« December 2003 | Main | February 2004 »
The Program Manager for OneNote, Chris Pratley, has a blog. It's great to see more information coming out on this app. OneNote is now as central to my daily computing as Outlook. My favourite feature: No more Ctrl-S. It's so freeing to not have to save a document. Ok there are plenty of actual features I like, but not having to save a note just makes the application fade into the background while you just get the job done. We need more apps like this.
Tablet PC.
I've created my Christianity blog, as promised. If you're interested in following the side of me, check it out.
I finally figured out how to get an extremely annoying song out of my head.
First, the problem. I have a serious disorder that requires an annoying song to be playing in my mind at all times. Unfortunately, I only have to come into brief contact with such horrifically catchy crap as Clay Aitken's "Invisible" (I swear, the ONLY reason I listened to it was to watch the video credits at the end to see if he was saying "invisible" or "invincible". The song was just too creepy if it was "invisible", but alas...), "Oops! I Did it Again", or "Complicated" to have it play non-stop for an entire day in my head. I'm a tortured individual.
The solution. Sing "The Berenstain Bears". So far it's worked every time for me... The song is still annoying, but hey, it's the Berenstain Bears!
They're kinda furry around the torso... they're a lot like people, only more so...
If you notice from the screen cap in the previous post, my Messenger status is "offline". I've been in that mode a lot lately. I'm finding that Messenger is starting to become like the telephone for me. If you know me, you'll know that is NOT a good thing. Here's an idea of how much I despise the telephone: I did a set of personality tests a few months ago. One of the tests had me arrange about 20 things in order from bad to good. When I had finished ranking the items, I realized that the "Telephone" item ranked just one item above "Poisoning the city water supply" and "Prostitution".
I wondered how people were creating those nice cutout screen caps. I tried using various graphic programs, but the process was too convoluted in each of them. (Of course, Amanda could do them with ease, but she's a Photoshop guru.) Today I discovered the Microsoft Tablet PC Power Toy called Snipping Tool for Tablet PC. Now I, too, can look like a screen cap pro.
Hey Blogger.com, the planet is Earth, the year is 2004. Wake up.
Update: Blogger has announced support for Atom. That's great to see. I'm trying out Newsgator 2.0 and subscribing to Atom feeds where possible. So far, so good...
I confess, I'm watching American Idol - but it's only to mock the first batch of contestants. After that, I'll be back to mocking the actual show at a distance.
I finally purchased a subscription to Sound on Sound Magazine after over a year of purchasing at the newsstand. This is a great magazine if you're into home recording. It's a UK publication (with an International version), which means that its chock full of useful information, and light on saturated advertising (ala US magazines). The articles also don't assume that everyone has a super-deluxe-decked-out-with-all-the-latest-gear studio. There's useful information in there even if all you have is a Pentium 300, an old version of Cubase, and a Sound Blaster. They cover recording from all kinds of perspectives, including one guy who built a home studio completely from found items! My favourite regular feature is "Studio SOS" where they go to a reader's home studio and help solve common problems.
When you subscribe you'll get immediate access to the online version of the magazine. Highly recommended.
I've had my Acer C300 Tablet PC for a few months now, so it's about time to do a review; especially given that I've been promising one for a while.
This entry is going to meander quite a bit. I'm not a professional reviewer/writer and I'm doing this in a rush between other stuff, so please bear with me. Feel free to ask questions or request clarification in comments. I'm going to assume you know the basics of the Tablet PC. If you would like more background on just what a Tablet PC is, you can visit the official Microsoft site. I should also state that I've been using Acer laptops exclusively for several years now, so it's difficult for me to compare against any other brands, Tablet or not.
My first experience with the Tablet PC was the Acer C100. l immediately saw the potential that the Tablet PC offered, but found that the C100 had some limitations that kept me from using it on a regular basis. For one thing I found it too small to use as my primary computer - I kept drifting back to my laptop for must computing, thus never having enough of my information on the Tablet to encourage its consistent use. Another contributing factor was the low memory capacity - 256MB maximum was just not acceptable. l wanted something that was either a simple slate, or a combination of a full-featured laptop and Tablet PC. When I saw the C300 announced as "the convertible Tablet that you'll want to use as your primary computer", I immediately ordered it, knowing it was the Tablet I was waiting for.
Here's a picture of the C300 next to the C100, and the C300 in laptop mode
Just so you know what my baseline expectations for a laptop are, here are the primary things I use my computer for:
Hardware
Here are the hardware specs of the C300 with some comments:
This unit also has a built in light sensor to auto adjust the screen brightness. I was ok with this initially, but disabled it after a few weeks. It got annoying having the screen constantly change brightness as I moved around the office, and I found the screen was always a bit dimmer than I usually prefer. There may be ways to tweak these tolerances, but I'm quite comfortable with changing the screen brightness myself using the keyboard shortcuts.
It's nice to see that gigabit Ethernet is becoming generally available, though the office is still wired for 10/100. If I have large file transfers to do, connecting to the LAN through the wired NIC is still the only way to go. 802.11b is just too slow.
As for the modem, I guess we will still need them for the foreseeable future. I'm hoping that wireless will become as ubiquitous as modem connections in the next few years though. I will not shed any tears when the modem as a computing device gasps its last breath.
Here are some other general comments about things I like and dislike.
The C300 includes USB 2.0 and Firewire. My MOTU 828 external Firewire audio interface works just fine with my Cubase SX 2.0 recording software and plugins. When I ordered the new laptop, I decided to hold off on purchasing a docking station for it, but was pleasantly surprised to find that it worked with the docking station I already owned for my previous Acer laptop!
I wish there was a way to configure ClearType settings for different screen orientations. ClearType doesn't look right when I change the orientation to anything other than the standard. Hopefully this is something that Microsoft will address in future Windows versions.
Battery life is great - more than 4 hours, even on wireless and generous power setting (i.e. Presentation mode). My experience is that after a couple of years, battery life drops off a steep cliff, so I'm not sure if this one is any better.
I really like the swivel hinge on this model. The C100 required engaging/disengaging two side clips. With the C300 you just twist the screen. The swivel feels sturdy, so I don't expect any trouble from it.
Acer ships a nice 3M screen wipe cloth with all their Tablet PC models. This is a nice touch. They clean my glasses wonderfully too.
This model doesn't ship with a floppy drive, but that hasn't caused me any trouble so far. I have a USB floppy drive in case I ever do need one again.
Oh, the unit looks nice - black and silver - though I really could care less about the look. This ranks very low on my priority list.
The Tablet comes with a 4 in 1 Card reader in the PC Card slot. This is great for my Olympus digital camera that uses SmartMedia. It doesn't support Compact Flash, but I already have a PC Card adapter for that.
I rarely use any of the software that's included with a PC, so I can't really comment on what shipped with the Acer. l think it was some Antivirus
Software, CD burner and DVD player app. I uninstalled all of the apps and really didn't look at them.
Areas for Improvement
The M key is starting to rub off already. I normally wear my keyboard down pretty quickly, as I do a lot of touch typing, but this key is actually scratching off. I don't know if this is covered under warranty. It's really not an issue with me, as I never look at the keyboard anyway, but it has already caused others difficulty when they use the computer.
I wish the C300 was a bit more ergonomic for holding in Tablet mode, both portrait and landscape. I find it a bit clumsy to hold in certain seating positions, especially vertically. With the C100 I preferred vertical mode. With the C300 I prefer horizontal. Of course, because it's a full sized laptop, it's fairly hefty to carry around. I knew that going in. For me, it's an acceptable price to pay for having a full featured laptop and a Tablet PC.
I find that the pen calibration is a little off in the corners, especially the bottom and top right. This is significantly improved over the C100 though - something I found so annoying on that model that it was a show stopper for me.
The system runs pretty hot at times, but that's to be expected on a system with this speed, but I have never had it feel uncomfortably warm to hold in Tablet mode.
The unit shipped with the hard drive divided into two FAT32 partitions. I had to manually convert the partitions to NTFS and merge them using Partition Magic. Thankfully this worked without incident, but it makes me hesitant to ever rebuild the system using the included recovery CDs.
Conclusion
Overall I'm very happy with the C300 . I'm finding that the more I use the Tablet, the more I like it. I believe the Tablet PC has a big future, especially with the significant improvement that Tablet PC 2004 (codename Lonestar) will bring. In 2-3 years we will wonder how we ever lived without Tablets. There's something wonderful about being able to sit in a comfy chair on a Saturday afternoon, drinking a Tim Horton's coffee and writing a computer review on your laptop screen in your own handwriting.
Those close to me know that there's another big side of me that doesn't show up on this blog much (any?). Yes, I am one of those followers of Christ -- often referred to as a Christian. I must be absolutely nuts to believe such nonsense, but I do for many reasons that make perfectly rational sense to me. I have no intention of making this blog a pulpit, but I do have a lot of thoughts about Christianity that I would like to get out for those that are interested. That's why I'm in the process of creating a separate blog just for my thoughts and rants on Christianity. Watch this space for details on the new blog. This will be the last time you see Christianity mentioned here.
Back to our regularly scheduled insanely boring and trivial stuff...
I've read in several places lately about the recent measures Adobe has taken to restrict scanning and manipulating banknotes in their software. I just read a piece on NeoWin.net that suggests that HP may have anti-printing measures built in as well. I think this is a good thing.
Interestingly, I visited the www.rulesforuse.org site referenced in the NeoWin piece and navigated to Canada, which brought me to this page from the Bank of Canada's website. Hmmm... I wonder how they were able to scan that clip from a Canadian $50? Do they have their own special copy of PhotoShop? In any case, the use of the image seems to fall within their guidelines stated on the page.
I've been watching the Wacom site for a long time to see if their long-promised Executive Tablet PC pens are available. It seems like they adjust the ship date every month. The site says:
"Executive pens with eraser. These pens are under development in cooperation with A.T. Cross. Please review press release for details. Scheduled to be available January 2004."
The press release (which is from the same day the Tablet PC was launched) says it will be available in the second quarter of 2003. What's the delay?
I really would like to try a heavier pen -- I know what a difference a real weighted pen did for my PDA experience. I'm hoping it'll do the same for the Tablet PC. Does anyone have any idea when they'll actually ship?
Update: This article from January 14, 2004 says that the pens will be available at retail in February 2004. I guess the ship date is actually coming close.
I know that handwriting recognition wasn't really pushed as a selling point for the first release of the Windows XP Tablet Edition - it's just not there. I am in the process of converting several pages of handwritten notes in OneNote into text for my Acer C300 review. What a painful process. I realize I should have used Lonestar to do the writing -- converting my handwriting to text on the fly with the wonderful and incredibly accurate handwriting recognition engine that will ship with Windows XP Tablet PC 2004.
I don't know if the recognition engine in OneNote is the same engine used for the Tablet Input Panel, but I sure hope they upgrade OneNote soon to support the level of recognition used in Lonestar. What I like about OneNote is that I can just write freeform without having to worry about editing my words then and there.
When using my Tablet PC to browse my email in Microsoft Outlook 2003 I found that the oft-used Delete icon was in the wrong place. Moving the pen over the Delete icon caused my hand to obscure the message that I was trying to delete. It's simple to reorganize the icons in any Office application. Here's how to shift the icon to the right so that it's in a more convenient location for Tablet PC users:
Click View -> Toolbars -> Customize. When the Customize dialog box appears, you can go ahead and drag 'n drop icons on the toolbar. Drag the Delete icon over next to the Find icon, or anywhere else you'd rather for it to appear.
Here's a good article that describes well the reasons I've long preferred FreeBSD over Linux. FreeBSD fits my personality - I like things structured, consistent, and predictable. The author says, "Thus, this rant; as a BSD person, I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb." The article that follows is pretty biased and uses a lot of loaded words and phrases about Linux in general, but overall I agree with his observations and his attitude toward Linux.
Though I'm a big Microsoft fan, my dirty secret is that I always keep a VMWare instance of FreeBSD around for when I get the itch to tinker in un*x.
(BTW, yes I did get this link from Slashdot. I know, I know, I'm supposed to have been cured from my Slashdot addiction, with one minor fall-back. But it's ok. I can make the occasional stop back there now without flaring up my addiction again. In that sense, you could say I've been "deeLIIIVered" from the evil power of the Slash. Somebody say Hallelujah!!)
I've finally broken down and started to write my Acer C300 review. I hope to have it published by tomorrow. I've never really written a review before, but l hope it'll be useful to someone.
I purchased Project Gotham 2 on the weekend. Some really nice improvements over the first version. I especially like being able to walk through the showroom and try out vehicles on the test track. I haven't had a chance to go head-to-head with Amanda on Xbox Live yet, but if you have PGR2 and a Live account add "Pyreal" to your friends list for some easy "competition". (Extra points if you can guess from my GamerTag what MMORPG I used to play).
Microsoft, today, officially released Services for Unix 3.5 -- for free. I've been a longtime user of Cygwin, but haven't been using it as much lately. PuTTY has replaced my Cygwin SSH shell, and l haven't done any perl programming in a long, long time (thankfully). I'll do my normal couple days of toying with SFU, installing a bunch of add-ons like the bash shell, then letting it idle until I get command line withdrawal again. In any case, I'm supposed to be beta testing the Longhorn Command Shell -- now there's a cool command line!
Updated the add-ons link.
Does anyone really believe it when a celebrity says a shampoo "changes everything" for them?
It's been a long time since I've posted here. I've just been reading so much that every time it came to consider writing, i just chickened out. I owe my readers a long overdue review of my Tablet PC, so I've got that started. I just got into the Lonestar (Tablet PC 2004) beta today, so I'll be doing the writeup using the new Tablet Input Panel! I'm actually writing this entry using the new TIP. All l can say about Lonestar is that it will make the Tablet go mainstream. I can finally stay in Tablet mode indefinitely - the handwriting recognition and input is improved so dramatically.