Tangled up in Purple » Tablet-PC

Reinstalling XP Tablet Edition

nix — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 04:09:33 +0000

I’ve had my Toshiba M400 for nearly six months now and in that time I’ve fallen out of love with the Tablet. I love the concept, but if having the extra functionality means having all of the extra bloatware then it’s not for me.

I have re-imaged it from Toshiba’s image several times but the sheer number of bits and pieces added in by Toshiba have alway annoyed me. The hardware is great – but the software to support that hardware is awful. Over the last week it’s been like woring through thick sludge trying to get basic tasks accomplished. Having a gigabyte of memory is useless if it’s swallowed up by seemingly redundant drivers and processes. I like to be in charged of what I run on my computer. They don’t call it a PC for nothing.
So this week I bit the bullet. After a search around the interweb I discovered a way to cleanly install XP Tablet Edition. I used nLite to create my own Toshiba flavoured version of the Tablet PC OS. Using Media Centre Edition as the base OS, I slipstreamed in the Toshiba Raid drivers. Then after tweaking it a bit for my own particular preferences, I made an ISO. I used Nero to burn the ISO to CD and voila – one Tablet Edition disk.

Last night I started the XP install process. I used the key that Toshiba used to install Windows even though it’s different to the one printed on the sticker on the notebook. I’m not totally certain about how kosher that is? It worked though!

After getting XP loaded, installing my anti-virus and testing the pen (to make doubly sure that I had done it right), I put in my Toshiba drivers disk – the one one that I made from the factory install. I loaded the wireless drivers and then headed straight out to Windows update. After that I headed to Toshiba’s support site and got the latest basic driver set. After making sure I had got all the drivers I started to load the additional stuff to run the stuff that I wanted to run.

I have loaded the hard drive protection utility but not the accelerometer (who in their right mind would want to shake a computer to start a programme?). I loaded the raid driver but not the additional systems because I don’t think that I’ll be using an extra hard drive.

I haven’t loaded the Toshiba Power Saving stuff because I’m hoping that Notebook Hardware Control on top of the default Windows setup will take care of my power saving needs. I haven’t loaded ConfigFree because, much as I like the idea of being able to change the network and proxy server information on the fly, it’s just too resource hungry.
At the moment I have a basic installation with all of the basic programmes that I use on a day to day basis. Firefox (and all my extensions – gotta love FEBE) is looking after my browsing and FeedDemon is taking care of my RSS. Office is installed and I’ve got Nero and WinDVD loaded. I’ve put VideoLan in for my media needs but I still need to load Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative to manage the extra codecs.

At the moment I am back in love with this little computer. It’s whizzing along beautifully with none of the lags or stuttering that have blighted things previously. For sure I have yet to put in PaintShopPro, Inspiration, KidPix or some of the other programmes that I use regularly. So far so good. Now I really need to find that Ghost disk!

Tablet Apostasy

nix — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 22:14:45 +0000

So | find myself in something of a conscience crisis.
lam in one of those is it really working moments that is happening all too often at The moment.
First up. This tables PC thing. I’ve got myself an absolute monster of a machine. Hs gel a cove Duo processor, a gig of ram. Its gel a 12 inch Screen so potentially its light enough to always have at hand to quickly jet down a nougat through to a website. I have 80 gigabytes of hard dive space that, can full up with useful “stuff!! ¥ paid for a DVD miter so I can shave my shut. And on it goes.
When I first got mu. tablet I prepared itself to become
• garn. A abutter. A tablet evangelist converting hither and thither.
I traveled the web looking for applications that would Show off the miraculous properties of my new torn.
first on my list of must haves was Art Rage. The guy had already sent me a full license to ¥ was lucky enough to be able to really run the programmer through it’s pace). My verdict. Art Rage and pen computing are a marriage made in heaven.
Next up I needed to look at handwriting. Note here that I’ve been using handwriting on an pocket pc since 1998. So I’m reasonably au fait with what it can and can’t do.

And so here lies the problem. I handwrote the first part of this post into OneNote (because that’s where I now keep a lot of the “stuff” I collect and because I can theoretically covert that text into typed text. (You can see a snip of what my handwriting looks like here. ) One of the huge advantages for me of using a computer (of most descriptions) is the ability to save information and ideas and be able to sift and sort through them later (like – I took notes at that meeting and …. this is exactly what she said and I wrote down at that time). Will I be able to sift and sort through the above stuff? I possibly have the only cove Duo tablet in town that I paid for in Yen?

So where am I going with this and what is my conscience telling me? That many of the benefits attributed to putting tablet technologies into the hands of teachers and kids are imagined or overblown. Apostasy? Probably.

The ether is full of educators who are promoting tablet PCs as the next big thing for students (well after Web 2.0 that is). Even here in Godzone we have a Digi-Ops project based on a partnership between HP and a school in Wellington who are using tablets with year five and six kids. They are all very keen to show enhanced learning outcomes! Paperless classrooms!

And so they should be! But there needs to be more work. As I hope I have proven with the first part of this post, using a pen to get writing down is cumbersome and slow (I have a whole lot of Ulearn notes to prove this further). The time spent correcting from pen before proof-reading and editting is wasted time. And yet, in review after review I see all of this waffle about speed and accuracy with the pen. Not true. I simply don’t believe it. Typing is still quicker and more accurate for anything more than a simple jotted down note. I know that Vista is promising to be light years ahead in handwriting technology, but these schools are claiming speed and accuracy now. With today’s technology.

So where does the pen become useful? As I stated before, if you can translate, Artrage is a wonderful example of a programme that is only enhanced by a pen. I have also found that I find the pen is an amazing tool in KidPix, MSPaint and in PaintShop Pro. I find the pen is useful when I annotate or edit Word documents – in Excel it is clumsy and frustrating. I enjoy using the pen to edit PowerPoint slides on screen. I can make a presentation more interactive by putting comments or ideas straight up there.

But wait, there is more to a tablet than just a pen enabled device. I like to lie around and surf the web or to take my tablet to bed and cruise through my RSS reader. The form factor makes it a great device for doing just that. The buttons and pen mean that navigating through web-pages is easy. Do kids in classrooms lie around and surf mindlessly through blog feeds. I hope not, but maybe I missed that particular Web 2.0 goodie.

During meetings, (if I’m in slate mode) the tablet sits on my knee meaning that I don’t look over my screen to the other people. This is good. However, the innacuracy of my handwriting means that I spend far more time looking down correcting my errors so I still don’t look at the people I am with. However I’ve seen lots of photos of kids clustered around tablets on the floor. Now that does look like a good thing – kids all with their own pen anle to add to a mind map … maybe that’s more like it? Next cluster meeting on the floor around my 12 inch tablet guys?

Here endeth the crisis? No, probably not. I wanna be a Tablet PC Evangelist. I really do! I have downloaded the Becta research papers to read later and I hope that I can find some more solid data (???) to support spending money on something that in my opinion has limited usage the way that it’s being presented today.

Tablet PC Webinar

nix — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:45:24 +0000

Are you in the market for a Tablet PC?

Alliance Technology Partners are holding a webinar where potential buyers can have their questions answered by experts ffrom the world of Tablets PCs.

Link to find out more information and sign up for the webinar.

TabletWiki

nix — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:05:50 +0000

TabletWiki for us tableteers. Or those of you contemplating the move to tablet and touch technologies – the Tablet, the UMPC (Origami) and Windows Media Centre PCs. Set up by MVP WNewquay of Tablet PC – thoughts and ideas.

via Warner Crocker

Getting the Jobs Done

nix — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:33:33 +0000

Some of the places that I work in are Windows places and some of the places that I work in are Apple. Some of the people that I work with are Windows people and some are Apple people. I get a bit of flack from the Apple people about my decision to mostly use the Windows platform.
I used to be a Commodore 64 user. In 1992 my Dad gave me a 286 computer to play with. Quite quickly, I managed to upgrade through the 386 years and onto a 486. I vividly remember upgrading my 486SX23 from 4MB ram to 8MB. I put in a Soundblaster 16 and a double speed CDrom drive. I had a CGA video card and a brand spanking new 14inch monitor. My children were very excited to be able ‘play’ with Encarta and to be able to watch movies and listen to audio. They used to love a piece from AA Milne about Pooh (Bear) and the Living Books software – ‘Just Grandma and Me’ and Athur’s Teacher Troubles’!

After a few years of upgrading desktop machines I moved into the world of laptops. Last year I got a 15 inch Apple Powerbook so that I could support teachers who were using Apples. The Powerbook is a beautiful machine. It runs Tiger (OSX) and has a range of good software on it. It’s a light machine and it’s damn sexy to look at.

But it’s not my machine of choice. I’m a PC user from way back. I’m not dogmatic about using the PC, it’s just what I am used to using and what I am most comfortable using. For me it’s about getting the job done. I’m not able to get the work that I do as comfortably on the Mac. If I had ‘grown up’ using a Mac it might be quite different.
So when I was in the market for a new laptop a couple of months ago, I took a look at the new MacBooks. They are very nice machines with some cool features. Bootcamp and Parallels desktop could have given me the best of both worlds, PC and Mac.

In the end I decided to stay inside the PC world a bit longer. I’d been thinking about pen computing and how a tablet pc might be an interesting computer. I was really interested in the convertable tablet and decided that it was time to go to the smaller form factor offered by the Toshiba M400. And if Apple had a tablet on offer? I would have been interested. Maybe next time?
I was interested to see what Apple’s Steve Jobs had to say at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). He talked about some of the exciting new features of Leopard (the next version of OSX) due out sometime early next year. Then he rubbished MS Windows and accused the developers of Vista of stealing everything except his last billion dollars. Apple even made one of their funny little commercials about the conference.

Does Microsoft do this? Do either of these companies need to do this? People use the technologies that they want (and can afford) to accomplish the tasks that they need to accomplish.
Frankly I am tired of the one-eyed illogical ranting of the Mac fan-boys. Macs, Pcs, Linux boxen, iPods, Palms, Smartphones, PocketPCs, iPhones, Zen and Zunes … who cares? It’s about getting your stuff done in a way that you are comfortable with.

Links:

Steve Jobs at WWDC

Lifehacker puts Vista and Leopard side by side

Paul Thurrot’s take on Jobs’ keynote

iPhone – Smoke and Mirrors?

Tablets in Education

nix — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 07:39:45 +0000

Last week New Zealand hit the edu-geek press with the news that a school in Wellington is trialling using Tablet PCs amongst their year five and sixes.

NZ Herald story

DigiOps Website

There has been lots to say about this project and about some of the dollars that are being spent on increasing connectivity and capability for New Zealand teachers and schools. Computerworld journalist Stephen Bell provided an interesting analysis of the press release information. He notes that the initiative could be a useful little earner for HP as it is one of the few vendors still selling tablet PCs.” Not quite true. There are several big name vendors selling Tablets , it’s just that many of the vendors are not well known here in New Zealand. Motion Computing? NEC? Fujitsu? And Lenovo or IBM? Toshiba? Off the top of my head …

Overall the article is a positive report about the value of putting tablets into the hands of kids and the importance of the government putting some dollars into ICT in schools in general.

Stephen Bell’s last paragraph is worthy of comment:

The children say the tablets provide for a quicker method of recording data in real-time, but say they would prefer a simple spreadsheet rather than the specially set up, but perhaps inadequately explained, database entry form provided. (italics mine)

In this case it’s not the tablet that is the issue, it’s the activity that is the problem. The kids can use the Tablet PC but are not quite sure about the activity they are doing. Surely the same issue would occur if they had been using a regular laptop or desktop computer – or even a pen and paper. So in this case it’s the design of the activity that is the problem.

Apparently there was a bit of controversy about this story:

There is little need for computers in day-to-day education. It may be nice to use Google Earth to see where you live, but Google this (or that) is not going to teach you the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic.

and this:

Kids doing this kind of survey should stand outside with clipboards and pencils, and make marks on sheets of paper. They should then transfer the results to the white/blackboard. After that, they should draw, on paper, their own little bar chart showing the results and then colour it in.

And on the discussion goes.

What is being ignored here is the reason why we put kids in front of computers (on in this case, computers in front of kids). It’s to allow access to other ideas. It’s to allow data and ideas to be manipulated and shared and focussed upon. Yes, children need to do the old tally charts and construct graphs by hand. But, they don’t need to stop there. They need to be able to look at those tally charts and elegantly constructed bar graphs (and pie charts and line graphs) and identify what the data is telling them. Once a child has made a few graphs in their maths book do they need to go on forever making pretty colourful graphs? Or does it then become more important to analyse the data and develop some ideas or conclusions? And then maybe find ways to appropriately share their conclusions.
—

As a new tableteer, I am interested in how they are being used in education. One of the huge advantages of a Tablet PC over a traditional desktop or even a ‘normal’ laptop is the smaller form factor and the way that it combines the best of paper with the best of digital. Sometimes a screen becomes a barrier in a discussion; the tablet, because it resembles a diary or notepad, is far less intrusive. I quite enjoy entering information using the stylus pen and it’s an amazing way to work on digital art. A lot of the time (like right now), it’s easier to type but if I am in a meeting, then I prefer to go into slate (tablet) mode and draw on my screen.

The DigiOps website says:

Brooklyn School is part of the Digital Opportunities Project, a joint initiative between the Ministry of Education and technology partners and is looking at how emerging technologies can help improve student learning. The school’s three-year project named CHaOS (Children Having Ownership of Schooling), is investigating whether pen-based technologies such as the Tablets, help increase student engagement levels and contribute towards enhancing student learning.

I am interested in the Tablet Classroom project. I hope that we continue to discuss what is happening in all of these inovative projects and actually get some hard data about whether “whether pen-based technologies such as the Tablets, help increase student engagement levels and contribute towards enhancing student learning.“