What an old imac told me about tablet computers ...

Yesterday was a hot, humid, sticky day with thunder rumbling around, and it was also the day that I'd decided to set aside to hack the hedge on one side of our driveway backinto something like a respectable shape. The hedge grows up between Manuel's , our neighbour's, car port and the fence which means I have to do my side.

It was a hot dirty job, hacking, cutting and feeding the trimmings through the shredder. Towards the end of the afternoon the background rumblings started sounding more serious so I thought I'd better check what was happening. The Bureau of Meteorology have this reall useful rain fall viwer on their website that lets you track storm activity.

I could have run inside, grabbed my tablet, or powerd up one of the computers and checked, but no, my eyes fell on the newer of the old power pc imacs I installed xubuntu on back in 2008.

Now this machine hd languished unused in the garage since 2009 on what had been my workbench, but when I flipped the power the machine powered up, as did the wireless bridge and the hub connecting it to the home network. Xubuntu came up, I logged in (obviously I'm not very imaginitive about user names and passwords), the machine told me I had about a zillion updates to install, something I ignored, started firefox and got the rainfall viewer page up, and hey presto I had a display I could check on to see how storms were tracking.

Now it was pretty gratifying to see what is a ten year old machine come up first time after four years of gathering dust, but it got me thinking.

Back when I was I proponent of desktop linux, the thing that always struck me was how linux would give a new lease of life to old hardware – basically it was just more efficient in its use of resources than windows, and I used to think that running linux was a way of extending the life of old hardware, especilally for web browsing, and basic word processing, which is probably ninety percent of what people do on a computer.

Well, desktop linux didn't happen. Tablets did.

The question of course is why tablets and not netbooks running linux which seemed the blindingly obvious way to go back in 2008. The difference was the interface. Full linux is scary. It's not actually, no more scary than windows or a mac but it comes with a reputation of 'scary'. And some of the applications are scary to use.

Manufacturers responded by creating dumbed down interfaces, as seen on the original Eee or Acer Aspire. What they didn't make easy was adding extra applications - and of course applications are what people use.

Tablets are highly portable not particularly powerful devices, but they have been a runaway success because they make tasks easier. You have your weather app. Your banking app, your mail program, a couple of other apps, and perhaps a lightweight editor and that's that. Adding apps is easy, just a couple of clicks.

What people typically do on a tablet you could do the same on a laptop, any laptop, irrespective of operating system. But you don't get reasonable battery life, and you get complexity, the dread pauses while a billion upgrades install, and sometimes they're not that easy to use.

Tablets take the pain away, and they are highly portable and let you do standard tasks easily. And that's why we have tablts rather than netbooks.

The other thing is that you just don't need that much power. My seven inch android tablet and keyboard combo is superb as a note taker, but no way is it a general purpose computer, instead it does a small number of tasks well.

People on the whole don't want a general purpose computer. People instead want to get stuff done, and that's what the tablet phenomenon is about. It allows people to get stuff done. And it means that those people who had computers at home to do the two or three things they needed to do, online banking, a bit of email, a bit of skype say don't need to have a computer any more.

What it doesn't mean is that the general purpose computer is dead. It's just that the use case for having one at home or at work has changed.

Using Markdown

I've been using my seven inch tablet and textedit to successfully take notes for three or four months now.

I like on the whole to take structured notes (headings, indents and the like) and sometimes to polish up the notes afterward.

Now textedit is agnostic. It's a basic text editor and doesn't care how you lay things out so I started by using a subset of media wiki layout. This was good but not particularly readable.

Since the new year I've taken to using Markdown - and it's really powerful - the syntax/markup  is simple enough to remember, the layout is simple enough to read easily in evernote's viewer as if it was a simple textfile. Yes, I know I've just mentioned using inline hand coded markup, but it's not difficult - we're not talking TeX here ...

The real killer is that if you have pandoc installed somewhere you can take your markdown documents and convert them into good looking libre office odt files (or word if you're that way inclined) apply whatever corporate prettiness is required and it's ready to be whacked out as a pdf of meeting notes etc etc.

The other nice thing about Markdown is that most texteditors will handle it nicely, including textwrangler on the mac and kate on linux, meaning that a file can start on my android tablet, be saved to dropbox, and be finished off and polished on whatever text editor I'm using (usually either kate or textwrangler)

So, if you are looking for a standard lightweight note format, try Markdown ...

[update]

since writing this I've come across two dedicated editors - markdrop for android which neatly synchronises with dropbox, and markdownpad for windows,  which has quite a nice preview feature

So, what do you actually use ?

Over the past few years I've done a 'what worked' post at the end of the calendar year. As an experiment I thought I'd list what applications I use most and then review it in twelve moths time. 

I nearly wrote software rather than applications, but some of the things I want to mention aren't really software programs – they're applications and often depend on infrastructure hosted elsewhere.

Here goes

• Dropbox – used mainly to sync files across computers irrespective of file format
• Libre Office – platform agnostic document editor for off line writing. Often used in conjunction with Dropbox
• Evernote – used as a notes and document management system (Nixnote is used on Linux to access my evernote files)
• Wunderlist for 'to do' list management
• Chrome – browser extraordinaire
• Gmail – email solution
• Google docs – fast means to create quick and dirty documents irrespective of platform
• Windows Live writer – offline blog post creation
• TextEdit – android text editor for note taking and integrates nicely with evernote and Gemail
• Microsoft Skydrive – used for document backup
• Excel Web App – for these occasions when Google Spreadsheets or Libre Office Calc will not do
• Google reader for rss feed management
• Twitter for tracking interesting things – rarely for messaging
• Hosted Wordpress and blogger for blogging, and wikidot for creating structured web pages

The interesting thing is the omissions. For example I use pdf files extensively, but I often view them inside evernote or via the Google Docs viewer – hence no Acrobat, Evince, or Preview. Microsoft Office again is something I use – when I need to create or edit a complex report it's what I turn to as it is simply better than Libre Office, but it's Libre Office I turn to for day to day work.

Most of the applications are multi platform. The two that aren't, Windows Live writer and TextEdit are a reflection that (a) most of my offline blog writing is done on a Windows netbook and (b) most of the note taking I take in meetings is done on an Android tablet.

Otherwise I flit between platforms – the operating system I use has basically become unimportant – I have a Mac and a Linux laptop at work and a Windows pc and an iMac at home plus a couple of netbooks, one linux, one windows, for travelling. It is truly the applications that are important not the operating system. The reason why I use so many operating systems is because of the applications I need to use occasionally – some are not available for some platforms, and some simply don't work as well on some platforms as others.

Looking at the list it's basically a work list. If I was to include receational activities I'd add flickr an picasa. Reading e-books takes place on a dedicated e-book reader – these days usually a kindle. I'm also purposely not counting things like newspaper web apps or weather apps as they're simply an alterantive to using a browser.

I also don't use facebook – I have a facebook account that looks as if it does purely because my twitter feed goes to it, but, believe me, I don't use facebook. The only reason I have an account is because of other things that use facebook's authentication service.

Twitter and bushfires

Yesterday we had a bad bushfire day here in Canberra.

We got through and nothing really bad happened but on days like yesterday you're always a little bit on edge.

One of the important things about days like yesterday is communication, and here twitter came into its own. The Emergency Services Agency posted regular updates on events, with meaningful descriptions and links to detailed posts on their blog site.

The thing about twitter is that it stayed up and it got the message out, even when at busy times, the ESA's main site struggled.

There's a message here for all problem management guidelines. Fortunately we don't all have to manage bushfires, but I did once have to manage a major SAN failure, and learned the hard way that communication is key.

Tell people what is happening, tell them when the next update will be, and be accurate. No spin, no doom and gloom. If the problem is being worked on and there's no accurate time to fix, say so. If you're having an unexpected delay, say so.

The point is that people may not like it when you tell the truth but they'll take you seriously when you tell them.

One of the best techniques I have found is that when there is crisis, appoint someone like a moderately technical manager to manage the communications. That way he or she can ask the engineers what's going on, and understand what's being said to them. Use someone from corporate communications and they won't understand the implications of what they're being told, or worse keep on hassling the people trying to fix the problem with inane supplementaries.

Like all good management it's basically common sense, but even so it's a good idea to work out how you're going to do things in advance. Like the bushfire survival plans the Rural Fire Service keeps on telling us to make, it means that you make decisions about what you're going to do and how you're going to it in advance so you know what to do and there's no last minute arguments about what's going to have to happen ...

Copying as preservation

I’ve just posted a link to a rather worrying story about what is happening to the manuscript in Timbuktu after the jihadist takeover, but there is also a positive message in the story.

Once digitised, artefacts, be they manuscripts, oral history recordings, or whatever can be copied, and quite simply, the more copies the greater the likelihood of the material surviving.

Museum directors tend to find the idea of letting people copy their digital holdings worrying for a whole host of reasons, such as misuse of the material (do you want your byzantine manuscript being reused in a design for a coffee can?), reduction in visitor numbers, and even conservation budgets (it’s digitised, stuff the original).

In fact what they worry about is losing control.

There are a lot of ways round this – a clockss type solution for museum collections would be one, although in the ideal world a more open solution may be preferable. Likewise one could imagine using something like Amazon glacier for an escrow service.

Solutions like clockss are cheap – the hardware is not remarkable and other than the salaries of the core technical team, all of whom would fit in a minivan with space over, the organisational costs are not high.

Otherwise we are left to ad hoc peering arrangements and arbitrary decisions as tho what is worth replicating. And that tends not to be a good thing – when the monks copied manuscripts they were selective copying the things they thought valuable, plus of course the odd salacious passage to enliven these cold dark winter nights, and that’s not a particularly good set of selection criteria …

Fun with email

I've previously written how at the day job we've changed to Office 365 for email, and how to be subversive and connect your Gmail account to harvest your Office 365 email and thus allow you to consolidate your email on Gmail.

As an act of pure geekery, I installed Alpine, the command line mail client on my linux machine and then connected it to my gmail account - as you can see below this actually lets you see your office 365 email in a terminal session:

No, I don't have a use case for this. I suppose if I wave my hands it's a way of reading your consolidated email on a cli only unix box, but that's pretty tenuous ...

2012 - what worked ...

For a last two or three years I've done a 'what worked' post at the end of the calendar year– this is the 2012 version:

Android tablet and keyboard

Undoubtedly the success of 2012. My no name seven inch tablet and keyboard combo worked incredibly well, especially as I can sit in meetings and type notes and then post straight to evernote, or indeed pull up reference information from evernote.

Virgin mobile data dongle

The star of our trip to south Australia. Data access problems solved just about everywhere apart from the seriously remote – shame though it's only for Windows or the Mac

Kindle e-reader

Light, versatile, portable. Revolutionised my reading habits, not because it's better than the Cooler, but because it has a e-book delivery solution behind it

Samsung smart phone

it just works, and couple with a decent data contract, doubly useful for checking email etc on the go

Still Delivering

Zpad

my 9inch android tablet is still useful – allowing me to read the morning paper electronically and check email and rss feeds in comfort, not to mention read and post to Evernote

Evernote

still the best note management solution around. I must admit I'm less keen on the new interface, but it is still highly effective

Back from the dead

Libre Office

after my travails with AbiWord I've switched back to Libre Office and find it a good text editor, and one which makes an excellent tool for the creation and posting of pdf based notes to evernote

Hanging in there

The Asus lightweight travel notebook and my cooler e-reader havn't seen the use that they have seen formerly, but still have a role to play even if they have been superceded by a windows netbook and a kindle respectively ...