Randy Laptop

Time again for a delve into my reading of the last three months, folks - and an interesting time it has been. With our jobs falling through and a house becoming available near Kim’s family, we’re set to move back into the Herefordshire countryside sometime soon. It can be unsettling, moving home. I’m just glad I take my books with me whenever I have to do it…

On to the summary, then! In the 91 days of April, May and June, I consumed no less than ten thousand, five hundred and forty-eight pages of fiction. No non-fiction this quarter, I fear, just forty fiction works from a variety of authors. This works out to me reading about a hundred and fifteen pages a day, which is quite respectable.

Looking more closely, though, the variety of authors is a little on the misleading side. This is because five of the forty were written by James White, 6 by Harry Harrison, and a staggering fourteen written by Peter David. Add the trilogy of fantasy novels with which I ended the quarter and a little over two thirds of my reading matter for the last three months is made-up of series, or is material written by the same author. I’m not too bothered about this - I firmly believe that if one finds an author or series to one’s liking then one should go ahead and like it. Hopefully, having found this trend, I will be able to diversify my list somewhat for the next update.

Let’s have a look at averages again. Either I’m becoming more normal, or the community is starting to bow to my brilliance. My average rating for the books this time was 3.7, and the average by everyone else was 3.8. the delta isn’t too overwhelming this time.

With that in mind, there aren’t too many titles which stray from the norm, either. I gave Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy a combined rating of 13. Community consensus was 12.4, so even that’s not too different. The only other disparities were in some of the peter David novels - I gave some 5 stars whereas the community held a 3, and alternately gave some 3 or 4 when the community thought they should be higher. That’s all I’ll say in this paragraph, except to point out the average rating for a Kevin J. Anderson title (which was 2.69). the reason will become apparent…

With the facts and figures out of the way, then, it simply remains to go through the books I particularly enjoyed this quarter. I gave five 5 star ratings, twenty-one 4’s, and 11 3’s this time around, so on the whole you see I enjoyed quite a few. I’ll just mention a subset, as usual.

The first two things that deserve mention are James White’s Sector General series, and Peter David’s New Frontier. Both sci-fi, both enthralling, the first with a fascinating alien outlook and the latter with a raiser-sharp sense of humour and fun, neither of these long-running, short-booked series’ should be missed.

After survivors, I wanted to read a little more Star Trek. Peter David falls very well into that category, but I extended myself to read a little Original Series, some Voyager, and of course the novelisation of the latest Star Trek film (which I read and gave 4 stars on May 16). I also gave 4 stars to The Kobayashi Maru and the Hologram’s Handbook; both fine Trek works in their own right. The only Trek title that didn’t work for me was echoes, a voyager story. But what’s one afternoon?

I also enjoyed harry Harrison’s stainless Steel Rat series, for although I’d read them before, they have such a sense of light amusement about them that it’s hard not to enjoy them. Realtime Interrupt, by James Hogan, utterly gripped me - but then I’m a sucker for Virtual reality romps. Nick Sagan’s idlewild was different and enjoyable, although painted quite a grim picture of the future; and Mall Purchase Night, by Rick Cook, is something I’d wanted to read for years but never found in print.

I gave 4 stars to Hopscotch, by Kevin J. Anderson. As I feared, the future he paints is quite samey from one of his titles to the next, in theme, if not substance. But despite that, the story, the idea, the people and most of all the personalities made this one well worth the mention here. James White’s standalone novella Second Ending is also worth a look.

But finally, topping off the week, the month, the quarter and indeed, thus far, the year, is the Farseers. Robin Hobb’s writing compelled me to read, night after night after night. For over two weeks I’d go to bed and pick up one of these epics, and with the shortest clocking in at just under 500 pages and the largest easily half that again, it’s easy to call them epics,, believe me .But size isn’t everything, or indeed anything. It’s all about tone, immersion, and feeling. One of my favourite series this year was Dave Duncan’s seventh sword, and I enjoyed them as light-hearted fantasy. Hobb’s gone in the other direction - the torment, suffering, and pain her character’s undergo is nothing short of horrific to observe. Hobb’s got this huge, cruel yet beautiful world in place, where dangerous things happen so often and yet the characters are so real, so Human, and so normal - normal in the ways that matter - that you can forgive the odd magical ability or adroitness with animals because it’s not that at all that makes the character’s who they are. The whole saga is grand and sweeping, melancholically beautiful and heart-warmingly tortuous; so much so that I couldn’t but help be drawn in.

Well, folks, there you have it. Another slice of the year has flown by and I’m 40 books better off. It’s still scorching sunny outside: so what else am I going to do after finishing up here than go read in the garden?

Pop back in October for more news on the book front. Until then, happy reading to you all.

It’s hard to believe, but it was almost a decade ago that Andrew Heart wrote some JAWS scripts to convert the temperature between Celsius and Fahrenheit. The code for these scripts is still available online and thus I’ve incorporated part of the functionality into my new scripts for JAWS. If Andrew reads this, or anyone can get me in touch with him to ask his belated permission, please leave a message here.

These scripts (written on suggestion of brian Hartgen) allow you to type in the name of a City and have the temperature there announced. If you want to hear the information again you simply need to press the keystroke a second time, or a double-tap of the key will ask you for a new city, or allow you to update the weather for the first one. You can choose how long the scripts will keep the old weather before disregarding it for updated information from the web, and also whether to hear your temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit. The results are spoken and displayed on a Braille display, and once installed the scripts are very easy to use.

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My first “pipe dream” post, discussing some notetaking software I’d have in my dream world, went down very well and garnered some feedback. As I’ve slowly been setting things back up here with the new system, I’ve found myself sorely seeking something for which I cannot seem to find a satisfactory solution.

To set the scene: i’ve started using Microsoft Outlook quite a bit - partly because it was the first sensible mail client I got installed (as I needed Word and Excel for day-to-day business). I then had to work with someone completely new to computing, pretty much, who wanted to learn it for her calendaring and contact storage, which in turn has given me a larger appreciation of its capabilities. it may have clunky problems and go somewhat against my open source philosophy, but until something equally useful comes along for everything I use then Outlook can stay.

What precisely do I use it for, you ask? Firstly mail, of course. Rule-based sorting, flags and follow-up labels, and all that cool stuff. Secondly RSS feeds; a great addon lets me handle them within my folders as normal messages. Add the calendar and contacts, furthermore add seamless synchronisation with my mobile phone, and what more do I want? Appointments I schedule on the road appear in my calendar at home. Contacts I add at home appear on my phone. Exceptions are easy to make on a per-contact or per-meeting basis, and all is good.

What I haven’t gott set to synch is my notes and other files.. Notes because I’d rather keep the two separate - my PC notebase is far too cumbersome to pile onto the phone’s notes application. I have no need for paralleled video, image and audio synchronisation either, so the system as is works well. Almost…

there are two things missing to make this an ideal situation. the first is minor: Outlook has a journal, and my phone has a call log. The two could match up quite nicely, especially considering that the contacts are already synchronised. This would have to be single-way syncchro, obviously; but even with that in mind it’s hardly overly important.

The other thing is far more vital, though;; or if not vital, at least important. SMS messages are the lifeblood of any mobile communication. They have exploded in popularity (for good reason) over the last few years and I find myself pulling the phone out of my pocket or keeping it within easy reach to reply to or send one of these quickest of communiques. Quick if you’re a Japanese teenager, that is. If you’ve got my dexterity then they can be painfully slow. Not that I mind when I’m out and about - that’s the nature of the situation. you work with what you’ve got. but it seems a complete waste when I am sat with a decently-proportioned qwerty keyboard in front of me and my hands are occupied twiddling and fiddling with a finicky numeric keypad.

I had a brief trot through the software scene to see what I could come up with, but hit stone walls. Services either allowed one-way work (i.e. an Outlook adding for sending sms but not reading them), systems that used middleman services (and large amounts of gprs or 3g data), or systems that tried to use At commands in an attempt to retrieve SMS data from the device.

The first is obviously a step, but only a partial one. The second is not practical for me (even if I were to use a network connection through the computer to absorb the 3g issue the software phone-side wasn’t accessible). the third, at commands, held more promise, but a few minutes in hyper terminal brought me to the infuriating conclusion that whilst my phone can send SMS messages with an at (as demonstrated with technique 1 above), listing existing ones (or getting notified of new ones) was a big no no. I assume this is because the original at specification for retrieving SMS dealt with fixed memory, specific hardware locations, modems etc. with the addition of folders, memory cards and the like the technology seems to have fallen by the wayside.

So, it’s time for my dream software: what do I want?

A server, would be the first requirement, sitting on the phone and passing out data requested by the client. Serial port connection is fine, because that virtualizes neatly via Bluetooth or cable or whatever else your phhone and computer speak. ironically enough serial is actually something of a high-end interface for this purpose. amusing, given its origins.

The client would be the interesting bit, because it’d request data from the phone, send data back, etc. Obviously I’d prefer it to be a microsoft Outlook addin, because that’s the context we’re talking here. the addin could set up a notifier for new messages, cache the existing ones, direct them and new to a folder and allow for reading in a similar way to email itself, feeds with rssPopper, tweets with OutTwit. Et Cetera, Ad nauseam. I don’t know how addins work, reply and forward would have to be intercepted so that you reply by sms and choose how you want your forward to work. Furthermore, you’d need a toolbar for new SMS messages, settings and so forth.

the protocol would make sense to use the at command specification, I suppose. it’s already defined and established and there’s already software out there for symbian s60 2nd to make the phone respond to the appropriate commands. The world’s moving on to 3rd and 5th editions but that software isn’t; at least we know the path has already been trodden.

I suppose Python would work fine for a server, it allows for rapid development and is easy to deploy. I’ve never even looked at what goes into an addin for Outlook; libraries and hooks and all sorts of scary stuff, I imagine.

Quite why PC suite for nokia and Outlook don’t play nice with SMS is unknown to me. it seems a simple, logical extension of what the system already does. if you’re going to have a synched contact and calendar base, why not be able to choose to do the same with your messages.

perhaps I should investigate Windows Mobile one day…

Getting a new computer is always an exciting or at least interesting event for most of us. Whilst I am arguably a bit of a geek, I also see no reason to spend money (which I usually don’t have) on the fastest, most powerful machines on the market. It’s been a long time since I could buy a computer for the sake of buying something; my last four systems have been purchased purely out of necessity.

I wont’ get into the whole laptop versus desktop debate here and now. , suffice it to say that having used laptops at school, college and everywhere in between, it was only natural that they should take their place as a primary day-to-day computer system when processing power permitted. They were smaller, more portable, and even worked on occasion out in the garden with a nice chilled beverage and the sun.

I got my laptop now residing in pieces almost a year ago. It was second-hand then, had done the rounds for a few years, and came into my possession with a 60 GB hard drive and an overclocked 1.4 GHZ processor. It was the second Dell Latitude D600 I’d owned – I found the unit reliable, rugged and light and small enough to make me very happy indeed.

Sadly, even upon arrival one of the screen’s hinges was noticeably loose. The years had not been kind to the poor thing, and yet I had very little to complain about apart from this minor hardware glitch. The mighty machine also seemed not to mind, but alas on Wednesday the second hinge decided it too would become unstable. This resulted in the entire monitor panel almost falling off, and the keypad of power and volume controls literally crashing to the floor in a shower of plastic bits. It was sad to see and even sadder to realise that this machine, for all practical purposes, was utterly busted.

Luckily the data is safe, as the hard drive is (hopefully at least) still spinning quite happily. The system still boots, of course, but pressing the power button, getting a steady picture or adjusting the volume requires almost heavenly intervention and can become rather trying on the fingers. I’d always anticipated the machine’s death, of course – it was quite old and had been in almost daily use, that just by me.

It seemed clear that I should get myself a new system, then. But which? What did I want in a computer? What were my limits?

Obviously my very first consideration was price. Being out of work and privately renting a house doesn’t bode overly well for anyone’s finances. I’d been wanting a Netbook-sized computer for months but never actually could afford one. Now I was pretty much forced into it, I decided that a Netbook was the way to go.

I didn’t really want anything overly powerful. My original purpose in getting a Netbook was to have as a secondary machine, but reflecting on it whilst typing with one hand and holding the screen to the Dell’s chassis I realised that the processing power of almost any Netbook would outdo, or at the very least match, what I already had.

I’m not a heavy gamer, and apart from the rare times I do any sort of audio editing work, tend to use my system for browsing the web, word processing or writing the odd computer program. With this in mind, a Netbook really did seem more and more viable.

I’d had my eye on the Samsung NC10 for my birthday back in December, but circumstances conspired against that plan. Now, it was out of my budget somewhat, and so I settled on this, the Asus EEE PC 1000h.

In typical fashion I didn’t take the time to go see one of these tiny machines before ordering online, and so when it arrived this morning and I took it from the courier I was immediately aware of the weight. Or lack thereof. I thought my old Dell was light – and it was, for its class and time. But the Netbooks take weight to a whole new arena and from what I understand, this Asus is heavier than many of its competitors.

Unboxing was a simple enough process; lying in its own cardboard box was the computer itself, a battery pack, an AC charger, a zip pouch for the machine and assorted manuals and recovery data disks. The first thing to strike me about the computer itself was the gloss of the thing. The plastic was shiny and bright, and I suppose I should be good enough to keep it that way if possible.

Sliding in the six-cell battery proved simple as well. It required some delicate finger work as there are both manual and automatic battery latches on the Asus’ underside, but having read the manual in advance I was aware of this fact and so came prepared, nimble-fingered and all.

From there it was a simple matter to flip up the lid, attach the power outlet and (after finding the power switch which is rather neatly positioned on the top right-hand side of the unit) to be presented with the wonderful “windows Out of The Box” wizard.

I spent a few hours this afternoon adding a few essentials. Screen reader, web browser etc – and the oddest thing I’ve found is the keyboard. Not that it’s small per se, but the wrist room is rather limited. I’m fortunate to have small wrists, really, and learned to type quite young in life which gives me a degree of adaptability. I’m word processing quite accurately and, if not up to my usual speedy standard, I’m sure eventually I’ll get there. The home, page up, end and page down keys are all accessed with the Fn key. This makes for an interesting finger dance and I’m prone to whacking enter instead of the navigation key I’m after. Furthermore, FN+insert is a numlock toggle, making insert plus any of the other keys requiring FN untenable.

The battery gave me a solid 4.5 hours on its first discharge, and as that’s easily double what I got before I’m in no position to complain. It’s hardly the 7.5 touted by the sticker on the front of the computer, but it’s better than nothing.

What else is there to say? I haven’t done enough to be as detailed as I could be – the Realtek sound card is crisp enough but the silly software mixer needs a bit of work, for instance. The system tray Asus utilities for power management and webcam/wireless/Bluetooth support work well, the screen is extremely bright and the 160 GB of space gives me a little over 2 and a half times what I’m used to.

Jawter is my work in progress at the moment so how this baby programs will be a story for tomorrow. I can’t see that evolving into a blog post of its own but even so, if I have any startling news about the system I shall comment here for the sake of historical interest.

To conclude, I like the netbook idea. I’ve seen and carried laptops that would give an elephant a spinal problem. To have something so light yet as powerful as something I’d been using already is quite nifty, methinks.

Extended System Time is a JAWS script that will extend the power of your insert+f12 keystroke. By default, in JAWS, this key says the time with a single keypress and the date with a second press. By using this module not only can you precisely customise how this is announced, but also retrieve the time and date for any city in the world.

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It’s that time again - and I can hardly believe a quarter of the year has flown by. It seems like yesterday I sat down at this very text editor to write about my reading from the end of last year, and here I am, doing the very same thing for the first quarter of a whole new earthly revolution of the sun.

Diving straight into the statistics, then, I can immediately see that I’ve read 29 books over the last 3 months. Despite me reading nothing of literary merit between February 12th and march 4th, this averages out at roughly 1 third of a book a day (or 89 pages). Overall I read 8,083 pages, which puts the average book at about 278 pages.

In actual fact, 8 of the 29 books had less than 278 pages - but several titles didn’t include page counts and so are knocking the statistics off a little. 4 of the books were over 400 pages long, 3 novels and a short story collection.

Something I didn’t look at last time but which is utterly fascinating is the disparity between what I thought of a book and what others said about it. Of course it’s impossible to analyse my reviews against other peoples, but the five-star rating system Goodreads employs is useful as a general balance. Of course we must remember that my rating influences the average and the number of ratings that make up the average for any given title is a widely unpredictable factor, but even with all this taken into consideration the results are interesting.

If you’d asked me to give a general opinion on my recent reading, I’d have said that I’d come across a few brilliant titles, some enjoyably memorable ones and a few which I rated “good” or “average”. On Goodreads, the ratings go:
1. didn’t like it.
2. it was ok.
3. liked it.
4. really liked it.
5. it was amazing.

I keep ratings 4 and 5 for the above-average and superb titles respectively. I give a 3 for a book I liked, even if I didn’t enjoy it as much as I might have, and anything less than a 3 does not bode well for my future consumption of the author, series, etc.

Yet it’s surprising how selective our memories can be. Over the last 3 months I’ve dished out no less than 7 2’s, 11 3’s, 9 4’s, and 2 5’s. Funny, isn’t it? If you’d asked me my favourite books of the quarter I’d have been able to tell you what the 5 star titles were at once, and probably thrown in a few of the 4’s for afters. If a conversation had followed, some of my 3 star pickings might’ve been offered up as OK reads, but looking back at my 2’s, only seeing their titles lets me reconstruct some of the plot - and even then, not for all of them.

Given all these figures, we can see that my average rating is 3.2. The community average for the titles I rated is 3.6, which means that on the whole, the community enjoyed them more than I did. This is a generalisation, of course - that’s how an average works. Survivors, one of my 5-star titles, had an average rating of 3.25. Coming of Wisdom, my other, was viewed slightly better at 4.11 - even so, there’s quite a difference. Other disparaged titles included Resurrection, Inc (which I gave 4 stars but which averaged 2.75), and Starship troopers (which I gave 2 and averaged 3.90).

As you can see, my views differ from the average perhaps more than is typical - but then what’s an average without outsiders? I was impressed by some titles more than the community, in contrast, they liked others that I didn’t. it’s good to see what others thought of the books I’ve been reading, makes recommendations for new titles and finding of friends with similar tastes an enjoyable experience.

Let us take the titles in my order of rating, then - we’ll talk about a few of the highlights.

I read survivors by Jean Lorrah about a week into march and couldn’t put it down. The depth of character portrayed, the breathtaking way in which emotions swirled their way through the text and the sensations of love, betrayal, loss, redemption and death that haunted the pages made it a commendable story. Of course it’s also a Star Trek title, so the science fiction aspect made the setting familiar to me - but it wasn’t just a space story; it wasn’t even a space story. The plot was there simply to illustrate the character’s lives - I’m sure the story could’ve been told at sea, in a medieval setting or in a desert with equal vigour , if an author worked at it. The plot was not thin, so much as opaque - it served only to link the reader to the people in the text and from then on, they told their stories by their actions and feelings. The storyline itself was gripping, but for me, utterly dwarfed by the characters themselves. For them, the plot was a job, a life, a world - and there can be no denying that had I not known how the story had to end I’d have shed a tear or two.

My next 5 star was the Coming of Wisdom, by Dave Duncan. I’d finished the Seventh Sword trilogy by January 18th (of which this was the second book) and found them joyfully exuberant. The other titles in the series got 4 star ratings, only because they sandwiched the second instalment so well. Light fantasy, humorous in places, written with pace and aplomb and certainly worth your time if you’re into swordplay and magic.

Kevin J. Anderson’s Resurrection, Inc was another one that I read cover to cover. At 320 pages it’s short enough to do in a single sitting and I found the entire concept of the book to exert such a hold that I simply had to finish it. Character is built up for reasons of plot more than anything else, and some of Anderson’s imagery will doubtless become repetitive if any other of his “in the future” stories go a similar route. Still, although it didn’t make me cry or laugh out loud, a solid 4 star read and a worthy addition to anyone’s sci-fi bookshelf - especially those who like a touch of horror.

Other 4 star titles included Sleeper Agenda by Thomas E. Sniegoski (although without the first in the series it’s not worth much of a read), Across the Nightingale Floor by Lian Hearn, The Turing Option by Harry Harrison, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, and The Veteran (a short story collection) by Frederick Forsyth.

Also of note is the fact that I read a non-fiction title - Harry, A History: The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans, and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon by Melissa Anelli. It was quite a weighty read, clocking in at over 350 pages, and I gave it 3 out of 5 because although interesting, it was more comprehensive of some things than others. It has over 4 stars by community consent, and the author is a Goodreads member. It tells her story as much as Harry Potter’s, and that at least was something I found quite enjoyable about the book.

That’s about it for this quarter. The time has flown by, and there’ve been books both brilliant and banal. I hope that, if you’re interested, you’ll check out my Goodreads profile, or at least the recent reading page of this site to see what I’m chomping my way through as we move from April through to the end of June. The summer months are often alluring - sunshine, lighter nights and later mornings, perhaps. Whether this means more time lounging in the garden with a good book and a beverage remains to be seen. Check back in early July for my next literary progression, and until then, happy reading to you all.

As did many others, I switched from internet Explorer to Firefox as my default web browser of choice some years ago. On the whole the transition was smooth - JAWS presents any HTML document in a standard way and so there was little sufferance in that area. The two things I perhaps missed about IE were the feed view and the favorites menu.

Of feeds, I enjoyed being able to view an entire folder of new items on one page with the feed for all addon, and of favorites, I liked having a standard windows folder because I preferred using it over IE’s Organize Favorites dialog box. Still, these are minor quibbles. I found a decent RSS reader which serves well enough but until recently I hadn’t really done much with Firefox’s bookmarks. Until recently…

I then learned that each bookmark could have a keyword associated with it. That keyword could act as a shortcut, when entered into the location bar. Furthermore, keywords could take a parameter - and this opened up a whole new can of worms.

Stop and think for a moment, just how many websites you might go to and type in some information. Even sites you may visit infrequently, just to look the odd thing up. Then think how much quicker, more productive and streamlined your workflow would be if instead of going to that site’s home page, possibly finding a page within that site, then entering data into a form - instead of that, you go to your location bar, type a keyword, then your search text.

Let us take an example. I did a lot of elemental work in High School Chemistry and the periodic table became quite a friend. I had some old software that let me view element information. Nowadays, there are a plethora of websites to do the same thing. I use one in particular, and now, with a bookmark keyword, if I want to tell you something interesting about helium, all I need do is hit f6 or ctrl+l, and type “element he”. Hitting enter takes me to the precise page on ChemicalElements.com, and I can then expound upon the virtues of this noble gas which was discovered in 1895 by Sir William Ramsay.

This is perhaps not the most useful example for computer users of my generation. Out of our teens, unless we’re pursuing a scientific career or hunting for some obscure fact, there’s little use for this lookup. I’m no scientist, but I do converse with people all over the world…

Time is quite an important concept when talking around the globe, knowing when you should or shouldn’t call someone is always useful information. Suppose I want to make a phone call to a friend in New Zealand but can’t quite remember what time it is there. Dead easy - I go to my bar and type “time Wellington”. It’s almost 11:00 AM on Tuesday morning as I type this, but what do I hear? “11:53pm Tuesday (NZDT) - Time in Wellington, New Zealand”. A little late to call, mayhap - but it’s only 7:00 PM in Hong Kong, so perhaps I’ll turn my international efforts there instead as I seem to have missed the NZ boat.

You can see the advantages of such a system, I’m sure. Take the concept further - to dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopaedias - TO weather lookup, sites that collect quotations, sell things, stream music, provide downloads. Almost anywhere on the web where you fill out a single form field as a method of information retrieval this system will be faster and just as reliable.

The next thing to discuss is how it’s done, of course. To show you exactly how it works I’ll navigate to “element au” (which is the entry for gold on the periodic table). Looking at the URL of this page, we see http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/au.html. As you’ve probably gathered, the “dynamic” part of this address - the bit that changes with each request, if you like - is “au”. if I were to look up helium again, the URL would become http://www.chemicalelements.com/elements/he.html. Some pages have your search text in the form of a parameter after the URL - i.e. the location of my time keyword is http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=time+%s. it doesn’t matter how the parameter is specified, as long as it’s a part of the address then you’re in business.

To give a bookmark a keyword, you need to get to its properties within Firefox. I find it easier to create a new one from the bookmark manager than to edit an existing one, so my steps are as follows:

1. With the URL on my clipboard, I hit ctrl+shift+b to get to the bookmark manager.
2. I cursor to my bookmarks menu, then to my submenu which contains my keyword searches. In this way I keep them organised.
3. I go to the organize menu and choose new Bookmark.
4. I input a name that I’ll remember. In the location field I put the URL, and I replace “he” or “au” with “%s”. %s is a Firefox substitution string used with keywords.
5. Finally, in the keyword field I type “element”. Hitting enter saves the bookmark.

It’s worth noting at this stage that you can add any tags, descriptions or whatever else you use to sort your bookmarks. However, because of the %s string in the bookmark’s location, navigating to it from the bookmark menu or tool bar will not work (you’ll end up with a page not found message). I’ve described adding a keyword without using any Firefox extensions or addons or anything of that nature which means that, if you run the browser portably, the keywords will be portable too.

Using a keyword is, as already described, a simple matter of going to your location bar, typing said keyword, giving it any parameters (they are not required by any means) and hitting enter. What I mean by the parameter thing is that if you have a site you visit often without dynamic information (suppose a TV guide), you could just add a “TV” keyword to an existing bookmark and it would work in exactly the same way.

This brings us on to my final point - the combination of keywords and bookmarklets. A Bookmarklet is simply a bookmark that does more than your standard favourite. With use of Javascript a bookmarklet can prompt you for data, take information from the page you’re on, and do something interesting with it. Popular Bookmarklets let you send things with Gmail, post to link sharing sites, and plenty of other fascinating things I’ve probably not yet discovered. The logic behind a bookmarklet is that it’s quick to click - most people stick them in their toolbars for easy access.

I have yet to delve into the depths of the bookmarklet, but as I use twitter quite regularly, thought a method of “tweeting” about the web page I’m on was a good idea. Twitter is a great way to share interesting things, web pages are no exception.

I have two bookmarklets that I use with Twitter. The first, which you can get from Myopic Lunacy, uses a URL shortening service like tr.im to keep the URL you post short. This is often useful but sometimes slow, so for my first ever bookmarklet I created one that lets you tweet your current page’s URL and title. This is what the one I discovered did as well, but I just wanted to see how a bookmarklet might work. To try it out, you can Get it by adding this to your bookmarks. Both these require you be logged into twitter with the “remember me” cookie, and both work real well with a keyword. Try it out - add the bookmarklet to your collection, give it a keyword - “tweet”, perhaps - and try it from this page. I’m not going to complain! ?

You can add a bookmarklet to your own bookmarks by simply right-clicking the link text and choosing “bookmark this link” in Firefox. Other browsers vary, but most support bookmarklets, if not keywords.

I hope you’ve found this informative - I certainly plan on using both bookmarklets and keywords much more now I know what they are and how they work. I have to thank Monica, a great friend, for getting my mind on this whole topic, A post entitled Keyword Searching in Firefox from Blogzilla, and Firefox and the art of keyword Bookmarking from hack Attack, both of which gave me ideas and help on exactly how everything works.

Alongside version 4 of their market leading accessibility suite for Symbian-based mobile phones, Nuance Communications have included “DAISY2go”, a software player for DAISY material. At a similar time, they have announced an upcoming screen reader for the Windows Mobile platform: so is this DAISY player a sign that Symbian won’t be left behind? or a peace offering for those who haven’t converted from what has up until now dominated the mobile market?

It seems too early to be certain as to their intentions - anything I might come up with would be pure guesswork. What we can work on as fact is the way this DAISY software works, though - here are my thoughts.

Installing is a fairly standard process, and I suppose by now I should be used to applications weighing in at over 600 KB. The first time I ran the program I got a prompt saying that my bookshelf was empty, asking if I wanted to add any titles. Choosing “yes” yielded a fairly standard “browse for folder” type affair, which enabled me to choose my memory card thence specifying a particular folder. I chose my books directory which contained a talking book from the RNIB, a hybrid Audio and Text title which I downloaded from the web and two Bookshare files (one older format, one newer). there was also a book in pure MP3 format (i.e. no DAISY markup, no text, no anything other than audio).

OF these, only the first 2 were recognised. The text audio combi was produced 2 years ago, and the RNIB title in 2003. I can therefore only assume that newer formats (such as those employed by Bookshare) are as yet unrecognised by this software. The folder of mp3’s was unsurprisingly ignored.

Of the found titles, I was able to mark/unmark at my hearts content. adding them to my shelf required a detour into the options menu (the call key or even select would have sufficed for a default action), but alas, the shortcut was not to be. They might’ve even arranged the menu so that add comes before the mark menu, but I suppose you do need to select a title before you can add it: in that, at least, I understand the logic, even if I don’t agree with it.

When all’s added, a bookshelf screen allowed me to choose any of my added titles. In doing so, a table of content (not contents”, but “content”) for the chosen title is displayed. Any company with communications in its name should surely speak proper English - but I digress.

The content view is a collapsed tree - assuming the book has any sort of navigation markup, that is. my RNIB title had no such markup and so I was presented with a list of the book’s title and 30-some short stories. Each was named reasonably well, and I happen to know that each was a level 1 heading in the DAISY source material. I could navigate this list with my cursor, it wrapped when I reached either end, and pressing 0 returned me to the top. Quite useful, although had there been 300 short stories rather than 30 I might have craved letter navigation, but I suppose the theoretical structural benefits of DAISY make this unnecessary.

Predictably, hitting select on any given short story starts the audio playing at the appropriate juncture. I also happen to know that, in this particular instance, the short story collection came from a commercial CD and had one MP3 file per disk. The DAISY markup specified in what file and at what time each story started, which is the only reason I was using this particular book in DAISY format in the first place. if I Rip from CD, I like to do it by chapters, parts, stories - whatever medium lends itself to the material. The RNIB clearly had no such compunction in this case, but from a listeners viewpoint (if you’ll pardon the mixing of terminology) the effect is largely the same.

The quality of the audio was unimpeachable - slightly tinny, perhaps, when compared to the Victor Stream - a failing of my handset’s audio output more than the software, though. up until now I’d not seen a DAISY player without tone control, but it’s not a feature I miss. I adjust each time I buy a new set of headphones, when I move from using a headset to an earpiece, from laptop to television or Book Courier to Mp3 player. Adjusting to the particular timbre of my phone takes no more effort than anything else and I don’t really know why I’m rambling on about it. A further tap of select pauses the audio, and the responsiveness of the application is hardly lightning but certainly more impressive than some applications I’ve used, especially those that deal with Symbian’s audio system (it paused faster than Nokia’s standard music player, for instance).

The hash or pound key is supposed to cycle through the application’s views, namely “content”, “play view” and “text”. content we’ve already briefly mentioned (although we’ll be back for a discussion of trees). play view allows you to choose how you want to navigate the book (heading 1, phrase, page etc), and text view is where you can read the text portion of an appropriately marked-up DAISY title. In theory, all is well - but on certain handsets (like mine), there’s a bit of a technical snafu.

Some phones have dropped the Edit (or ABC) key from their keypads. I’m using a Nokia 6120 classic, and my fiancee Kim has a Nokia n78. In both instances, there’s no edit key (which used to double as the Talks key). This has some far-ranging implications, the most severe of which I discovered was the complete inability to use Mobile Speak’s modifier features. Both screen readers for phones intercept a single key for their functions - kind of like a JAWS or NVDA key, if you will - and I never got mobile speak to use a key that was actually available on my handset. That aside, if I want to mark items in a list now, rather than tapping “edit” I press the hash. If I want to highlight some text in an edit field to copy to my clipboard, I hold the hash, cursor to highlight, release, then access a menu (either through pressing Star or through the specific app’s options menu). What they’ve done is take away Edit, and spread its features through the hash and star keys respectively. Doubling a few keys up in various instances, but reducing the overall number of keys on the handset. Nifty. Talks doesn’t complain either - it shifts itself to the menu key and although this does mean a double tap whenever I want the phone’s main menu, its a small price to pay and has become something of an engrained reflex.

Back on topic then - what do you suppose happens if I’m in a list (which the play view is) and I press hash, wanting to navigate elsewhere? The phone thinks I’m selecting something. Select resume’s playback, remember? So that doesn’t really work very well. Quite why select-as-play and select-as-selection mean the same thing is anyone’s guess, but I can think of no other meaning for the odd quirk.

That issue aside, it’s possible (with judicious juggling of the menus) to get to wherever you want, view-wise. Selecting an item from the content view puts you into the text if your book has it, and from there, hash for play view always seems to work. getting back to text is a bit of a risky business, but despite that, the system is reasonably robust.

So here we were, if you’ll remember, listening to a random short story. The audio was sounding good, but came on quite loudly. What can we do about that, you might ask? well the obvious answer is turn it down, and that’s quite correct. Both handsets I’ve tested with have purpose-built volume control keys - most do. if not, a long-press of cursor up and down does the same thing. Volume is independent of the screen reader - it’s like having a multi-channel sound card in the palm of your hand.

Whilst playing, tapping my left and right cursor keys jumped me forward by phrase. Quite what constitutes a phrase is debatable, but each phrase is so specified in the DAISY markup. this particular book allowed phrase and heading 1 navigation with the latter taking me between short stories. You can choose how you want to navigate with cursor up and down from Play view, which is respected even if you keep your focus in the content view.

Another hallmark of DAISY players is the ability to adjust the speed of the audio. have Nuance left this one out, I asked myself? is it, like tone, a feature considered unnecessary? the answer, fortunately, is no. The 4, 5 and 6 keys of the numeric keypad let you adjust the speed of the playing audio. 5 (being midway between the other two keys) resets the speed to its default. 6 increases, 4 decreases. it’s a very Un-victor-like interface: no beeps, no announcement of what speed your on, no great clunking sound when you hit 0, just a minor audio hiccup sometimes and the speech continuing at its new pace.

I’m going to take up another paragraph talking about speed because it’s a feature of DAISY devices that I find useful. It’s something of a catch22 that the more I listen to synthetically-read books, the more I want to have a good narrator read me an audio title. yet conversely, the more titles I buy, beg or borrow, the more vexed I become with the speed (or lack of) on the narrator’s part. Because my synthesizer can hammer out hundreds of words per minute, I want the narrator to do the same - I find absorbing information at most “normal” reading speeds to be painfully slow, probably as a direct result of the speech synthesizer in the first place. DAISY2go handles speed adjustment, which is lucky for me and a boon to many others. Compared to the Victor Stream (which Kim has), the faster speeds are certainly not as polished-sounding and the slower ones distort some. However I have to concede that my handset at least has quite a small amount of Ram and a fairly slow processor. Any sort of speed at all is preferable to none, and that it’s handled smoothly enough to be listenable is a testament to the ingenuity of whomever programmed the algorithm. Speed, like volume, is retained across sessions (not titles).

Let us depart from my short story collection for a while, remembering that we are now midway through a story, and turn to another title on my shelf. I tested, for illustrative purposes, the agenda of an ACB conference from 2007. This was my “hybrid” title, produced by the Wyoming Medical Center with open source DAISY generation software and containing both audio (in the form of prerecorded, synthetic speech), and text.

Opening this title, as before, landed me on the Content view. this time, however, a little icon next to the focused item told me that there were items inside, or beneath the heading, or however you’d like to picture it. Talks did not read this icon and, either because I had a Beta of Talks 4 installed or because someone got lazy, I had to label it myself. No hardship, but unnerving if you’re not expecting it and your book seems to be missing a few levels.

Expanding any particular heading is a simple matter of pressing the right-arrow key. Headings beneath are then exposed, and if they themselves contain sub-headings, you can open those up in the same way. pressing left takes you back up the tree until you eventually reach your starting point. Pressing select on any heading starts audio playback, per usual.

The difference with this title is that it contains text, of course - so as the audio plays, the appropriate words are highlighted alongside the speech. How much use this is going to be in practice I don’t know - I’ve never known anyone use a phone academically (not without some nefarious purpose anyway). In any event you can stop the audio with select, navigate the text with your cursor, and if you then press select (whilst at a different point in the text) the audio picks up from that point. Similarly, your place in the table of content is matched to wherever you happen to be, so if you started playback at chapter 1, paused audio and navigated midway through chapter 2 with text then pressed play, the audio would resume at chapter 2 and you’d be on chapter 2 (or its appropriate sub-heading) in the contents as well. Everything is synchronized so that your position in the title is guaranteed, which is another staple of DAISY software and generally a useful tool.

It’s also worth noting that talks does not read the text whilst the audio is playing, even though parts of it highlight to sync with the speech. This is probably good. On the other hand, if you’re reading without audio and just cursoring through the text, you’ve got no way of knowing you’ve moved from one heading to another. The title of the heading is part of the text flow, but there’s nothing (that Talks notices at least) to set it out from any other part of the text. Not having any site, nor any way to determine font information with talks, I cannot tell you if the heading is visually distinguishable from paragraph text in text view, but would imagine it to be either larger, coloured differently or rendered in a different style. For those curious, a “say all” does seem to perform a successful continuous read operation and, if you stop reading with a keypress, your position is maintained.

let us now turn to my directory of Mp3 files. I recorded them from tape some years ago, there are 4 tracks (one per side of cassette) and I haven’t the tools nor desire to turn them into DAISY just to play them with appropriate software. Luckily I don’t have to -because the alternative to adding a “book” to your bookshelf is to “DAISY-FY” material.
No changes are made to the files themselves; I assume DAISY2go simply amends its virtual bookshelf to add the files you specify. browsing is as easy as it is for adding any normal book, and you can choose to sort the added files by artist, album, filename etc. What I found particularly odd was that DAISY2go read the artist tag (which it used as the author when listing my book), but prompted me for a title, rather than using the Album tag. even had it given me album as a default and allowed me to change it, that would’ve been preferable, given that when recording tapes I set the “title” field of my ID3 tags to the book’s title plus tape or side number, and the “album” field to simply the name of the book. Content from iTunes, audible etc surely uses Album in the same way, and if the software can read the artist tag, then it certainly has the potential to read the album.

That issue aside, my bookshelf now contains DAISY books and my other title, which shows up on the bookshelf in precisely the same way as a normal DAISY book. Pressing select once again takes me to a content view, and because I sorted by filename, I expand the first tree element (which is the artist) and therein find my files (01 to 04). They are identified in the list by their ID3 title tags, but sorted by filename (which means that they go “01, 02,” not “1, 10″). Pressing select yields the same high-fidelity audio, the same fine speed and volume adjustment. The same level of navigation? unfortunately not…

Almost all DAISY hardware I’ve seen plays standard Mp3 as well as DAISY. Mp3 has no markup for “phrase” navigation, so what the sensible systems do is to take an arbitrary value (say five seconds) and jump through the file in that amount. DAISY2go seems to shirk this approach in favour of bouncing you to the next or previous file in your book - which in my case means I hop a whole forty-five minutes of audio with a single keypress. By no means an ideal solution, I’m sure you’ll agree. If I’d wanted to jump a whole file I would have either gone to content view and selected the file of my choice, or chosen level 1 navigation - which, minus any DAISY indication, means to move by file.

On the plus side, we’re given two more methods of navigation. Holding down the left or right cursor lets us jabber through the file as with an old tape player. You can choose just how fast (from 2 to 16 times speed ) you want to hop, and optionally can have a beep when you move from one element to another. For instance if I’m winding backward and I move from the beginning of file 2 to the end of file 1, I hear a cute little beep to inform me of the move. There’s also a “jump” feature, theoretically allowing you to input a time or percentage to move to. I have yet to make this work, however - I read mostly fiction though so I don’t mind very much.

In essence, that’s pretty much it. The settings of the application allow you to resume books where you leave off, but if you don’t set it up before you start playing there’s no way of getting back to where you were upon application restart. The options for auto-resume are Yes, No and Ask, Nuance might want to have defaulted it to Ask from the start so that people don’t have to go fiddling just to continue their reading.

As to my overall thoughts on the application? I have to say I’m impressed. The power of anything like this always amazes me, given the low memory footprints of mobile devices. there are a few niggling issues - the settings could have been defaulted a little better, the ID3 tag support is sloppy and the phrase navigation should really do what it says on the tin - but apart from that, this little gem does what it does reasonably well. For me especially, now that I can speed up my audio material without having to buy additional hardware, I’ll certainly be listening more. The sheer amount of output possibilities on mobile phones (bluetooth headsets, standard headphones, Fm transmission etc) means that a device I carry with me constantly just doubled up as a useful audio book player too. Symbian is very flexible and given that I also have a decent e-text reader, there’s very little reason why I’d need to use anything else for my pleasure reading.

not all is sunshine and flowers, though. We have to remember that Nuance are certainly not the first off the bat when it comes to a DAISY application for mobile phones. As mentioned in Graham, Ron. “Code Factory releases DAISY reader for Symbian mobile phones Access Ability.” 08/12/2008 14 Mar 2009, Code Factory (maker’s of Mobile Speak) had one out first. what’s more, theirs does more than Nuance’s - voice bookmarks over plain old text ones, automatic Bookshare integration, and probably more customisation of text formatting.

It seems to me that this is going to go the same way as their screen readers - i.e. however better the Code Factory offering may be, Talks (with its dominating market share) will win out. nuance are giving their DAISY reader away with Talks 4, but as yet haven’t announced any payment information for buying it as a stand alone application. Why would someone like myself bother to buy something when I can get a very similar product as part of my phone’s screen reader? The answer is I wouldn’t, of course - and I suspect for the majority of talks users that answer is the same.

To conclude: an impressive bit of software, but nothing new. I’m impressed, but then I’d never even used Code Factory’s offering and so it was new to me. Hopefully they’ll add more DAISY formats - bookshare support would probably be useful for the Americans and a little integration with the RNIB’s streaming service would be nice. That aside, quite how useful DAISY is on a phone (or DAISY is in general) remains to be established. I plan on using this software for audio titles (be they DAISY or standard Mp3), and that’s all. even so, a great resource and a useful tool for those of us too hard-up to afford portable DAISY hardware.

I’m rather disorganized when it comes to taking notes, primarily because I’m lazy. A recent look at cloudPad (an open source project) got me thinking as to what my perfect notetaking application would do.

My current “notes” folder contains text documents, each named. Taking a random sampling from the last few weeks we have “master kebab” (a hand-typed menu of a local pizza place which fell onto our doormat), “gwenthealth” (the phone number and contact details from a letter that came for the previous occupier of our house I had to deal with), and “skych” (a list of satellite TV channels and their shortcodes). Picking a few more for discussion later on we have “Hd replacement” (a receipt for a hard drive I bought before Christmas and have yet to install), “fPlus” (which contains connection details from our ISP including a hashed password for voip services), “Tredegar Taxis” (with a list of local cab companies and their telephone numbers), “TV License” (which is quite self explanatory) and “lemon sylabub” (which surprisingly for me contains a recipe).

Recent notes are fairly easy to manage - we ordered from the kebab place last week (and regretted it). I dealt with the letter sent to my house but not to myself this morning and the tv channel list is used often because certain audio-described programs require specific channel numbers. Thus far, all works reasonably well.

But the system breaks down when looking for older things, or those where I’m unsure of the arbitrary note name. Suppose, for instance, there was a fault with my recently-bought hard drive. I might need to find our ISP password but not remembered I’d named the note “fPlus” rather than simply “plus” (which already existed), or I might have needed to find the phone number for taxis (but not in Tredegar - I have several other files with locale-specific taxicabs).

The solution to all these problems are tags. Taking the hard drive file as an example, it contains several prices, a phone number, a web page and e-mail address and a postcode. All of the above could be picked up with a regular expression, and the note “auto-tagged” (i.e. so a tag field inside that note consists of all those things). manual tags I might apply to that note are “receipt”, “bill”, maybe “computer” or “purchase”.

Going further, the taxi companies would also be auto-tagged with phone number, I might want to add a “taxi” or “travel” tag to each of the files (of which I have about 6). Regular expressions aren’t just for dynamic content either, I might have travel auto-tagged whenever words like “taxi”, “train”, “bus” or even “ticket” appears. similarly, a “password” tag would easily enable me to find the ISP file I need.

A “license” tag would probably enable me to find the TV license as well as other licenses (such as codes for software I’d registered). “Recipe” would be something not used overly often, but nobody says tags have to be populous to be useful.

So we’ve established tags would be incredibly, undeniably, superbly useful. what else? What is there about a folder in windows explorer and a bunch of text files that makes it a usable system? The answer to that is several things.

First and foremost, the ability to view files sorted in several ways. more often than not I want date modified, so the latest notes I worked on are the quickest to get at. Occasionally I’m sure of my note name, and having them arranged alphabetically means by typing four or five characters of said name gets me to what I want the quickest. rarely I want to access the largest of my notes, so viewing them by size gets me the longer lists, tables etc that I’ve cribbed for various reasons.

The second useful feature is itself the ability to type more than one character of a note name. Standard list views in explorer let you enter multiple characters, and for my needs this is preferable to the single-letter navigation some controls tie you to.

you’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned folders. I don’t tend to structure my notes into folders. I make notes whilst on the phone, talking to people, having bright ideas. I don’t have time to go categorize them into this, that and the other beforehand - and don’t have the will to bother doing it afterward, either. This may be the reason why my note box is such a rampant mess, but the power of categories (namely the fact that they give you a semblance of structure) is taken away by the fact that if you don’t maintain that structure, the whole system falls flat on its face.

But enter the tags. Tagging notes may seem as arduous as splitting them off into directories, but the power comes in when tags are automatically applied. If I’m noting a contact down and the phone number is picked up and the tag appropriately inserted for me, I’m much more likely to add any other tags that aren’t so automatic but equally as relevant. Furthermore tags are not folders - each file, however diverse your directory structure, needs to be in a specific, unique folder - a file can have any number of tags, they aren’t mutually exclusive.

Anything else? encryption, a decent search (in notes as well as their names), both features missing from standard explorer. portability would be good, as well as a quick way to make a “new note” (empty, from clipboard contents, whatever).

So how would my ideal notetaker look? I suppose primarily I’d want a tree/list view, with a number of viewing options. call the 1st “standard”, where you can sort, as in explorer, by name, date created, date modified etc. A pain of notes on one side of the screen with an edit window for the note itself on the other. NO save button, no specifying paths or properties, a note either named by its first line or by the user upon creation. Right-clicking a note in the tree view would allow for renaming, deleting, printing etc.

The second type of view would by its very nature be a tree, a cloud of tags. Each tag would open up to disgorge the notes that are thus tagged. Going back to my collection, expanding “phone numbers” would list the taxi note, the hard drive sale, etc. A cloud would have to be generated based upon all tags in all notes, and there’d certainly need to be a dialog where you could specify auto-tags, which would be applied to each note when it’s moved out of for the first time or amended. In that way the things I’ve already mentioned - e-mail address, URL, phone number - these could all be automatically inserted as tags in any note you may write.

On the issue of tagging, how would I want it handled? Cloudpad has an edit field next to the note content area where you separate your tags with commas, but I feel tags should be unobtrusive (unless you want to worry about them). My ideal would be a pop-up window, a combo box perhaps where you could add any number of your own tags, or remove existing ones on a per-note basis. A toolbar button, menu entry or keyboard shortcut to edit the focused notes tags would be my methods of accessing said dialog. The auto-generated tags should always be present in this box of course, software that forces anything on its user is something I’d discourage.

Searching is also an interesting one, but for a lightweight noting system I suppose you could use a lightweight search. A standard find function could search through note text, titles, tags or all (so if I’d tagged phone numbers but not taxis) I could search for the word “taxi” in a note title or text and “phone number” as a tag and find them that way. A multi-tag search may be useful (so software I’d got a license code for with a phone number for the developer could be found by a tag search for “license” and “phone number”).

The next concern is priorities, many notetakers let you handle this. I wouldn’t bother doing anything more than giving priority tags - they’d be free form and as leveled as the user wished. Do you want stars (i.e. priority 1-5)? Text representations (urgent, important, can wait)? Colours (red, green, blue?) Just stick ‘em in as tags. Even phone numbers could be further segmented (by area code, mobile etc), and you could pick up notes with key words in (”boss”, “immediate”, etc). Why go through the constrictive process of adding priority menus and levels when tags don’t restrict the user to your type of prioritization? Just inform them of the power of a tag with copious examples and let them do it themselves.

my next thoughts - storage. Everybody is using XML, it encrypts as well as any other type of text and is open enough that should you break the software your notes are still in a format vaguely comprehensible to Humans. it allows for attributes (you could set notes to read-only using the attribute method and who knows what other useful things), and is endlessly nested (so a note can contain tags, a title and text without concern).

My creative juices are slowing, so I shall wrap up here. I’ve never really used a Blog as a sketchpad before, but it’s certainly an interesting approach to brainstorming. Does anybody want to write me such an application? Teach me how to do it myself? have any ideas? Know where I can get one that does all this, and more? Keep the comments coming, folks.

Here is v0.2 of Shurly. New in this release:

• Brief help dialog box to explain program function
• New URL shortening services added:
  • TR.IM
  • Puke.It

Download:
Shurly v0.2 Installer (206)

As always, feedback welcome.