Tag Archives: Devices

Independance, Mobility, Technology

Interesting or not?

Leave a comment

Sorry for not posting in a while. I think I’m going to keep thse to one post a week because I had a lot of school work this week so I didn’t have a lot of time to write.

One thing I’ve found in life is that things are very interesting to people who don’t have to deal with them. What I mean by that is is that people will find some of the technology I have very interesting and cool. Though I agree that some of it is amazing, most of the time it’s more hassle than it’s worth. Still, it’s a conversation starter because a lot of people want to know what it is and how it works. Especially when you’re in school. I suppose it goes off the idea that things are so natural to us that we take them for granted, but when something else comes into the mix we pay attention to it.  We take things almost for granted that they’re the way we thin they are. If someone constantly gets coffee from the coffee machine at their work, but suddenly their office bought a new machine they would notice.

My point is that with some of the things I have it’s so unusual to other people that they’re interested in what it is and how it works. They want to test it out and play with it for a bit It’s not that I mid that, but that I don’t see why they’d be so interested in  something that for me is a normal thing.

I’ve had plenty of “toys” in the past including computers with cameras so I could see the board or machines that could read the text on the page and make it bigger. So many people wanted to play with them and explore them.

I also had one time a young girl ask what my cane was to her mother while I was walking past them one day. her mother told her and I showed her a bit how it worked.

It’s also interesting to think how sometimes you take tings for granted. I had a program during high school that was set up for blind and visually impaired students and at one point my high school had four blind students (including me), but my girlfriend when she first met me was very curious because she’d never met a person who was visually impaired before.

So I guess we really just assume things are mainstream that we’re used to, but when something is common to us it might not be so common to others.

Technology

Kindle can read books! Yay!

Leave a comment

One thing I’ve found out recently is that Kindle actually does have the ability to read books to you. While looking for books for my next year of college my mom and I were trying to figure out the best way for me to maximize my efficiency when it came to reading books. As a combined English and Creative Writing major writing and reading are a big part of the deal. Of course with a lot of reading there raises a dilemma, reading books takes way too long and sometimes I have no idea even what I’m reading. Listening to books is a lot of fun, but sometimes it’s hard to get direct quotes for essays. There were a few ways we tried to get by this, and they were met with moderate degrees of success. So we thought about a kindle because you can see the text as you’re reading it. The thing is we didn’t know if they had an audio function. So a bit of searching around revealed that in most cases the answer would be “no”, but some more searching came up with a bundle specially made for visually impaired and blind people that allows you to listen to the books. Which is great! So now I can listen and look at my book at the same time! Yay!

School, Technology

Victor Reader Streams are very helpful

4 Comments

A piece of technology I like using are Victor Reader Streams for Mumanware. They are small and portable (which is a vast improvement from things I’ve had in the past. Technology really has been getting smaller for the better). I’d recommend it for many different things. Itps practical for many different uses. from recording notes, to listening to stories from Audible, Learning Ally, and other things to even being able to put your own written documents on it. It makes listening to stories on the go really fast and easy, and if you’re a writer like me you can even listen to your own stories (if you don’t mind the-sometimes highly amusing-butchering of names that aren’t English).

I use mine for various purposes. I have some SD cards where I have stories I’ve written or fun stories I want to listen to on my free time. Then I have a number of SD cards that I use to record notes from lectures and read the books I need for class.

One thing I will warn about notes is that you can’t rename them. It will not recognize them unless they have a specific name. So my suggestion would be having more than one card for different classes to make them easier to go through.

The navigation isn’t too hard to figure out, and you can navigate it rather fast. There are also ways to change the speed and pitch of the voice if needed. It’s a very useful tool for anyone who needs to listen to books, things they’ve written and record notes all in one. It also has various differnet language functions as well so it can help visually impaired peole from theor countries.