This may in part be an effect of using the same engine for University as for the vacation expansion, World Adventures. You even need to “call someone abroad” when you want to speak to your dormies from home. University really is a different country! I knew it!)

-New studying. All use of skill objects that fit your major will contribute to your final score. for instance, as an arts student you will gain study credit for sketching, painting or playing the guitar. You can also read relevant books and even study on your smartphone, or do group study, but the fun and easy way is to do what you probably want to do anyway, use skill objects. Each major gives the student a portable skill object as you start, so there is no excuse not to. But you can still use other relevant skill objects.

-New social groups: There are now 3 “castes” or social groups: Nerds, jocks and rebels. The first two should be familiar to most, but rebels are mostly art students living on the edge of the law: Painting on walls and parking lots, instigating protests, and selling cheat sheets for the exams. Fame within a social group can give benefits, included an extra personality trait. (Unfortunately you cannot pick this trait – it is either random or typical of the social group.) It is also possible to unlock one of three extra careers this way.

-There are fewer majors, and no careers that are unlocked by study alone. You just start at a higher level and advance faster in the relevant career.

-Extra personality trait when you graduate successfully! And you get to pick this one! Yess!

-Missing: Extra want slots. Sorely missed. You can never have too many of those.

-Possibly missing: Secret society. Then again, with it being secret, I may just not have found it.

-Possibly missing: Getting good grades by socializing the teachers. They seem to play much less of a role this time. But again, I may be mistaken, since I don’t play overly social sims.

-Dorms are more homelike and less prison-like. There are bedrooms with one bed, two beds and a double bed. You can assign beds to playables and non-playables alike, and program doors to allow a list of specific sims.

-Sims now have smartphones! Social networking is a new skill, and sims can surf the Internet, blog and unlock new apps as they grow more skilled.

Samsung Galaxy Note 2

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I bought this a few days ago. To be honest, it was a case of gadget lust rather than necessity. If you want to judge me for spending my money unwisely or unjustly, I will not hold it against you. My previous smartphone is still under warranty for a long while yet, and would have been sufficient. If I have an excuse, it is my principle of trying to buy the kind of inventions I hope to see more of in the future.

And this invention, gentle reader, is about as futuristic as you can get on a Norwegian working class budget. It looks and acts like something out of a recent science fiction movie. One could imagine Tony Stark carrying around one of these. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but it gives a hint about how I feel about it. In other words, I am impressed. I am very impressed.

After a couple days, I started writing a lengthy review, listing many impressive features. But it just kept getting longer and longer, and at the same time I realized that there were already many great reviews on it, including several on YouTube where you can actually see it in action.

(I sometimes read positive reviews or watch YouTube presentations of products I already own, so I can feel the happy glow of owning them. Ideally, at the end of the review, I should feel ready to run and buy the product… Except that I already own it. I mean, I have already wasted the money, so why shouldn’t I milk it for all it’s worth? ^_^)

So rather than compete with the expert reviewers, I will just list a few things that impressed me in particular.

***

Handwriting and “Han writing”: The handwriting recognition impressed me so much that I found myself handwriting instead of using the on-screen keyboard, which is incidentally the best smartphone software keyboard I have ever seen, with the possible exception of Swiftkey 3. And I generally dislike handwriting.

I mean, handwriting was a great invention back in ancient Egypt or wherever they first tried it. And it is very versatile, you can bring a pencil and a scrap of paper pretty much anywhere except the shower. But I have preferred typing for as long as I can remember, at least from the age of six. (Well, with the exception of the few times when I had acquired a new fountain pen or some such.) From shortly after the first IBM PC, I have written by hand mostly in “emergencies”, to jot down a name or phone number or some such. Well, this is like having my first fountain pen again, except it is magic.

The handwriting area is a black slate at the bottom of the screen where the keyboard usually is when you’re writing. Writing with the built in S-pen makes the letters appear in thin white lines. I write a few words without stopping but with spaces between the words. When I stop, the phone pretty much instantly converts the text into typed text in the field where I am supposed to write – a comment field on Google+, for instance, or an email. At this point the slate goes black again so I can start writing from the upper left corner again. Even though my handwriting is ugly – especially after decades of disuse – the only recurring problem is that it occasionally capitalizes the first letter in a word if the letter looks the same when small or large. So for instance it might write Can Spell, but not Take Flight, because I write these letters differently when capitalized. With a quarter hour of practice I have mostly gotten rid of the extra capitals though. I am not sure whether the slate has learned from me or I have learned to write better.

I have failed to enable recognition of Hanzi / Kanji characters (Chinese / Japanese logograms). It was selectable in the phone’s setup, but for some reason it reverted to Scandinavian (my location) handwriting recognition, which incidentally works too. Perhaps you need to go all Chinese / Japanese to get it to work, although I doubt you need to physically be there. The Hanzi keyboard input worked though: You type the English letters which the word begins with, and immediately a long list of relevant signs show up. Chinese writing is far more compact than alphabetic languages, and expanded to 3 lines you get dozens of alternatives. It must be a bit of a nightmare learning all those characters, but man, Orientals must be able to read and write at a crazy speed with this thing.

The English word suggestions can also be expanded to three lines, but with only three words to a line, that is merely 9 suggestions. They are good suggestions though. As I’ve said, I think Swiftkey 3 may be better once it has learned from your writing, but I don’t know yet how well Samsung Keyboard learns from experience, so “the jury is still out” on this one.

***

Split screen: As the biggest smartphone on the market today, it makes some sense to use that space to run two windows at once. Only certain applications support this, I am sorry to say. You start them from a separate docking are to the left. To bring this up in the first place, hold the back button on the phone a couple seconds, and a small marker will pop up to show you that the pop-up dock is available. Pull on the tab to get to the dock, launch the first program, then hold the next program icon and pull it to either the top or bottom half of the screen. This will tell the Note 2 to run both of them at once. You can do this with movies without slowing down (unless you are streaming on a bad line, obviously). More likely you will want to open a Google search window while writing an email so you can copy some information…

Mouseover: You are probably used to being able to hover your mouse cursor over various fields without clicking and getting a tool tip, a preview or an expansion of a link. With the S-pen, I can do this on my Note 2. I can’t do it with my fingers, alas. Perhaps at some later time? It looks like pure magic: The pen does not even touch the glass (the distance is about the radius of a pinky finger) when the small mark appears in the picture, and if I do this over a feature that supports it (typically Samsung programs, at least at first) the mouseover effect will turn on. This is what Arthur C. Clarke must have meant when he said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Face recognition: Not a Note 2 or even Samsung feature, but part of the more recent Android versions (Note 2 has 4.1, but I think face unlock came with 4.0). Still, it is the first time I have tried it, and it is indistinguishable from magic. When I turn it on, there is a lock screen, but when I see my face in the screen, it unlocks. It will only work with people who look like me, or at least that is the theory. On the down side, it reminds me daily of how ugly my face now looks up close… Well, I am not sure that reminder is a bad thing. If you are young and pretty, you may want to use that sharp front camera for video conferencing instead. ^_^

Power: The battery has very high capacity for a smartphone. You can use the device actively from dawn till dusk and still have some juice left. I mean, like continually watching video or something. For everyday use, it could easily last two days. That is how things should be, of course, but very few competitors come even close to it. And that’s with the big, high-resolution display and a four-core processor that runs everything I can throw at it at full speed. The machine responds immediately and in crisp detail, and it just keeps running. Extremely habit-forming. Don’t borrow one if you can’t keep it.

And here is the review I would have written, except it is not written, it is shown on YouTube. If you have the time, the awesomeness just goes on and on. I did not watch it until after I had bought it though. ^_^

 

Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 – part 2

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“If you don’t listen to everything, you won’t understand anything.” When dictating, speak in statements, or at least phrases. Don’t stop randomly, for instance between “the” and noun.

I have now had the new version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking for a couple days. With my throat condition, that probably corresponds to a couple hours for those of you who talk a lot. I intend to use Dragon to dictate this entry, but I I will still need to make corrections. Perhaps you won’t, if you are a native English speaker without too much accent or dialect.

I am impressed by how quickly  Dragon has adapted to my voice.  It certainly happened much faster than with any earlier version. In all fairness, I also have more experience with Dragon now. For instance, as I mentioned in my previous entry,  I have made sure to perform training at different times of the day and at the beginning and end of a “speech”.

(I actually dictated the previous paragraph without making any corrections, but that’s not the rule for longer paragraphs yet.)

*** 

A problem with browsers: I haven’t heard about this from anyone else, but I have found Dragon to operate erratically in text entry fields in browsers. This could be a serious drawback, considering how much time we spend on the Internet these days, both at home and in the office. At first I thought the problem was only with Opera, which is my browser of choice. This program is not explicitly supported by Dragon, and in version 11 the text field where I write my journal was marked as unrecognized. While I could try to dictate there, the result was usually pretty bad. In version 12, Dragon alternates between “unknown text field” and “normal mode”. If I dictate while in normal mode, it seems to work well enough. If it is in unknown mode, I can usually just wait and it will switch to normal mode  after a few seconds. Even so, the hotkeys don’t work, and corrections  frequently mess up the text a little. So for longer texts,  I tend to use the DragonPad and just paste the result into the browser.

Unfortunately, I have similar problems in Internet Explorer when using Google+. Again, this may be a problem with that particular application – even typing can sometimes be sluggish in Google+ – but there are tens of millions of people who use that application frequently. Then again, it might be just me. Since I am one of the first to actually buy the product, there aren’t much in the way of reviews for me to compare with.

Is this a big deal? After a few days, you would probably not need to make corrections every time you post. A more serious problem might be if parts of the text are missing because you dictated while it was in “unknown field” mode. Again, this could be peculiar to my computer – there certainly doesn’t seem to be any problems in the demonstrations on YouTube. (Then again, they use neither Opera nor Google plus.)

***

 I haven’t had any problems with other programs. Dragon works beautifully with yWriter, the program I use when writing fiction. It seems to work fine with all kinds of notepads, whether plaintext or rich text. The commands for opening programs, switching between programs or clicking on buttons work as expected. And the on-screen help which came with version 11 makes it unnecessary to memorize the handbook with its dozens and dozens of commands. I am sure there are a number of features that I am never going to use, but better that than the other way around. And in version 12 you can even turn off features at a very detailed level if you’re afraid of activating them by mistake or if you simply need more speed.

You guys, I really feel like I can’t get across how smart this program is. When I first tried Dragon NaturallySpeaking approximately a decade ago, I compared it to a drunk and homesick high school exchange student. I compared version 11 to a native English speaker with a college education. But version 12… It is like a professional secretary with a genius IQ. Oh, it still has problems now and then, but it has only spent a couple hours with me, and there are several sounds in English that Scandinavians of my generation simply cannot pronounce. I am not sure any of my English-speaking readers would be able to understand me that well after listening to me for a couple hours.

Because I have spent decades mostly in silence, I cannot dictate a long entry like this without taking breaks. My voice simply dries up. If not for this physical handicap, I would be sorely tempted to do exactly what Nuance proposes in its slogan: “Stop typing, start talking.” It really is that impressive.

The Dragon has landed!

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Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 became ready for download today for us  existing Dragon users who had pre-ordered. I’ll come back to the installation shortly.

For those who do not know, Dragon NaturallySpeaking is a voice input program for the Windows computer, and the leader in this category. It takes dictation but also allows you to open programs, search the web, compose mail and edit existing texts without using your hands. As such, it solves an acute problem for those who don’t have hands or can’t use them. For us who have hands, it is most useful for dictation. It is fast and, with a little practice, amazingly accurate. The new version claims a 20% increase in accuracy, putting it well above 99% accuracy with 15 minutes of training. In practice, it takes longer, but the program keeps learning the more you use it. When you see an experienced user work with Dragon 11.5 (the previous version) it is “indistinguishable from magic”.

Installation:  The download link from Nuance arrived by email before I woke up in the morning. A separate mail also contained link to the training video. While I am personally a fan of reading, the training video will surely be welcome by dyslexic users, another core customer group. (The program can also read text out loud, even text you have not dictated.)

The download process proceeds in several steps. You first download a tiny download manager program. It does not really matter much where you save this, it is very small. This program must be run to start the main download. The main download is a compressed file, but still close to 3 gigabytes. This must again be unpacked to a larger set of files before the actual installation. During the unpacking process, both the compressed file and the unpacked file take up space simultaneously, and that’s before the actual install into the Program Files directory. This program is not recommended for people with small disks!

It is recommended that you back up the compressed file so that you can install from this if your computer suddenly crashes or if you simply decide to buy a new at some point.

The download went without glitches, but the install itself caused me some trouble. A ways into the installation, the program warned me that several processes had to be closed down before it could continue. Three of these were unknown to me, and did not appear with the given names in Windows Task Manager. I had to break off the installation and reboot the computer, then run the install again. The install did not automatically resume, and if I had not taken note of where the unpacked file was saved, I would have had to restart from the compressed file. I would recommend you reboot your PC before you start downloading, and not start any unnecessary programs until after the install is complete.

After installation, the software offers to let you register the product online. There is also an online activation which is necessary to continue using the program. The registration and the activation are unrelated tasks.

As a user of version 11, I had my existing program removed automatically and my user account upgraded to the new version. This takes some time even on a fast computer. New users will be led through creating an account instead, and the system checks the quality of your microphone input before asking you to read a text to attune the program to your voice and reading rhythm. You can skip this step and train the program by correcting mistakes if you want. New users also get an offer to let the program read through their email and documents to adapt to their vocabulary. This is a separate task from adapting to your voice. Again, you can skip this and just train the program through use, if you are impatient, but there will be more errors during your first few days of use if so.

Accuracy training: Since Dragon was complaining about my microphone, I bought another, an analog headset to replace the digital USB headset. I established a new user account and started over from scratch with the new hardware. This microphone passes Dragon’s test with flying colors, but the new account doesn’t have any of the accumulated experience with my speaking. Newsflash: It certainly wasn’t useful right out of the box!

My experience is probably not typical, since I am a foreigner to the English language and also have a chronic problem with my vocal cords – my voice grows “rusty” many times faster than a normal human – but I think we should still consider this. After all, most people aren’t native English speakers, or if they are, they have dialects or accents. And your voice does change with use even if more slowly than mine. And my experience is that it takes several hours for a new user before Dragon NaturallySpeaking 12 becomes truly useful. So don’t buy this program an hour before you need it. Set aside a couple days at least to become good friends with it before you start working together.

Not only does your voice change after you have used it for a while, but it is also slightly different from morning to evening. So it may be a good idea to do some reading training at different times, to help the computer get familiar with your voice. It is not necessary to read all the way through the exercises, you can click finish at any time. Also, try to make sure that you read the exercises in the same way that you speak to the computer when you dictate. For my part, I have found that I have a tendency to speak faster and in longer stretches when I read something, compared to when I dictate my own thoughts. For some reason I also tend to read louder – perhaps a habit from my school days? We used to be required to read aloud in class.

Features: The previous version mostly improved the user interface, introducing context-sensitive help in the form of the “Dragon Sidebar”. It also expanded support for more programs, and the engine was made more efficient. Version 12 has very few changes in the user interface; it supposedly includes 100 new features, but I don’t expect to need more than a few of them. Most of the development this time seems to have concentrated on the technical: In addition to the improved accuracy, the program also runs much faster, especially on new computers where it now takes advantage of multicore processors and extra memory. Additionally, even the home version can now take advantage of mobile phones as microphones: If you have an iPhone or an Android smartphone and it’s on the same Wi-Fi network as your computer, you can dictate to your smartphone and have the text appear on your computer screen!

One feature I thought was included in the home version, but which evidently isn’t, is playback of your own dictation. On the other hand, the program includes an excellent synthetic voice which can read what you have dictated (or any other normal text). This will begin to come in handy when the accuracy approaches 100%. Dragon doesn’t make typos; when it makes a mistake, it writes valid words, usually words that make sense  next to each other, but not the words you intended to say. We who have been typing for decades, will naturally look for typos when we proofread our text. It is all too easy for us to overlook that a wrong word has been used, such as “is” instead of “isn’t”. But chances are we catch it when we hear it out loud!

That’s all for this time, but I hope to be back with glowing praise when the accuracy approaches 100%. ^_^

 

Go (igo) on Android

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One of these two players is an idiot at playing Go. And it is not the tablet. -_-;

It has been a long time since last I wrote about the Oriental board game of Go. The game is deceptively simple. It takes two minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. Since more and more of those lifetimes are spent on the move, it makes sense to have the game available on your mobile phone or tablet. With the Android operating system becoming more and more widespread, several high-quality Go programs have become available for it.

There are basically three types of Go program for Android. One type lets two players use the same mobile phone or tablet to play the game against each other. Basically the device is used as a Go board (Goban in Japanese). Since I don’t know any local players, I have not downloaded this type of program.

The second type lets you play against your cell phone or tablet. These processors are less powerful than desktop or laptop computers, so they will not provide a challenge to the experienced player. I am not an experienced player, so I downloaded one of these. It is called Godroid. This is probably a pun, there’s nothing godlike about this program. Well, not by today’s standards. I suppose it is indistinguishable from magic. But that’s business as usual for today’s telecommunication devices. Using it is simple: You tap on the board where you want to play your stone, and a shadow of the stone appears. Tap once more to confirm. The device will play next. The first time I started, it directly opened a training game rather than taking me to the New game dialog where you can set board size, handicap, black or white, strength, komi and scoring. This made me think initially that these options did not exist, but when I started a new game, they did.

The computer is a computer, obviously, so it will surely become predictable once you have played long enough. But with ten different levels of strength, this should take some time.

Godroid is just one of several programs, but it is free and has built-in artificial intelligence rather than running a separate program in the background as your opponent.

The ultimate challenge (for the time being at least) is another human player. Luckily this is also possible on your phone or tablet! Panda Tetsuki is a fast, clean and simple program to connect to the “PandaNet” IGS (International Go Server), which is what you would expect, a place where you can play Go against people from around the world, day and night. It also has limited chat / comment capabilities. You can connect as a guest right away, but if you have an account (as I have from my home computer), you can use that to log in as yourself. You need an account to participate in games, but you can watch games even as a guest. If you want to play, I recommend you first go into the menu and set “confirm moves”, so you don’t accidentally place your stone in the wrong place and ruin the game for yourself and your opponent.

The functionality is simple: Players who are online are sorted by strength. Your name is highlighted in blue. Players available for play are listed in black, unavailable in gray, and a symbol of a tiny Goban shows those who are playing a game. By clicking one of these you can watch their game. Click on the small arrow to the right (not very obvious!) to get the game board up and watch them play in real time! You can also wind the game backward and forward to catch up to what has happened before, use the phone’s menu button to get the option to jump to the start. I’d expected that to be in the action line with the back and forward keys, but I guess that would be a bit crowded?

There are less options than in the official client for the PC, but you can watch games, chat and look at statistics. And once you have an account, you can play against other registered players. As far as I know, it is still free to register. The ranking system on the IGS is based on your games, at least unless you are a verified pro, in which case you are marked as such. By consistently winning against players of higher rank, you will eventually move into that rank. Correspondingly if you consistently lose against a lower rank, you will fall into that rank. This assures that other players can easily choose you as a suitable opponent. It is possible to challenge someone of a distant rank. A higher player may play a teaching game. There is however no provision for a strong player to play against several weak players simultaneously, as far as I can see.

I apologize for not having more detail and for not having tested more programs. But since I have complained in the past about the lack of such programs, at least I can now eat my words. They are tasty. ^_^ By that I mean that I am glad to see there are now several good programs available for Android. Perhaps one day I will watch one of your games on the IGS?

***

This entry is actually closely related to the last few ones. Back when I read (and wrote) about deliberate practice, one of the things that occurred to me was the Oriental ancient board game of Go.

I know I have written about this a couple of times over the years, but there is a 75 episodes anime called “Hikaru no Go” about a boy learning this game and his deliberate practice to become one of the best players in the country. It is a very inspiring series, especially for those interesting in that particular game, but also more generally inspiring towards deliberate practice. The essential message is that you can learn both from loss and victory, but this requires that you always challenge yourself, that you always try something that is beyond what you should be capable of.

In other words, you should always seek out challenges where you have a small but nonzero chance of winning, and then seriously try to win. You should try so hard that there is a chance you might start crying if you lose. But whether you win or lose, you’re going to learn something. In fact, you are going to learn a lot if you practice that way. This is the fastest path to progress.

But thinking about this in my current life phase, I realized that there is nothing on Earth that I feel so passionately about, except possibly life itself. If I were to look at my life with those eyes, as a challenge which I have a small chance of not losing – the loss of this lifetime, this incarnation as Easterners would say, the loss of my soul as the Bible would put it – that would be the one thing that I would be sure to cry over. Thus my recent reflections on Gnosis (which, incidentally, is not related to Gnosticism except linguistically.)

But I cannot maintain such a high perspective for long, because I suck at being serious (except if I am sick and rapid getting sicker, at which time I tend to be super serious, imagine that! But that is not the case now, and I appreciate that.) So instead I have been watching this anime and downloading Go programs for Android.

A little fun with anime

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I just want to share the fun I've had lately! With bacteria!

I just want to share the fun I’ve had lately – including this anime, Moyashimon Returns.

I don’t spend all my time reading tomes of ancient wisdom. (Actually very little of my time, it is just particularly conductive to writing.) This time, something entirely different!

While I won’t call myself an otaku, I’ve watched my share of anime over the last decade or so. These Japanese cartoons are far more varied than cartoons here in the west, which are mostly for kids. In Japan they are an important part of youth culture, but many adults also enjoy them.

Still, I have felt for some time that the quality of Japanese anime was in terminal decline. Not the technical quality, which has benefited from bringing together handcrafted style and computer animation. Rather, I have felt that the content has more and more become extreme, in a desperate attempt to avoid boredom by going further and further. The breaking of taboos has left any pretense of art and become a competition. For those of us who don’t watch anime to be shocked, there seemed to be less and less to watch for each season. To be honest, I was OK with that – I already have plenty to spend my time on.

But this season saw the return of Moyashimon, one of my all-time favorites. This is a college-level edutainment series, featuring a bunch of college freshmen and the bacteria with which they live. Yes, bacteria, and yeast as well. The main character is a boy with the ability to see and talk with bacteria. They appear to him as roughly similar to marshmallows in size and consistency, with a big head shaped roughly like their real shape under the microscope, but more cute and cuddly. None of the others can see the bacteria, but most of his friends know that he can. The microbes also provide running commentary and humorous punchlines. The series teaches about various forms of fermentation and other useful roles of bacteria in our lives, in between the antics of the human cast.

Exactly how weird is it? Feel free to watch the Moyashimon Returns ending song on YouTube (until the takedown notice arrives, I guess). It is safe for work, unless your workplace requires sanity.

***

If tales of agriculture are not your major, what about history? One of the most famous periods in Japanese history is the civil wars era where Oda Nabunaga eventually did most of the work to unify Japan, although he died before the process was finished. This “ambition of Oda Nabunaga” is a familiar topic to Japanese, but perhaps less so in the modern age. But this summer a strange new anime has appeared: “The Ambition of Oda Nabuna”, which is a recast of the history of that era, but with cute girls instead of the various warlords. This is sure to renew interest in history among the male viewers! Hopefully it will not feature the enormous massacres on civilians which mar the reputation of the historical Oda Nabunaga.

***

A very bloodless war story is “Dog Days”, which appears with a second season this summer. In the original story, a young school boy from Japan is summoned as a hero to a magical world, where his quick wits and gymnastic skills let him successfully defend his new homeland in war. The wars of that world, however, are completely ceremonial: The defeated soldiers don’t die or even get seriously wounded, instead they are converted to “furballs” for a while, unable to fight. All people in the magical kingdoms are furries: People with animal ears and tails. The country defended by Cinque is populated by dog people, and the ruling princess is addicted to being petted. 0_0 Other kingdoms are ruled by big cats, bunnies, squirrels etc in human form. It is all very cute and colorful, and the battles are beautifully animated.

In the second season, the hero returns but brings with him two girls: A rival gymnast who ends up joining another kingdom, and an ordinary and rather scaredy-cat classmate who seems to have a crush on him. By all accounts she is going to turn into a hero of a third nation, although how that transformation is going to happen remains to be seen. I look forward to it. I believe I may have mentioned the original Dog Days under the name “The Cutest War”. I am no big fan of war myself, but the colorful mock battles of Dog Days are a welcome break from the escalation of gore and mayhem in so many recent anime which I cannot recommend or even want to watch for myself.

***

So that’s my summer anime this year. You can watch English translations of anime several places on the Net, but I prefer Crunchyroll, which is a legal anime streaming site that contributes (a little) to the anime industry. It is quite affordable as well, at least by first world standards.

The Sims Freeplay Android

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Here’s how it looks on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, except it looks sharper. Apologies for the lack of professional photo equipment.

For those who cannot get enough of The Sims, there is now a new and better Sims game for Android. And it is completely free, well if you don’t have connection charges (it connects to a server occasionally). Oh, and if you are patient and not too impulsive. But it can be free. It is for me. Then again, I don’t drink.

There are certain minimum requirements, and the game will not install without them. I would recommend a tablet or a really big screen, honestly, because there is a lot of detail and you would have to zoom in quite a bit on a small screen. Luckily, you can zoom in and out and rotate with the usual controls – the tutorial should also show you this.

The Sims Freeplay can be downloaded for free from Google Play (formerly known as Android Market). It gets you started right away with a tutorial which continues far into the game, giving you ever new goals. Goals again give you some kind of reward when fulfilled. However, some of the goals also require some expense (in-game, not on your credit card) to fulfill.

Already in the tutorial you will learn about the “Lifestyle Points”, which you get from time to time by fulfilling goals or leveling up. (Yes, the game has experience points and levels like a role playing game.) These Lifestyle Points can be used to hurry a project. For instance, each time you add a building to your town, it will not only be more expensive than last time, but also take more time. By throwing in LPs, you can finish immediately. If you run out of them, you can buy them for real dollars through the game interface. The developers probably hope that people will either lend the tablet to their kids without warning them, or else playing when drunk. Warning: these things are expensive.

What you will NOT be harassed to do is recruit your friends. There is no friend requirement whatsoever to play the game, although you can in the most recent versions of the game log into Facebook (of all places – why not Google+? Android is a Google product, you guys). Once there, you can supposedly do social things on a houseboat in the game. The YouTube trailer seems to imply that the social activity largely consists in your sims wiggling their butt. Or perhaps that’s just what I remember. I don’t have any Facebook friends who play the game, to the best of my knowledge, so apart from a small daily gift the social boat does nothing for me. If you are my Facebook friend and want to wiggle your simulated butt to tinny electronic music in this game, I’ll try to help; but I’m not really a social person.

What you can do without friends however is built small homes for your sims, create more or less random sims (small computer people) and dress them up, and direct them around their homes doing various things. Like using the toilet or gardening. Pretty much every interaction will give XP, which helps you level up. The game as a whole levels up, not the individual sim. Also, all of the households share the same money, unlike in the normal Sims game. So you can earn money in one house and spend it in another.

The easy way to earn money is buying a garden plot and grow vegetables. At least in the early levels of the game, the income depends on how much you are willing to click. The vegetables that take a half hour to grow give more money than the ones that take five minutes to grow, but they don’t give six times more. If you can be bothered to click six times as often, you can get noticeably more profit. I assume that after a few dozen clicks you will have second thoughts, though, unless you have an extremely boring life otherwise. (There is even a 30-second vegetable, if you are extremely trigger-happy. It is also free to plant, which is nice if you have somehow wasted all your virtual money. Not that I would know, would I?)

Once you have built a workplace in town, you can send your sims off to work and earn money and XP that way. This also has the benefit that they will rise in their career over time, earning more and more money and XP per hour. Be warned however that everything in this game takes real time. For instance, I built the science building, which gives a pretty nice pay. It so happens that I can send my sims off right before I clock in at my own workplace, and they will finish around the time I arrive on my own bus home! Most people start earlier in real life than I do, however, and unless they think playing this game at work is OK, there is no point in having a science building: You cannot program your sims to do some action in the future, and they have no free will worth talking of. So you need to access the game in the hour before their virtual workplace opens, to send them there. They will go home on their own though.

Don’t despair if you don’t find any workplace with suitable working hours (although there probably is one – each workplace has different hours). After a few levels you will unlock vegetables with a roughly work-like time span, like 10 hours, which should keep them occupied all through your workday if you are European. Americans may want the 12 hour option, from what I hear. Poor folks. I wonder if we should boycott products made with unpaid overtime. It is kind of like slavery, isn’t it?

The sims, to get back on track, certainly don’t require much attention for their own needs. For those of us used to the original Sims games, it is amazing that the small computer people can go a whole day without needing to visit the toilet. They can also go a long time without eating. But over time their need bars do fall, and you should check them from time to time. The sims will get XP from filling their needs too, after all.

One element from the original games is that more expensive objects take less time to fulfill needs. So if you sleep in a more expensive bed, you can sleep an hour less and be just as rested. In addition, you get more XP for using expensive objects. So that is an encouragement to earn more simoleons (the sims currency). Simoleons are also needed to buy houses for new sims. The new sims can help earn money, but at some point the cost of getting a new sim house is more than the new sim can earn in quite some time.

Your first household comes with a free dog. You can buy dogs for your other households if you want to. They will once a minute or so find a place where something is buried on the lot. Click on them and they will dig up money, or occasionally some other treasure. Supposedly they can even find Lifestyle Points. I generally have enough other hobbies to not watch over an imaginary dog every minute. Your hobbies may vary, as may your attitude to dogs.

In the end, I don’t see myself sticking with this game. The reason is that time cannot be frozen. If you leave the sims alone for a day, their status bars (hunger, bladder, energy etc) will have declined quite a bit. At this speed, they should starve to death over the course of a long weekend or so. I don’t really want to play a game that I can’t put away for a week or a month to concentrate on other interests. I haven’t yet let it alone long enough to say whether the sims die a slow and agonizing death or just get really grumpy, but I dislike this situation on principle.

Apart from that, it seems a pretty harmless game. If you want to hide from reality in an imaginary world, this seems a good place to do so.