Zagg keyboard for the iPad2

I finally got my Zagg keyboard for my iPad 2 and am very pleased with it. From a pros perspective, it connected with no trouble at all and types very well. I have another blue tooth keyboard for my droid X and while it works well, the set up was a little painful. I like the fit over my iPad, as it completely covers the device much like a turtle shell, so while in the case / keyboard, it is completely protected. From a con perspective, I wish the device could nest in the case face up when you are not using the keyboard, and the rise of the case means adjusting your hand position a bit to avoid having it rub the sides of your hands while you type. The keys are also a bit smaller than a normal keyboard, again, requiring a slight adjustment to typing style. On balance, I think it is a great device, making the iPad even more useful. I have only had it a couple of days now so the real test will be a couple of months from now when we see how much use it has gotten. At this point, the keyboard case has replaced my original iPad smart cover as the default cover and I am typing this review using the keyboard.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

iPad 2 cover - functional art

So I am really loving my iPad 2, and I just found a cover, made in the Netherlands, that is a attractive (more so) than the device it protects. The cover is made by Miniot and can be seen here.

The craftsmanship stands out, certainly, as does the functionality. I have the basic smart cover for the iPad and it works great, don't get me wrong. This is not a NEED, rather a want based on aesthetics and the very slight functional improvement. How cool is a wooden cover on the high tech iPad - function meets natural beauty. Nice work guys at Miniot.

iPad 2

So I did it - I broke down and bought the iPad 2. It was a bit of an impulse buy, since it happened serendipitously that I was in Target when the shipment of 2 arrived. I took it as a sign and bought one and I am very happy with it. The unboxing was simple, the device, a cord and a plug. No user manual to much around with, just plug it into iTunes and go. The biggest struggle was what content to keep where, since even though I have the 64g model, it is no where near enough storage for even just my music, let alone all the other goodness. I settled on keeping a subset of my playlists on the iPad, the rest on my iPod touch and only moving over a subset of my photos and movies to keep room for the apps I want to use.

I'll throw up a few more posts as I work out the best configuration for this little gem, from office apps to photo apps and more. My goal is to keep the apps as low cost as possible, going with free wherever there is a good alternative.

As an eReader, it is great for magazine style reading and casual browsing, but I definitely prefer my kindle for prolonged reading. The eInk vs tablet display is no real comparison for long reading sessions and ease on the eyes. Overall - totally pleased and glad I went this direction even though I was certain I was headed for a Motorola device.

Droid X and Froyo

Sometime around 3 this morning I updated to Froyo. Very cool and worth it. I have been stalking the net a bit looking for this update with the improved performance and capabilities and right out of the gate, the screen rotation, system performance, and keyboard jump out as improvements. The upgrade was painless and reasonably quick and all my apps seemed to migrate well though with over 300, it's hard to know for sure. I have to winnow through the stack a bit to see if any died in the upgrade.

My focus now is cleaning up the device from all my testing and sorting out the apps I am using. I have downloaded a few key utilities that make a difference and I will profile that final list here when I am closer to complete.

Update on the Droid

So I got my droid and have been playing with it steadily since. I am more and more impressed with it the longer I use it. It has the capability to be a lightweight laptop replacement and more. A few features have been especially helpful and fun. The Navigation bit is one of my favorites when I travel, as it is the best integrated platform I have experienced. The droid X ties in my music (streaming or local), navigation, and phone calls into one tight experience. It pauses my music for turn by turn alerts, re-routes dynamically as well as all the other standard stuff you would expect out of a nav system.

Beyond the nav, the music and entertainment capabilities are top notch with streaming media options, a nice integrated music player and a boatload of apps to pick from. I am quite happy with Pandora and the built in media player for now as most of the time I stream my tunes. I also have a selection of local (Philly) radio stations and a few others that I occasionally use though again, Pandora usually wins.

The Droid is on its way!

I'm looking forward to the imminent arrival of my new gadget / phone! The Droid has been picked up for delivery and should arrive today or tomorrow latest. More to come, but it's looking good for arrival before I have to leave for Asia.

phone ordered

I took the plunge and ordered my droid X last night! I'm really looking forward to getting it and playing with it. I'm using my dads droid while I compose this post and it's only making me more eager to get the device. The typing on the keyboard seems solid and the autocomplete seems to be the best i've used so far. Now commences the waiting. :)

iPad compliments the Kindle?

I ran across an article today about the iPad and Kindle. While you may know about the Kindle app for the iPod, iPhone and iPad (among other devices) have you thought about owning both and if you will use the Kindle with an iPad? No? Well, time to start thinking about it. :) The article in Computerworld raises that question and makes a good case for both in parallel.

I use my iPod touch with my Kindle now, to look up references and notes while reading, especially on technical or theological reading. I don't yet have the iPad, but if I did, I can imagine continuing that pattern in a deeper way. Among the other points that are raised, the readability of the Kindle vs any other device is still king. I love the Kindle's ability to vanish in your hands while using it - it becomes like a paper book, only lighter and easier, and avoids the problems typical of electronics such as heat, battery life and glare. I do like the iPod for short stints reading and to bridge the times I don't have my Kindle, but for long reading sessions, the Kindle is the best.

Read the article yourself and see what you think, and if you already have both, let me know how close the author is.

The Kug

On our company intranet I ran across a link to the Kug

The Kug is a revolutionary new product in the world of making hot drinks. No longer have the hassle of interacting with a kettle. Boil water in your Kug to make a drink and bring it with you, and then re-heat it or make a fresh drink without the need for a kettle. Great for bringing in the car, or using at work and avoiding the 'work kettle'.

I think the idea is great - the genesis was around making life simpler / easier for people suffering with arthritis who struggled with their kettles. Clearly the concept has a much wider reach into most of our lives. There are similiar ideas on the market, but this seems to be the best execution so far.

diaspora - the new Facebook?

I use Facebook, blogs (clearly) and other social networking tools and am always interested in what's next as well as what's happening with what I have. With all the recent hoopla around Facebook privacy (subject of a coming post) it's good to see alternatives popping up that MAY get legs. I just got plugged into diaspora, described in their own words here:

What is it?

Enter your Diaspora “seed,” a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends. Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity. Once we have built a solid foundation, we will make Diaspora easy to extend to facilitate any type of communication, and the possibilities will be endless.
For a little more detailed explanation, checkout this blog post.

I'm not sure how far these guys will get with this idea but conceptually it's cool and not entirely new (napster anyone?). Good luck and I'm signing up to the blog to stay informed.

Blackberry v iPhone

In today's issue of CIO, there is an article on the Blackberry v iPhone debate. Essentially the claim is that the Blackberry in all it's forms is dying (or dead depending on whom you ask) and the iPhone is the new king in town. I imagine the Android crew have an opinion on that as well - the story mentions the iPhone app store as the key to keeping the Android at bay but having used both, I think that's a weak defense. Read the article for yourself and see what you think.

Goodbye BlackBerry: Future Belongs to iPhone

The Apple iPhone changed the mobile game in less than three years. Apple continues to make improvements that resonate with consumers, who are gaining more control over technology in the enterprise. I've seen nothing from RIM that shows it can reverse this tide.
By Tom Kaneshige on Wed, May 12, 2010

Chemistry Add-in for Word

So as promised, here is the blurb on the Chemistry add in for Word. Very cool idea and I hope they include it in PowerPoint as well since so much of the work ends up there for presentation.

The Chemistry Add-in for Word makes it easier for students, chemists, and researchers to insert and modify chemical information, such as labels, formulas and 2-D depictions, from within Microsoft Office Word. In addition to authoring functionality, Chem4Word enables user denotation of inline “chemical zones,” the rendering of high-quality and print-ready visual depictions of chemical structures, and the ability to store and expose semantic-rich chemical information in a semantically rich manner.

You can head over to the MSR site and grab it here.

Office 2010 impressions

I just went through the upgrade to Office 2010 - what a journey but it seems worth it so far.

• Downloaded x86 and 64 versions last night
• looking forward to install!
• Tried to set restore point on work machine - policy lock out! (Really???)
• Start install and wait... stopped and told need SP3
• Mad hunt on M$ site for SP3 (really about 1 minute) since not a corp distro
• found and downloading.......... still downloading .........
• now extracting.............................................
• Now installing.............................................
• REALLY!!! ok - I'm patient and I can multi task to get my mind on something useful
• So the install of SP3 took a very long time and I picked up the rest of the install the following day in the office while I went to another meeting - I did a full upgrade install.
• Install completed (finally!!)

The result is a nice office experience that seems to work well. I a very pleased with Outlook and the search / threaded discussion capability. The other apps work as expected with tweaks here and there. I am going to upgrade my home machine next and that's a 64 bit machine with 6G of ram so it will be a good comparison to the 32 bit laptop install.

BioCoder - code for Biologists

While trolling through some Microsoft research projects recently I ran across two of particular interest in my current area - BioCoder, described below, and Chemistry for Word which I will cover in a later post. The BioCode concept applies programming constructs to the protocol definition process. The idea is interesting and worth exploring. The blurb below from the site summarizes it nicely and you can read more by downloading the package here.

BioCoder is a high-level programming language that enables standardization and automation of biology protocols. Our vision is to change the way that experimental methods are communicated: rather than publishing a written account of the protocols used, researchers will simply publish the code. The code can be automatically converted to human-readable steps for manual execution in the laboratory. When written as a computer program, biology protocols can be parameterized to facilitate reuse in different contexts. They can also be mapped automatically to the setup of a given laboratory, taking into account the equipment and reagents that are available.

Gap Minder

I recently came across an interesting web application called GapMinder. It allows you to get tailored views of the world and compare a wide variety of demographic information. The summary from the site is here below.

Gapminder is a non-profit venture promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

We are a modern “museum” that helps making the world understandable, using the Internet.

I recommend a visit. It reveals the stark contrasts that we often take for granted here in the US and in other more developed countries. How does this gap (Wealth / lifespan / healthcare) shape our world view?

Ontology based data & semantic relationships

Working through a data architecture and strategy for clients recently, I had to compile some information regarding development of the landscape. This information is reflected below.

The primary components to reference are detailed in the included diagram. In this case, the ontology is clearly a piece of the stack, but not the “data” or the single UI.

The ontology is best thought of as a view of an established information set that uses concepts to define relationship. The data is then mapped onto ontology to provide a specific high value view of the data, aiding in the generation of information and knowledge. Clearly there is an assumption that as a precursor to the use of the selected ontology, significant work has gone into the process of cleaning the target data through direct manipulation or a meta data based transformation layer to manage synonym matching, etc. across sources.

Another definition, more succinct is, “Ontologies are computable conceptualisations of a knowledge domain” as defined by Nico Adams, emphasizing the transformation from data to information that can then be further acted upon.

The OWL Web Ontology Language is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. Source: http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/

The semantic layer-cake.: (Copyright © 2008 World Wide Web Consortium, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal

Useful links :

1. W3 OWL Reference a) http://www.w3.org/TR/owl-features/
2. Good article on Ontology implementation a) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T64-4GMB0F0-F&_user=358874&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000017638&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=358874&md5=4b5c6decc4b2f01fad8183b00aec72b1
3. 3) DDI - An Ontology for Drug Discovery Investigations a) http://users.aber.ac.uk/ddq/ddi/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
4. Open BioMedical Ontologies a) http://www.obofoundry.org/crit.shtml
5. OWL ontology browser a) http://pellet.owldl.com/ontology-browser/
6. OBO Ontology Download Matrix a) http://www.berkeleybop.org/ontologies/
7. Semantic Chemistry a) http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-chemistry.html

Reference:Stephen P. Gardner, Ontologies and semantic data integration, Drug Discovery Today, Volume 10, Issue 14, 15 July 2005, Pages 1001-1007, ISSN 1359-6446, DOI: 10.1016/S1359-6446(05)03504-X.(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T64-4GMB0F0-F/2/f296f93f44347cfd561668ede72ac5f9)

Nico Adams, Semantic Chemistry http://www.semanticuniverse.com/articles-semantic-chemistry.html

More to come...

Running an "Air Car"

I ran across a link to an interesting article today - a car that runs on air. Seems like an interesting idea to me, of course, there is a cost to generating the compressed air that has to be balanced against the elimination of traditional fuels. The article is at the HowStuffWorks site and talks through some of the challenges. 

The car will only be practicle for short commutes and is focused on city driving at this point, but like all the other ideas out there, a good start.

Introducing the Solar Tree

Because real trees just are not effecient enough...

I just read an article on solar trees - see the link below. The idea is that these "trees" will use solar panels to charge batteries that will power street lights, thereby reducing power use in the city and reducing the overall carbon footprint. It does seem to beg the question, what about the real trees and their negative carbon footprint? Are we replacing CO2 processing trees with plastic trees to reduce rather then eliminate green house gasses? A single tree is a pretty efficient carbon dioxide processing plant. Maybe some combination of real trees and street lamps would be ok. I guess something just rubs me the wrong way about calling these "trees".

Check it out for yourself by reading Introducing the Solar Tree