Eric

Voice Recognition Really Works Now

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Some time between 8 and 10 years ago, I remember getting voice recognition software with the intent that it would make writing faster.

This was running on a machine with Windows 98 on it — and even with training it didn’t work very well.

I recently saw an iPhone app doing voice dictation and it worked great for recording me without training. It’s amazing how much power new computing devices have (even the tiny ones).

But seeing this video completely blew me away. Not to pick on Tyrone, but his combination of accents (I think it is Australian English combbined with whatever his native asian language is???) makes him difficult for me to understand, yet the software can understand him! That’s amazing! If it can understand him, I’m pretty sure it will be able to understand me.

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Bruce’s Homemade Sugar Cookies – Almond YUM!

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There’s something that’s always bothered me about homemade cookies: they taste… homemade. They are missing that “something special” that cookies from the bakery have. If I’m going to go through all the trouble of baking cookies, I want them to taste as good as the bakery makes them. It ought to be possible — I mean I’m starting from scratch with just a pile of ingredients just like a bakery would. Yet somehow homemade cookie recipes always lack that lightness and yumminess that comes from a good bakery.

A few years ago, I was in Bruce’s Bakery in Great Neck (reviews) and they had the most wonderful thing — an actual book with the recipes of how THEY made things. Aha! Now it all makes sense! They’re using the same ingredients, but not always in the same ways — and that makes all the difference.

In this recipe for Homemade Sugar Cookies, they use powdered sugar (confectioners’ sugar, or as I have always called it “Pow! Dead!” sugar) to make the cookie have a light texture and then sprinkle regular sugar on top to give it bright crunchy sparkles. Read on for the recipe and photos!

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What did he say?

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I don’t know how people ever survived without the internet to answer those simple yet nagging questions…

Sure there are big questions that we manage to survive despite not having answers, but it’s these little questions that build up and bounce around and create little tiny stress puddles that never go away. For instance, what do people mean by “dining out?”

Let that fizzle around a brain for 30 years or so. It must be something dirty… but how dirty?

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