**** (that's 4 stars out of 5)
Potentially life changing gadget
I believe the Pulse Smartpen is a fantastic platform for many day-to-day applications. The working principle of it just makes so much sense!
Fortunately, there is an SDK for external developers, unfortunately, file formats and communication standards don't seem to be open, but I am no software expert.
But back to the pen. Very well crafted, looks serious and professional. I can really use it in a board meeting. Although it is kind of bulkier than I expected, but maybe my expectations were too high. On the other hand, it is smaller than many highlighters in the market.
The screen is very good.
Interface quite intuitive everywhere: pen, software, notebook.
Writing recognition works fantastically well! Not only is the transferred "image" very detailed and looks natural, the software recognized my handwriting without any previous "training" when using the search function.
I do seem have to have problems transferring the audio sessions, which can be a deal breaker, but Customer Service has been very responsive so far and I hope to clear this soon.
All in all, I am very happy with the purchase, as long as the audio part starts working properly. I believe there is room for improvement and further development, especially in extra applications for it and am awaiting eagerly to beef up the functionality of my pen.
Written for: http://www.amazon.com/review/R374WV94NBJ5C8/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
What can we say, the divide between Explorer 6 and the rest of the world is becoming gargantuan. Sorry Explorer 6 users, Passpack will work for you, but it’s just never going to be fast for you.
Firefox 3 seems nice. But I have Firefox 2 working now more or less stable, even with a ton of add-ons installed, especially for working better with Gmail.
The questionis: am I ready for Firefox 3??
Not that this is a big deal, but I wanted to add to the buzz in the blogosphere. Twitter is built on Ruby on Rails, a platform that seems to have problems scaling. So maybe that's why it is down today. Or maybe they are changing something on their servers.
But I guess that twitter's biggest problem is not a technical one. They still don't have a business plan and have no idea how to make money out of it. Nice little tool, well thought, but: where is the money?
And it seems that twitter's technical problems upset other people more than it upsets me. There is even this site which tells you wether twitter is down or not. In the affirmative case, it shows a link to a book which presumably teaches people how to build scaleable and robust systems. http://istwitterdown.com/
I believe this discovery will really be significant: meet the memristor! Read an introductory text at Nature.
I found Johnny Lee's videos through a BusinessWeek article and they just blew my mind. I have been aware of Wii modifications for some time now, especially for music interface purposes, but what he has done is not only extremely professional and relevant, it is also explained in a great way. Instead of writing more about his ideas, I'll let you see the videos. For all his videos, follow this link.
His haptic pen, even though it does not use the Wii remote, is a very cool device too:
Well, no classes this week since Wednesday. So I should have had a quiet week and weekend, right? But that was not the case. Laundry, assignments, pre-reading for next block's classes and socializing (I'm avoiding to use the term party too much around here) and kitchen duty have kept me fairly busy. And, on top of that, my phone continues to give me problems from time to time, and I don't really know what the cause is. But, with the help of the all knowing internet, I'll figure it out.
This travelling around the globe is getting me confused. The timezone setting for this blog has been wrong for the last 3 weeks or so. But that's not too bad.
Arrived well in Toronto. The bus downtown was maybe expensive ($17), but very convenient.
The hostel, Clarence Castle, seems to be really cool, I am, so far, happy with my choice.
At the moment I'm using my mobile over the wifi of "Craft Burger", where I expect to eat a very good burger with cordon bleu cheese and big, deliciously looking onion rings.
Hope this posting from the E61 works.
I really miss my Hagenuk S200 Palm OS Smartphone. It died on me, or, more probable, the battery did. But it could run Java applications, the best being Google Maps for mobile phones.
The only thing missing was a feature telling you where you are. My phone didn't have a GPS module, but Google Maps helped me a lot in several occasions in Germany, where I had GPRS internet access very cheaply (www.symio.de, I can recommend this pay as you go SIM cards).
Well, now I won't need a GPS module anymore, it seems. Google is using the cell tower location to approximately tell you where you are. It is by far not as precise as GPS, but I imagine that it is a really big improvement over the older version of Maps.
But it is revision week, an assignment is to be delivered on Monday and others have already written about this. So check the fun genial video below and the following article.
http://lifehacker.com/
Just one more quick note: it seems that the best precision of Google Maps Mobile My Location feature is about 600 m or half a block.
I took a look at my spam folder and saw that I had almost 8000 messages in there. Wow, this all only in the last 30 days! Great filter, works really neatly. I have to divert some messages there from time to time, but it is really not a problem for me anymore.
So I wanted to see if, deleting all the spam in there, I would gain a significant amount of storage space back. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but all that spam ammounted to less than 100 MB. Too bad. Or not.
Now that I know that the accumulated spam of 30 days is actually insignificant compared to my total mail ammount in terms of storage space it takes, I will never clean that folder again. This means that, even if I get some important e-mail automatically diverted by mistake to spam, I will have 30 days to know about it and retrieve it. That's good enough for me, I will not worry about spam no more.
Just read a bit about microformats and thought the concept is good, but needs embracing. So here is my small contribution.
››› hCard
This is how good it is:
I mean, that is pretty good, wouldn't you say so? Anyway, I am happy with it.
But don't think of using P2P (peer to peer) networks over here. They are not allowed here. And I have the impression that the guys running this network know what they are doing and would catch you quite quickly.
Update
The first test was on the 3rd of November. Today, I got another result, rather disappointing:
So it is out what was expected, the Android Google phone OS and platform. This is no breaking news as this blog does not intend to be breaking any tech news around, but those interested in knowing more can take a look at this short list of facts by Engadget.
Talking about hackers is always complicated. In the general public's mind, hacker is a 13 year old geek kid locked in his room trying to get into the Pentagon's system and deploy some cool missiles to some uncool places. Or a shady type who tries to get credit card codes to transfer zillions of dollars to his own account.
Other people say that these malicious guys (or girls) are actually crackers. Hackers would be those who like to study vulnerabilities of different systems, but do not mean harm to anybody, or don't try to take advantage of these vulnerabilities themselves.
I just came up with two other ways of describing the differences between hackers:
- White hat
- A white hat hacker, also rendered as ethical hacker, is, in the realm of information technology, a person who is ethically opposed to the abuse of computer systems.
- Black hat
- A black hat is a person who compromises the security of a computer system without permission from an authorized party, typically with malicious intent.
OK, we are in Britain, have I mentioned this? Diferent country, different culture, different habits. At least the language is understandable. Sometimes.
But those faucets, man, those faucets! I just can't get it! And so can't the Brits themselves, it seems.
I have already tapped into this subject before (no pun intended), but I'll elaborate: it is common in the U.K. to have two taps on a sink, in the bathroom or in the kitchen. One for hot water. One for cold water. Steaming hot. Ice cold. On. Off. No in-betweens. The digital water system! Arrrgh!
"There must be a logical reason for that. Or at least a historical one." I thought. And I guess that I am right about the historical one, although nobody was able to confirm it to me.
It is quite clear that you are expected to block the drain hole, pour some hot and cold water into the sink into the temperature mix you want and use the pooled water for whatever use you have.
Yeah, right. That must have made sense 70 years ago when a mixing faucet was really expensive, but nowadays? Doesn't convince me, as I see this arrangement in places where the investment in mixing systems would have been definitely covered by the construction budget.
But it is also frustrating when they try to solve this problem by actually installing a water mixer. Like in the kitchens of Lakeside 4. I was delighted to see a mixing water tap in kitchens there. "How lucky they are" I thought. Well, not that lucky. If you take a closer luck at the photo below, you'll see why.
Note that there are two streams coming out of the tap. And yes, you guessed it, one stream is hot, the other cold. In theory, they should mix in the air, and all would be fine. In practice, it doesn't work that well. So, even if they try to solve the problem, it doesn't really work!
So one has to take the matter in his own hands, and be inventive. And really, it is not difficult. All it takes is a PET bottle, a Swiss army knife and 3 minutes, and the problem is solved a bit more satisfactory. No, it doesn't look great and yes, it is a bit fiddly to work with, but, so far, no one has burnt their hands under the hot water any more.
I don't usually simple post links to interesting texts here; I like to try to make this personal. But maybe I am just an arrogant writer who pretends not to like to take other people’s ideas.
In any case, I have been advocating for some time now that e-mail is clearly not always the best form of communication. It might take days to solve a question with e-mails which could be solved with a 3 minutes phone call. And often people don't realize it.
One of the things that I instituted at Hohner was to try to answer letters and e-mails we go from consumers by phone, if the info was available. It takes less time, the customer gets impressed (wow, a product manager actually called because of my e-mail!) and I could tick the task off knowing that I wouldn't get a reply with more questions.
So meet the e-mail free Fridays. Some companies are telling their employees not to use e-mail on Fridays. Other are stressing the importance of an e-mail free weekend (which has always been my policy towards work e-mail).
An excerpt and a link:
Managers complain that rather than confronting problems, employees use email to avoid them by passing issues back and forth in long message strings, like a hot potato. Email reduces face-to-face contact among co-workers and clients; terse, poorly phrased messages further strain those relationships. And it is spilling into weekends, chaining employees to computers when they should be relaxing.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119205641656255234.html?mod=blog
Got my scooter on Monday. And it was a really good acquisition, I am using it often. It is at least 40% quicker than walking, and more fun too.
I know I look silly on it. But I do prefer to spend the little spare time I get doing things instead of walking.
Continuing the observation on the high tech infrastructure available at WBS, it is impressive to see how video has crept into the structure of the classes administered here. We have seen videos in the obvious case of Market Analysis (or simply marketing, if you wish), but also in Practice of Management (PoM) and Operations Management (Ops). It has been used during the induction week and I am probably forgetting some of the other times video was used.
In any event, it is there. We have seen advertisements, we saw how lettuce is harvested by Polish undergraduates in Cambridge, we saw the result of the PoM project of a group from last year (with 2 Mannheimers, yeah!).
This is, of course, only possible because the lecture room is very well equipped with computer, audio and video systems.
And this is taken for granted in such a measure that we wouldn't be able to imagine class without a simple powerpoint presentation. Well, it wasn't too common where I come from.
WBS does offer us a great learning and studying infrastructure, with a completely new building, great integration of computers and projectors in the class rooms, study group rooms with computers and a big number of computers, among other features.
The picture above shows the two class rooms with individual computers. They have a movable dividing wall which has been opened to transform both spaces into one big lecture room with about 70 workstations and 2 projection screens. Pretty impressive, I would say.
And I have yet to go to the university's learning grid, which is supposed to be this high tech as well.
