Today I took my tablet out for the first time. I was at Parakai School with the wonderful teachers who work there. First up, we were distracted by a powerline that had chosen today to snap and fall down just metres from my car. The teachers that I was working with, and I joined the support crew. When I realsised that my car was metres away from sparking and live wires, I decided to get my car keys and move my wheels away from the arc-ing lines.
I returned to the disaster scene with my camera.
And snapped some photos.
Back to work.
Day one with the tablet. Toshiba’s Config utilty allows you to set up different profiles to allow your laptop / tablet to set itself up in different networks. It was a snip to get through parakai’s proxy-server and get onto the ‘net.
I found that my screen resolution was too high to let the teachers that I was working with to see what I was doing. I was able to fiddle with the settings and get an 800X600 screen and centre the screen so that the others could see what I was doing. This was the ideal resolution to let the others see Kidpix – an essential tool in my line of work.
Other jobs. I found that I needed to set the tablet so that I could wake it from keybowad. During the day, I move between all sorts of things and the computer often went to sleep. It asw a serious pain to have to turn the computer on again. So I set t to allow it to wake up from the keyboard.
I bought an extended slice battery. This meant that I could use the tablet all day – I hoped. In reality the battery ran out at 4:15pm. Not too bad, but I hope that with conditioning I can get the unit to last an hour. the sl or so longer. For sure, I can set up profiles to make the thing go to sleep here and turn off this bit there and make the screen dim at this point, but really I just want a devcent 6-7 good hours out of the batteries.
The slice battery adds a sort of wedge under the machine. When you are in notebook mode it tilts it approximately ten degrees towards you. Quite usefull really. In tablet mode, it adds a bit of weight, but not uncomfortably. I was still able to work with the computer tucked into my elbow.
As my partner in crime describes it, “that computer is really quite dinky.”
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