loose wire blog

The Size of the Future

(This is a guest post from a friend and long-time colleague, Robin Lubbock of WBUR, who will be contributing to Loose Wire Blog. You can read his blog, the Future of New(s), here.)

Why don't you buy hard-back books? Either they are too expensive, or too big. They are too big to comfortably hold in one hand. So if you're sitting in bed trying to read you've got to find a way to prop the thing up. Not a hurdle you can't overcome. But an inconvenience.

Now think about the reader of the future. It's the same issues. Size, readability, and cost. Any lessons you've learned from book reading, apply them to the electronic book and you'll be imagining the electronic reader of the future.

So why hasn't anyone made a good electronic book yet?

I was in Staples the other day and an assistant asked me what I wanted. I said "I want something about three or four times the size of an iPhone which I can use for browsing the Web when I'm in bed." He said they had nothing like that, but he wanted one too.

So when I saw photos of a group of proposed readers in an article by John Markoff in the New York Times this weekend I thought my dream had come true.

But Markoff has a different view. He says he also used to think he was looking for a mid-sized reader for the Web. He went over some of the issues. But he reached the conclusion that although chip power means that you can't get book performance out of a phone sized reader yet, people could be comfortable reading newspapers on a three-and-a-half-inch screen.

I took his implication to be that if people are happy with a small screen for reading newspapers and blogs, there will be no call for a mid-sized reader.

But I still want one. And I still believe the company that successfully develops a tool that has the same benefits as a novel, in usability, portability and ruggedness, will make a fortune.

Stumbling Into the Future

Listening to Mark Anderson's predictions for the coming year on the BBC World Service with Peter Day. A lot of his stuff is spot on, and what I've been thinking (a lot less coherently):

• Small portable computers -- he's talking about the Samsung Q1, but he could also be talking about the Nokia N95 of the Asus Eee PC. He says that there's research showing a 7" x 9" screen is the optimum size for users to absorb and handle information. I haven't seen that, but I think there's definitely a sweet spot there, at least for users on the road (where we tend not to need to handle large amounts of data, instead focusing on what's next up the pipe -- that meeting, that story, whatever. What I think will be most interesting, though, is when the screen can adapt to the situation or environment -- a foldable screen that can fit your seat size, expanding when you need it to something much bigger. 
• Revolt by users over privacy issues. I think ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble, as ever, is through his dabbling with a Plaxo screen-scraping tool, finding out before the rest of us that what we thought was our data, isn't. (This isn't strictly true; Facebook does allow you to export your friends' data via a third party app called FriendCSV.) Anderson's point was that people don't like things like Facebook's Beacon, which monitored users' activity on participating websites, but I think bigger will be people's growing realisation that all the time they've spent on Facebook isn't easily transferable. 
• Pervasive Internet: It won't be a big thing. It'll just be there, a place where we store and find stuff. A key element in this is flat rates for cellular data. It's beginning to happen, but I still get a real shock when I see my cellphone bill. Speed is also an issue.

Of course, he said all this much better, and understands the wider context (oil prices, that kind of thing). But it's good to know someone who charges $600 for a newsletter to the likes of Bill Gates isn't that far off in his thinking from a minnow like me.

Technorati Tags: scoble, plaxo, mark anderson, future, 2008, mobile computing, cellphones, mobile data, pervasive computing, facebook, privacy

Leaky Laptop

My friend has brown gunk leaking out of the bottom of her laptop. I'm not able to see it in person, but the above is what it looks like. She says that nothing has spilled on her laptop, but that's the only explanation I can think of. Could it be something else?

Grynx has a couple of interesting posts on this kind of thing: One post describes rain getting in to a router:

It didn’t look that bad from the outside, but gee it really looked bad on the inside. The brown gook is what was left after the water dried. It seems like the water wasn’t that clean and that it contained a lot of minerals which has rusted.

He points out that the problem is not the water:

The water in itself is not your enemy but what is contained inside the water is. Especially the minerals which will be left after the water evaporates and in this case it went really bad as the minerals decided to corrugate.

I can only assume this is what has happened to my friend's laptop. Over time the water has gone but left behind the minerals which have corroded the circuitry inside. What can be done about it? Well, the best thing would be to take it in for servicing, but if you wanted to try to resolve the problem itself, there are some interesting solutions among the responses to the post, and in this post on cleaning a laptop that has suffered from a wine or soft drink spill.

Among the tips:

• Clean the laptop as soon as you've spilled something. Don't just dry it out and think the problem's gone.
• As soon as you have done the spill, turn the laptop off and disconnect the power. Remove the battery.
• The key is washing off the residues. Suggestions: compressed air, rubbing alcohol (which contains Isopropyl alcohol), contact cleaner, WD-40, distilled/deionized water.
• When you dry it out, leave it for several days. Use a hairdryer and/or compressed air as well.

There's another video here on cleaning up a spillage from eHow.com.

All these stories, however, have the computer/device not functioning. My friend's does. But with that kind of gunk coming through, I can't help feeling its days are numbered.

Update: Apparently, it's not a liquid spill but a partial melt of the rubber seal around the hard drive, a problem not uncommon in the model (a Toshiba Portege R100.) It explains why the machine is still functioning, for now. Sounds like a design fault they need to fix.

Technorati Tags: spillage, leaks, laptops, damage, howto

Backing up hard to do, but worth it

This is an edited version of my weekly column for Loose Wire Service, a service providing print publications with technology writing designed for the general reader. Email me if you're interested in learning more.

Sometimes it takes something like an earthquake to realize that you're vulnerable.

Once the ground stops shaking and you've begun to sense that your life -- and those of your loved one(s) -- are not in imminent danger, your thoughts turn to the next most important thing in your world: Your data.

Well, of course, that may not be your exact train of thought, but it's the general direction. So much of our lives are digital these days -- e-mails, music, photos, social lives -- the first thing we tend to clutch when we're in trouble is our cell phone/laptop/external disk drive.

Or at least it should be. So what should you prepare for when things go wrong and you need to evacuate, pronto?

Here, in brief, is how to do it:

Whatever can be online, should be. E-mails, for example, should be on something like Google's Gmail (or Yahoo!, who have launched a new e-mail service that's at least as generous in terms of storage as Google's.)

This doesn't mean you can't also keep your e-mails on your own computer, but make sure they are also online. Get in the habit of e-mailing important documents to yourself, as well, so you've got an extra copy online.

This means you can evacuate in a relaxed state of mind. Well, as relaxed as you can be fleeing a building that is burning/falling/swaying/no longer strictly speaking a building.

Same goes with photos: Get in the habit of uploading your favorite photos to an online photo album service like Flickr (www.flickr.com), because if there's one thing you don't want to lose it's family snaps.

Sign up for the Pro edition if you've got the cash and a fast(ish) Internet connection, since at US$25 a year for unlimited storage it's a reasonably cheap way of backing up.

Add photos incrementally: Just get into the habit of uploading photos to your Flickr account when you upload them from your camera/cellphone to the computer (I'm assuming you do this; you do do this, right?)

Of course, online options are only good if you're online. And, tellingly, I'm not right now because there's a problem with the Internet -- and quite a big problem, since even my trusty backup connection is down -- so you shouldn't rely exclusively on connectivity.

(The other problem is that as more of us go digital, we can't hope to store everything online, because there's so much of it. Our iPods store 60 GB or more these days, which is still impractical to back up online.)

In which case you need to have a hard drive backup. There are several ways of doing this, but here's the best one: Back up everything on all the PCs and laptops in your house to one big external drive the size of hardback book, which you can then grab as you exit the building in an orderly manner.

Here's how to do that:

Maxtor offer a pretty reasonable range of backup hard drives -- the cheapest are really just hard drives in a plastic casing (good to prevent damage: hard drives are not as tough as they pretend to be.)

Expect a whopping 500 gigabyte drive to cost you less than $200. Attach the drive to a USB port and you've now got a seriously large drive attached to your computer.

Then buy a program called Acronis True Image ($50 from here) and make a backup image of all the computers in your house.

(An image is a sort of snapshot of your computer. It's faster than backing up individual files, but will still allow you to restore individual files or folders if you need to.)

It's a little tricky to set up but you'll get the hang of it, since you're going to be backing up once a week. (Yes, you are.)

If you think this is too much for you and that the only data you really need to save are a few documents, then get a USB flash drive (those little sticks you can put on a key ring.)

Prices have fallen to the point where they're a cheap option now for up to four gigabytes. I would recommend the SanDisk Cruzer micro, not only because they don't have removable caps (which always get lost) but because they include software that make backing up important files easy. (Stick the drive in a USB slot and follow the instructions.)

A word of warning: Think hard about what data you've got and what you want to save. It's easy to forget stuff hidden in an obscure folder.

Get into the habit of saving important files -- whether they're attachments, photos, spreadsheets or whatever -- into the same folder. It'll make finding them to back them up much easier and quicker.

Oh, and try not to wait until the building is swaying/filled with smoke/has moved down the street before actually doing the backing up.

Trust me: You can't count on thinking as clearly as you might expect.

The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today

del.icio.us Tags: backing up, backup, storage, acronis, indonesia

Foleo, Foleo, Where Art Thou?

Caption competition:

"Is this a dagger I see before me?"

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio"

Now you see it, now you don't

Photo from BusinessWire

It has the grim predictability of a company that doesn't seem sure of what it's doing, and what people want. Ever since Ed Colligan unveiled the Foleo -- a Linux-based sub-sub-notebook -- a few months back, folks have been saying it was a mistake. Now it's dead.

I liked the idea, but felt it was the wrong solution: the iPhone and the Nokia N800 seem to prove people now want something that isn't just a workhorse, but another onramp to the social web, whereas the Foleo seemed to be aimed simply at business customers. Such folk have long been used to lugging heavy stuff around, so it made no sense.

Anyway, Ed has done the right thing and knocked the project on the head, taking a $10 million hit (while sparing a moment for the poor third party developers who committed time and resources to software to run on the dang thing). What is most telling, though, are the comments left on his blog post announcing the gadget's demise. They reveal the frustration and supportive passion of Palm users around the world, and to me illustrate what people really want from the once-great company:

• a better interface that isn't so buggy and unreliable.
• better battery life (the Foleo boasted six hours. But remember the IIIx: days and days on a couple of AAAs. How far backwards have we gone?)
• more durable. The IIIx also survived a lot of bashing about.
• a phone that isn't a sop to the phone companies -- in other words, so it can do VoIP, work on WiFi networks as well as cellular ones.
• find a way of getting a bigger screen onto a Treo. How about projection?  
• GPS. Things have moved on, Ed, and nowadays we expect our devices to fit a lot more in.
• Like good cameras. Not just for snapping, but for scanning.
• And 3.5G.
• And probably WiMAX.
• And big storage.
• And decent software that can handle PDFs, flash, browsing and interactive stuff.
• And decent keyboards (get back in bed with the ThinkOutside guys, or whoever bought them.) I still love my Bluetooth keyboard and can't understand why they're considered such an afterthought.
• Voice commands and voice recognition.
• USB connectivity

The bottom line, is that we've been thinking the PDA is dead, whereas we should be thinking the other way around: The smartphone is just a PDA with connectivity. A good PDA does all these things we've been talking about, and while we take calls on it, that's a small part of what it is about. We just want the things we did on our PDA to be connected, that's all.

That's not just about being able to take calls, it's about SMS, email, browsing, and of being able to meld into our environment -- GPS to know where we are, cameras and HSDPA and GPS to take photos that go straight to Flickr, tools like Jaiku to wrap us into our social network. It's still a digital assistant, it's just a connected digital assistant.

As one commenter put it, it's still a Getting Things Done Device.It's just we do lots of different things these days, so a to do list shouldn't be where you stop.

del.icio.us Tags: palm, foleo, pda, treo, iphone, smartphone, mistakes

A Beginner's Guide to Saving an Old Computer

(This is the text of my weekly Loose Wire Service column, written mostly for newcomers to personal technology, and syndicated to newspapers like The Jakarta Post. Editors interested in carrying the service please feel free to email me.)

What should you do with an old laptop that is so slow you have time to down a cup of coffee while it gets ready?

A reader wrote to me recently: "I would be very grateful for your advice on how to make my very old (1999?) Toshiba Satellite 2545CDS laptop work faster and less erratically."

His symptoms may be familiar to you: "Composing this message in Yahoo Mail becomes a hardship. The cursor moves slowly or disappears, to suddenly reappear. The computer is always doing something other than what I want it to do -- the hard disk drive light is flickering madly, the drive is whirring, but the cursor won't move.

"Using the Delete or Back Space key is particularly exciting: you press the key many times and nothing happens until the machine wakes up and wipes out your whole sentence. Appending files to messages takes hours, and when you leave to go to the bathroom the computer has put itself on standby.

"It takes me a whole cup of coffee to wait for the laptop to get ready to do two things simultaneously like proofreading a document in PDF format while listening to AccuRadio Classical."

The reader goes in a similar vein for several pages in the best description of a computer past its sell-by date I've come across. He concludes: "Other friends have told me it is time to buy a new laptop, and I now have a much faster Toshiba Portege."

But understandably, he's reluctant to let go of this piece of hardware, with plenty of hard disk space remaining, and better inboard speakers than its successor. So what to do?

This reader has done the first thing right -- clean the Registry. The Registry on Windows machines is the place where all the information about your programs and settings is stored. Windows refers to this file a lot, so the bigger it is and the more messy it is, the slower your computer runs (and the bigger the chance of errors.) So you should keep it clean.

The easiest way to do this is via a program called CCleaner (no, that's not a typo; the first C stands for something a family paper like this can't mention.) CCleaner is free from here: http://www.ccleaner.com/. Download it.

Then, just to be on the safe side, create a Restore Point in your system in case you don't like what CCleaner does (you'll find System Restore under your Accessories/System Tools menu. CCleaner will also let you save a backup of your registry before making any changes).

When you've created a Restore Point, run the "Scan for Issues" on CCleaner's Issues tab (it may take some time). Then click on the Fix Selected Issues button. When this is finished your Registry should be a lot cleaner -- meaning the computer will be faster. A bit.

Next stop is to defragment the hard drive. This tidies up the files on your hard drive so they will load more quickly and new files can find a place for themselves without having to split into smaller bits. Think of it as cleaning up after a raunchy party: the files are the wine glasses and plates piled up in the sink, the kitchen cupboards are your hard drive where they all need to go.

Windows has a pretty good defragmentation tool called Disk Defragmenter in the same menu as the System Restore program. Run that -- and drink another cup of coffee or six while it's doing it. It could take some time.

This should speed up your computer. But it may not be enough. There could be several reasons for this. One is that the hard drive is overloaded. (If so, delete the big files until at least half the hard drive is empty.)

My reader is clearly not having this problem: He reports using only 1.5 gigabytes of the 4 GB hard disk. In this case, you may be better off cleaning the hard drive of everything and starting again.

This is not a step to be taken lightly: It involves backing up all your data, collecting all your serial numbers and installation disks for software you have, and then canceling all hot dates for a few days as you laboriously reformat your hard drive and install the operating system, the drivers for your external devices, software programs and settings, and then the files you saved from before.

It's like war: boring and scary in equal measure. Boring because watching a progress bar move slowly from left to right isn't fun, and scary because you occasionally get heart-stopping moments where you think you've lost an important file forever, or the whole process stops for no apparent reason.

I wouldn't recommend it, but neither would I recommend you outsource it -- at least until you're absolutely sure you've backed up every single file, e-mail, photo and password you might need again. But if your computer is not responding to lesser measures, this might be the best way to go.

Another tip: If your computer is an old one, don't try to force fancier operating systems onto it. If your computer was made in 1999, for example, chances are it won't like Windows XP very much, for the good reason that XP came out in 2001 and was designed for faster chips than were available back then. Your computer won't like it and will rebel.

Better to have an operating system that's older than the computer. Even better, if the computer is not going to be your main device, ditch Windows altogether and install Ubuntu (www.ubuntu.com), an Open Source (meaning free) operating system that looks a lot like Windows, but will run quite happily on older machines.

You could still play music files, write documents and e-mails or surf the Web on it, and you'll be considered very cool by your friends.

There's always another option: Ditch the laptop and just use the hard drive as external storage for your other computers. But that's for another day.

The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today

Technorati Tags: computers, registry, fixing, howto

A Beginner's Guide to Scanning

(This is the text of my weekly Loose Wire Service column, written mostly for newcomers to personal technology, and syndicated to newspapers like The Jakarta Post. Editors interested in carrying the service please feel free to email me.)

A lot of folk ask me whether they should buy a scanner: those things that take bits of paper, or photographs, and turn them into files your computer can use.

Frankly, I'm surprised by this (not the taking and turning, but the asking). Why would people not have a scanner? I have four.

Well, five, actually, if you include that little business card scanner sitting in a drawer somewhere. OK, six. I bought a backup scanner once in case all my other scanners eloped. I scan every piece of paper that I can.

I scan whole books I want to read on my computer. I scan coworkers who pass me in the corridor. The truth is that scanners can save you lots of time, space and pain. But I readily accept that my passion for scanning may not have won you over.

First off, don't get your hopes up. Twelve years ago I bought a scanner that, lulled by the pictures on the box of pages flying into my computer, I thought would rid me of a ridiculous four-drawer filing cabinet full of stuff I had been lugging around Asia.

I was to be disappointed. Scanners won't digitize everything paper, I learned, and sometimes they will but will take so long the task won't be finished in your lifetime. No, scanners won't make you paperless, but they may lighten your load.

So, the second task is to figure out what there is you have to scan, and then get the right scanner for the job. There are flatbed scanners, which look a bit like the tops of photocopiers, which scan one loose sheet of paper at a time. (You can sometimes buy sheet feeders that, well, feed the sheets in, to some of these units.)

These can be cheap: Less than US$100 will buy you a quality Canon device. These are good, and do the job well. They're fine if you've got the odd document or photo to scan, or the odd chapter in a book you want to store on your computer.

But they're not good if you've got lots of stuff. For this, I'd recommend something like the Fujitsu ScanSnap. I have one of the basic models (5110EOX, selling for $300 to $650), which looks a bit like a small fax machine, and it's still going strong after three years of heavy-duty scanning.

You can only scan single sheets into it -- none of the flatbed/photocopier option -- but it will scan pages fast, front and back, without you having to do anything other than press a button. The pages are scanned direct to a common file format called PDF.

I love my ScanSnap. I will scan all incoming business mail -- bills, receipts, statements, letters of eviction -- which means I need keep no formal paperwork except the odd will or letter from Aunt Maude that has sentimental value. The ScanSnap can also handle business cards, which it can scan more or less directly into Microsoft Outlook.

Neither of these options is particularly portable. If you scan and you travel, you may want to consider a small portable scanner. NeatReceipts has two scanners that make more sense if you move around: one a thin, long device that looks more like a truncheon or night stick, and one a small, cigarette box-sized business card scanner.

Which brings me to the important bit of scanning: What happens to the document once it's scanned. Most software simply converts a physical thing to a digital thing, but to make the text that is on that physical thing something you can edit, search or add to, you need to run more software over it called optical character recognition, or OCR.

This software - which usually comes included with the scanner -- basically looks at the patterns in the image of your document that the scanning software has created and tries to figure out the letters.

OCR software nowadays is remarkably accurate, so long as you give it good, clean documents to start with. Don't expect your spidery handwriting or a smudged and heavily annotated tome from the Dark Ages to come out 100 percent accurate.

NeatReceipts doesn't just specialize in digitizing and organizing your receipts: The smaller device handles business cards too. But for most jobs, you'd be better off with something like Paperport, which will handle all the OCR for you and also help you organize your documents into folders.

Bottom line? Scanning stuff is a very useful way to keep your desk clear and to be able to find stuff. But you have to be disciplined about it, and get a rather perverse joy out of watching paper disappear into a roller.

And be prepared to be regarded by co-workers, friends and family as a bit of a freak.

Technorati Tags: scanning, paperport, fujitsu, OCR, organizing

The Jakarta Post - The Journal of Indonesia Today

Foleo, Surface, Stumbling etc

There’s lots of news out there which I won’t bother you with because you’ll be reading it elsewhere. But here are some links in case:

• Palm has a new mini laptop called the Foleo. I like the idea, but I fear it will go the way of the LifeDrive, which I also kinda liked.
• Microsoft has launched a desktop (literally) device called the Surface. Which looks fun, and embraces the idea of moving beyond the keyboard not a moment too soon, but don’t expect to see it anywhere in your living room any time soon.
• eBay buys StumbleUpon, a group bookmarking tool I’ve written a column about somewhere. I don’t use StumbleUpon that much but I love the idea of a community-powered browsing guide. Let’s hope eBay doesn’t mess it up like they seem to be doing with Skype.
• Microsoft releases a new version of LiveWriter, their blogging tool. Scoble says Google is planning something similar. True?

Oh, and Google Reader now works offline. Here are my ten minut.es with it, and a how to guide at ten ste.ps. This is big news, because it’s the first step Google have made in making their tools available offline. I’ve found myself using their stuff more and more, so the idea of being able to use the Reader, Calendar, Docs and Gmail offline seems an exciting one. (We’re not there yet, but Google Reader is a start.)

This brings me to again plead with anyone offering an RSS feed of their stuff, to put the whole post in the feed. Offline browsing is not going to work if you can only read an extract.

Tags: rss, google, microsoft, surface, foleo, stumbleupon, ebay

The Shift to a Mobile Web

This more than anything else, probably, will push the shift from desktop browsing to mobile browsing. The more restrictions workers face on their office computers from blinkered employers, the more natural it will be to turn to their mobile:

A nationwide study by T-Mobile UK has revealed that over a quarter of the UK's workforce, still deprived of web access, are now turning to the Internet on their mobile - as employers enforce blanket bans on net usage.

A few points worth making here:

• It’s an umbilical thing: offices misunderstand the use of the Web, which is probably why they ban it. It’s no longer just about surfing for information, shopping or football scores (although it’s still that). It’s about staying connected. The Internet is no longer just a resource of information (and, cough, images) but of “checking in” with one’s network, whether it’s on FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Skype, or wherever. Offices need to cope with this somehow, or they’ll lose the attention of their workers.
• A different screen, a different app: the shift to the mobile web because of this negative pressure from the work place will create huge demand for mobile web apps that work quickly and efficiently. Indeed, it’s not the only pressure: Browsing is a quite different experience on the mobile phone. Browsers are already developing ways to reshape information to fit on a screen, but a smarter way would be to find new ways to deliver the information via the mobile phone (Widsets have made a start in this direction.)
• Toilets: the unsung productivity hive Techdirt rightly points to the part of the survey which shows that 15% of users “resorted to hiding in the toilet just to get online.” Working from home, I do this with my laptop, frankly. But it’s not really about resorting to anything: it’s what the mobile world is. We used to read the newspaper on the john; why not a mobile phone?

History will find it weird, not that we connect to the Web on the john with a device once designed to make phone calls, but that for 15 years we had to do that via a big hunk of metal, plastic and wires sitting in the middle of what used to be a big open space called a desk.

Tags: mobile+web, toilets, browsing, offices, restrictions, UK

Loose Bits, Nov 28 2006

From my PR intray, some surprisingly interesting little odds and ends:

LocalCooling is a 100% Free power management tool from Uniblue Labs that allows users to optimize their energy savings in minutes and as a result reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions. The software "automatically optimizes your PC's power consumption by using a more effective power save mode. You will be able to see your savings in real-time translated to more evironmental terms such as how many trees and gallons of oil you have saved."

Electronic Arts Inc. today announced SimCity for mobile, which "lets mobile phone users create and manage the growth of a living city in the palm of their hands. Originally created by Will Wright, SimCity is now available on major U.S. carriers." Not sure how this works, as there's nothing yet on EA's site. It does sound a bit like milking a cash cow or is it flogging a dead horse? 

CyberDefenderFREE is "a full internet security suite that can operate  standalone, or complement existing security software to add an existing layer of early-alert security to the desktop." As far as I can work out, this is a competitor to Windows Defender although it seems to include a collaborative element, where users report either manually or automatically dodgy software and sites they've come across. I think.

 

Technorati tags: simcity, mobile games, security, phishing, viruses, malware, environment, power, greenhouse gases, global warming, games, windows

del.icio.us tags: simcity, mobile games, security, phishing, viruses, malware, environment, power, greenhouse gases, global warming, games, windows