Card Cutting Tips- Tech

A few people have asked me about the tech I use to cut cards recently, so out of laziness I will put it all here and just refer them to it.

1. Speak and type- For this I use a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking . I first bought a version of this as a junior in high school just before the Twins won their last world series. When I first got it it was rough- lots of mistakes, had to talk very slowly etc. Now it is pretty money. I don't speak debate fast into it, but I type at around 80 words per minute last time I consulted Mavis Beacon and I can go faster than that with this. It also works pretty slick- if I alt+tab into gchat you can keep talking and it will fill in the text there. Highly recommended. You can teach it new words like "disadvantage" that never show up in word, you do have to train it for a little while on your voice though- the most extensive I think took me like 45 minutes of reading out loud. I like it esp for doing overviews/theory blocks that are a lot of text because Dragon + wireless headset= don't have to be at your computer ftw.

2. Mouse- I started with one of those microsoft mice with 2 extra buttons but they are sort of clunky/not very precise. Now I use the Razer Diamondback that you can regularly find on sale on amazon for like 35 bones (I think it was like 120 the first time I bought one 6 years ago, I have bought 6 since then because I broke them etc (although I have 3 in use now)). I would suggest if you are going to travel with it to get a mouse case instead of just sticking it in your backpack (the first one I bought came with one, alas no more) because once you first get it it is SO SMOOTH to use and after some poor handling it will still work but the smoothness will be gone. I also have the death adder which I bought because it was new fangled and the blue went with the lighting scheme on my desktop/keyboard/toothbrush/blue tooth headset which were all blue. I like somethings about it better but overall not worth the money I think and the diamondback is probably more durable for sure.

So the buttons- it has technically 4 extra buttons that a regular mouse doesn't have, but I also reporgram the middle scrollwheel "click" to be something other than fast scroll which is the default. Razer mice come with thier own software that works way better than the microsoft mouse software imo. You can adjust scroll speed, click speed everything in one pop up window along with programing the buttons. So basically you have these 5 buttons to work with so like on my template underlined card text is F3, so that is one mouse button. Then I made a paste special macro which is hotkeyed to ctrl+F3 so I hit ctrl with left hand, mouse button which does F3 with right hand. So each button has a key, and then the template has controls for that key, ctrl + that key, and alt + that key, so each botton does 3 things total, for 15 hotkeys on the mouse. That + dragon and I never really need to type much of anything.

I also have a keyboard for my desktop with extra buttons, the Razer Tarantula , generally I programmed these buttons to do general thins like cut and paste, undo/redo etc. that usually take a few buttons but now can be done with 1!! I also made a few of them more complex little macros like past special + eliminate hard returns + format as small card text which could of taken 4's of seconds and upwards of 9 buttons to push before hand. Most of these improvements are trivial, but if you spend 5+ hours a day cutting cards, over the course of a year you will have a lot more free time.

3. Scanner/scan software- I have tried just about every scanning software out there (my brother in law works basically as a archiver/document scanner for a major bank so I have even played around with sort of "industrial strength" programs) and for my money omni page slays everyone. There are programs that are more accurate- but they generally take a lot longer- and in my experience the recent omni page makes maybe 1 or 2 mistakes every 10 pages or so (my senior year it never even made mistakes on chinese characters). A lot of people hate it for some reason but I think they are stupid. Generally when I scan I don't do it a page at a time, i scan a lot of pages into a .pdf- then right click on it and omni page gives me the option to convert the whole thing to a word doc. Now, while this takes longer than doing the pieces individually, I dont have to be at the computer while it does its mojo. So after I get 2-300 pages of scanned text I go eat dinner or whatever while omni page doe sits magic. Then I come back and go find the parts I need. I alwasy skip the corrections phase because I will just manually correct any errors in the parts i need since the odds are low that there will be very many. If you are strapped for cash microsoft office comes with an OCR program as well that is dec.

One thing- if I have a .pdf that was clearly originally a word doc I will use the OCR in adobe acrobat professional which I think is better in this one instance- for some reason it always has 0 errors whereas omni page will occasionally have some, and you can modify the .pdf to be cut and pasteable that way (this is only for pdfs that dont let you cut and paste the text obviously).

Befriend the tech people who work at your school- odds are no one ever pays them any attention and they are pretty smart. just like befriending librarians this can pay dividends- they can oftentimes get you free software the school already has on mass education licenses etc. I find out about most new things by explaining to people like that what i'm doing and then they tell me some new way to do it better.

4. Scanner-don't think you can beat the canon lide series for cheapness/portability. They fit in a backpack, dont have thier own poer source just get it from USB, and are pretty fast/accurate. The sound they make drives some people crazy (ak) but I generally think if it bothers you that much you are probably a baby. You can get them for as cheap as 40 on amazon and the more expensive ones don't really make much of a difference for debate as they usually just have improved color/photo options which you won't use. I have had a few of them, have the 200 right now. The only reason I would get something else is if you have the cash to shell out for a feeder/faster scanner.

5. Recording sound- Audacity is a free program to record/edit sound. Great for recording speeches/lectures. Works substantially better than expensive programs like Camtasia. An external mic will also greatly improve this.

Let me add this- to those of you who plan on recording debates- the microphone is 20X more important than the camera. I frequently see people with 800 dollar camcorders with no external mics who then set up the camera 25 feet away from the debaters and think "great, another recording of an awesome debate that will be worthless because the sound is going to suck". You have all probably seen youtube videos of somethign of debates where the speech sounded garbled, odds are the debater wasnt that unclear (ok maybe they were) but the recording of sound with a standard handy cam blows. Scower AV forums before making your purchase, or just know that RODE makes probably the best mic for this purpose. Also- no one really cares about the video for these things- so recording in 1080p is probably unnecessary and just makes it difficult to share the files. If you have a program like adobe premiere that lets you independently chose the quality of sound and video downplay video and emphasize sound obvi. The mic will eliminate the need for a lot of that though.