A selection of things which rocked my world this week
Its been a fun and exciting week. Not only has Copenhagen managed to give us sunshine for days at a time, but I received my new tablet pc and home server too!
Tablet PCs are the coolest thing. Ever.
To help me to be a better ‘mobile worker’ (i.e. work on the train to work as well as at home and in the office) I’m given a laptop at work, since I already have a slew of big, chunky performance laptops under my belt, I thought I’d opt for something a little more exciting, like the HP 2710p Ultralight Notebook. Its light, gives a totally reasonable 4 hours of battery life under (what I consider) normal load and best of all, has that cool swiveling tablet functionality.
In case you’re not familiar with Tablet PCs, the screen rotates thru 180 degrees allowing you to close the laptop with the screen facing outwards, then use the stylus to write on it like a real, physical notebook. The most shocking thing is that it actually works! Its really easy to take notes on, the touch screen is responsive and crystal clear, coupled with OneNote and I haven’t used a piece of paper since the thing landed in my lap.
Windows Vista has some awesome built in tablet functionality, mainly the writing space overlay you are given to hand-write into any text box – the recognition is astounding, even my worst scrawled, scripted handwriting is correctly converted into typed characters. I’m experiencing an accuracy of about 95%, and its getting better every day, since windows is automatically adjusting to my style. Its weird, but I’ve really gotten used to having this new way to interact with my machine – from crossing out dodgy parts in Word document with a red felt tip, to circling mistakes in an excel graph and signing and mailing documents electronically, rather than the old Print-Sign-Fax farce of yesteryear.
The only mystery is why these things never took off… any ideas?
Windows Home Server
My old server didn’t quite make the trip to Copenhagen; I shouldn’t be surprised that it finally gave up living since in one form or another the poor thing has been alive (and abused) for close to 7 years now. Anywho, the upside of its sad demise is that the insurance company paid out for the cost of a similar replacement, and the payout stretched easily to buying myself a shiney new HP MediaSmart Server.
As you might expect, its cool. It looks great, makes pretty much no noise (although there is a fan, which you can just about hear when is deathly quiet, a situation which rarely occurs in my house) and works way better than I expected. Just stick the install CD into a machine, whack the next button until it isn’t there anymore and you’re done – its working, on the network, named sensibly and ready for your files/backups/photos/music/whatever. Of course, there was the small matter of installing Power Pack 1, but the download was tiny and the install was painless.
Its my first look at the Home Server OS – which looks like it’s been derived from Server 2003 – and it seems like a pretty sweet platform. Being able to remote desktop into it is a great feature, and taking the ‘You can break your server by doing this’ warnings with a pinch of salt it seems like its really versatile! I’ll need to get it working with my VOIP phones sometime this week by seeing how much it likes Axon – we’ll see how that goes, but for now, its two thumbs up.