Steve Richards: Gadgets

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I used to love my Blackberry - but this looks like a dream

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 19:44:25 GMT

The new Seimens SK65. Full blackberry functionality with a really innovative format, tri-band. Hopefully it has a decent task manager! For more details check out this web site.

This is just so cool!

Mon, 12 Jul 2004 22:15:25 GMT

Microsoft research have come up with some really cool tools for capturing and manipulating whiteboard contents captured using low quality web cams. My whiteboard is right behind me, (so my web cam points right at it, so it would work just great, but the downloads are MS only. The best trick is it removes the person writing on the board from the image. Here are some of the key points:

Other systems use expensive cameras or dedicated electronic whiteboards. The Live Whiteboard system, developed at Microsoft Research by Zhengyou Zhang and Li-wei He, uses whatever whiteboard you already have. It only needs an inexpensive Web cam and some clever software.

Live Whiteboard doesn't just deliver a video stream of the whiteboard. The software takes out all the shadows and uneven surfaces that come through on a Web cam, and turns the whiteboard into an image that allows viewers to see the whiteboard notes. Through a series of image processing procedures, the originally captured image is first transformed into a rectangular bitmap to correct perspective distortion, and then color-enhanced to increase contrast, saturation, and to provide a clean uniform white background.

In addition, if the remote viewer wants to focus his attention only on the content, the system can take out the image of the person who is writing on the board. The remote viewer sees only the new content magically appearing, he never sees the person who is writing the content. This saves even more bandwidth.

The full news article can be found here, and the web site for the developer with more info and the research reports can be found here.

My Home Office

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 18:16:03 GMT

In another post I am going to talk a bit about why I think multiple monitors are really important, but first I want to introduce you to my home office, so you can see my personal working practice in its full context. First things first:

Everything I need is within arms reach
I try to scan all my paper, and its all there in PaperPort, see below
I have two desks, a computer desk where I have my three monitors, and drive all my clients and servers from one keyboard and mouse and a layout, reading etc desk where I have space to organise. The kids use this desk at night if I am happy to be disrupted a bit.
I have a web cam on top of my primary display, again more on that later

For the full article click here to continue ...

3 Monitors is the way to go!

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 23:25:58 GMT

I have been quite happy with my two monitor setup at home, but using maxivista I am now able to drive three monitors from my main desktop PC. This is just great. I can now have my email in one, my RSS feeds in another, be using Office in another etc. I am also using a lot of virtual PC's and I can have these displaying on different monitors. So I can have RedHat on one monitor and SUSE on another and still be using Office on my third. It really must have driven my productivity up 20% when I am doing this sort of work, which is probably 50% of the time. That's at least £100/day. A staggering return on investment - the third monitor, (old laptop), was being scrapped and Maxivista is about $40!!

The other great advantage is that your concentration and focus is not disrupted, you might think it would be, but it seems that by not switching applications all the time, and by being able to focus on the task at hand on your primary screen, the other two monitors just provide supporting information.

We really must get more people to understand the value proposition of multiple screens!

Amazing array of Windows Powered Devices

Wed, 30 Jun 2004 16:28:53 GMT

I was wondering a few weeks ago why the Tablet PC team were moved into the Mobile and Embedded Devices division in Microsoft. Then I saw this web page and the array of Tablet format devices and I realised why! Theres a very good write up of recent news from the Embedded developers conference here. More links to Windows powered devices can be found below:

Tablet PC
Pocket PC
Media Center PC
Smart picture frame
Portable Media Center
Smartphone
Windows Automotive
Gametrac gaming device
SPOT watch
Windows-powered cash register at store
iCEBOX kitchen PC and home controller

Goodbye to the Tablet

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:01:59 GMT

There is a flurry of debate in the blogs because Peter says, I Still like the tablet. But I am all out of love, well I have a story to tell about Tablet love as well.

I got my first Tablet, a HP TC1100, in January and it was love at first sight, I just took to the slate format and at the time forgave the terrible keyboard, (although it didn’t take me long to remember my old IBM keyboard with increasing longing). I wrote all about my early experiences in my tablet blog. Well my circumstances changed and I found myself working mostly from home so the mobility benefits I was getting from the tablet reduced and I started to look at the platform more objectively. These are some of the conclusions that I came to, but I think it’s a pretty personal view so don’t expect any conclusions that I draw to apply to you.

The Tablet didn’t work for me when I was mainly deskbound:

I love screen real estate, before I had a Tablet I had a 1400*1050 resolution ThinkPad A20p, it had a great keyboard to, (I love IBM keyboards).
At home now my desktop drives a 19” 1280*1024 LCD and a 19” 1600*1280 Flat screen LCD and I still have my ThinkPad A20p as a management console for my home lab. So for me the 1024*768 screen on the TC1100 was just not up to the job.
With a screen that size the Tablet is a huge improvement over a PDA, but it’s a lot bigger, I have just settled on an IPAQ 4150 so you can see that size, or lack of it in true portable device is pretty key for me.
As an auxiliary display things improved considerably but the docking station was a bit ‘strange’ and I still found myself struggling to use the small screen for anything really useful, when I had a glorious 19” LCD as my secondary. I tried using it to monitor my email but I found I could do that just as easily on my IPAQ, which had a brighter screen as well.
I found it slightly under powered compared to my desktop, but I could have lived with this, it had 1GB of memory and this seemed to make up for the slower processor and hard drive.

The true mobile experience I was hoping for never happened:

When I first got my Tablet one of the real benefits I was looking forward to was being able to take anywhere and use it inside and outside. However all too often I found that the lighting was not right. Outside it’s practically unusable and this was a real disappointment.
I also never came across a really good case that I could use at work and home that was small enough to always take with me everywhere
Battery life however was never a problem for me as I had two batteries and I managed 6-8 hours.
The end result I ended up leaving it behind and wishing I had a Pocket PC so that I could take something everywhere. In the end I bought a Pocket PC!

I still needed a keyboard:

I was impressed by the handwriting recognition when I got the Tablet and blown away when I started testing XP SP2, but I still needed a keyboard for so much of the work I did when I was mobile, even when I was just sitting watching TV, answering a few emails or reading blogs I missed the keyboard. This was a real shock to me as I just love the slate format, its just that the slate format is only really useful when you are making very short notes, browsing/reading or making hand written notes or drawings. If you are doing any serious writing or PowerPoint for example you really need mouse and keyboard with today’s applications. Strangely enough PDA’s seem much easier to use in slate mode, they are lighter, the applications are better optimised and my expectations about being able to write are much lower.
I have found since switching back to a laptop when mobile, a IBM ThinkPad T40, that I use it much more sitting in the lounge or in the garden than I used my tablet. Quite the opposite of what I was expecting when I let the Tablet go.

So what did I like about the Tablet:

I loved the slate format
I thought the HP hardware design was fantastic, apart from the keyboard, they should have recognised how important the keyboard was still going to be
I thought the handwriting recognition was first class, especially in SP2 and was vastly improved over that on my IPAQ, however it should be put in its place, a useful complement to the keyboard, or a bonus when you just have the slate with you
I loved the natural interaction model, and the more applications that are developed to take account of it the better
I loved OneNote, but still think it could be optimised slightly more for the pen interface, look at a product like Pocket Informant for some clues
I loved some of the concepts, but not the reality, for example the voice recording and recognition just did not meet my expectations

What needs to be done to get me back in love:

I need a first class keyboard
I need a much higher resolution screen, one I can read an A4 page on, 1400*1050 would be just fine!
I still want to be able to use it in slate mode, keyboard detached, to minimise weight and maximise portability
I want some innovation put into cases, or protection so that I can bung it into my rucksack and take it wherever I would take a pad of paper
I need to be able to read the screen outside
The price point needs to be right
It needs to be light enough without the keyboard to hold in one hand

Interestingly all of these improvements are hardware, there have been a lot of criticisms of the platform, but I personally liked it well enough, sure improvements would be welcome but these are unlikely to win me back on their own. At the end of the day today’s hardware does not allow for the radical new way of working that the operating system and applications already support.

For another personal perspective, I looked at the needs of one of my daughter’s who suffers from Raynauds and Scleroderma. I think a Tablet would be just perfect for her, I wrote that up here.

Microsoft Monitor on the Tablet PC

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 17:03:04 GMT

Microsoft Monitor is probably the best blog out there if you want a real insight into Microsoft and provides consistently high quality challenges to Microsoft as well. This entry on the Tablet PC is typical of what to expect.

Tips for using Lotus Notes and GTD methodology

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:51:56 GMT

I recently read Getting Things Done, and wanted to apply it using Lotus Notes. I struggled a bit and to tell the truth I have not fully implemented it even after a month of playing around. I am trying again now that I have a new PDA, better synchronisation software, mNotes and some hints and tips from Eric Mack on using Notes and GTD and on using Notes for task and action management.

Choosing a PDA - can it really be so difficult!

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:59:40 GMT

I used to have an IPAQ years ago and despite using it a lot in the beginning I gradually stopped using it mainly for the following reasons:

I did not like having to sync it
It was too big to carry around everywhere
I did not have a case that gave me instant access to it when carrying it around, so it tended to be in a bag
The battery life deteriorated to the point where it could not be relied upon
It did not have enough storage space without a great big expansion jacket add-on

Then along came a Blackberry which I instantly fell in love with, I have talked about my love affair with my Blackberry before in my gadget blog. However I recently started working from home and the subscription costs to the Blackberry service no longer seemed worthwhile so I decided that I would take that money and invest it in something that was a higher priority, I decided I would try a traditional Palm or Pocket PC PDA again.

The process of choosing is a classic example of the tyranny of too much choice.

My experience went something like this:

Every day I changed my mind because I loved my Blackberry so much
Email and Calendar on a PDA always seemed like a compromise compared to the Blackberry, but everything else I wanted from a PDA either was not an option or didn’t work too well, like tasks for example.
I have a company supplied phone and for some reason its incredibly difficult to get GPRS approved so I would have a PDA that was only online at home, making the transition from the BB even more difficult
On the days when I did decide to go the PDA route I alternated between Palm and Pocket PC.
Each day I switched from wanting a lovely large high resolution screen at all costs, to wanting a small Bluetooth and wireless equipped machine

I finally managed to make a decision to swap from the BB as follows:

I gave myself the money from a years BB subscription and asked myself how I wanted to spend it
I decided that it was useful to break the instant email addiction
I decided that when I was out of the house it was most likely that I was not working so getting a device that had many non work related distractions would be a good idea

I made the Palm/Pocket PC decision as follows:

I run Windows 2003 Server on my desktop and I was able to make sure that Active Sync worked fine and that Wireless worked fine with Pocket PC before I made the purchase
I had quite a lot of software left over from my old IPAQ. Particularly eWallet and Pocket Informant which I really liked
I use Lotus Notes at work and came across some fabulous synchronisation software called mNotes and I was able to check this out before I made the decision, (its available for Palm too but I couldn’t test it)
I was familiar with Pocket PC and knew that it was good enough

I made the decision on which form factor to get as follows:

I knew from past experience that having a small device was important if I was to be successful in motivating myself to carry it around
The small devices were cheaper than the half or full VGA models
The VGA models had problems with some applications using the screen in VGA mode that required hacks to get around and whilst these seemed to work for most people they seemed to stop WIFI working for some people
The VGA models were first generation. Next generation models were likely to be much better, but I didn’t want to wait
I decided that if the next generation models were really great then I would do a bit of cascading and make my eldest daughter very happy when she starts High School in September!

I finally decided on an IPAQ 4150 because:

HP has a good reputation and they are going to be in the market for the long term
I had an IPAQ before and that gave me confidence
It is very small
It has a great screen
It has a good software bundle
It has Bluetooth and WIFI
I found a great case, holster style that fits on my belt and is as close to the Blackberry case as you can get. That decision was easy I wanted something exactly like the Blackberry, this is it.
I got a good deal and had money left over for the case and 512MB storage card
Battery life seemed ok, but a high capacity battery is available if I have problems

The Tyranny of Choice

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 16:58:40 GMT

An article in Scientific American, titled The Tyranny of Choice has sparked a considerable debate on the web about the problems faced by western societies as a result of too much choice. In fact the idea is a very old one, I came cross it years ago but it is not mentioned very often by your every day Happiness literature which tends to talk more about internal changes that people can make to the way they think rather than factors from their external environment.

You can sum up the material prior to this article as follows:

The intent of advertising is to make us dissatisfied with what we have
If we meet people who have more than we have, or have different spending priorities or saving priorities then we tend to be dissatisfied with what we have

These two factors are the main environmental factors that effect happiness. In my experience they are even more powerful than having somewhere warm and dry to live and enough food to eat, which I soon got used to. However some people disagree with this and consider these to be essential, (Hygiene factors in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

This new article extends the model a bit with the following concepts:

Too much choice can be a bad thing
Especially if when faced with a choice you spend a lot of time and energy of assessing the options and agonising over them. This is a particular problem now days with the popularity of “what xxx” type magazines and the Internet which:
- Exposes us to ever increasing choice
- Provides access to a huge amount of information on each option
- Provides access to a huge amount of often conflicting opinion about each option
Even worse if when you finally make a decision you then continue to expose yourself to options and opinions that may change the choice you made and lead to dissatisfaction. In fact this can easily happen anyway because often the way that tradeoffs are prioritised when making a decision then change once the decision has been taken and real life experience refines or overturns them
These factors are compounded with easy credit which does not provide a natural limit on peoples capacity to dream and plan to acquire things.

I don’t want to repeat the article, but it’s worth mentioning that it identifies different personality types who are affected by the above to a greater or lesser extent.

There are a few articles that discuss this topic in more detail and I have provided a few of the links here:

Worth repeating is a great quote by the great physicist Richard Feynman, who when faced with the dessert menu in restaurants always chose the chocolate option. As Feynman saw it, while the other desserts might be better, they might not be. On the other hand, the chocolate option was always pretty acceptable - so why fret for ages over making a choice that might be wrong anyway?

In many ways Richards approach mirrors my own, I am happiest and most at ease when I am doing simple familiar things, that I don’t have to think about, but which I know I enjoy. When faced with the option to do something different I will often avoid it to reduce the risk that I won’t enjoy it, rather than take the risk that I will enjoy it more. However when faced with choice I definitely suffer from the problems described here. Read my blog entry about choosing a new PDA for an example.

Giving tablets another try

Sat, 29 May 2004 16:06:52 GMT

I must admit that whilst I love my Tablet I rarely use it for text input. For flexible browsing, reading, reviewing etc its a great machine. For text input and voice recognition the quality is just not there. In this article Tom Yager of Infoworld agrees, and gives the tumbs up to Tablet PC 2005, part of XP SP2, which radically improves the recognition quality and the general usability of text input, although I am not sure about the voice recognition yet. He also notes that hardware innovation is continuing.

It just works!

Wed, 26 May 2004 18:14:21 GMT

Great little piece of writing by Scott about the fact that some stuff just does not work easily enough and how people will seek out maybe pretty complex ways of doing things just to be confident that it will work first time every time. This is right up my street, I really like things that 'Just work' and MS and the Linux community need to really focus on that effortless simplicity. For inspiration I look at the Nokia phone UI, (6310i in my case), and the Blackberry which I think is inspirational from a UI design standpoint and reliability standpoint. How much of what we use in IT every day from any supplier would pass the test, effortless, reliable, intuitive etc and to what extent are these attributes sacrificed for fancy features, customizability etc.

One of the most impressive things about Scott's post? He wrote it all on his Tablet PC using the new input panel in SP2, his experience 'it just worked', that was my experience to with the alpha, except in Lotus Notes which kept crashing, so I had to uninstall it!!

What would I like?

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 13:23:49 GMT

In my previous blogs, I talked about my concerns over the neglect of employees productivity and my personal productivity challenges. In this blog I talk about some of the simple things I would like. Its interesting that lots of them sound quite easy to achieve, and some of them work right now if only the systems were configured that way.

A single inbox, that works all of my email services and with the appropriate directories I need to access
A single calendar, that aggregates and synchronises calendar information from different sources and allows me to interact with different resource reservation and freebusy services
A single task list, that aggregates tasks from different sources and responds to the source with task progress and completion information
A single contact database, that synchronises with the server side record if there was one
A single presence/IM environment, that integrates with my contact database
A single way to get subscriptions, RSS seems the likely candidate, whether its subscriptions to company announcements, or WSS lists, or search results, or changed web sites
Then a place to make notes, link stuff together, annotate
a way to record everything I have touched in any way, has written by me, read by me, been pushed to me, subscribed to by me, and store it in a way that makes it easy to find again and easy to backup, perhaps peer to peer, ie to another machine in my home, rather than just to that expensive server infrastructure in my company.
an easy way to share subsets of the above with my peers
Then a UI for it all like the Avalon/WinFS stuff people are showing that allows me to search across all of this, group/visualise it in anyway I can imagine etc.

All of the above need to be integrated, so tasks can be converted to email, emails into tasks etc and other applications need to interact with them. This sounds fairly easy. Web Services standards for handling tasks, calendar items, emails etc. A standard client side representation like that in WinFS, standard UI components that all spps can leverage client side. Standard ways to deliver subscriptions, but more extensible than RSS, because I need more metadata associated with the items in the subscription.

Then I need something similar for files, probably a lot like WebDAV on the server side, but with support for pulling down all that rich meta data that’s on the server, remembering which server the files came from, understanding how to work offline/synchronise, version control etc.

Finally I want my devices to be in sync, without having to think about it, and if I get a new device I just want to be able to tell it who I am, and it rebuilds all of the above from some peer to peer replica.

This sounds a lot to me like Longhorn, but probably not explained as neatly and tidy. However I don't see the Longhorn value proposition being communicated in these terms, they are still trying to sell to the corporate audience, not to the individual. Maybe that comes later.

My personal productivity challenge

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 12:49:03 GMT

In my previous post In Pursuit of personal and team productivity I talked about general problems. In this post I talk briefly about my problems. My company:

Uses Notes for email and some applications
Has an extensive Intranet for functional web sites, news, standards etc
Uses Plumbtree as its portal and to host communities, some are still hosted on Notes
Some of the projects I am working on use MS Project Server
Others use just MS Project
My company uses Lotus Sametime for IM
One of my project teams uses Microsoft Exchange IM
External contacts use MSN IM
Some of the projects use a Windows file server for project files
My function uses a Notes Database as its repository for Work In progress and approval
Some of the projects use WSS, for documents, risks, issues and changes
Some use spreadsheets
Some of the projects use an in house developed collaboration server
My customers use even more systems, some MS Team Services, others use Documentum

What do I use, in addition to all of the above:

I use my local disk for all my work in progress, archive, to read, to review, to watch etc
The family email is accessed using Outlook express
My personal email is accessed using Outlook, because I use Newsgator for RSS
I use Onenote for note taking and for my daily log
I use Radio for my blog
I use Office 2003 Pro most of the day

I have a range of different devices, which I talked about here and here.

I think this mess is pretty typical, but one thing I know - it certainly is not productive!

Too many PDAs

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 22:13:20 GMT

I have 2 pocket PC's, a Blackberry and a Tablet, all of them play music but I also have a Creative Nomad 20G. How did I get in this mess.

Well it started with one of the original IPAQ's which a few years ago I thought was a marval. I carried it everywhere and loaded it with loads of useless software and tried to squeeze a CD's worth of muisic onto it. After about 3 months I hardly ever used it because the battery life was too short and the synchronisation too much of a chore. My 11 year old daughter has it now, and after a month of enthusiasm hardly ever uses it either.

Then I got the Nomad, I copied all my CD's onto it and hardly made a dent in its 20GB, I converted all of the Tech-ED conference DVDs into WMA files so I could listen to them in the gym and out walking. It got used a lot for a few months, and still gets used perhaps once or twice a week. But if I lost it tomorrow it would not have much of an impact on my life, in fact I probably wouldn't even notice.

Then I got my first Blackberry, a dual band mono model with integrated phone, (headset only). I loved it, in my view almost perfect form and function for its purpose, Wireless Email and Calendar. I never did get tasks to synchronise with Notes properly. In fact after about a week the only time it ever went into its crade was to charge its batteries. I never synch it with my PC all synch was wireless. However the gadgeter in me wanted more so I got a colour 7210, triband model, with a bit more memory and a real phone. Its great, has fantastic battery life and the colour makes it look a bit livelier. its true that its adictive though. I use it every day, even though I work at home because it allows me to appear to be working when I am in a cafe or walking, or sitting on the beach. The fact that I never need to synch it, that its always on, always up to date, incredibly slick to use means I am never without it.

But then I was given a shiny new Pocket PC, from HP. It's tiny, has a fab display, bluetooth, 64MB, SD and CF cards. it syncs with my Tablet just great. But its not got a phone, I still have to take an action to synch it and it's just not as slick as the Blackberry. However I do still use it, but more as a complement to my Blackberry, one I can do without but is nice to have.

Finally I have my tablet, my only truely indispenable gadget. Its a perfect complement to the Blackberry though neither depends on the other they both keep in synch via a corporate Notes server wirelessly. One is there for real work, the other for instant on communication.

I have another phone, a Nokia 6210i in addition to my Blackberry because Blackberrys don't have a car kit and using them as a phone does eat into that fantastic battery life.

I have so many gadgets!

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 11:03:01 GMT

I realised as I was thinking about things to blog about that I have a lot of gadgets. Some of them are useful and some are toys. Often I find I am wildly enthusiastic about one of them for a few weeks, telling everyone they need one too and then it sits in a corner for months without being touched. So I thought I might help others not to make the same mistake and also pick out some real gems, for me at least.

So these are some of the Gadgets I will talk about soon:

My two IPAQ Pocket PC's
My Blackberry
My Tablet PC
My KVM switch
My Amstrad Emailer
My HP OfficeJet d125i
My Wireless network
My Creative Nomad Jukebox
My Minolta Dimage Z1 camera
My Nokia 6310i phone

and just in cae you think I am too rich for my own good, lots of these were provided by work, or by friendly suppliers.