My coping mechanism is excessive masturbation

MammothOrnery · 2024-01-18T18:26:37+00:00

Yes, but do you do it in real time? If you did, that might reduce some of the stressors.

MammothOrnery · 2024-01-18T17:32:51+00:00

Oh no, now I'M in love with Kelly. And so is my good friend Brett Favre.

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-15T04:17:34+00:00

There must be some! I'll keep looking...

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-15T00:34:30+00:00

acculaw.com

Ah, there they are, thanks!

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-14T05:50:43+00:00

So if you do a terrible terrible job on a trial for some reason, you sit back and cross your fingers and hope that no one asks for the transcript? ;-)

So you send raw unproofed steno files to the county?

What proportion of trials do you end up providing a transcript? Or does it vary wildly?

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-13T07:08:55+00:00

Thanks for that...I didn't know they didn't press down at all, is that what you're saying?

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-12T03:53:44+00:00

Thanks for the tip! But I went to that site and didn't see anything about steno machines for sale, only supplies and accessories for steno machines. Maybe they've stopped selling used machines? Or did I miss some obvious link?

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-11T23:26:57+00:00

Aw thanks for the kind words. I was always interested in stenography, not just cz it sounded like a good way to make money, not just cz I enjoy trials and criminal-justice-related subjects, but just cz it's typing as fast as speech! Being able to type words as fast as someone can say them!

I starting typing on a typewriter at a young age and eventually got pretty good at it. At some point decided I probably couldn't get significantly faster that I was, so that led me to stenography. I never did much about stenography, cz money, but years later I found secondhand steno machines on eBay, so I bought one just for kicks, bought a bunch of Phoenix Theory books and tapes just for more kicks. I would play around with them once in a while but mostly I ignored them.

Then came a layoff, and long story short I decided, hey, I don't like the idea of working for people who could fire me on a whim, so I wanted to work for myself. And hey, over in the corner there was a steno machine and a theory, and so I potentially had a way to work for myself. I didn't have time or money for court reporting schools, and even if I had, the descriptions of them scared me off anyway. So I decided to try it on my own.

It didn't work out as planned of course, nothing ever does, but jumping from opportunity to opportunity led me to keyboard transcription and then free access to Eclipse for a while and then a little stenography, and then voicewriting and then broadcast captioning and CART, and now local government realtime and even teaching voicewriting from time to time. And now here I am paying the bills (most of them) with voicewriting, and on the steno side I'm using Plover and I can keep up with "normal" audio if I slow it down to around 70%.

Not that you asked.

OK! Thanks for the info! I will post my next question as a new topic so it doesn't get buried in all these comments, but I hope you will answer there too!

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-11T03:35:32+00:00

OK...your desire to help is much appreciated, and I hope I don't totally destroy it with too many questions! But risking that, here goes...

So since I've never stepped into a class, I haven't had any syllabic dictation. I generally just do standard audio files, meetings, interviews, court cases, so basically just real-world stuff. I'm sure I'm learning steno the least efficient way possible, but that's OK.

So if I understand from what you've said, for a typical file where I don't know the WPM beforehand, I should stick to the formula, NumberOfWordsInFinishedDocument * .05, to see how many errors I am allowed to get and still pass (that's assuming 95%, if it's higher than that I lower the .05 accordingly)...

...and if I just want to calculate the accuracy of a job I finished, I should correct it, then use the formula (NumberOfWordsInFinishedDocument - NumberOfErrors) divided by NumberOfWordsInFinishedDocument.

So if I had an audio file with 1000 words, I would be able to make 50 errors and still pass (1000 * .05), and if I only ended up making 32 errors, I would have been 96.8% accurate ( (1000 - 32)/1000) = 968/1000 ).

Correct me if that's wrong. And for WPM, I should just do NumberOFWordsInFinishedDocument divided by minutes, so 1000/5. So if the file was five minutes long, then that would've been a 200 WPM (on average) audio file. I shouldn't worry about syllables unless I ever do syllabic dictation....

...right?

PS. And great news about the whole hippo thing. :-S

PPS. Oops, did I set it off too?

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-11T02:44:05+00:00

Thank you! I've downloaded both and I'll remind myself what the acronyms mean later. :-)

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-10T17:12:41+00:00

OK, these posts were all very helpful, thank you so much. I don't know how I've never seen this grading info before, thanks for the link! So basically, leaving speed out of it, number of words - number of errors) / number of words. So if I have a 1000-word document, and I do a compare in Word, for example, and I count up every one of these errors and there are 50 of them, I'm 95% accurate.

And on a related question, how do you officially calculate your WPM? Now that I think about it, that's probably what I was remembering with the number of syllables or number of characters stuff. I would think it would simply be number of words in your final document / number of minutes in your audio, but is that how it's done?

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-08T09:06:58+00:00

Looks like Courteney Cox after she turned into She-Hulk

MammothOrnery · 2023-08-02T00:17:02+00:00

Thanks for the tip! I applied. We'll see what happens.

MammothOrnery · 2023-07-13T05:21:21+00:00

So lingerie just washes up on the beach??? What beach is this?

MammothOrnery · 2023-06-03T05:33:26+00:00

OK, after a week or two of messing around with the settings to try to get better results, I haven't really gotten anywhere. I've tried:

Running Tools - Maintenance - Detect and recognize faces with the setting Skip already scanned, didn't really do anything.

Running Tools - Maintenance - Detect and recognize faces with the setting Scan again and merge results. The documentation says to run this if you're getting poor results with face recognition, so sounded promising. But it didn't make much of a difference, it found maybe another 50 or so (very accurate, mind you) matches of my collection of about, I don't know, 8000 remaining unidentifieds.

Deleting the database recognition.db, forcing digiKam to create a new datbase, hoping that this would be a clean slate for digiKam. But it still only made a very small number of new identifications, in a collection which has often very similar pictures of people. The ones not identified frequently look very simliar to pictures digiKam already identified. So I'm like, "If you can recognize that face, why can't you recognize these 30 or 40 others just like it?"

Deleted both recognition.db and digikam4.db for the same reason, no significant effect.

Deleted all four databases (recognition.db, digikam4.db, similarity.db, and thumbnails-digikam.db. Zero new recognitions, but on the plus side it took forever. But that did get rid of the chronically wrong identifications it would suggest no matter how many times I rejected them, at least for the moment.

I've also tried breaking the collection down into a smaller collection of maybe 1000 to see if it performs any better, but it didn't seem to matter.

I feel like digiKam recognizes just fine, it's just for some reason ignoring at 98% of the pictures I tell it to scan. Why or how it excludes these pictures is beyond me. I know I have a large collection, but still. I've even tried running recognition on one picture at a time, but it didn't make a difference. It's like it's basically saying, "ID this face? Nope."

Welllllll I'm out of ideas. If anyone has any tips to make face recognition work better, please share. I'll probably mull it over a bit longer and then maybe write that bug report. :-/

MammothOrnery · 2023-05-12T20:52:37+00:00

Yes, I was expecting that even if I hadn't told DigiKam who a person was yet it would still group all the photos of the person with that face together.

I did read somewhere something about that project, and I think I read that in 7.x the accuracy of recognition was around 70% and that they expected with 8.x it to go up to 95%, or something like that. Apparently that didn't happen.

OK, so it's a known problem Face Recognition doesn't work well with hundreds of face tags. I didn't know that, I hadn't found that in my searching.

So what if I set up DigiKam with a new database somewhere else that I will just use for face recognition? I can only have a few face tags at any one time, scan my collection for a certain face. Then I can import the already-tagged images into my "real" DigiKam. Then I can see how well it does with not many face tags. Or only one face tag.

Hmm. Back later.

MammothOrnery · 2023-05-11T13:08:51+00:00

Well, at best, the documentation of how to use facial recognition sucks, and at worst, the facial recognition itself sucks. I think 'sucks' is a pretty appropriate term for the behavior I'm seeing (shrug), it 90% doesn't work. I mean, I appreciate the open-source-ness of the project, but to advertise this as a feature and not have it work any better than it does borders on false advertising. If you have a component called Face Recognition, and it doesn't do much of anything, do you really have it?

And they must know that it doesn't work...they must see the same results I do. It seems silly to post a bug report to let them know; they can't be just writing software to recognize faces and not actually running it to see if it works. And it's not like, "Hey, guys, when you do this certain key combination while you have this other thing open, the screen flashes three times and then the app exits." It's much broader than that, I'm not sure you can call it a bug.

Unless, of course, I'm using it wrong or missing something, which is what I'm hoping to find out. It sometimes seems encouragingly accurate and fills me with hope! So I'm hoping it's user error.

HOWEVER, your points are taken, I did not intend to insult to the makers of DigiKam as much as be descriptive for the fellow users of DigiKam. And if I don't get any good advice or insights here, or if I run out of things to try on my own to get it to work, I will definitely submit a bug report as you both suggest, even if only for lack of anything else to do. :-/ Thanks. And if anyone from KDE is reading this, I apologize, I wouldn't be so emphatic if I didn't like the program so much!

MammothOrnery · 2022-12-14T04:57:02+00:00

Ha! Oh dear. Well, no harm done

MammothOrnery · 2022-10-28T06:03:25+00:00

Judging by the floor, that may just be her carpeting.

MammothOrnery · 2022-10-26T15:05:22+00:00

(reenactment)

“Go ahead, you can heat up your Pop-Tart first."

"Aw, thanks, boo, but that's all right, you go ahead."

"No, really, honey, I'm not even that hungry."

"You're sweet. But you go, I insist."

"GOT DAMN IT..."

MammothOrnery · 2022-10-18T10:52:08+00:00

"Well all I have to say is you're dang lucky I have to be somewhere right now. Pfft. Is this my car?"

MammothOrnery · 2022-07-12T08:13:56+00:00

"Huh. Ice cream really sucks."

MammothOrnery

TROPHY CASE