Look what came via UPS today:

Guess when my tablet is slated to ship…July 21st. What am I supposed to do with this? Lenovo has found a new way to torture people, they announce that they have created the best convertible sub-notebook Tablet PC ever, take orders, then ship the batteries a month ahead of the computer that uses them. Now I have to sit and stare at this brick and think about how cool it will be when it actually is useful. I CAN’T EVEN CHARGE IT!

Since all I have is the battery, here are my thoughts: It has a nice rubber grip on it, and I can tell it’s a good quality rubber, so it won’t be falling off over time (hopefully). As you can see from the picture, it’s pretty small. My Dell Latitude LS is a sub-notebook, and it appears that length-wise, the X41 Tablet will be the same width, which I’m very excited about. I take my computer with me virtually everywhere, so it’s nice to know that I won’t be adding any bulk to my gadget bag with my new tablet.

I’m disappointed to see that this battery doesn’t have any indicator lights on it. I will have two of these once my tablet arrives, so it would have been nice to be able to see charge status at a glance, but it seems that won’t be possible. Other then that, I can’t think of a single thing to say about it. It is after all, a battery…

But I’m over it, I don’t care, and I’m not going to do a thing about it. The X41 Tablet PC IS the best convertible Tablet PC ‘available’ (notice the quotes…), at least it is the best for my needs.

I apologize. My site has been experiencing some issues with it’s database server. I’m currently talking with my web host to get these problems ironed out, as it seems that my database server is the same as their own database server, so I’m inclined to think they want to fix it soon. In the mean-time, I’m taking a look into some wordpress caching plugins to take the load off the server and to keep the site working without the database connection. The downside of this is that I won’t be able to keep track of how my site is performing with my stats program. Any wordpress gurus out there have suggestions?

With that out of the way, I thought I’d post an update about my X41 Tablet PC order – it’s back-ordered, and currently showing a July 19th ship date. This is getting dangerously close to my wedding date of August 6th, so unless I get it about a week before I leave for Tahiti, odds are I won’t be able to play with it until the end of August – which would be torture.

I’m also working on some posts about Orb.com and using it to stream your TV recordings to anywhere in the world, using Meedio and DVD Profiler to setup a cool database for your DVD collection, and compressing your recordings for consumption on your Palm OS device using MMPlayer. The first of these should be finished in a couple of days, so keep an eye out.

So my Lenovo customer service rep thinks I’m insane. He had just called me back when there was an incident in Yucaipa, CA.

Me: Uh, hold on a sec.
Rep: Oh, okay.
rattling
Me: Yup, it’s a quake.
Rep: What?
Me: An earthquake. Hold on I need to go outside.
Rep: Are you serious?
sounds of coworkers scrambling for door frames, exits, umbrellas
Me: Just a second.
wind noise
Me: Okay, that was an earthquake. Where were we, oh yeah, the 60gb hard drive.
Rep: Yeah, earthquakes…no big deal. Are you okay?
Me: Yeah, it was only a 2 or a 3.

So I was off a little – it was a 5.3. But here in L.A. you get used to such things. I moved out here in December of 1993, just in time for the 6.7 Northridge quake in January. Since that rude awakening, I’ve experienced around 100 smaller quakes, so this was no big deal to me. To my rep sitting in his office in Toronto, it had a decidedly different effect. He thinks his customer in L.A. cares more about 60gb hard drives than his life. I don’t think I helped break-down stereotypes much today.

Well, the net-sum is that my order was in fact for the wrong base system. I was going to get a 40gb HD instead of 60gb, and a 802.11b/g wireless card instead of a a/b/g one. I also decided to forget the 4-cell battery and upgrade to a second 8-cell for $49. I no longer see the point of carrying a second battery if it’s only going to get me 2.5 extra hours. I thought I’d like the lighter weight thing, but I decided if I’m going to carry ANYTHING extra, it’ll be for the extra 6.3 hours the 8-cell provides.

So now I have to ask the obligatory question: Did anyone else feel the quake?

Writing a blog post about OneNote, in OneNote…that’s what I’m doing right now. Kinda circular isn’t it? I decided to go out and purchase Microsoft’s OneNote now, instead of waiting until I got my Tablet (the delivery of which Lenovo keeps pushing back) because I wanted to get used to the metaphor that OneNote uses before I really jumped into replacing my spiral notebook.

The interface:

You had me at “Welcome to OneNote 2003!” You can tell right off the bat that Microsoft really put some thought into the layout of this thing. Everything just makes sense, and simply by clicking around a little, you will find what you were looking for, then it immediately becomes second-nature.

For instance – To setup my blogging section on TabletPCs, I clicked an icon in the toolbar that looked like the images that represented sections, a new tab was created, and it was automatically selected for naming. This is analogous to putting those silly little pieces of paper in notebook dividers, but this time it didn’t end up mutilating the slip as I wedged it into the plastic sleeve; and I have a feeling these aren’t going to fall out.

I got into work early and started typing my latest notes on a sequence into OneNote. This was very easy, but got the feeling that OneNote was just a glorified word document organizer. I tried to import some transcripts, but was unable to do so, because my laptop has MS Office 2000, and not 2003. Apparently 2003 is required to easily import files into OneNote, but there seems to be a Power Toy out there that allows ‘printing’ into OneNote. I’m going to take a look at that tonight.

Early on in the morning, one of the producers came in and asked me to output my most recent cuts to tape for the new writer they’re bringing on. I’m normally not very excited about outputting sequences before I get to a rough cut stage because there’s still a lot of missing pieces, and it’s tough to convey what you’re planning on putting in the gaps. But today, I was not apprehensive at all, do you know why? Because I had just put all my thoughts into OneNote, that’s why. I was able to ‘Publish’ the pages containing the pertinent notes to an .mht file very easily and it opened fine, but the problem is that IE is the only browser that supports this format. So I had to open the files in IE, then save again to plain HTML files. This way, I know that even if the writer has Lotus notes or something weird, they will be able to read my notes, bullets and all.

If I had Office 2003 on this system, I probably could have exported directly to a word document, which would have been fine – but I kind of like the HTML idea, it seems very portable to me and it prevents me from having to resend emails in different formats all day. I wish OneNote would let me export directly to HTML, and not just .one and .mht files.

One point of issue I have right now, is that I cannot link my word documents in a way that they remain searchable. When using MS Office 2003, you can import documents to pages in OneNote, but they become images used as the background, which allows you to annotate on top of them, which is great, but you can’t search the text inside. You can drag and drop files into pages, and a hyperlink is created to that file or folder. So that’s kinda cool, but you still have to right click -> search, set terms, THEN find the files, THEN search again inside the files. It would be great if someone would write a power toy that would allow you to search linked files using the built-in search function in OneNote.

I emailed Chris Pratley, one of the designers for the OneNote software who maintains a blog dedicated to OneNote on the msdn network, and he quickly replied to my question:

“I totally understand the interest in that, but we had to walk before we run. And for now the philosophy is ‘we search your stuff’. Obviously we are missing the ability to search documents you print into OneNote – that’s a natural add. Later we may expand that to ‘we search things you link to as well’, but no promises.”

So it seems that I’m not alone in thinking this is a good and natural extension of the metaphors already in place. I’d also like to add that it really is great that I was able to get such a quick response from Chris. Seriously, how many companies have software designers who are so accessible to the general public? That is a great thing, and really makes me realize how serious MS is about these products. Kudos to them, I can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

A related point, I also mentioned to Chris that I’m taking up C#, and am considering undertaking a Power Toy project to partially implement this functionality. His response came 14 minutes later:

“Great! Good luck with the Power Toy.”

I like this guy – a lot. MS is lucky to have him.

So anyways, so far-so good! I’ve setup my laptop next to my keyboard at the moment, so I can reference my notes as I go. I even resisted the urge to use sticky pads once today to jot a quick note down. The OneNote quick launch icon that the installation put in my taskbar is nice for this. It can be configured to launch OneNote, a quick Note (basically a sticky note), a screen capture (called a Screen Clip), or even start recording audio and video just by clicking the icon once. A nice touch for sure.

So those are the first 24 hours. I no longer feel like OneNote is a glorified document organizer and I can’t wait to learn more.

If you’ve never had a powersupply die on you – consider yourself lucky. I must have the touch of death for powersupplies, because my Avid’s PS is dead, my HTPC’s just died, and my Mac at work has been acting up too.

Here’s what I’ve learned about powersupplies on their death bed: You’ll never think it’s the powersupply until you’ve done everything else. Because seriously, who has extra powersupplies laying around? I either repurpose or recycle all my old cases, so I never have those kind of parts laying around. Luckily, this time I did. A couple of weeks ago, I purchased a powersupply for a mod I wanted to do that involves the case from my old stereo reciever that I was/am going to turn into an external drive case to match my HTPC. That amplifier fried, so it wasn’t technically a powersupply, but close enough. I use surge protectors, and UPSs, and it has happened at different houses, so don’t yell at me for bad power management. I just have bad luck.

Anyways, simple solution right? Wrong. I have an Antec Overture case, and apparently not all powersupplies will work with this because it manages it’s airflow in a very specific way that doesn’t happen to match my new powersupply (which also happens to be antec).

Here’s the current state of the afflicted HTPC. Sad isn’t it?

I didn’t want to disconnect it because I didn’t want to miss any shows, so it has been sitting there like that for about a week now, waiting patiently for me to sew it back up. It’s alright little one, I’m here to help.

The tools:

• Variable Speed Dremmel
• 2 fiberglass re-enforced cutting disks.

Kids, don’t try this at home. (I’ve always wanted to say that.) I obviously had to remove everything from the case, because those metal filings would probably be bad if they got all over the motherboard. I also didn’t want to inadvertantly carve a hole in my drives. My understanding is holes are NOT considered a good way to cool down hard drives. I might have heard wrong though…

The cutting line:

At least that’s the plan, we’ll see how this turns out – dremmel cutting discs aren’t exactly known for their smooth curves. It’s kind of like trying to cut a smooth circle with one of those one-armed paper cutters – straight cuts.

Half-way through:

I went through both cutting disks pretty quickly, so this is as close as I could get to a perfect circle:

The finger-slicing edges were smoothed with a grinding stone attachment:

See, you can barely see the blood stains.

Stupid Antec:

Their unique powersupply location also threw me this curveball. The internal cable was too short to reach, and that metal panel was in the way. Due to the way it will sit in my entertainment center I don’t really care about this. I unscrewed the extension cable from the case, and pulled it to reach, then plugged a normal powercable to the extension, and pulled it through the normal hole. It isn’t perfect, but again, no one is ever going to see this:

I am actually pretty pissed about the strange setup in this case. In an effort to create a case that will fit in HT racks, they really messed things up if anything needs to be replaced. I couldn’t re-orient the powersupply without some major modding, which I’m not in the mood for right now. I have movies to watch.

Complete:

That was fun…kinda. If I had not had to do this, could have lived the rest of my life and been completely happy, so whatever. This mod also helped me out with cooling. This case happens to be notoriously hot, and a lot of owners have opened thier powersupplies and flipped the fans in an effort to increase airflow. This takes it a step further by removing the powersupply’s heat from the equation entirely. The air is pulled from underneath (the rubber case feet give it clearence) and it’s pushed out the side. My ambient case temps have decreased 4deg C and my CPU reduced 2deg. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Sorry, no pics of the insides when put back together. I’m actually pretty embarassed about how messy it is in there. It works, that’s all that matters.

Now should I watch “Sky Captain, and the World of Tomorrow”, or “The Village”? Decisions, decisions.

Well, I’ve gotten it ordered finally! YAY! Now comes the waiting. I thought I was so cool getting it so quickly, but even with the help of the great CS rep, it’s going to be 3-4 weeks before I get my tablet! 3-4 weeks! Are you serious?

That aside, there was only one other issue that I am bummed about, Lenovo’s current $100 off a MS Office package doesn’t apply to the Tablet, so I had to pony up $129 for that, and OneNote 2003 wasn’t in his system. Bummer, so the going rate for OneNote is roughly $99 ($84 someplaces), and I’m going to have to get an external USB 2.0 DVD writer too, because I’m too cheap to buy the $214 X4 dock and still pay another $269 for a DVD writer. $500 isnt’ worth that when I can buy a dedicated one for under $200. Alright, so it’s not one thing, but the rep made it up to me and threw in a free 4-cell battery and free shipping.

So here’s the main specs:

• 1.5 ghz
• 512 mb ram
• 60gb HD
• a/b/g wireless
• Fingerprint reader
• 8 cell battery in addition to the free 4 cell
• Price – $2528 before tax

Pricey? Yes. Worth it? We’ll find out.

Anyone have ideas how to make 4 weeks go by quickly? My current plan of checking tablet pc websites all day isn’t cutting it, and people at work are looking at me funny.

RSS – pretty much anybody who reads more than 1 or 2 blogs regularly uses RSS religiously along with their favorite aggregator. Up until last week, I was one of the few left who were hopelessly drawn to my web browser, clicking through bookmarks to see if there were any new posts, and I’ll tell you why:

I’m a freelance film/video editor, and I’m rarely at one employer for long, let alone one computer, so I don’t like installing my favorite programs on every system and I especially don’t like leaving logins all over the place. As a result of this situation, I’ve become especially reliant on my Treo 600 because it’s rarely practical to whip out my laptop to do such things as email, contacts, calendar and todos.

All fine and dandy right? The Treo comes with programs to do all those things, and even a browser to look at blogs – but remember, I’m wasting a lot of time needlessly looking for updates.

Enter QuickNews an RSS aggregator for the PalmOS. I don’t know why it took me so long to think to look for this kind of thing, but it did. Some quick features from their site:

“Looks perfect” I said to myself as I started the trial download. A week later, I can safely say ‘almost perfect’. Here’s what I like about QuickNews:

• No-Nonsense Interface – Just what you need, right there in front of you.
• Automatic Updates – You can set each feed to have a different refresh period, from 1 hour, to 1 week. This is nice as it prevents you from pinging sites that are updated less frequently, it saves your bandwidth, and theirs.
• Automatic Read/Unread – it apparently counts how long you look at an article, and based on the article’s length it will automatically set it as ‘read’ once it has been on the screen long enough.
• ‘Quick Menu’ – (my name for it, I don’t know it’s official name) it only shows feeds that have unread articles, it also shows a little read dot with the number of ‘new’ feeds recieved in the last update. This makes it very easy to quickly go through feeds that are new – there isn’t any clutter and it’s nice.

Now for what frustrates me:

• Treo 5-way support – Wow, it is seriously half-baked. Some screens work, others are un-usable, especially the ‘feeds’ screen. It is also laid out in a way that makes navigation difficult. It’s almost as if each screen was created by a separate team and there wasn’t anyone keeping things in line.
• The shortcut keys change – I’m not sure why they did this, but depending on what screen you’re on commands like ‘A’ for update all change to ‘U’ if you’re on a certain screen. This is really stupid, it’s a pain to learn ONE shortcut key, now I have to learn TWO! Come one guys, be serious – see the above point, and streamline the user-experience. It feels kind of disjointed right now.
• Some links work, others don’t – I haven’t figured out the overriding factor, but links embedded in some feeds link fine, others don’t at all.
• Picture Viewer weirdness – I don’t know why, but nearly every picture I’ve tried to look at in the internal viewer is either skewed, or cropped with no apparent way of changing it.
• External links won’t launch Blazer or ‘email’ – Maybe this is a treo thing, but even after selecting the correct applications, QuickNews can’t seem to launch my other apps. I click a link, and nothing – no error message, no changing apps.

I haven’t tried the pod-cast support because even though I’m on Sprint’s ‘high-speed’ data network, I don’t want my Treo busy for half an hour downloading a podcast, I wouldn’t be able to receive calls. Maybe when I get an EV-DO treo I’ll turn it on, but for now I’ll rely on good old-fashioned web browsers to pull those down. Same goes for the desktop hotsync feeds – I don’t have a need to even install the thing on my laptop. By the time I sync, they’re out of date. I suppose it makes sense to develop such a client because most palms don’t have an ‘always-on’ data connection, but for me that doesn’t apply.

So there’s some room for improvement huh? Even with all those things, I’m still going to purchase it at the end of my trial. There’s a lot to like, and concerning it’s core features it definitely works ‘as advertised’ – I get my feeds in a nice hand-held form factor. Give it a try, heaven forbid you become a little more productive at work.

I’m bummed, no ‘add to cart’ link on their site today, June 14th will be the release date. There is a nice webcast though – running roughly 23 minutes. I’ve roughly transcribed the thing below. It’s pretty interesting and you get the feeling that IBM/Lenovo knows what they’re doing here. Waiting to make a tablet until now has allowed them to learn from mistakes others have made, and it looks like their first Tablet PC will be a home run.

After a corny-sounding intro with some decent closeups of the tablet, Steve Ward, CEO of Lenovo, gives his speal on how they listen to their customers, and how great their TabletPC is, “It’s the thinnest, lightest convertable TabletPC on the market.”

The webcast takes a decidedly ‘infomercial-esq’ turn when Mike Hagerty takes the screen. He basically lists their marketing targets…boooring…

Finally he gets to the Tablet: 1.14″ thick, 3.5lbs, and nearly 6.5 hours of battery life, 12.1″ anti-glare/anti-reflective XGA screen with a 170 deg viewing angle, and their famous security sub-system. He holds the tablet in his hands, and it’s friggin’ tiny. It looks like it has a nice screen latch too. They were smart enough to put the fingerprint reader on the screen side, so you don’t have to exit tablet mode to use biometrics – nice touch. The screen also has a bunch of dedicated buttons, most notibly a hotkey to bring up a menu for system-level functions like volume, screen brightness, security and sleep modes. It also seems to have a dedicated C-A-D key, very nice.

It also looks like they made it to be compatible with thier X4 dock, so those of you with X40s or X41s are in luck – no need to buy a new dock. He goes on to talk about some of their accessories like their Tablet Sleeve that seems to address all Eric’s gripes with the Tecra’s sleeve.

I’ll skip over their customer testimonials, which seem pretty scripted and more of a general Tablet PC infomercial than IBM specific. They do touch on IBM’s security measures, and one guy talks about how passwords and smart cards can be stolen, but “we certainly hope no one can steal your fingerprint.” Obviously he didn’t hear about this poor guy.

They then bring on a Microsoft employee who talks about the history of the Tablet PC edition of their OS. zzzzzzzz NEXT!

More scripted ‘testimonial’ infomercial stuff…you definitly get the feeling they’re going after the medical community with this thing. Lots of talk about ‘health care and life sciences’, and how it will remove the barrier of a screen between you and your client. Which actually seems very true. I know this is one of the main reasons the form-factor is interesting to me – my producers hate it if I click away while I’m taking their ideas down.

Maybe I’m getting brainwashed, or maybe I was already a tablet convert – but they make a lot of compelling arguments. If you want to get your IT department to foot the bill for one of these very cool-looking tablets, you should definitly send them the link to this webcast.

And that’s it. Not a whole lot of info past minute 8, so don’t bother watching the whole thing unless you’re really not sure about the tablet idea. The more I think about it, the more I believe it is well put together, and makes a good case for tablets in general. I definitly belive that IBM/Lenovo’s entry to the tablet space will make a sizeable splash.

Now where’s that credit card…

via TabletPCReviewSpot

It looks as though CNET has some inside info that IBM is either announcing or releasing their tablet PC on Monday! This article coupled with a leak on the Lenovo site paint a picture of me with my credit card in hand on Monday.

Everyone seems pretty excited about IBM’s (Lenovo?) entry into the Tablet PC arena, and I have to agree. IBM’s notebook track record is very good with business users, and I think this will really add credibility to the platform as a whole.

I figured I should write something other than that ‘Hello World’ post that was generated. Well, this is my blog…wierd. Almost too easy to setup – Wordpress is cool. Hopefully this blog will serve as a way for me (and others, if I’m interesting enough) to spread information about how technology can work FOR you, not against you.

For the last year and a half I have been drawn into the world of HTPCs. I got bit by the bug hard and after only about 2 weeks of planning (which you’ll find is not very much time for me) I built my dedicated HTPC around a program called SageTV. SageTV is an amazing fit for my living room, rock-solid operation, and a huge WAF – Wife Acceptance Factor. If any of you are considering bringing a HTPC into your house, and you have a significant other, you have to take the WAF into account. If you don’t, the HTPC will never graduate from a side-hobby that lives in your office to a fixture in your living-room.

Admittedly, I’ve always been a gadget-freak, but I won’t buy a gadget unless it’s exactly what I need. The last time I was looking for a cell-phone, I put it off for 6 months waiting for the Treo 600, and used an old flip phone with a broken screen because I decided that a keyboard was an essential feature in a smartphone and the Samsung SPH-i500 didn’t cut it (I’m a sprintPCS subscriber BTW), and I’m so glad I did.

The Treo 600 has been my primary computing device since I got it in November of ‘03, and it is amazing. Do I wish I had a 650? Of course! But to me, the 650 would be an incremental upgade. I’m waiting to see if PalmOne can put one of those 4gb hard drives in there and add EV-DO – Then I’ll be tossing the 600. In the mean time, I’ve found some amazing things that are possible with the 600: I can control my HTPC from anywhere using PalmVNC, get all my email with SnapperMail, watch re-encoded TV shows I’ve recorded with MMPlayer, go online with the built-in browser, and even get my RSS fix with QuickNews.

My most recent interest is in TabletPCs. I’m a film and television editor and a large part of my job is taking notes from producers, directors, executives or whoever and working them into a show. My current system involves my chicken-scratch handwriting in a spiral notebook and highlighters. I highlight the notes as I address them, when the page is day-glow, I move on. This works to a certain extent, but it becomes overwhelming very quickly when dealing with notes about notes and who made them, when they were addressed, what I actually changed to ‘fix’ it, the list goes on and on.

I originally thought I could use my Treo for this purpose, but I found that it is much less acceptable to be punching away on a tiny keyboard than it is to write in a notebook. The same goes for typing into a laptop – they just look at you wierd and say, “Can’t you just write it down?”. They believe it’s overkill, even though I don’t.

So anyways, the object of my gadget-lust is the semi-leaked IBM X41 TabletPC. My current primary computer is a Dell Latitude LS – ancient, I know (There’s a story behind why I’m stuck working on a 400mhz Pentium III, but I won’t bore you with it) but it “works” for me, or at least it has been working for me. It’s time for an upgrade, and I believe that TabletPCs have matured enough for them to handle all I can throw at them.

As for what to expect from my blog, I hope to write about the ways I make my technology work for me, and not against me. I believe that technology should mold to the way we work, and not the other way around, which is why the TabletPC seems like such a great thing to me – at least in theory. There will be commentaries on what I think should be changed, major news postings and what implications I think they might have, my ideas about the future, tips for those who are interested in any of the technology I use, and a light sprinkling of my ‘real-life’ just for good measure. This site will also be filled out with some of the software projects I’m starting work on, some of which I can’t talk about yet, so keep an eye out as I have big things planned for both my favorite HTPC programs.

So I think that’ll do it for now. I went a little longer than I planned, so if you made it through – Thanks for sticking with me.

Vince