Maine Antique Digest, April 2017

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Maine Antique Digest, April 2017 31-B
- FEATURE -
About 1960, the aerospace industry
coined the acronym KISS for
“keep it simple stupid” (no
comma) and insisted it in no way implied
the listener was stupid; rather the opposite
remind ourselves of the KISS principle.
Keep It Simple
Keeping notes is an important part of
antiquing. Appraisers are compulsive
note takers. Auction-goers in specialized
fields such as rare books once carried
pounds of index cards listing past prices
realized; now they carry a tablet or laptop.
Restorers sometimes make detailed
notes of a disassembly process to aid
reassembly. Showgoers may keep notes
as they go around the room to remember
booths and objects to revisit.
Powerful note-taking software
programs such as Evernote and
Microsoft’s OneNote (each available for
iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and web)
are marvelous tools for organizing sources
like text notes, pictures, videos,
websites, and e-mail. But they
take time and attention. Further,
to convert speech to text notes
requires setup and lengthy
personalization.
Suppose we want to keep it
simple. We want to make voice comments
and have them recorded one after another
in a simple text file without lugging
around a computer. There are tablet and
smartphone apps that will act as a hand-
held speech-to-text recorder. Speechnotes
for Android mobile devices is a good one.
Others with similar names will be found
for Apple iOS mobile devices. Check the
reviews in the Apple iTunes app store.
Speechnotes works with online help
as do most other mobile dictation apps.
This makes it more accurate than many
speech-to-text programs for desktop
computers. The online server has massive
computing power and vocabulary and
phrase lists. It is interesting to see it
work. After dictating a line, the note
taker can say “new line.” At first, the
“new” appears as part of the note. When
the app hears the next word, “line,” with
nothing immediately following, it jumps
back, erases “new,” and starts a new
line. In some cases, a misspelled word
is corrected when the context becomes
obvious. However, Speechnotes still is
far from perfect. There is an on-screen
keyboard for difficult material, such as
personal or geographic names. Simple
punctuation can be entered by dictation.
Several dozen languages are available.
The need for a simple speech-to-
text app became apparent in a recent
project. A local historical society in
a typical New England mill town has
a collection of diaries kept by a local
farmer. Many buildings, artifacts, and
photographs document the town’s two-
century industrial history. However, three
centuries of the surrounding agricultural
life are lightly documented. The diaries
could hold clues.
The diaries consist of short phrases and
are not narrative. The U.S. Census was
used to find the names of those living on
the farm during the period the diaries were
written. Then the diaries could be skimmed
with a smartphone in hand. A reader
could review anything that looked like
an interesting event—planting potatoes,
catching eels for market, record cold,
slaughtering lambs, repairing the truck,
painting the barn, seemingly perpetual
firewood chopping, birth, death—and
dictate notes and tag them by dates. Notes
could be recorded at an office desk, in an
easy chair, or lounging on the patio. Sorted
by topic and printed out, these notes might
help researchers find entries related to
specific areas of interest.
One of Speechnotes’ features is the
number of ways text files can be saved.
They can be copied to a word processor
or text editor on the mobile device, sent
as an e-mail, transferred to Google Drive
or Microsoft OneDrive cloud accounts
for download to a desktop computer,
added to OneNote or Evernote, stored on
Google Keep, or converted to a PDF file.
Speechnotes is not likely to lose notes:
they will be there after an interruption
such as a phone call or a recharging.
Keep It Simple 2
It is not necessary to use powerful
or expensive software for every
computer job. I looked for a shopping
list application for years. It should be
easy to use and automatically
synchronize entries between
desktop, tablet, and phone over
the Internet. Multiple separate
lists should be possible—
grocery lists or auction items
to bid on. Once entered in the
system, entries still should be available
on all devices.
The answer was the free Google
Keep. The app is available for Android
and Apple iOS devices. Windows,
Macintosh, or Linux desktop and laptop
computers can use it through their web
browsers. Google assures us that lists are
secure and device synchronization uses
encryption. When a new list item is added
on one device, synchronization with other
devices happens in seconds, as long as
the devices have Wi-Fi turned on. If one
device is not on Wi-Fi, synchronization
will happen next time it signs on. Voice
dictation is possible in some cases, but it
is not as useful as Speechnotes described
above.
Keep It Simple 3
Back when computers were giant
machines made of vacuum tubes,
bankers urged the computer industry to
consider helping banks. They said that an
average of one in 500 banking postings
was marred by human error. Well, the
computer industry certainly responded.
Banking today is totally computerized.
This has led to several simplifications for
us.
First, we can be aware almost minute
by minute of account status, instead of
waiting for a monthly statement in the
mail. Just sign up on the bank’s website
or install its app on a smartphone. Here
are two personal examples.
My wife and I ate at a restaurant,
charging the bill on a bank debit card.
Looking at the account online later in
the day, we saw that the charge was three
times the bill size. A call to the restaurant
manager on Monday found that the server
had waited until one cash bill and one
signed credit card bill were in hand. The
cash was pocketed, and both bills were
charged to the credit card. There had been
several similar frauds around town, and
criminal charges were filed in at least
one case. Our account was credited on
Tuesday.
A direct withdrawal showed up for a
three-month renewal charge of $60 from
the online edition of a national newspaper.
18-E
Computer Column #340
Simple Is Best
by John P. Reid, >
Speech-to-text smartphone app taking notes
from an old diary.
“Keep it
simple
stupid.”
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Cleaned, Restored and Preserved
We thought that subscription had
expired. A call to the paper was
answered by a persuasive agent
who convinced us to renew for
three months at a $40 discount. The
refund showed up in our account
the next day.
Second, mobile deposit saves
time and gasoline. Almost all
banks have a smartphone app to
record pictures of the front and
back of a check. The deposit shows
up instantly on the online account
status, though it may be labeled
“pending” for a day or so. If you
tried mobile deposit a year ago and
were disappointed, try again. It has
been much improved. I have had
problems only twice. One was a
postcard-size rebate check that was
physically too small for the app.
The other was a dividend check
from an investment that had a fancy
fraud-prevention background that
confused the online deposit system.
Both had to be mailed.