Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Tools That We Use: Word Processors - Ep 116
365 Plays6 years ago
We think of archaeologists' main activity as digging. But anybody who's ever done archaeology can tell you that, regardless of what kind of archaeology we do, writing is a far more important skill. Here on the ArchaeoTech Podcast we talk a lot about the tools that we use in the field, but we don't talk so much about the tools that we use to assemble our thoughts when the fieldwork is over. So today we'll dig into a class of often overlooked tools that we all rely on: word processors.
Links
App of the Day
- Webby: State Lines
- Paul: TP Link Deco
Contact
- Chris Webster
- Twitter: @archeowebby
- Email: chris@archaeologypodcastnetwork.com
- Paul Zimmerman
- Twitter: @lugal
- Email: paul@lugal.com
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
Hello and welcome
Introduction to Post-Fieldwork Tools
00:00:20
Speaker
to the Archaeotech Podcast, Episode 116. I'm your host, Chris Webster, with my co-host, Paul Zimmerman. Today, we'll take a look at the tools that we use once the fieldwork is done. Let's get to it. All right, Paul, welcome to the show. How's it going, man?
00:00:35
Speaker
It's going okay. Today was a really awful day with network problems that we chased and never came to a real conclusion, but now everybody's gone home and we'll attack it again tomorrow. Aside from that though, all fine. How are you doing? Nice. Not too bad. I think this is the first time you and I have recorded in about a month because we had some, I've just had some real tough scheduling challenges. So I put up that quick episode last week that was, to be honest, I don't even remember now what it was about, but I'm sure it was fantastic.
00:01:04
Speaker
but it was just a solo show because I have a vow to myself not to miss an episode if it all costs.
Scheduling Tools in Archaeology
00:01:12
Speaker
Put something up, but I'm not going to put up garbage, but I want to put something up and I don't run reruns. Hopefully, everybody enjoyed that. Along those lines, let's take a look at the tools that we use after Fieldwork is done because I have a lot of systems and processes in place that really keep my head on straight. For example, I missed a meeting on early Saturday morning. I do a podcast workshop once a month. That's nine hours long.
00:01:32
Speaker
for people who want to learn how to podcast. And I had a meeting with our co-founder here, Tristan, at 6.30 a.m. on Saturday morning, 6.30 local time, because he's seven hours ahead of me. And I'll tell you what, we were just having the conversation about that on Slack, and I didn't put it on my calendar. And at like 6.45, 7 o'clock, he's like, hey, I'm ready. I was like, ah, crap.
00:01:54
Speaker
Because I did not remember it. If it's not on my calendar, not in one of my systems that I use or one of the tools that I use to keep things straight, it simply just doesn't happen. The other tool I use is Trello. But you brought this up for a very specific reason and we've got a bunch of notes here, so I'm going to throw it to you so we make sure we get your rants out of the way.
00:02:24
Speaker
We focus a lot on the tech that people use in the
The Importance of Word Processors
00:02:28
Speaker
field, right? We talk a lot about things like LiDAR and drones.
00:02:31
Speaker
And I always want to talk about total stations and we talk about GIS and on down the line while GIS is often used outside of the field too. But one big class of tools that we've mentioned a number of times that we've never really done any kind of deep dive into is word processors.
00:02:49
Speaker
a little funny to me because it's something that we all use and we all I'm sure have opinions about them, but it's really top of my mind lately. And so the reason is we're recording this on November 5th and I believe the release date is a week and a half from now, November 14th, which is perfect because that's the day after we're going to have combinations birthday party and Feshrift reveal party for my
00:03:14
Speaker
for my dissertation advisor. So for the last few years, I've mentioned it kind of obliquely on the podcast, but I've never been able to say outright what this project was because it was a secret. I've been working with Katie Blanchard, who's the keeper of the ancient Near East section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, and my wife, Eleanor Rockhage, who's a curator of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Met here,
00:03:36
Speaker
We've been three of us co-editing a volume of collection of papers in honor of Richard Zetler, my advisor. But of course, it was secret, so we couldn't talk about it. But I've
Challenges with Microsoft Word
00:03:50
Speaker
been doing a lot of work off on that nearly as much as they have, but a lot of work aside from podcasts and my regular day job and my night job and everything else.
00:03:59
Speaker
has been editing this volume for the last two and a half years now. We've been doing it all with Word, with documents that are getting emailed back and forth between ourselves and the contributors.
00:04:14
Speaker
It just brought to the surface for me all the various ways that I love and hate word processors. So just to tee this whole idea up, we're all taking, we're writing all the time. We probably do more writing than anything else in our field, even more than actual field work.
00:04:30
Speaker
There's a whole range between note taking on the one hand and annotations, a small little sentence or two or a small paragraph here, through reports and articles, monographs, books, all the way up to very long documents.
00:04:45
Speaker
What I distinctly want to avoid talking about right at the moment, unless you want to bring it back in, are the short ones, things like notes and annotations. I want to talk about the particular tools that we use for doing any kind of longer document, anything that's multiple pages, and try to circle in on some of the issues around these and what kind of tools are being used and what kind of tools we wish people would use more frequently.
00:05:12
Speaker
How much writing do you use? Well, uh, quite a bit actually, because I'm, I'm writing for, I mean, even for the podcast, I mean, this is an audio format podcast, but you know, uh, this does, this isn't really long form writing, but I used to, uh, write blog posts associated with podcasts when I was, when I had that overlap period, when my blog was starting at the same time the podcast was.
00:05:32
Speaker
So a lot of times I'd write out the podcast first, but nowadays it's reports and draft reports and things like that. But I think my one major comment on word processing platforms and writing platforms is learn the damn platform. Because I'll tell you what, I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft Word, partly because we have to use it so often.
00:05:54
Speaker
and people always require like a Word document specifically, right? Because they don't know how to open anything else. But here's the thing, a lot of people complain about Microsoft Word for the same reason they complain about other software programs is because they don't understand it. Do you know how many people I say Word doesn't line things up when I bullet the list properly and then I'd look over somebody's shoulder and they're spacing like their indent and then putting in a dash or something like that and then spacing again. It's like, well, it's not Word's problem. You don't understand how to use tabs.
00:06:24
Speaker
You don't know how to use tabs. You don't know how to use first line indent and make sure all that stuff is automatic. And I think setting up templates and more importantly training programs for your employees to say, hey, these are the things we use 99% of the time. And here's the best way to do it. And in fact, I've got a link in the show notes. My Dig Tech Learn page, which at the very bottom has only three posts. I intended to do a lot more, but I think I just lost steam on it.
00:06:51
Speaker
only three posts on my Word for Archaeologists series, which I'm sure is still current. It was a few years back, but I've got one on tabs, one on, I don't even know what, so go check that out. It's in the show notes. But anyway, the point is,
00:07:05
Speaker
With any software program, if you're doing something repeatedly, chances are you can automate that. If you're doing something repeatedly, you can put it in a template. If you're doing something repeatedly, there's a hotkey for it, or you can create a hotkey for it. And just keep that in mind. And that's the whole thing with word processing programs. We hate them, hate them, hate them, but they're a necessary evil in our business, and just learn it. That's all I gotta say. I agree with you, but boy, there's a lot to unpack there.
00:07:34
Speaker
So, when we started on this project, I really wanted people to use collaborative tools, things like Google Docs. From my programming background, I would have much preferred people to just use text documents that I could throw into a version control system like Git and really finally control what
00:07:58
Speaker
what changed in the content of the documents they were sending us. But of course, nobody else was willing to do that. My wife, who's edited a number of different volumes in her capacity at the museum, said, yeah, this is never going to fly. Nobody's ever going to even use Google Docs, even if they know how to use it. We're going to have to use Word, because that's what everybody uses. And the publisher also said, yeah, give us Word documents. That's the only thing we're going to accept.
00:08:25
Speaker
The first thing I said was, let's simplify the matter for the contributors, for the writers. I created a set of templates. I stripped out all the styles that were not ever going to be used to just have a handful of styles. We synthesized the rules that the publisher gave us so we could present that to the writers and say,
00:08:46
Speaker
format this in this way, format that in that way, format this in the other way. And I made a custom template for each one of the contributors that had just those styles, had track changes turned on, had some people used it beautifully. And if they wanted to make a new heading, they put in the word and they highlight it and they hit the heading button and they got a heading. Other people kind of use it halfway. They
00:09:12
Speaker
you know, put in the heading and then they highlighted it and then they bolded it and they underlined it. Some people went ahead and used their own normal template from their own installation of Word. And then I'd have to go and convert that back into the template that I had originally provided them. So there's, you know, there's really good intentions
00:09:35
Speaker
to using templates, but people aren't always familiar with how to use, for example, styles as opposed to styled text, you know, where you can have a semantic style. Actually, let me let me back up a little bit. So when Apple first came out with Mac right, there was a debate about how they were going to allow people to style the text. And the debate was basically highlight the text, turn a bold italic, underlined, whatever, or highlight the text and declare what kind of a
00:10:04
Speaker
part of the text. It was a header, a title, a block, whatever, and that would adjust everything else. Now, obviously, the right answer is the second way, semantically. This here is the header in this part of my article. Therefore, mark it up as a header.
00:10:22
Speaker
And then we can mark them globally across all of them and decide to make them all purple or rainbow colored or whatever is appropriate or bold and slightly bigger than everything else. And then the other way is taking and adjusting every little bit of text as you go through. And people just even 30 years on from word processors really becoming a big thing, people are still totally unclear with the kind of semantic markup.
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah. And that's a problem. I wish more people understood it because it makes managing one's documents so much easier and makes then people not have to do the same thing that you're talking about, spacing to get the right spacing, hitting the space bar all those times instead of just setting your tab stops and going there or even better yet.
00:11:11
Speaker
Telling the the the document template, you know this kind of structure a list needs to be tabbed in this watch and then you just say this is that kind of a list and Boom, it turns into what you need it. Mm-hmm. Oh Yeah, I got that off my chest
00:11:27
Speaker
And that's not really particularly a word problem. That's across any word processor. That's an excellent point. I was actually just going to say that because that's a fundamental misunderstanding of word processing programs. And it's one of the things that it's interesting. I was editing the CRM archaeology podcast today, which as you're listening to this, it's already out. So go check out 176 if you want to know what I'm talking about here. But Bill White, one of the hosts, went to the ACRA conference. And one of the things they were talking about was
00:11:54
Speaker
What are the effectiveness of CRM grad school programs and undergrad programs? What did you learn the most? What thing that you did, did you learn the most? Blah, blah, blah, blah. It ended up being a discussion that also centered around things like certain skills you were supposed to learn and stuff like that. We always focus on the archaeological skills, but we don't focus on
00:12:15
Speaker
Anything else we say go write a paper, but we don't say and here's how you use a word processing program. Here's what styles means Here's what you know, all this little stuff is and once you learn that I mean Google Docs use it word uses it pages for Mac uses it pretty much any word processing program unless it's some Something we might get to on the list here that's completely different But essentially they still use kind of the same rules, right? Right and it's just once you understand those rules, man You can use almost anything
00:12:45
Speaker
Yeah, anything. Well, that's actually one of the interesting things I think historically is how Word came to be the dominant one, how it's the 800-pound gorilla. Because back in the day, I had already mentioned Mac Right. I wrote a lot of things at Mac Right back when I was in high school. I was in earnest in undergrad. Word Perfect was humongous. It was probably the first big word processor. Do you remember Nicest Writer?
00:13:07
Speaker
I know the name but I'm not sure I ever used it. That was on the Mac. It was in the 90s and what it really excelled at was text with multiple character sets. A Chinese friend of mine could mix and match Chinese and English in the same document.
00:13:23
Speaker
I knew people that were writing and they'd have transliterations with the extended alphabet in various Semitic scripts and they could have that with the Latin alphabet with all these wacky diacritics that WordPerfect and Word would just absolutely choke off up a long on anytime you gave it to them.
00:13:44
Speaker
A nicest writer was targeted at people like that who had to write in multiple different scripts. It could handle mixed left to right and right to left in the same document, which if you're somebody like me that works in the Middle East, that's kind of important.
00:13:59
Speaker
But then word slowly, I mean, I don't even know how it got to the dominance, but it's now to the point that nobody really uses any other word processor if they're using a word processor other than word. There are edge cases, pages being a big one. I don't know of. Yeah, it's dominant. It's dominant because of Windows.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, there are other ones. I steer a lot of people towards LibreOffice in general as kind of a catch-all Microsoft Office replacement. And it's kind of a clone of a slightly older version of Microsoft Office. Really smart in some things, kind of clunky in others. But there are things that will work as word replacements. LibreOffice pages, which I already mentioned, will export word beautifully.
00:14:49
Speaker
import it, depending on how complicated the Word document is, either beautifully or less so. But you can use it for collaboration if you're really upset with the particular layout of the toolset in Word. But Word as a file format is the default interchange format now, too.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's crazy that Doc X or something like that is just expected that anyone can open that. My Civil Air Patrol squadron, we get documents sent down to us, like agendas and other documents and things like that sent to us from the wing officers above us. And more often than not, they're in a Doc X format. And they just like, first off, send me a PDF. Second, don't just assume everybody can open this. I mean, there's actually somebody in my squadron.
00:15:37
Speaker
She hasn't paid for Office 365. Her computer didn't come with it, and she doesn't want to use it. She uses Google Docs and everything else, so she actually can't open a Word document. Now, you can import them into something like Google Docs, but the import there is kind of messed up, too. It's not perfect, but just making the assumption that people can open that is kind of a weird thing. People don't even think about it as proprietary software.
00:15:59
Speaker
Actually, you're also hinting at something. I don't know if I want to jump into this one right now, but the division when we're thinking of word processing between creating the document and displaying the document. If it's just something somebody needs to read and nobody ever needs to edit it again, that PDF is a wonderful format because it looks identical on your computer as it does on my computer.
00:16:21
Speaker
The Word document, I've got an older version of Word. I don't have Word. I'm opening a LibreOffice. We have a different set of fonts installed on our computers. It can go all different ways between what you think it looks like as the creator and what I think it looks like as the recipient. That's a problem.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, not only that, but 99% of the time, the first time I look at an email and its attachment is on my phone. And I'll tell you what, doing a quick view on a Word document on your phone, the formatting is all messed up because the phone just does not handle it. But a PDF displays exactly like it's supposed to. Right.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah. So yeah. So I'm a big fan of PDFs for that specific reason. Yeah, for sure. Plus the, the, the aspect that you can't really, well, you can change a PDF with a lot of extra tools, but generally somebody's not going to change a PDF. But if you pull up a word document as like an official document, which I was just sent the other day from somebody at Nevada wing, it's like this official notice that, you know, we've got this inspection coming up and he sends it as a word document. Like I just changed the date if I don't feel like doing it right now and say, Hey, you sent me this.
00:17:27
Speaker
How's he going to know? Probably doesn't know how to use track changes. So yeah, it's crazy anyway. All right. Well, that's actually a good spot to take our first break and we will come back on the other side and continue this discussion about tools that we use once the field work is done. Back in a second.
00:17:45
Speaker
Chris Webster here for the Archaeology Podcast Network. We strive for high quality interviews and content so you can find information on any topic in archaeology from around the world. One way we do that is by recording interviews with our hosts and guests located in many parts of the world all at once. We do that through the use of Zencaster. That's Z-E-N-C-A-S-T-R. Zencaster allows us to record high quality audio with no stress on the guest. Just send them a link to click on and that's it. Zencaster does the rest. They even do automatic transcriptions.
00:18:13
Speaker
Check out the link in the show notes for 30% off your first three months or go to zencastr.com and use the code ARCHEOTECH. That's A-R-C-H-A-E-O-T-E-C-H.
00:18:27
Speaker
Looking to expand your knowledge of x-rays and imaging in the archaeology field? Then check out an introduction to paleoradiography, a short online course offering professional training for archaeologists and affiliated disciplines. Created by archaeologist, radiographer, and lecturer James Elliott, the content of this course is based upon his research and teaching experience in higher education. It is approved by the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists as four hours of training. That's in the UK for those of you that don't know.
00:18:52
Speaker
So don't miss out on this exciting opportunity for professional and personal development. For more information on pricing and core structure, visit paleoimaging.com. That's P-A-L-E-O, imaging.com. And look for the link in the show notes to this episode. Welcome back to episode 116 of the Arceotech podcast. And we are talking about tools that we use once the field work is done. So what's next up on the list here, Paul?
00:19:17
Speaker
Well,
Embracing Google Docs for Collaboration
00:19:18
Speaker
the big one here for me is collaboration. Like I said, the whole reason why I'm thinking about word processors so much lately is because we're working on a volume and we've got about a dozen different contributors and we've got three different editors.
00:19:33
Speaker
Because everybody uses Word, we're stuck in this very file-centric way of collaborating with each other, of getting draft one from the writer to me, getting the revisions back to the next editor, getting those revisions to the next editor, getting the revised draft one back to the writer, who can then accept, reject, so on, and send it back. And the circle goes around a few times. And so I, for years, have hated
00:20:01
Speaker
this kind of a workflow where one takes a document and then emails it to somebody else to work on that document because it's so easy to accidentally open the wrong one. You open the wrong email and you download that and suddenly you're working on the entirely wrong piece of text or somebody has not sent you the latest version and you're making changes on version one
00:20:28
Speaker
but they are already well into version two, then you have work that has to be melted. Now, in the computer programming world, we can deal with that to some extent through something, through virtual control like Git, and you do merges and resolve conflicts and so on, but we can't do that with Word, which is a huge reason why I like a lot of the new tools that we have, things like Google Docs, Office 365, or Apple Pages and iCloud, in that
00:20:58
Speaker
If you and I, Chris, are working on the same document, say I've created one in Google Docs, I can make a change. You can make a change. We can both be working on that same document simultaneously. We'll see each other's changes just happen there. And these online tools also bring along that version control. So if somebody screws something up, we can just look back through the history of it very easily and find it there. It's baked into it. It's not a separate feature like it is in Word where the track changes.
00:21:26
Speaker
is something you have to explicitly turn on and you have to go through in a certain set way of working with it. I'll get in to try changes again because I've got lots of opinions about trying changes. Actually, one, and it's all stinky.
00:21:42
Speaker
But the collaboration, that I think is, again, I work at a school. We started using Google Docs on Google Apps for our school domain a number of years ago, and it's really taken off. So students now hardly ever write in any word processor. They almost exclusively write in Google Docs.
00:22:04
Speaker
And the reason is it saves automatically. And if they're working on any collaborative project with anybody, they can just do it simply. They share it to them and there's never ever a question about who has the latest version of whatever. And that is such a liberating way of working versus the mailing.
00:22:20
Speaker
mailing files back and forth like we had done for the previous 15 years before that. I just think it's about this new way of working, but it's not the way that the scholars that are putting together this book that we're editing are used to working, so we can't do it.
00:22:41
Speaker
a problem with, quote, scholars in general, which is people really get stuck in their ways, especially, I hate to say, the older generation. But it's not exclusive to, quote, older generation, basically anybody out of their 20s. So I'm including myself in that.
00:22:59
Speaker
it's a, it's not exclusive to them either. There's a lot of people specifically in archeology that really gets stuck in their ways. You know, I look at 25 year olds that have a eight year old cell phone because they either don't can't afford a new one or don't want to afford a new word or don't want to get a new one. And they're like, I can't handle this. And I was just dealing with somebody the other day that I need to contact on Slack all the time, but they didn't have a phone capable of loading Slack. And this person is in their twenties. And I was like, Oh,
00:23:25
Speaker
What is going on here? And then they got a new one. And finally, now we can communicate together. But anyway, it's interesting. And I don't know how to change it other than enforcing the change. Like, for example, I always bring up my civil air patrol squadron because it's such an anomaly to me. Half the people in this squadron are over the age of 65 because it's more of a thing conducive to people who are retired, right?
00:23:53
Speaker
And I have, I don't know if it's just a subset of people that are just inherently smarter and more, I guess, less resistant to change than, than the average group of humans that joins something that, you know, these sort of people, I brought Slack into the mix. I brought Google docs into the mix and they're all just like jumping on it. Now it took a period of adjustment. Like when somebody would send me a word document and say, what do you think about this?
00:24:17
Speaker
I would say, uh, convert that to a Google doc and send me the link. Like I simply wouldn't look at it, you know, and I just had to be that forceful about it. And now it's a regular thing. And, um, you know, it's a,
00:24:29
Speaker
I don't know what to tell you. It is a period of adjustment, though, to use those collaborative documents and to go. But man, once you go that direction, I also think that just one final note here, you were mentioning students using Google Docs exclusively. Man, that really just eliminates the excuse, oh, my computer power supply failed, or my hard drive failed, or something like that. If you get that excuse now as a professor or a teacher in some way,
00:24:55
Speaker
then that student should still be penalized or you're being lied to. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, Google Doc saves after every space bar you hit. I mean, it's just constantly saving. Yeah.
00:25:08
Speaker
Actually, this is tangential, but when that transition happened between kids using standalone word processors and using Google Docs, I was so happy because people stopped doing that. They stopped working for two hours on a paper, have their computer crash, and lose all the last two hours of work.
00:25:28
Speaker
Right. That was a constant thing that would happen at least once a week, 15 years ago. And now it doesn't happen. So I was very happy when people transitioned and then they didn't have to remember to save early save often, which was my mantra for them always. But now what's happened is they've gotten so used to never having to save.
00:25:50
Speaker
that if they are working on something, you know, they're working on a Photoshop painting or something, they're working on something in Illustrator, they're working on something that is still the old style file format, file metaphor rather on their computer, they forget to save.
00:26:07
Speaker
because they've gotten so conditioned never to have to save. So it's actually kind of come around full circle. It doesn't happen nearly the same rate that it used to. And very rarely with the same kind of dire repercussions. I was working on the term paper all night and then lost it. But it does happen now because people have forgotten that you have to save.
00:26:28
Speaker
Well, and the interesting thing about that is, again, it goes back to learning the software that you're using, because Word for a really long time has had an autosave feature. And you can adjust the time frame on that autosave feature, right? And it's funny you bring up the example of Photoshop, because I don't know about Photoshop specifically, but I would guess it's the same as Adobe Audition, because it's all Adobe products, right? And I use Adobe Audition on a daily basis to edit podcasts. And I have had that app crash more than a handful of times.
00:26:58
Speaker
In fact, I'd say it probably crashes several times a week, to be honest. It's very resource intensive. If I just decided to edit a podcast while I'm doing 700 other things, which is typically the case, then chances are I'm going to overtax my laptop and it's going to crash.
00:27:13
Speaker
I mean, that's just what's going to happen. But I've got my autosave set to, I think it's five minutes, because autosaving does actually take up a lot of resources as well, because it's also looking and saving in the background and doing different things. So I don't have it set too tight. But every five minutes is OK. I can recover five minutes worth of work. But like I said, I don't know of any programs today.
00:27:35
Speaker
that I honestly don't have an auto save feature of some way like creating a backup or just creating a save one of those two things I know Adobe products create a backup as well and I don't know what invokes the backup I'd have to look at that but every time I look at my backup file for a single podcast you know there's like 15 copies of the backup file there so I could step it back if I needed to but again goes back to learning your program yeah
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah, which I guess is a general rule for life. Know how to use the tools before you cut your fingers off. Yeah. Speaking of tools though, I've already mentioned it and I just have to get in my complaints. Here it comes. Version control. My note here
Limitations of Word's Track Changes
00:28:17
Speaker
says, is there a lower level of health and words track changes feature? The answer is no, there is not.
00:28:25
Speaker
Nice. I really dislike the track changes. We have to use it heavily. We make a change as we're editing somebody's article, a word choice, or we make a comment, which is done through the track changes. Hey, you didn't cite this, or the citation doesn't match what's in the bibliography.
00:28:45
Speaker
Or we make a comment like, could you explain this a little more carefully because it's unclear? We make some changes that just have to go through, but we still have to get the writer's approval. So for example, the style guides tell us to use BCE instead of BC. Well, a lot of the people wrote BC, or maybe B period, C period, and we have to change it all to the same BCE uppercase, no periods.
00:29:12
Speaker
That needs to be captured in the track changes so the author can see it and click OK and accept it. And that's just part of the process. So that's the way it should work. But we've had so many edge cases where things don't work quite the way you'd expect. One of them being it's deadly easy to just go over to the track changes, turn it off, make whatever changes we need.
00:29:34
Speaker
and then turn it back on so that they kind of go silent. That doesn't happen with Google Docs. Everything is preserved in the Google Docs. Actually, I do that. My main job on this editing is the final step. The other two are really mostly for content. I'm the one that goes through and is trying to fix all the mechanics.
00:29:52
Speaker
So I'm making sure that they don't use ampersands in inline citations. In inline citations are always done a certain way. That if somebody did period, period, period, instead of using the proper ellipsis character, I replace it. If they use two spaces after a period, I replace it with one space. All that sort of silly mechanical stuff. Things are named consistently, whatever. So I'm actually often turning track changes off to make those really simple little, they're not even
00:30:22
Speaker
They're not meaningful changes. They're just to enforce consistency in the style between one article and the next article in this volume. But then I found other things like somebody had a very long footnote and they had citations in there that weren't in the bibliography. Okay, fine. So track changes turn on. I want to make a comment on it. I can't actually comment on the content of the footnote in Word.
00:30:51
Speaker
I have to comment on the marker where the footnote was made, you know?
00:30:56
Speaker
All our footnotes are endnotes, too, by the style guide. So that means that 15 pages before the footnote actually shows up, I have to make a comment that says, hey, the footnote that this goes to, your third citation isn't mentioned in the bibliography, isn't included in the bibliography. What gives? So I can't even put the comment right where it belongs. I have to put it pages and pages and pages earlier. That really bugs me.
00:31:22
Speaker
And then one of the other things, and this isn't tracked changes per se, but this is related because the job that I have on this particular volume is that forever on the Mac, find his command F, find Nexus command G. Word does that, but doesn't always want to go into the footnotes.
00:31:45
Speaker
when you do the command G. Sometimes it does. I haven't figured out why it does sometimes and why it doesn't other times. But if you're in a footnote and you do a command G, it doesn't go find the next. It throws you into an entirely different view of the document. It opens up a panel at the bottom, and I'm not even sure what it's trying to do. So I'll be going along trying to find double spaces. So space, space, and the find bar. And I command F. I find the first one. I change it.
00:32:11
Speaker
command G, change command G, command G, command G. I end up in a footnote, command G, boom, it throws me into a different part of the program. It's not even consistent with the way that I've done things for 35 years on a Mac or the way that it does it internally within the same program and the same document.
00:32:30
Speaker
So, yeah, I'm finding the whole matter of that kind of version control and of the mechanical kinds of editing to be extremely obtrusive. I'm not able to work comfortably. I'm always fighting the tool. And I do believe I know how to use the tool, but I find the tool very badly designed.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yes, yes. Well, I got to tell you, there are some, just so people know, there are some adjustments you can make to track changes. I think there's a change tracking options option and I'm not sure.
00:33:07
Speaker
I could even tell you where this is because in different versions of Word, it's going to be in different locations. You can make some modifications to the track changes, but like you said, people have to use it right in order to really use it effectively and not make it super annoying. I wish you could restrict, and maybe you can,
00:33:26
Speaker
But I wonder if you can restrict what it actually picks up as a track change. Um, cause like you mentioned, if you just, somebody included three spaces instead of, you know, one or something like that, whatever your metric is and you just backspace it, does that really need a track change? You know what I mean? That's why I turn it off, but because I'm doing a mix of things that do require their approval BC to BCE and things that don't space space to single space. Um, you know, I'm constantly doggling it on and off.
00:33:57
Speaker
And how it highlights what's been changed is never consistent. But that's a whole different rant. Or if I want to make a comment on one of the other comments or changes that have been tracked, that that's a really interesting can of worms. I haven't been able to figure out how to effectively and consistently do that either.
00:34:22
Speaker
Yes, yes. Well, I did find a great website here from Lawyerist.com. And they've got a page called Microsoft Word for Lawyers. And I'll drop that in our links here to have on our show notes. So check it out. It's actually got a really comprehensive guide to all the major formatting things we've been talking about. And this is well put together in judging by some of the ribbon
00:34:48
Speaker
images I'm seeing here. It's for relatively new versions of Word, not a super old document here. So yeah, we'll check that out. All right. Well, we are running out of time here. What are some of the last things you really want to get involved? Okay. So I also mentioned this, you know, when I said about writing that document versus giving it to somebody else displaying it. And so that's
00:35:12
Speaker
another confusion in my opinion in what we mean about word processing. I mean, already
Word Processing vs. Page Layout
00:35:17
Speaker
at the very start said, we're not going to talk about short notes because that can be handled a number of different ways and doesn't, you know, even though people often will write their short notes in something like word, it doesn't, it's not necessarily a word processing problem. But so between word processing, which I consider the process of writing something of some length, the page or more, let's say,
00:35:38
Speaker
and page layout, assembling the bits into something that somebody's going to see.
00:35:45
Speaker
I have found that the tools for word processing, be they LibreOffice Writer, be they WordPerfect, Nice's Writer, Mac, Word, Pages, Pages is weird, it kind of straddles. The tools for word processing and the tools for page layout are very different. And then trying to get one to do the other's job is usually an exercise in failure. And I first discovered that
00:36:11
Speaker
Oh, 20 years ago now, I was doing a temp job with some museum consultants and they used FrameMaker, Adobe FrameMaker really heavily. And this was a program that was meant for books, for long documents. And it was brilliant at incorporating chunks of text that the head of the company would write elsewhere and we'd copy and paste in and it would flow them nicely and you could
00:36:37
Speaker
The best feature that it had I loved was that you could make things variables, right? So if you had boilerplate like Dear John, every time you said John, you could use that same letter and send it to Peter and just say, you know, client's name equals and you switch it and it goes globally across the 100 page document without having to do find and replace.
00:37:01
Speaker
This one was very much geared towards long chunks of text. It wasn't so visually oriented, but it was a way of managing and organizing a very long document. As an aside, Word, I find if you get too long of a document, it often will start to self-corrupt.
00:37:23
Speaker
Yeah, so one of my coworkers was just telling me about his mother-in-law who is an academic and was writing a book and just lost her entire work because she didn't have good backups. She was working off one document for the entire book, all the different chapters, and it started to corrupt and it just got itself into a state that she couldn't open it. They could retrieve bits of text, but they couldn't really work with it anymore.
00:37:48
Speaker
So if you're working with Word and you have something that's multiple chapters, make each chapter its own file. That's my caveat. But then there are other ones. Quark Express was really big, especially in the advertising community for page layout. PageMaker is still huge. And these are very good for taking that text that you've written somewhere else and making it into something that you can present to somebody. And so I just wanted to, as a general caveat for our listeners, is that if
00:38:14
Speaker
If you can separate the concerns between writing and editing on one hand and making a document on the other hand, do so. They're two different classes of software. Yeah. Well, I'll make one note on page layout before we end this section here.
00:38:34
Speaker
The, to me, the biggest difference between, of course, page layout and what you would consider the normal way to use Microsoft Word or Pages or something like that, which would be the word processing side, is word processing, essentially your entire document is a text box, right? Your entire document is you're putting text in there and that's what it's designed for. And between like Pages, which is Mac-based, and then Microsoft Word,
00:38:59
Speaker
the way they handle things that you drag and drop in there, like images and things like that, how the text flows around it. Some of them handle it really well and some don't. Pages does that really well. It just kind of does what you need it to do intuitively because they said, hey, we think most people are going to want to do this. And so they do that. Typically it works.
00:39:17
Speaker
With Microsoft, my God, it's like you can spend hours just reformatting how a picture displays on the page and then anchoring it and make sure it doesn't move with the text or doesn't with the text. Why would you ever not want an image to move with the text? That's what I want to know. But anyway, why that's even an option? Why is that the default? Anyway, I don't know. Back to page layout.
00:39:38
Speaker
I think in most people's concerns or cases, they're going to use page layout for very short documents, like a brochure or a flyer or something like that. Because you think of page layout as basically creating a collage. And that collage is like when you would paste on things onto a piece of paper, like for magazines or something like that, creating a mood board or whatever they call it. That's kind of page layout, except you're pasting a text box and then you're pasting an image and then you're pasting a title and then you're pasting these other things.
00:40:07
Speaker
and you're moving those things around. And they do have some cool features, like you mentioned before, that frame software, whatever it was, like I know in pages. It doesn't exist anymore. It's long dead. Yeah, yeah. Well, you could create conceivably a huge document using page layout view and then type it in something else. And then I know in pages, and I'm sure you can do it in Word, you can have the text boxes flow from one box to the next if there's too much text for it.
00:40:31
Speaker
And the neat way to think about that is you can have it flow in any direction, like from this box to this box. That box doesn't have to be under it or next to it. It can be 10 pages away, and you're still going to flow into that next box. And that's a pretty cool way to think about page layout. But I wouldn't use it for a really long document for most people. That's going to take some serious formatting. But if you have, like my wife creates knitting patterns all the time,
00:40:56
Speaker
And she has a page layout document because she has her patterns look the same way with the same styles and the same kind of formatting every single time. But I told her, you know, actually create this in another document because as you're creating this pattern, you don't want to have to fill up a box and then go to the next box and go to the next box as you're typing in. You shouldn't type in a page layout document.
00:41:15
Speaker
you should do it somewhere else and then copy it in. And then I had the boxes flow from one to the next. So it separates the chunks of her pattern accordingly. And then you can do things like section breaks and text box breaks and stuff like that to say, well, this one broke here, but I actually wanted to break here and flow everything else to the next box. And then just do a little bit of work to it. But already have your layout done, which is pretty amazing. If you're doing a consistent layout all the time,
00:41:40
Speaker
create that layout and then create the text somewhere else and then just flow it in and bam, your formatting's done. So many people spend hours formatting like a flyer in Microsoft Word. I'm like, just don't do it. Yeah.
00:41:54
Speaker
Well, back to, you know, beat the same dead horse that I've already said, it's separating content from, from, uh, from display, right? Yeah. And, uh, and I like tools for writing that let you focus on the content. And then if you need to display it to somebody else, worry about that as a separate step in the process. Yeah. There's a, there's a big reason big companies have a technical writing department and a design department. They're not the same people.
00:42:22
Speaker
One's going to double check your stuff for consistency of the technical writing standpoint, then they're going to hand it to the design department and they're going to make your report. Big, huge engineering firms have that, and you don't have to worry about it. You just create the text. You send it to somebody to double check that text, and then they send it to design, and now all the reports look the same. There's a reason those aren't the same people.
00:42:41
Speaker
And then to just bring it back full circle to what I was starting to say is that if you do that writing and where you have things that have to be marked as certain kinds of elements, a block text, a block quote rather, or a heading, those were the examples I said early on.
00:42:57
Speaker
you give it the style that is named that, and then anybody else can restyle it very simply and globally because it's just a tag on this chunk of text. It's going to be shown in this way or not shown in that way, rather than going through and manipulating each little piece.
00:43:19
Speaker
Yeah. And a pro tip. If you are using, if you understand how to use styles, um, you don't actually have to highlight an entire paragraph. Um, if you're doing more than one paragraph, then you have to highlight, you know, those, but you don't actually even have to highlight all the words. You just have to highlight across both paragraphs. So you can highlight the last two characters of one and the first two of the next one. And when you click that style, it's going to apply it to the paragraph because styles work on paragraphs, not on highlighted text.
00:43:46
Speaker
So as long as your cursor's in that paragraph and you click that style, it should change the entire paragraph or the whole line. You don't have to bother yourself with highlighting. Might sound insignificant, but hey, if you can save a micro fraction of a second right now, the amount of times we use these things, I might just save you hours worth of time. So there you go.
00:44:04
Speaker
your life. Hey, there you go. All right. Well, that's enough about word processing programs. We've literally lost all of our listeners and we're going to try to go rebuild our audience over the break and come back for the app of the day segment back in a second.
00:44:19
Speaker
You may have heard my pitch from membership. It's a great idea and really helps out. However, you can also support us by picking up a fun t-shirt, sticker, or something from a large selection of items from our tea public store. Head over to arcpodnet.com slash shop for a link. That's arcpodnet.com slash shop to pick up some fun swag and support the show.
00:44:39
Speaker
Welcome back to episode 116 of the Archiotech podcast, and this is your app of the day segment. And thankfully,
Travel Tools for Digital Nomads
00:44:46
Speaker
neither of us are talking about, I don't think Paul is, because I think I know what his is, but we're not talking about word processing programs. My app of the day is not Microsoft Word. However, as some people may know, I'm going to preface this with a little bit of a story, but I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but I bought a boat like three months ago, right?
00:45:06
Speaker
And we've now put it in a marina in the Bay area in California so we can use it over the winter rather than winterizing it over the winter and not using it at all because I really love going out there. In fact, I'm spending, my wife is out of town next week for like six days. So I'm going to go out there on, I think Tuesday night, the day she leaves and spend basically Wednesday through Sunday on the boat, just working from the boat, take it around to different places where I've got cell service or wifi.
00:45:32
Speaker
make my calls, do my editing, do all my stuff that I need to do, and just work from the boat, because I love it. But that boat's not designed for that. So I've been watching these YouTube videos from this one couple who call themselves digital nomads. They've been digital nomads since 2006. They started in a van, went to an RV, and now they're on a 50-foot, well, I think it's a 48-foot Bayliner 4788 with a flying bridge. And it's an awesome boat. The models from the 90s,
00:45:59
Speaker
are really great. They're usually in awesome condition and it's just a fun thing and it's kind of a goal to buy something like that and live on it for a couple of years and just tool around. But anyway, the point is to make money because they still have full-time jobs.
00:46:14
Speaker
They have this website, which I'll link to in the show notes. I forgot all about it. But they create apps and other things. They have this website that's all for digital nomads, which is great for archaeologists because it's all these tools and things and gear reviews and stuff you would need for a life on the road. But in order to supplement that, they also create apps. And a couple of the apps I talked about one last week called Coverage? And I actually just downloaded the paid version of that today because I got a bundle of their apps.
00:46:43
Speaker
And the one I want to talk about today, they call their app company Two Steps Beyond. But the one I want to talk about today is just called State Lines, and it's super simple. It's amazing how simple it is. When I open it up, what I see is a list of states. And I can organize these by alphabetical, by distance, which is super cool. So I can see my state and then the ones that are near me.
00:47:11
Speaker
And then there's three pieces of information right on that state, and I can choose which pieces of information display in this quick view. Right now, I've got average local tax rate, just because I haven't played with it very much, rest area, overnight rules, and time zone.
00:47:28
Speaker
That's a really cool thing, and I can change what I see in that quick view. But once I click into the state, I can see pages and pages and pages of information about that state. Now, these guys developed this app when they were RVers full time, and they still do that part time. But they need to know when they're going into a new state, what are some of the rules and regulations here? What are the, you know, what are the, I don't know, they've got wine and beer tax. I like seeing that. How much are people charging?
00:47:54
Speaker
Should I buy my alcohol in Utah or should I buy it in Colorado? I think everybody knows the answer to that question. But anyway, all kinds of different things. The time zone, it's just a really great tool for people who are traveling around and constantly crossing from state to state. I mean, something in here that really pertains to an archaeologist, not myself necessarily, but marijuana usage. This one right here says for organ, recreational and medicinal. If you're a smoker of that sort of thing,
00:48:22
Speaker
You're probably going to want to know that. Texting bands, cell phone bands, leash laws, default speed limits. What are the left turn on red rules? That's an interesting thing to have in there. Right on red arrow rules, U-turns, keep right rules for highway driving and stuff like that. Just a lot of really cool things, a lot of interesting information. Max tow speed, 55 miles per hour, right there for Oregon.
00:48:51
Speaker
Anyway, it's a great little application. The only free one that I think they have is their coverage light, which shows you cell coverage for different areas and different carriers and providers. And it'll show you all of them for a certain period of time and then default back to one if you're not going to pay for it. But it's like $2.99, and I'm more than happy to support them. And I think I paid $8.99 on the Apple App Store for three of their apps, including the regular coverage version that gives you HD coverage plus all the carriers and the different you can sort by 2G up to LTE.
00:49:20
Speaker
Then the other two apps that I got, and I'll talk about the next one, the other one next time around, but I think it's called Public Lands. I'll talk about that on the next episode. Hey, $8.99 to support these guys that are making these apps and their iOS and Android. It's pretty great. I linked to their website for the State Lines app because it has the iOS and Android link. Check that out in the show notes.
00:49:46
Speaker
check out the rest of their site. I'll put a link to their mobile internet, mobile nomad, whatever they call it, site. You can check that out as well. That's all I've got. Paul, what do you have? Well, that one actually, that sounds like it's really useful for shuffle bums in particular.
00:50:05
Speaker
Absolutely. If they're traveling around doing work outside of their home state or between states, or you spend a fair amount of time traveling across the country when you're doing your shovel bump thing, right? Yeah, I did. And it made me realize something, too, that I hadn't even thought of. The RVing community, which is a huge community of people that just live in their RVs or take extended vacations in their RVs, there's no difference between them and shovel bumps.
00:50:33
Speaker
The only major difference is most of them are doing them on vacation or while they're retired. But they still have all the same concerns. You know, where am I going to get internet access? How much does it cost for a campsite? You know, all these different things. And there's a ton of resources out there for RVers that shovel bumps can definitely use and piggyback on. Yeah. No, that sounds very useful. My mind, on the other hand, is not for people on the move. It's more for home bodies. And as is my want, it's not an app in particular.
00:51:02
Speaker
But there's an app related to it, so I'm not totally off base this time.
The Benefits of Mesh Wi-Fi Systems
00:51:07
Speaker
So a couple years ago, the director of IT here brought a Google Wi-Fi for his house, for his apartment in the city, and he was raving about it. It's a set of three different access points, and they work together in what's called a mesh Wi-Fi.
00:51:24
Speaker
And he was really impressed, not just with the hardware, but also with the software that came with it. So I've been keeping an eye out on similar sorts of mesh Wi-Fis for a while. So Google Wi-Fi is one that you've probably heard of. They've now released Google Nest Wi-Fi, which I guess is an upgrade of it. I just found out about that the other day, so I don't know what's the difference. Netgear has Orbi or RBI.
00:51:49
Speaker
There's Eero, E-E-R-O. I have a whole bunch of other smaller ones that I see if you just go on Amazon and look for mesh Wi-Fi, you'll see. And so as I was looking for Google Wi-Fi over the summer to see if maybe the price had dropped at all, the one that popped up on the Amazon search for me was TP-Link's Deco mesh Wi-Fi. And I hadn't heard anything about it in particular, but it's a class of the same kind of network infrastructure.
00:52:18
Speaker
It had really good ratings and the price was excellent. It was on sale when I got it. I've got a place in the country that we live at and I have gone through every kind of Wi-Fi possible up there over the years with varying effects.
00:52:39
Speaker
custom routers with DDWRT running on them and repeaters and all sorts of stuff. And for the last couple of years, I've been running just the Wi-Fi that comes on the Xfinity cable box that came into the house where it comes in in the basement and then a repeater, a little itty bitty box that plugs into the wall. I mean, it's totally unobtrusive up on one of the other floors to kind of reflect it up higher. And the problem with repeaters is that
00:53:07
Speaker
that a repeater, the way it works is it takes the Wi-Fi signal and it rebroadcasts it. What that means effectively is that any time you put a repeater in your system, you're having the throughput on the Wi-Fi. And so if you put in two repeaters, you've got a quarter of your original throughput.
00:53:27
Speaker
So, repeaters don't scale out very well. And then there's a variety of other problems. Some of the fancier firmware I've used, I could give the repeated signal the same SSID, the same network name as the main signal. Others, I had to use different ones. I had to use a different name than the main signal.
00:53:45
Speaker
I've had some routers that are dual band, they do 2.4 gigahertz and they do 5 gigahertz, and I could give them the same SSID. Some of them I had to give them separate SSID. I've never settled on a system that I like. There are always drawbacks.
00:54:02
Speaker
Even with the latest one that had for the last couple of years, every now and then the repeated signal just stops working. Sometimes it stops working in a way that's so bad that it screws up the main signal and I have to just reset everything. But at the very least, I was finding myself having to reset the repeater at least once a month.
00:54:19
Speaker
And that got really old. And then I saw this TP link for sale. It was under 150. And I said, you have to help with it. I'm going to treat myself and get this. The big difference then between mesh Wi-Fi and a repeater is that they have more antennas. And some of those antennas are the ones that you as the end users see. They're the ones that reflect your signal. And some of them are just used for the backhaul. They're used for the different access points to talk to each other.
00:54:48
Speaker
Some things like the TP-Link, which I have, and the Google Wi-Fi, any one of the access points can be the main one. And the other ones you just need to put on a power outlet. Oh yeah, I've also tried Powerline, which sends your network signal over the power lines in the building.
00:55:03
Speaker
with varying success. I tried everything under the sun to get the whole house wired nicely. The TP-Link came with three different access points I plugged in, turned off the Wi-Fi on the Xfinity, put one in right there next to the router, put one up on the first floor, and then
00:55:21
Speaker
and then put another one up in the attic. And now the whole house is bathed. It's all got the exact same SSID. I don't have the 5 gigahertz SSID and the 2.4 gigahertz SSID and the repeater SSID. It's just one. And it's fast. There's no degradation of signal speed anywhere in the house. And I love it. And the reason why I'm saying this under app of the day is regardless of which ones you use of these, they all have a tie-in app.
00:55:46
Speaker
that helps you name and configure the different access points for your network. And the TP-Link one isn't the slickest thing, but it certainly does the job. The Google Wi-Fi one is really, really cool in that it'll help you find optimal placement for the peripheral, for the secondary access points, the ones you're placing elsewhere in the house.
00:56:11
Speaker
So, I just wondered if people weren't aware of this whole class of Wi-Fi networks, and they've got a house that has spotty Wi-Fi in certain places. It's definitely worth looking into. Not just because the hardware of these is all good, it's tested, it's understood how it works and why it works, and it makes a lot of sense, but also because these companies have all put effort into making
00:56:34
Speaker
complimentary apps to the configuration, and in some cases, optimization of your network. The week before, I bought another set of three for use in the apartment that we stay at during the week. That has had the same set of problems I've always had up in the country.
00:56:57
Speaker
and suddenly I have no such problems. The only issue I had is that in the country I used one SSID and in the city I used the same SSID and the TP-Link Deco app does not like that I have two different networks with the same SSID.
00:57:15
Speaker
Yeah, because it names the network off of the SSID. So if I wanted to separate them in the app, I would have to call them Apsu Brewster and Apsu Manhattan or something like that, and then it would be happy. But I called them both Apsu. That's the abyss in Acadian in case you're wondering.
00:57:33
Speaker
That's the archaeological tie in right there. Wow. There it is. There we go. It doesn't like that. And so it was a little bit. It took a little extra effort to get the second one set up versus the first one. Yeah.
00:57:48
Speaker
Okay. Well, my comment on all this is for years, I am like just about everybody else. And I would, you know, just have my Wi-Fi router that's usually the all in one or, you know, you've got your router, then you've got to Wi-Fi plugged into it and tucked away somewhere in the house, right? So nobody can see it because you don't want it to just be out there. But obviously that's going to destroy the Wi-Fi in the rest of your house. And when we moved into the condo a couple of years ago,
00:58:18
Speaker
It's a high-rise condo, so it was all like metal studs. And the Wi-Fi in the house is just not working. And luckily, oh my God, it was so bad. So luckily, just the random placement, it just worked out this way. The Wi-Fi router actually secured it up higher on the wall. So it was probably about a little over my head. And where it was in our master bedroom was kind of like, the way this place was is a huge box. And you had the living room, one side of the bedroom.
00:58:50
Speaker
a bathroom next to that, but you could go all the way around the whole unit through the bathroom had two doors, so you could kind of just do a loop around the unit. And because of where the Wi-Fi was, it was kind of right in the middle of this huge square, which was perfect. And then when we moved into this townhouse, there was no good place to put it to get it in the middle. There just wasn't, like with the access points coming in. So we had it basically on a two floor townhouse. We had it on the top and on the end, because that's where the signal was coming in.
00:59:10
Speaker
and then kind of a hallway behind the bedroom in a
00:59:17
Speaker
So I bought Eero, one of the ones that you mentioned, and it came with, it came with two access points, but actually the base unit is also an access point. So we've got one in the room, in the spare bedroom where the, where the unit is, then one downstairs in the living room. Cause we had no access in the kitchen whatsoever, which is also downstairs in the living room. One is kind of in the middle of that floor and then one down in the master bedroom. So we cover that end as well. And now we have, like you said, a perfect 115 down, I think 15 or 20 up.
00:59:47
Speaker
in the in the entire house and it's amazing because we got garbage cell service there and that helps our phones too because if you have an iPhone and I know Android phones probably do this too you can boost your cell signal by using Wi-Fi and otherwise we wouldn't be able to use our phones at all on the AT&T network there it just dies and we're in the middle of town it's weird so
01:00:09
Speaker
Anyway, yeah, I can't recommend it more because nobody can put their Wi-Fi router where it needs to be. So buy these little extenders because they're nice and they're stylish too. The era ones are really neat looking. They just blend into the wall. They're designed to be reasonably attractive. You can have it on a shelf and it's not some blistery, warty-looking angular box with two big antennas sticking off the top.
01:00:30
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. I mean, the old one we had was a, I want to say it was a TP link router and I think it had four antennas on it and they all just came off. This thing was enormous. And it was like, my God, my wife hated having it on the wall of our bedroom. I was like, listen, do you want, do you want to be able to, you know, surf Facebook anywhere in the house? Cause let's be honest, that's what she's doing. Or do you want to have, you know, no internet service at all? So anyway, uh, in the last two minutes here, I just want to bring up by the time you hear this, I'll already have it and I'll be crafting my review and I'll be
01:01:01
Speaker
But I'm actually selling my DJI Inspire Pro 1 because I just don't have the applications for it anymore and I know somebody else can use that. And in anticipation of that actually selling, I'm buying the...
01:01:14
Speaker
I purchased today, actually, November 5th, the DGI Mavic Mini. Now, this just came out. You can't even buy it yet. It's on pre-order. I bought it through Best Buy because pre-order makes it live on Monday, the 11th, which means it's going to ship to me on the 11th, which is pretty cool. Just like pre-ordering a book or something like that, you actually get it on the day that it's supposed to be out.
01:01:38
Speaker
It's $3.99 and I actually paid the $4.99 price for the full package. I think it comes with an extra battery or something plus a case and all that stuff. Basically, it's called the Mavic Mini because it's based on the DJI Mavic line. It's the same exact shape. It's just smaller. It weighs about as much as your smartphone. It's about the size of your smartphone.
01:01:59
Speaker
Fold it up. And in fact, the image they had it next to is the iPhone 11 Pro, which is the bigger one. But either way, it's about that size. And this is the kind of thing you can throw in your field bag. You can throw in your pocket, for Christ's sake. You can throw it in your field vest. And it's got a little remote that you hook your phone into for the display. And it's got a four kilometer range. This little tiny thing has a four kilometer range, a nice camera that swivels up and down. So it doesn't go left and right. But you could just move the drone for that.
01:02:29
Speaker
It's just, I'm really excited to see what this thing can do. And some of the pre-built DGI maneuvers too are getting better and better and better for doing different things. So yeah, I'm looking forward to using this because I can use it in a lot more applications. I mean, when I go fly somewhere or whatever, I mean, I've got this DJI Inspire Pro, which is an amazing aerial platform, but my God, is it enormous.
01:02:50
Speaker
Like, I can't take it anywhere. It's heavy. The box is huge. And it's just like very particular applications that I'm just simply not doing anymore are what that's designed for. And I hope I can find a good home for it, somebody that can actually use that level of drone. Of course, one of the things I'm definitely going to test is how stable is this thing in the wind? Because it has GPS stabilization. Oh, and it's supposed to have a 30-minute battery life as well. Yeah, I was going to say.
01:03:17
Speaker
Yeah. Now, with that 30-minute battery life, you're probably taking a lot of it down if you're in a windier condition. Because with GPS stabilization, it's going to be really fighting a heavy wind. Because aerodynamically, the lighter it is, the less resistant to wind it's going to be. So the wind is really going to be pushing it around. And I'm interested to see how stable the camera is and how stable the platform is in a moderate wind condition, which is pretty much every single day after 11 o'clock here in Nevada. So yeah, we'll see. I'm excited to test it out.
01:03:47
Speaker
And I think the first time I fly it, or the second time at least, will probably be off the back of my boat in the Sacramento River, which means I'll probably lose it in the water. So might only get one review out of it, but we'll see. The algorithm has been doing a great job about trying to get me to buy one of these because it shows up on my news feed all the time. And I've clicked on a bunch of links on it.
01:04:08
Speaker
You mentioned the 30-minute and the pre-reviewers are all confirming that it does get incredibly long battery life. The big reason why it does it is because it's so small. It weighs so little that you don't actually have to register with the FAA.
01:04:24
Speaker
Yeah. Well, okay. So I've heard things about that before. You're right. Drones of a certain size do have to be registered, but the other thing that triggers registration is commercial use. Yeah. Yeah. If you're using a part 107.
01:04:39
Speaker
No, if you're using it for commercial use, if you're using this on archaeological projects legally, you still have to register it. And you're still going to have to have a part 107. It doesn't matter how big the drone is. It can be the size of your thumbnail. You're going to have to register that if you're using it for commercial use. That's just a fact of the FAA. It doesn't matter what you're doing.
01:04:57
Speaker
Yep, that's what I wanted to get to. But then the other thing, though, briefly about the wind. I saw a video yesterday of a guy flying his demo unit out over the Hudson River last week when we had 20, 25 mile an hour gusts. And he has one camera. He's a drone reviewer. So he had one camera on the ground pointed up at the drone. And the other view was the view from the drone's camera. And the wind is buffeting that drone around. It's putting all its energy into staying in one place.
01:05:25
Speaker
And that video is rock solid off the truck. It was really amazing.
01:05:30
Speaker
That's what I'm looking forward to because I totally trust DJI's ability to create a stable platform because they've demonstrated it time and time again. And it just gets better and better and better. And so I don't think wind is going to be a problem. I mean, that confirms it right there. And I was kind of thinking that because I knew the camera would have really great stabilization. And sure, you're going to reduce your battery life. But still, if I'm reducing it from 30 minutes, not 15, I'm OK with that. Yeah. So yeah. All right.
01:06:00
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, me too. So that's it for this week's episode. Check out all the links on the show notes, the things that we talked about, and send us in your Microsoft Word horror stories about track changes so Paul can read those as he goes to sleep at night.
01:06:17
Speaker
I don't know. I don't want to be too scared before I go to sleep. I'll have no worries. I know. I know. So send us anything you want. We're constantly looking for new guests and topics to talk about. So if you're doing anything in the archaeological space, chances are you're using technology of one way or another, even if it is just Microsoft Word. Talk to us and we will have a nice little chat about it. So all right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And thank you, Paul, for the great topic. Thanks, Chris. Take care.
01:06:52
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Archaeotech Podcast. Links to items mentioned on the show are in the show notes at www.archpodnet.com slash archaeotech. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com and paulatlugol.com. Support the show by becoming a member at archpodnet.com slash members. The music is a song called Off Road and is licensed free from Apple. Thanks for listening.
01:07:18
Speaker
This show is produced and recorded by the Archaeology Podcast Network, Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in Reno, Nevada at the Reno Collective. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
01:07:39
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arcpotnet.com slash members for more info.