A couple of years ago, my wife showed me an article about the Fly Pen, a pen that used the paper on which it was writing as its user interface. Brilliant. It used a special coordinate system provided by “micro-dotted” paper to help the pen know where it was on the paper. Amazing technology from a team led by Jim Marggraff at LeapFrog (makers of the LeapPad). The FLY Fusion Pentop Computer itself was very cool but never really caught fire as a kid’s toy. The micro-dot coordinate system went on to be used in LeapFrog’s popular Tag Reading System book products. (Admittedly, at the time, I thought the Fly pen was just a ruse to sell special paper.)
The idea is simple; cram the computer into the pen, make the pen the computer. Jim Marggraff left LeapFrog and started a new venture to push this idea forward. His company released the Livescribe 2 GB Pulse Smartpen with some fanfare, and has recently released the more sleek and higher-capacity Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen. They look like all kinds of “wow.”
According to the Livescribe folks, “Echo™ and Pulse™ smartpens are functionally the same.” The older Pulse model uses a proprietary pen cradle for connecting and charging, while the new Echo provides a much more universal micro-USB port directly on the pen (read: no more freak-out if you forget the cradle at home). You can see their official word on the other differences here.
I really want an Echo, though I’ve been down a similar road before.
I have terrible memory skills; truly atrocious memory skills. If I don’t write it down, it will not likely be remembered. I’ll doodle symbols and representations of concepts as mental placeholders to replay my meetings in my head, recounting the journeys to the hard-won conclusions. Without preserving these epic tales on paper, the previous battles are lost and we are prone to retelling and reinventing the entire process at each meeting, burning my clients’ valuable time and money. One of my responsibilities as a consultant is to be a good steward of their time and money. As such, I send meeting recaps/summaries (usually along with my bill). The more detailed and precise the recaps, the more forward progress we can make and the better I look in my clients’ eyes.
I have wound my way through countless note-taking techniques. I refuse to type on a keyboard during a meeting because it is impersonal and rude. Somehow, writing on a piece of paper conveys a collegiate respect while typing on a keyboard conveys a disconnection, as if you’re working on your thesis instead of listening to their wisdom. Also when I’m talking to my clients on the phone, I don’t want them to hear me typing. As such, my note-taking is almost always pen-based. I have tried paper notebooks, note pads, and even pen-based tablet computers with MS OneNote, but they have always crushed me under their redundant effort; either I ended up with mountains of paper to transcribe (and the doodles need to be recreated in Visio), or I was forced to sync the tablet with my desktop and be tempted to use both the laptop and desktop (risking dreaded sync issues). Also, the tablet computers just didn’t have the resolution, flexibility, reliability, or battery life of a pen and paper. When you think about it, you just can’t beat the “pen and paper.”
So, the siren song of the Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen is calling me once again to the shore of note-taking paradise. It’s features are sexy; audio recording automatically linked to your drawn notes, text OCR, bookmarking, search, you can print your own special paper from your (compatible) laser printer, and the note management software looks ridiculously-great. You owe it to yourself to watch the demo videos.
So, will the Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen be my last stop in my journey for the perfect note taking workflow? I can only hope.
So, my fancy-schmancy single-bay Hoverman antenna looked cool. It worked well, considering that it was 75 feet from my headend in my house. The problem – the cable run was 75 feet from the headend in my house. I couldn’t just re-route it because I needed to keep the ground bonded to my house ground. What to do, what to do.
I decided to try putting it in my attic, but the single-bay Hoverman is some 38 inches tall, and my attic space was 30 inches. In desapair, I looked around my garage and saw my old coat hanger hoverman that I had made. It sat collecting dust, waiting to be donated to a friend. It was about to become supremely useful again.
Long story short, the coat hanger Hoverman is now in the attic, the cable run is now 25 feet long, and the signal strength is superb. The amazing thing is that the antenna is up there, sitting behind a metal duct, beside some other metal conduit. Just sitting there, pointed in the general direction of the general area of the TV transmitters many miles away. It is a superbly ugly and elegant piece of garage tech.
As I mentioned yesterday, I uncovered a set of audio tapes that our college choir recorded in 1988. While most of the tapes were labeled with details of their contents, one of the tapes was not. Of course, that tape contains a work that is eluding our ability to identify its name and composer. After several hours of searching online on YouTube, iTunes, and some more obscure sites, we have not found a match for the piece.
It is a “Jubilate Deo” for choir and organ recorded by our choir in 1988-89. There are a lot of “Jubilate Deo” pieces in the wild. Ours does not appear to be one of the more common ones. It sounds like a John Rutter composition, but I cannot find a match for it in his compendium. (Maybe I just didn’t look far enough?)
So I hope to leverage both ‘the human processing power’ and ‘the human generosity’ that is the Internet. Can you help us? Do you know the name and composer of this piece? Extra-extra-super-duper brownie points if you can provide a link to audio/video of someone else’s performance of it to help us confirm the identity.
We cleaned out our basement a couple of weeks ago, and I found three of my old audio cassette drawer units FULL of vintage 1988 tapes. Two of the units were full of copies of terribly lame 1980’s albums. (Did my copy of Vixen’s Rev’ It Up really deserve its own type-written label? In retrospect, I think not.)
One of the units contained audio recordings of my old college choir, jazz band, and jazz singers. Jackpot. I have many fond memories of the RMC music program, college-type shenanigans, road trips and choir tours (usually involving beer), and staying up way too late with the crew. I’ll save the story of how I met my wife for another time, but I want to thank my manipulative friends. Ah, good times.
I dusted off the old Technics RS-T212 and plugged it into my computer. Wow, there was some good stuff on those tapes. Don’t get me wrong; there was a fair share of imperfect/poor performances to be found on the tapes, but most were quite respectable.
I must say that Dr. P (Dr. Donald Francis Pihlaja) was an incredible director and an even more amazing person.
At the request of several former members of the RMC Choir from that era, I am making a few select recordings available as MP3 files here. The key soloists shall remain nameless to protect the innocent.
UPDATE 2010-10-20: Our fix was to replace the wireless access point and the router with a new Netgear WNR2000 WiFi Router. We were lucky that we were able to use that old Linksys equipment for 6 years before it was obsolete. (I mean, come on, the old devices still said “Linksys” on them.)
Now, on to the old story as if it were new…
Our iPhone WiFi connections will frequently stop working even though the WiFi symbol remains visible in the iPhone’s status bar. We suspect that there is some janky business happening when our iPhones toggle between the cell network and our local WiFi network during the phones’ sleep/wake cycles, as well as at other times.
Nothing we have tried has fixed the problem. Our next step will be to buy new networking gear, but we have no guarantee that will fix anything. The “fix” that has worked best for us is to try to keep the iPhone WiFi connection alive all of the time, and those settings are described here as well as in this blog post. If you want to know more about our journey and to see if our problem matches yours, read on…
Ever wonder what it’s like to read a bedtime story with a pre-schooler? Wonder no more. Enjoy this 8 minute clip of me reading to one of our kids right before bedtime, with a few interruptions…
September 23rd, 2010 is a day that shall live in infamy. Facebook implemented a ‘fix’ in their software that tore the entire system down for 2 1/2 hours. (Yeah, been there.)
Besides being an excellent opportunity for journalists to highlight that people are way too addicted to social media, it was also a chance for me snark.
As seen by my Twitter followers at @mrscottfletcher, here is a blow-by-blow rundown of the events that transpired between 2:15pm and 4:36pm Thursday September 23, 2010.
2:13pm
Derp. Facebook ‘server not found.’ I can hear cries through the din of humanity now.
2:17 PM
BREAKING NEWS: Global productivity returns to 95% pre-Facebook Levels. (5% of people still clicking Refresh.)
2:20 PM
BREAKING NEWS: FOX News reports that Facebook DNS failure caused by hidden clause in Healthcare Reform bill.
2:28 PM
BREAKING NEWS: FEMA estimates Farmville crop losses in the billions of nothing.
I’m a pencil and paper kind of guy. I like scribbling and drawing arrows on dead trees. I like doodling on napkins and drawing stick figures. That’s just the way I roll.
As I was noodling around with a Window Phone 7 app idea, I realized that I needed a visual canvas on which to explore my genius. The Design Templates for Window 7 is an excellent start, and there are some other great resources available from the official developer site, but I needed some sheets with blank mockup screens… so I made some. Read on to view and download the files…
Geek dad. Must over-complicate! They call me… Complexitor!
When I saw a video of Sterling Johnson blowing enormous bubbles, and I knew at that very moment what I wanted to do when I retire. Since I will probably never actually retire, I decided to just get this little itch out of the way right now. No time like the present, and all things are possible with the vast compendium of knowledge called… the interwebs. Read on about the details!
The cable companies would like you to believe that the only way to get moving pictures on your wall-mounted glass lamp is to connect to their media faucet. Thankfully, the folks that sell those old wire contraptions called “antennas” have joined forces to provide tools to break free. One such tool is AntennaWeb. I recently used it to line up my new Hoverman antenna. It is a marvel of “web 2.0” meets “free as in beer.”
While the tool is ridiculously-awesome, I do have an important tip for using it –
Lie about obstructions and height to see ALL stations.
If you tell the truth, the system will faithfully only show you the stations that you might get with rabbit ears. You really want to see ALL of the stations that you could get if you bought/built an Frankentenna. So, you should say “no” obstructions, and that your antenna height is absurdly high, like 200 feet.
Doing so will cause the website to show you vectors and distances to all stations in the area. You can then dial the exaggerations back a bit to see more-realistic estimates of reception.
The AntennaWeb website will give you a detailed listing of stations, channel numbers, distance, compass direction, and the recommended antenna type for each station. You can even click “View Street Level Map” to see a Google map with directional markers and a legend for each station. It is truly a smile-making tool.
If you’re on the fringe, you will likely see that most/all of your local TV stations’ transmitters are grouped together in one area so that one directional antenna will cover them all.
Good luck with your OTA TV endeavors, and let me know how you’re doing in the comments!
. We were lucky that we were able to use that old Linksys equipment for 6 years before it was obsolete. (I mean, come on, the old devices still said “Linksys” on them.)
