Author: Ash Nallawalla

About Ash Nallawalla

Ash Nallawalla is a consultant enterprise SEO with a long background in large companies with complex websites. He is a published author of several books and thousands of magazine articles.

Chicago Manual of Style and PerfectIt

SEO No Comments
Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have almost finished writing three books (“Tapping Organic Leads for Profit” series) and as a former professional editor at Unisys back in the 1990s, I had to get a second opionion. I am an Australian but writing in American English. The books are a vanity project, as I should be retired according to the calendar and, therefore, am not publishing them to become rich or famous. The budget allowed for a subscription to the Chicago Manual of Style (US$30/year) and PerfectIt (US$70/year). They work together if you use the same email address.

CMOS Online

The Chicago Manual of Style is one of the well-known American style guides and is liked by many editors. Companies can and do have their own house styles, as did Unisys when I was a senior editor in 1989-1991. I used the Hewlett-Packard house style when I did a contract task there. Apart from browsing it online, in this context, you access it through PerfectIt.

PerfectIt

PerfectIt is a consistency checker. It isn’t a spelling or grammar checker. The following is taken from its own Getting Started guide:

PerfectIt checks:

  • Hyphenation consistency.
  • Capitalisation consistency.
  • Consistency of title case in headings.
  • Spelling variations.
  • Consistency of italics.
  • Numbers in sentences.
  • Punctuation and capitalisation consistency in lists and tables.

In addition, PerfectIt finds:

  • Abbreviations that have not been defined (or that appear before their definition).
  • Table titles presented in the wrong order.
  • Brackets and quotes left open
  • Subscript missing in chemical formulae.
  • Superscript missing in measurements.

PerfectIt also checks house styles. It can:

  • Check UK, US, Australian and Canadian spelling preferences.
  • Check UN, EU, WHO, GPO, Australian Government, and American Legal styles.
  • be customized to check your house style.

As an example of checking consistency, it presented “end user” and “end-user” as variations I had used. Some writers will need this type of check if they are not sure about using a phrase as a noun or as a modifier.

Detecting hyphenation opportunities
Detecting hyphenation opportunities

Towards the end of its numerous checks, it offered to tidy up the loose ends. For example, many of the edits needed the references to be updated.

Tidying up the manuscript.
Tidying up the manuscript.
Summary Report.
Summary Report.

For a small book of about 70 numbered pages (14,874 words), the process took me just over an hour. The other two books are 100 and 200 pages, respectively, so that will be fun.

Recommendation

PerfectIt requires a human to assess the recommendations, so I did not accept all of them. It did find a few omissions on my part, so I am happy with it.

Lumina 4K Webcam User Review

Reviews No Comments
Camera contents
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I ordered the Lumina camera on 10 May and it arrived eight days later – an excellent turnaround. I had seen a friend share his Lumina Founders Edition webcam image and I was so impressed that I ordered one immediately.

First Looks

These are my initial comments, as I unboxed the camera less than an hour ago. The parcel was well packed and the camera box is well-made – not unlike an iPhone box.

Lumina packaging
Lumina packaging

Contents of the Package

The camera comes with a magnetic cover to hide the camera when you don’t want the bad guys to monitor you secretly (if you believe in that), but the magnet is only above the lens. So you might bump it off by accident when the camera is exposed. You get two kinds of USB cables There is a folding mount that connects to your own tripod, or folds over your monitor or laptop screen. A supplied Allen key helps to tighten the camera on the mount.

Camera contents
Package contents.

Software

You need to download the Lumina software from their website, but before you do that, the camera must be connected to the computer so that its serial number can be supplied before the download. I installed it and there was also a firmware update I installed. All pretty straightforward.

Lumina software and firmware update.
Lumina software and firmware update.

Bugs

The colour tuning card you see in the photo could not be used immediately, as their website mentions some issues that are being ironed out. I used Zoom to test the camera and found that switching between the AI “Plus” mode and the Raw mode caused Zoom to not see my face until I restarted both the Lumina app and Zoom.

I became invisible.
I became invisible in Zoom settings.

Comparison – Old and New

My old webcam is a 10-year-old RocketFish RF-HDWEB that had served me well for the occasional video call. Most of the old cameras don’t have zoom (the feature, not the app). I sit more than an arm’s length from it, so I look small compared to others who sit close to their laptop’s built-in camera. I will soon be publishing two SEO books, so I expect to be on camera a lot and needed this new camera. This odd comparison of old and new isn’t fair to the RocketFish, but it’s the kind of comparison that consumers will face, unless they are buying a new camera every other month.

My face with the old RocketFish HD camera.
My face with the old RocketFish HD camera.
The Lumina in Raw mode.
The Lumina in Raw mode.
The Lumina in Plus (AI) mode.
The Lumina in Plus (AI) mode.

Checked shirts don’t suit video cameras, but I wasn’t changing clothes for this quick review. There was just one ceiling light and ambient light from the monitor in front of me. The Lumina is clearly better than the old one and the Plus mode is better than the Raw mode. I saw the warning about using 720p rather than 1080p, so I took the above screenshots in 720p mode. I did not test the AI mode, which adjusts the virtual “cameraman” if you are an animated kind of person who moves close to the camera and then moves back.

Warning about using AI at the higher resolution.
Warning about using AI at the higher resolution.

You can read more about the software at the Lumina website.

Zooming

Zooming (not the app) is done by having the Lumina app open along with your video app (Zoom in my case). A convenient slider lets you choose the level of zooming.

Maximum zoomed out (and background blur on).
Maximum zoomed out (and background blur on).
Maximum zoomed in.
Maximum zoomed in.

Verdict

Keeping in mind that I have used the Lumina camera for a few minutes, my initial impression is one of delight. Without adding any special lighting (which I will buy soon), my face is better lit than the old camera could achieve. More impressive for me is the ability to zoom in.

Lumina Website Link

Full disclosure: This link will take you to the Lumina website where you can read more about it. If you buy through this link, you will get $25 off and if two people buy a camera each, I will get a free one – I intend to gift it to a very deserving person whom I know.

Lumina website link

Losing a Corrupted Word 2021 Document

Windows 10 2 Comments
Reading Time: 3 minutes

I suffered a major setback by way of a book manuscript I was writing. It is lost beyond repair. I know what I should have done, but I am documenting this to help others. I use an offline copy of Word 2021, not the online Office 365.

Possible Causes of Word Doc Corruption

The book manuscript was about 283 pages from memory and I had not backed it up for over a month, and the backup copy was 30 pages shorter. I was finding that Word and Excel documents were taking longer than usual to open and I wondered if my hard drive was on its way out. I decided to back up the folder to my backup drive (a separate physical drive) and that was a clue that something was wrong, as the copy failed.

I used O&O Software Disk Defragmenter to defrag my data drive D but it was taking very long, so I thought I should stop it.

I tried to open the manuscript to add some content and found that it would not open. I had last used it last night, so I was puzzled. I remembered that I had done an online repair of Office and wondered if I had installed the 32-bit version of Office instead of the 64-bit version. I had an ISO of the original download, so I reinstalled Office, but it made no improvement. The Word doc refused to open.

The doc would not open.
The doc would not open.
Still no luck.
Still no luck.

Things Tried on the File

chkdsk /f reported no errors.

chkdsk was happy with the drive.
chkdsk was happy with the drive.
chkdsk was happy with the drive.
chkdsk was still happy with the drive.

Error checking via File Manager > Properties showed no file errors. (image above)

Open and Repair did not work.

Text recovery tool did not recover any text.

Recover Text from Any File did not work.

Opening in Notepad is a crazy suggestion, as seen in some articles. The contents are not plain text – other than some file names. See below the older, working copy and the corrupted file below.

Corrupt and clean versions viewed in Notepad.
Corrupt and clean versions viewed in Notepad.

There are no previous versions or unsaved versions.

Importing into Google Docs did not work.

Inserting into an empty document as an object did not work. “Word has encountered a problem.”

The recovery tips in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/word/damaged-documents-in-word were tried but none worked.

Trying to link the corrupt file to a clean doc did not work.
Trying to link the corrupt file to a clean doc did not work.

Tools Used

There are many articles with suggestions, but they are rehashes of the things I tried above and sometimes have affiliate links to tools.

Libre Office could not open it.

LibreOffice failed to open it.
LibreOffice could not open the corrupt file.

OpenOffice also failed to load it. Its help text says “The most recent versions of OpenOffice can load, but not save, the Microsoft Office Open XML document formats with the extensions docx, xlsx, and pptx.” Note: Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice did open the working copy – but not this corrupt copy.

OpenOffice failed.
OpenOffice failed.

Stellar Repair for Word crashed on the file.

Stellar Data Recovery was useful to undelete an earlier version, but 30 pages shorter.

GetData Word Repair couldn’t open it.

Remo Repair announced that it had recovered it, but the file vanished

https://word.recoverytoolbox.com/online/

https://onlinefile.repair/rtf

https://online.officerecovery.com/word/ took ages to upload, but at least it was uploading.

Conclusion (See update)

At the moment I am stumped. The disk and data are fine. The file is difficult to select – clicking it sends File Explorer into a long delay before I can get control, but the file just does not open. Sending it to an online service times out for this reason and downloaded trial tools cannot process it.

If you have any suggestions and have personally solved this problem, please leave a comment. (Comments are moderated)

Update

I managed to open the copy with a paid version of the file recovery tool – Remo Repair Word – but it turned out to be an older version too. In the end, I used a recent PDF copy and exported it to RTF. This has some scrambled tables and some missing images, but it will get me back to sanity, with fewer than 10 lost pages. Many of the lost pages have images, which are safe, so the lost text won’t be too hard to re-create.

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