The computer thread

Today was another trip to the electronics recycler, picked up: a Samsung 850 M.2 SSD which is reported to be able to boot on non-UEFI BIOS's for $13 (for my cheapo workstation), a 40mm mSATA SSD for $15 (to hopefully turn my daughter's netbook into something more usuable), and a Surface Pro 4 for $150 which will hopefully satisfy my wife's request without having to buy new.
 
Recently bought an 8GB Nvidia Graphics card so that the current desktop (Ubuntu) could run Whisper Open-AI (needs to offload to GPU memory and has a high Cuda requirement).
Works a charm and the wife can now convert her audio from phone recordings to text for her studies. Works amazingly well for all and any recordings be they speakers at an event or lectures and even native speakers.
Then this past week I found a Philips dictation machine unused, bundled with Dragon Naturally Speaking for US$4.00 and installed on Win 10
I am currently training it so as to be able to read into and convert our decades old favourites recipe book.
Again, works like a charm ( but way less of a charm than Whisper) and only recognises me, but at a fraction of the cost of the Nvidia card.

Horses for courses... both give excellent results for their respective applications and I marvel at how the technology to achieve this has changed in the last few years.