Tag Archive: technology

Nov
25
2010

Kindle-ing

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kindleAnother in an occasional series of gadget reviews, and more general thoughts on books. This time I look at the Amazon Kindle, my latest gadgety purchase – I have the WiFi only version with added leather carry case. The Kindle is an electronic device onto which books can be downloaded from a range of sources. In a sense the device is a side issue, Kindle software is available for smartphones (I have it on my HTC Desire), and computers. The main action for the Kindle is in the ecosystem: it makes it very easy to spend money on Amazon!

There are quite a few books available in the Kindle Store on Amazon, both free and paid. The paid offerings are a little cheaper than their paper equivalents but not hugely so. In addition PDF files can be read using the device, it will also play MP3 audio files. The Kindle Store also has links out to places where free content can be downloaded. For example, Project Gutenberg holds a wide variety of out of copyright material in a variety of e-book formats.

As long as you’re prepared to compromise a little you’ll not run short of things to read –  I’d like to read the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin series but they are not yet available for download. Only three of the top ten Amazon bestsellers are available in Kindle format at the moment. So far I’ve bought “Trilobite!” by Richard Fortey and “22 days in May” by David Laws. I also have “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air” by David Mackay which I got as a free download, and converted to an appropriate format using Calibre e-book Management, this is available as a community conversion of the original HTML files. Books can be transferred to the Kindle by WiFi, or direct cable connection. Buying books is magically easy – press button, wait a minute and you’re done!

Compared to an HTC Desire the Kindle interface feels rather clunky, I kept wanting to change pages by touch! Having said this moving from page to page is ergonomically easy: there are a couple of handy page forward / page backward buttons suited to either handedness. Page changes feel ever so slightly ponderous with a bit of a flash as the page changes. The battery life is very good, the display is e-ink based and so static display takes no power, only switching pages requires power. The display size is about right and it is very nice to read from, when I first opened the device I assumed the picture on the screen was a piece of paper for display purposes. There are a range of options for adjusting text size, spacing and so forth, although I found some glitches with text size control.

The Kindle is ideal for plain text, however for text with diagrams it is a bit hit-and-miss, although the quality of the display is good enough to show quite detailed greyscale images in the case of the Fortey book these have simply not been included by the publisher. The Mackay book includes figures but the placement of the figures in the text has largely been done automatically and is a bit wobbly. I’d really like to try a book with illustrations which have been done properly – any recommendations then please comment.

The benefit of the Kindle with non-fiction is that searching, bookmarking, and highlighting are all relatively straightforward. I have religious objections against making marks in paper books – I think as a result of using the library as a child. It’s also possible to add notes to a book and to see the “favourite” notes of others.

The problem is the Kindle misses the display aspects of book owning and reading; my house is full of books collected over 20 years. They are my extended phenotype; they tell you something about me. If you visit my house you can see my books – you might want to borrow one. The Kindle cuts this away, you can’t see what is on my Kindle, and if even if you could, you couldn’t borrow it. I’ve tried to replicate the bookshelf aspect in my Shelfari account, where you can see what I am reading and what I have read. I’m also missing the pile of books beside my bed. I’m an old-fashioned animal that misses physical objects.

Overall: not at all bad, reading raw text is comfortable, the whole buying new text is frighteningly easy, and a range of formats can be read. I’m looking forward to using the Kindle to avoid my mortal holiday fear – that I might run out of things to read!

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Aug
03
2010

Bamboo Pen and Touch

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This is a tiny technology review. I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch tablet, I say recently – I picked it up from the post office a little over 2 hours ago!

I used a Wacom tablet extensively as a mouse replacement at work some years back, and rather liked it. I only gave up because I moved into industry from academia and they are a bit more fussy about what I attach to the PC with which I am provided. At home the pen interface didn’t work quite so well because at the time I was quite keen on computer games, first-person shooters in particular, and controlling the little man in such a game using a pen is exceedingly challenging, to say the least.

The big benefit of a pen interface to my mind is that I can hold the pen whilst typing, then when I need to do some “mousing” I don’t have to scrabble around for the mouse. The whole process is just much smoother.

Unlike my original Wacom tablet this model will accept both pen and touch (with your fingers) input – I must admit I’m not really anticipating using the touch input. It appears to support the range of multi-touch gestures that a smartphone will accept. The active area of the tablet is roughly journalists notepad size which makes it small for an artist type tablet.

In terms of software, the installation attempts to guide you into some spoken tutorials which treat you like a moron – praising fulsomely your every successful pen-stroke. None of this is actually necessary since using a pen is largely intuitive and all you really need to learn is what the right-click simulation is (it’s the button on the body of the pen) and what the configurable buttons on the tablet do.

I have the tablet installed on a Windows 7 system, which is “ink” aware – it understands interacting via a pen: A little palette will pop out wherein the miracle of the “handwriting recognition” is performed – being able to read my scrawl is impressive but it’s a bit like a talking dog: it’s very clever but ultimately pointless on a computer with a keyboard. Office 2007 is also ink aware, you can open up a document and scribble on a separate layer – obviously the first thing I did was draw a big circle around something and wrote “bollocks” next to it.

The tablet also comes with some little mini-apps in which you can doodle and play games, you can also download more mini-apps. They don’t look fantastically useful.

All in all I think we’re going to be happy together – holding the pen feels just like old times!

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Apr
03
2010

A brief history of gadgets

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This is a post about gadgets and my relationship with them, spurred by my purchase of the latest gadget: an HTC Desire smartphone aka “Shiny”.

I have a suspicious relationship with telephones, basically I consider talking to people at a distance a form of devilry and if you expect me to type messages in a 26 letter alphabet using a 12 key keyboard you’ve got another thing coming. Telephone use at SomeBeans Towers is simple: most nights Mrs SomeBeans rings her dad, once a week on Sunday my mum rings me, roughly once a month my dad rings me with a list of computer problems for solution and once every three weeks I ring Majestic to arrange wine delivery : “Simples”. All phone calls beyond this are a cause for chaos, consternation, confusion etc. I appreciate this makes us “anomalous” but I’m too old to care.

Mobile phone use is even more occasional, whilst skiing we sometimes arrange slope side meet-ups via mobile phone. Mrs SomeBeans was reduced to hysterics watching me typing a text message, moving my lips as I did it and eventually giving up because of cramp. When buying a house use of the devil’s mobile speech-horn is inevitable. At the start of the last house purchase I sat on the train with my mobile phone ringing from my pocket thinking: “Why isn’t that person answering their phone? It sounds an awful lot like mine (I think)”, on the previous house buying occasion I attempted to recharge my phone via it’s headphone socket, it died.

My last trip to the phone shop was rather embarrassing for all concerned, I bought a Samsung E250 slider phone. I completely missed the point of the “slider” bit and asked the phone-geek whether it was a touch screen phone: “No, sir”. I expressed a desire for a phone embedded in an SLR camera lens, at which point the phone-geek claimed that the picture from some phone was as good as an SLR, so I like to think I wasn’t the only one to come away from the experience looking like a complete idiot. The Shiny was bought over the internet to avoid embarrassment.

I did wonder about the touch screen aspects of the Shiny, I believe there a two types of people in the world: those that are happy to smear their horrible, greasy fingerprints across displays, and those that wish to kill them. I fall into the second group, so there was some risk I would have a touch-screen phone which I was psychologically incapable of touching. Fortunately this has turned out not to be the case, whilst transferring over numbers from the old Samsung I repeatedly tried to use the screen as a touch-screen, to the chagrin of all involved.

Why the HTC Desire? I do a bit of programming and the Android operating system on which it runs is relatively straightforward for me to program on (the iPhone requires you to use a Mac). Android has such magic software as Google Goggles which carries out picture based searching – it works too: it successfully recognised “Luncheon of the Boating Party” by Renoir on our wall, as well as a rather more obscure photo, and Tasty by Kelis (front or back cover). It has a radio too (you notice phone functionality is pretty much the last thing on my mind here). Chatting to friends of a more phone-friendly nature I got the impression that the Desire was the way to go. Blackberries looked a bit serious and business-like (and don’t have radios).

The predecessors of the Shiny are my Psion 5mx, a fabulous PDA with a lovely almost proper keyboard and built-in software which did not need to be supplemented, I gave it up after many years because the connector between screen an keyboard started to break regularly, I followed this with a Dell Axim x51v which I never really loved. My phone history is completely unmemorable, my first mobile phone looked like a toy bone for a dog, and made young people laugh. I’ve had two other phones since then but I scarcely used them. In other gadgets I got a bluetooth GPS to talk to my PDA so I could geotag my photos, then I got a Garmin GPS60 which did it rather more robustly.

I joined the digital camera revolution rather early with a Kodak DC210, this was a revelation to me since previously my photography experience was limited to taking a few shots on film in a weeks holiday, finally filling a film after 18 months having completely forgotten where I was or what technically I had done to achieve the effect I had. After the Kodak I got an Olympus C750UZ, in parallel I also had a Casio Exilim S20 for it’s extreme compactness, then I went SLR picking up a Canon 300D from my father-in-law on which I became completely hooked, upgrading to a 400D shortly thereafter. The reason for going to the SLR was that even with a reasonably good point-and-shoot I was finding there were photos I knew I just couldn’t take because I couldn’t control the camera. An SLR gets round this problem by having a decent set of real controls, like a focus ring on the lenses, rather than some buried menu options and octopus-friendly button pressing. The thing with an SLR is that the camera body serves the function of a gateway drug, your dealer makes the real money on the lenses*. There’s probably a business model in giving away SLR camera bodies and making your profit solely on lenses and accessories. I’ve subsequently got a second Casio Exilim S10 to fill my dinky camera needs, this camera will take photos when people smile and claims that it can recognise different people and prioritise snapping according to your preference. This seems like a new way of offending friends and family, is making your wife anything other than top smiling priority grounds for divorce?

Returning to the HTC Desire: it’s fantastic! It can replace phone, pda, GPS and dinky camera: all in a beautiful package. The interface is a joy to use, wave your finger around on it and you go skittering off to different parts as if you’re skimming across the surface of a large desk. My old PDA felt like you were peering into a tiny fixed porthole on it’s innards. Tapping buttons on the screen gives you a touch of vibration feedback. Even the internet is pretty usable, as is the 200 page PDF manual.

I have a bit of a mixed attitude to gadgets: things that are nice to use like the Psion, Canon 400D and Shiny, I really like. Things with crap interfaces, I can’t abide: programming video recorders and central heating systems I hate for their horribly kludgey 20 random keystrokes with no user feedback nastiness.

And now, if you don’t mind, I will return to fondling Shiny.

*For the camera fans I have the 10-22mm, 50mm f/1.8, 18-55mm kit, 28-135mm, 100mm macro, EF 70-300mm lenses.

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