February 14th, 2009

The pen is mightier… than it used to be

February 14th, 2009

My favourite recent gadget is a Livescribe Pulse. Described in their Architecture Overview as ‘a Montblanc-sized computer’, it’s a pen which incorporates the Anoto technology – there’s a small camera which points at the tip, and a very faint dot pattern on the paper which allows it to recognise its position. The upshot is that it records what you write and can transfer it to the computer when you put it in its USB dock.

2009-02-14_10-38-00

The technology has been around for some time… you can get similar pens from Nokia and Logitech, and the paper is quite widely available. But there are a few things that persuaded me it was the right time to try one:

  • The pen is aesthetically more pleasing, I think, than its predecessors.
  • There is support for the Mac. Decidedly beta quality at present, but the 1.0 release is out on Tuesday.
  • The coolest bit of all: it has a microphone built in. If you’re in a meeting, making notes, you can also be recording the audio. Later, you can tap on some text you wrote – or click on it if you’ve transferred it to your PC – and it will play back what was being said at the time you wrote the text. Quite brilliant.

There are quite a few fun things you can do with this beyond simple note-taking, and they’ve even got an SDK so, if you want to, you can write your own ‘penlet’ applications for it.

I got mine from a UK supplier, Magicomm. Livescribe have just announced another round of investment funding. They deserve to do well, I think.

Update: Bother… they’ve postponed the Mac release for a month or so.

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February 13th, 2009

An app a day…

February 13th, 2009

The Camvine February Twitter Feed is going well – one new thing to do with your CODA screens every (working) day. We’re up to nine so far!

Some of them are just hints and tips, and some require a little more technical ability – though even those are pretty straightforward if you understand a bit of Python or PHP.

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February 12th, 2009

ClickToFlash

February 12th, 2009

In general, browsing the web with Flash disabled makes for a more pleasant experience and saves a lot of horsepower on your machine. But it’s a pain switching it on and off for those few sites where it’s important.

ClickToFlash is a WebKit plugin which provides a convenient solution for Safari users. Flash content is replaced with a shaded image saying ‘Flash’. If you click on it, the Flash is loaded and plays, and you can right-click to whitelist a site so that their content always works.

There are, apparently, still a few rough edges, but I’m going to try it for a while and see how it goes.

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February 11th, 2009

Hudson Tribute

February 11th, 2009

I can think of few greater honours one could achieve in this life than to be celebrated in a song by Garrison Keillor. Here’s a little ditty he wrote last month about the crew of the Hudson River plane crash.

From the News from Lake Wobegon podcast.

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February 10th, 2009
February 7th, 2009

So terribly Cambridge

February 7th, 2009

Leaving a college late last night… passed a girl talking on her phone… “Oh… Psalms are my faves…”

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February 5th, 2009
February 4th, 2009

Ambient social networking

February 4th, 2009

Most of you will know by now that my company, Camvine, makes a particularly cunning lightweight digital signage system – that’s ‘screens on walls’ – which we call CODA.

One of the fun things about CODA is that it’s entirely web-based, and can link to other internet-based sources of data. This month, on the camvine Twitter feed, we’re going to be posting one example per day of fun and interesting things you can do with CODA.

The first one, appropriately, was a little PHP script that would allow you to display your Twitter feed on a CODA screen. This is an example, by the way, of what makes these social networks work for me. I don’t have to keep going back to their web pages or run lots of applications that get buried on my desktop. Amidst various newspaper front pages, weather forecasts, recent photos, my CODA screen also shows me my friends’ blogs, my Twitter and Facebook feeds, my diary and the company calendar… and I notice them when I walk past the screen to get a coffee, for example. it’s almost a way of picking up on the activities of your social world out of your peripheral vision.

I think this needs a name. I’m calling it ambient social networking.

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January 30th, 2009

A new warning about Sony batteries

January 30th, 2009

The back of a Sony battery pack advertises a different model, which promises ‘Absolute Power’.

Well! I’m not buying any of those! Don’t they know that it corrupts absolutely?

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A Rose, by any other name

January 30th, 2009

The Blackstone Key has a different title in German:

Miss Mary and the Secret Document. I think they’re planning on a ‘Miss Mary and…’ series.

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January 24th, 2009

Expanding your horizons

January 24th, 2009

My friend Phil Endecott has just released a rather interesting iPhone app: Panoramascope.

It can identify the various peaks visible from your current location, which, if you start to think carefully about what that involves, is actually quite clever. And, if you take a photo with your phone, you can overlay the app’s view on your photo.

If, like me, you live in a place where peaks are things you dream of going to see on holiday, it can have more prosaic uses, like telling you where nearby pubs or tourist attractions can be found. You can also save locations, so you can look fondly back at the view you had last summer from the top of the Matterhorn.

Start by loading some overlay sets – in my case, European placenames, peaks, and pubs – and then you can search for a location, which is generally much easier than entering latitude and longitude. Here’s part of the view from Coniston Old Man:

This will work on an iPod Touch, but you really want an iPhone for the GPS and camera facilities.

Available from The iTunes store, of course, but there’s a lot more information available at Panoramascope.com.

Update: Ha! If the thought of viewing all those glorious peaks makes you feel exhausted, and you’re more interested in the pub-finding options, Phil also has something just for you!

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