Family time

Over the holidays I’m taking time off from the shop to spend with visiting family members.  Only once a year can we get everyone together for a few days.   I’ll still have some time to do design work and catch up on one of last years resolutions to learn more about the Mac laptop I got about a year ago. 

I’ve got the hang of the dictation feature now and downloaded the program so the text appears as I talk.  It is impressive and requires very little editing.  I anticipate using it a lot.

I also worked with the text-to-voice feature which seems useful for dealing with longer text documents, but it is not something I would need often.  Maybe it would be useful for reading those long fine-print documents we have to agree to and accept to download a program.

I worked more on scanning blacksmith references I want to keep handy and getting them into a pdf format so I can run them through a PDF OCR convertor and extract the text component.

Betty has listened to audio books for years, but I’ve just come around to it.  I’ve learned to download some free ones and let them play in the background as I work.  Not the best way to do a book justice but better than nothing and it goes a lot faster for me than when I read the text.

One of the most useful projects was to go back through all the files I made when learning SketchUp and purging useless ones.  Also, I wanted to watch some tutorials covering features I haven’t been using and learn a few new tricks.

The snow seemed to reinforce any excused for not walking down to the studio for almost a week.  It is one of my longest absences.

No footprints to the shop.