Scarlet Umbrella|Adventures in Mobile Technology

I am writing this post on my lovely screened in porch enjoying the summer weather and the benefits of a ceiling fan. Feel free to feel jealous.

I’m not posting to gloat (well, not too much). I am posting to do a bit of evangelization to the crowd that still feels it is okay to lug around an 8 pound notebook everywhere. It’s not. I am always bemused to see someone walk into the local Panera lugging a huge go bag, and pull out a desktop replacement, mouse, smartphone, ipod, and assorted other gadgets. This is NOT a healthy mobile lifestyle. I can’t even imagine how much stress that carrying all that weight is putting on a person’s back.

Today I am going to talk about a concept that I like to refer to as samurai mobility. Samurai mobility is a software-based approach to cut down on the amount of “stuff” that you carry around on a daily basis. Samurai mobility warriors do not need to carry around every gadget imaginable to get the job done.

The first step in samurai mobility is to leave the desktop replacement at home. I know you have all of your important documents and applications exclusively on it. Well, that is going to change now. With the many Web 2.0 applications out there, you have no reason to have all of your files stuck in one place.

To kick off the discussion of samurai mobility, let’s talk about online storage. Online storage options can range from free plans with limited options to deluxe plans with the ability to edit your files “in the cloud.” Here is a selection of some of the best storage solutions:

Box.net Box.net is a comprehensive Web 2.0 style storage system. They offer three levels of storage from free (1 GB) all the way to corporate (15 GB) pricing. The free storage plan comes with limited functionality but the other plans offer file sharing, the ability to edit photos and images online as well as the ability to edit Office documents.

Omnidrive Omnidrive is setting itself up to be a major competitor to Box.net. Currently in a closed beta, Omnidrive offers free storage up to 1 GB. Included in this is the ability to edit your files including Office applications and media. They also offer a Pro level with supposedly unlimited storage. Omnidrive is preparing to roll out version 1.0 at which point they will open signups again.

openomy openomy is another new storage solution. Currently, they offer free storage up to 1 GB. Files are organized by tag rather than folders which may help with searching. openomy is being closelipped about future plans. A pro plan is reportedly in the works. They also have developed an API so interaction with other applications is in the works.

GMail GMail gives you tons of free storage. Why not use it to store files? A comprehensive look at using GMail to store your files is beyond the scope of this post but several software solutions to upload files to GMail are a google away. However, unlike the previously mentioned solutions, GMail was not designed for file storage so use at your own risk.

file, file storage, GMail, mobility, online, online file storage, web 2.0, web2.0

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Recently I have noticed a new trend in my daily consumption of blogs. Ordinarily, when I found a page interesting, I would bookmark it with del.icio.us. However, more and more I have found myself just grabbing the feed for the website and putting it into Google Reader.

I find this technique useful for a couple reasons. First, I find that if I like one blog post a person has written, I will probably like other material that they post. Secondly, RSS feeds combined with Google search make a much better method of searching than tags and my own (bad) summaries of web content.

Most sites publish full RSS feeds. This is really useful in Google Reader when I am trying to find that post that one person wrote about, for example, three new and useful GMail Labs Apps. I can use Google Reader’s search function to search for “GMail Labs Apps” which gives me the blog post that I am looking for much faster than searching all of my “GMail” and “useful tags” on del.icio.us.

Of course, I haven’t found a way to integrate all of my internet links into Google Reader. There are still the few sites that don’t have a RSS feed. Also, there are sites that only give the headlines on the RSS feed. While some people may like this, I definitely prefer full posts myself (hint to blogs: provide both).

The best benefit is that I have a database that automatically adds more information to itself. I really can’t express how valuable this is. I love DevonThink on the Mac and I have often wished that I could have something similar on a PC. Google Reader is almost equal and some ways better to DevonThink. When I use DevonThink, I have to continually add to a category. However, once you have enough useful subscriptions on Google Reader (I like to call this critical mass), new content is added every time you hit refresh. Simply awesome.

database, Google, googlereader, hacks, information, lifehacks

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I am going to let you in on a deep dark secret: I still use a paper agenda. I know it’s shocking. I’m a self-professed tablet freak and typical technophile. However, I still need my paper agenda.

I have tried to get rid of a paper agenda several times. Among the tools in my mobile arsenal have been the Palm Tungsten E, the HP Jornada 728, and several web-based applications.

I love the ease of electronic todo lists but until inking tasks becomes as nontrivial as jotting down a note in a paper agenda, I really am tied to an paper agenda. I currently use a Franklin Covey agenda with the Simplicity planning pages.

I like the Simplicity planning pages because they do not have specific blocked off appointment times. I very rarely have appointments so appointment pages were always a waste of paper for me.

While Franklin Covey makes nice templates, they can get expensive. for the true paper agenda aficionado, the first stop in setting up a planner should be diyplanner.com. I currently use several templates from the classic kit and the DIY/GTD Teacher Kit
.

franklin covey, hp jornada 728, lifehacks, luddite, palm tungsten e, productivity, technophile

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Both my Mom’ house and our neighbors’ next door have wi-fi. I was at my Mom’s this weekend and I learned that the highschoolers in Mom’s county are now given laptops in high school. Since the bus stop is right between my Mom’s house and our neighbors’ house, they have been using our wi-fi to finish up their homework and browse the internet before school starts.

Because I’m a total tablet nut, I immediately saw this as an opportunity for tablets to be used instead of conventional laptops. Time posted an interesting article about the problems with America’s school system and a lot of their attention was devoted to outdated teaching methods and the lack of technology. My passion is improving science education and I immediately began to brainstorm ways to solve many of the problems with current American educational methods that Time was commenting on.
Let me begin with a disclaimer before anyone tries to rip my head off. What follows is a description of an ideal world where all school systems were funded equally and received adequate funding. I am a realist, however, and I understand the difficulties with deploying new technology in schools. The issues of cost both in acquiring new technology and training teachers and administrators to use new technology can make any deployment of new technology seem daunting. But I think the benefits warrant the cost.

Let’s take a field trip to what I like to call the Modern School. In this school, students are given a small slate tablet and a portable keyboard at the beginning of school. That’s it. These students don’t have to carry backpacks around all day because all of their textbooks are in ebook format and are preloaded onto their tablets. They can annotate their textbooks without getting into trouble. In fact, their teachers encourage them to take notes in their textbooks! They can highlight and make lecture notes without getting in trouble for defacing rental textbooks. Students can look up words that give them trouble using dictionary software and get the correct pronunciation for the words as well. Look at those SAT vocabulary scores going up!

Lectures are different at the Modern School. Teachers post worksheets on the class website at the beginning and students work along with the teacher in filling them in. Teachers don’t mind tablets in lectures. They can see that their students are paying attention to the lecture and they don’t have to talk over the background noise of 30 keyboards clicking. Since these students have OneNote and its recording functions, they feel comfortable participating more in class. They aren’t worried about missing a few notes because they have the lecture recorded and they know that the teacher is recording her screen notes as well and will post them after class.

The teachers at the Modern School don’t like lecturing. They know that the average attention span is about twenty minutes. They break up their lectures with different activities. Students participate in group work- made easier by the ability to send files to each other and make edits to each others’ work. They also participate in activities and chats with their sister class in Japan. One of their recent assignments was a paper written with a partner in their sister class. Because of the ability to track changes in a document, both teachers were able to see the work that their students had done and grade accordingly. The students learned how to work with international partners which will help them when they are ready for the business world.

Okay, let’s get back to the current world. Every bit of technology I described exists today. When students graduate from college, they are going into this world. Business is increasingly project-driven and teamwork-oriented and having international clients and partners is a way of life. So why are our schools stuck in the 19th century (and yes I DO mean the 1800s)? Yes, the deployment of this technology will be somewhat challenging. Any change is. However, we will be preparing students for the “real world” and I think that’s reward enough.

business, education, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc

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My Christmas present to myself was a shiny new brown Zune to replace my 3G iPod. (Pictures will be forthcoming once I return from being out of town). My initial impression was very favorable: the Zune is lightweight, attractive, and the finish is very nice. The finish is actually kind of difficult to describe- the best I can come up with is smooth and velvety. The color screen is also clear, bright, and easy to read.

I wish my impression of the installation process was as favorable. The first run of the software installation process stalled midway through so I was forced to do my first reinstall. Following my first reinstall, I tried to add music to my library. My Zune did not recognize any of my mp3 files which are located on my C drive (I even put them into the My Music folder). I tried to rip a CD to see if the software would recognize it- also a failure. I then reinstalled the software following Microsoft’s own recommendation for a clean install. The Zune software still did not recognize my music. I took off the software and I cleaned out my music. I reinstalled the software and then imported my music back onto my computer. This is where I am currently and my Zune software is still not recognizing my music.

I would be inclined to say that this a bug with my machine but I’m not the only one who has blogged about problems with Zune software. James Kendrick and Aran Johnson among others have blogged about problems with Zune software installation. I’m going to try my luck with technical support when I get back home. I have to say that overall the installation of the Zune software seems to be hit or miss. This is particularly worrisome for the success of the platform. Coming into the market so late in the game, the Zune really needs to have all the bugs ironed out. Most consumers aren’t willing to go through multiple installs to get a product working. I’m hoping that Microsoft releases a software update soon that gets most of these bugs ironed out.

Microsoft, mp3, mp3 player, software, Zune

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My first experience with Linux was with Redhat 7.3 back in the day. I liked the security and ability to customize but I was turned off by the difficulty installing packages (dependency hell). I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake on my new Windows laptop (a Panasonic R3 which I intend to rave about in a new post). My first impression is that Linux has changed dramatically in the four years since I have played with the platform. Ubuntu installed in a straightforward manner. I used Ubuntu’s built in partition utility to add two partitions to my hard drive (after backing up my data of course). Ubuntu installed without a hitch and right out of the box I was able to use my screen brightness hotkeys and wireless (nice!). With a little tweeking, I was able to adjust the screen brightness hotkey so that it went through a range of brightness levels instead of the high and low levels only which was how the screen hotkeys worked right after the install. My only concern is that you do have to go in and manually edit a configuration file, something that I am comfortable with, but a novice user may not be comfortable with. To my pleasant surprise, my usb hard drive automatically mounted!!!!! Finally!! I have been waiting for some flavor of Linux to get this perfected. Dapper Drake comes with Firefox 1.5 but I was able to use an installer script to update to 2.0 without any problems. I was also able to get Enlightenment 17, the upgrade to Enlightenment 16 my favorite Linux window manager, up and running easily. In conclusion, so far Ubuntu is working really well as a second operating system on my Panasonic R3. Linux has come a long way as an operating system. I’m going to go into more detail about my Ubuntu experiences in future posts but I’m beginning to see what the buzz surrounding Ubuntu as a Linux distro is about.

Linux, panasonic, Ubuntu

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When I first got a tablet, one of my coworkers asked if I knew whether or not you could install Linux on it.  My response was probably, although you would kill all the tablet functionality.  I think one of the signs that tablets are finally being appreciated, at least among geeks, is the growing interest in creating a tablet PC Linux distro.  I found this discussion on what could be included in a tablet PC version of Ubuntu interesting.  Although I am perfectly happy with Win XP Tablet PC edition, I figure all software development in the tablet PC world is a good thing so I add my vote for a tablet PC Linux distro.

Linux, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc, Ubuntu

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Part of the reason for my month long absence was the fact that I was involved in applying for two positions. The first was as a temporary guest worker in a government research facility. I am going to make a protein with a colleague at this facility and to be legal, I had to fill out an application and send them my curriculum vitae among other things. Sending them my curriculum vitae proved to be a bit of a challenge since I had never created a c.v. and I hadn’t updated my resume since I applied to graduate school four years ago. So to the other students and fellow workers out there, let me reiterate the advice that your counselors gave you to keep your resume updated. You never know when you might need to send it in to meet security clearance at a government facility.

The main subject of this post is leveraging the extendability of OneNote. Or “it’s really easy to fix OneNote to suit your needs.” The one thing I did miss when I made the decision to try to go as paperless as possible was my daily planner. I use Outlook combined with TEO 3.0 for the majority of my planning. I have Outlook organized so that when it opens, I view my calendar along with my tasks organized with custom categories. This approach works really well for helping me see what is going on while avoiding the time sink of reading my email immediately when I get to work.

Still, there are definitely times when physically writing a list of what I have to do helps organize my thinking. I have to give credit for this idea to Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC.  What she did was create custom stationary for OneNote using the D*I*Y Planner templates- a set of custom templates so that you can create your own paper planner.

This year in addition to my normal tasks as a grad student doing research, I am also going to be doing some teaching and will need to design some lesson plans.  Back when I was using a paper planner, I had used some templates from the D*I*Y planner and I decided to check and see if they had any templates that would be of use for teaching.  It turns out that there is a whole set of templates devoted to teaching. I downloaded the templates and used Adobe Reader’s clipping function to create images of each page that I wanted. I then imported the images into OneNote and set the images as background. I could then use the templates as OneNote stationary. So now I have templates for lesson plans as well as GTD-related teaching tasks in my OneNote notebook. Pretty cool.

education, OneNote, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc

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Thanks to Tracy Hooten of The Student Tablet PC for posting this:  TEO 3.0 has been officially released with upcoming student pricing of $29.99 compared to $49.99 for the nonstudent version.  I paid for TEO 2.0 and have been enjoying the beta.  If you are a student and a tablet pc user, I really really really recommend that you get TEO.  If you are unfamiliar with Tablet Enhancements for Outlook, I hesitate to call it a plugin to add better pen functionality to Outlook when it is so much more- full ink tasks, contacts, notes! coordinated with tasks, as well as integrated audio recording.  The program is simply wonderful and if you have been hesitating due to the price, now is your chance!

OneNote, Outlook, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc

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Brian Eng and Jeff Cohen of Luckymonk are working on an application that will allow direct ink support for the popular online collaboration software, Basecamp.  They have a video of the upcoming application at their site.  Great work, guys!!

ink, software, tablet, tablet+pc, tabletpc

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