Randy Laptop

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.

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.

The eloquence software speech synthesizer has, for many years, been a staple of not only my life but that of innumerable other screen reader users as well.
I wanted to write something of a tribute to it here, as a sort of opening for the more personal entries on this site.

I can’t truly remember the first time I started using the JAWS Screen Reader - not specifically. I was too young, I suppose - and even had I taken the
time to mentally fix the date and time in my mind, I hadn’t the technical expertise nor the years of experience to appreciate the differences between a
screen reader and a synthesizer. I grew up running Hal (from Dolphin Systems) on a dos machine, and when windows came along and I found JAWS, simply accepted
that they had different voices.

It occurred to me yesterday whilst playing jumble on my Franklin Language Master that I was truly getting old - the speech was too fast for me to distinguish
the c and the z and caused me to make a mistake. So when I came back to my laptop and started reading some e-mail, I took a moment to appreciate the clarity
that Eloquence offers. Of course you can argue that I hadn’t used the Franklin device for several years, the volume was low, I wasn’t paying a great deal
of attention… yet all of those things, whilst true, still make me think that Eloquence means much to me.

The text-to-speech market has changed tremendously over the last decade. Big companies now offer big voices: even so, it’s not impossible to get one of
the ScanSoft voices on a mobile phone or portable daisy player - files that were hundreds of megabytes only months ago downsized for the mobile market.

My problem with all these voices is that they are not 100% artificial - they use, in case you were unaware, segments of Human speech. Clever processing
rules and translations tell the engine which segments of speech should be played to simulate words, and thus we have a “human-like” voice.

This seems remarkably desirable for many people. I concede that in some industries it’s incontrovertibly useful - and for sighted people, the more human
the better. But from a very young age, I always liked the fact that my screen reader wasn’t a person. People don’t always read precisely what you tell
them to, in the way you want, pausing on queue and adjusting their pronunciation at your slightest whim. Despite a longstanding image of a little man sat
inside my computer, I never associated the speech I hear whenever I’m logged on to speech I hear elsewhere. The two are distinct, separate, and their only
relation is that I can understand them.

Even so, there are plenty of formant synthesizers in use today (i.e. ones not using Human samples). I would venture to say that Eloquence (or its IBM variants),
DECtalk, Doubletalk and E-speak are today’s leaders. The aforementioned nicely cover both hardware and software as well; although not the same (I’d love
an Eloquence microchip for instance)!

The question I have to ask myself then is why I’m so inured with Eloquence? It’s almost like a built-in prejudice, and it can be frustrating at times.
Firstly, I have used it more than perhaps all other synthesizers combined. Not only that, but I’ve used it for a wider variety of purposes: yes, all involve
written text, but the form of that text has varied from recipes to poetry; fiction novels to reference works. Be I relaxing with a book or chatting online,
Eloquence has been there pervasively.

There are downsides to this attachment, of course. Eloquence is old - tried and tested certainly, but there are issues that could be addressed (such as
certain combinations of letters crashing the entire synthesizer). Also, whilst it provides extraordinary powers of customisation as regards pronunciation,
that’s not always handed down by a screen reader. In JAWS, for instance, there’s no way to directly change how eloquence pronounces things itself. The
JAWS dictionary manager lets you shuffle letters around and try and make it speak the best you can, but the synthesizer itself allows direct phoneme entry
which would make things much easier. With that, you could not only change the pronunciation of a word, but its stress, etc - and for a heavy fiction reader
such as myself, some things niggle mercilessly.

Another problem is that I’ve been pampered too much by JAWS. Since the introduction of the speech and sounds manager, I read all my fiction with quotes
in a different voice. The voice I use is only a slight modification to the default (the pitch lowered slightly) but it is a useful distinguishing characteristic
for me. Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions, Eloquence doesn’t make an appearance in NVDA or free screen readers.

So what’s the future of the synthesizer? Well, what do I know? I’m just an average user. But it seems to me that despite the undeniable popularity of the
more Human-sounding voices, Eloquence (and its formant brothers) has long life yet. As to the particular voice that is Eloquence, it’s hard to say. It’s
not only screen readers on the desktop - mobile phones and notetakers are carrying the torch as well. If it were to vanish, I am sure I wouldn’t be alone
in my sadness.

I do love the quirks it exhibits. The aplomb of the programmers astonishes me - the way in which Eloquence can say the word voyage so naturally and yet
utter “bon voyage” in such great, French style. It is a remarkably subtle synthesizer, with many a nuance (if you will pardon the pun). Yes, it mispronounces
many things. From Harry Potter alone there are terms like “Azkaban”, “Cruciatus”, “Firenze” and “Hermione”. The science-fiction world offers plenty more
- “Jedi” has an I sound at the end, and trek names of places and people (such as “nerys”, “Jem hadar”, “Dukat” and “Cardassia”) are all off. The power
of this synthesizer means that all of these (and countless others) are easily fixable, simply by substituting letters and showing a little creativity.

So: a powerful, impressive, long-lasted product. It’s weathered changes of ownership and used by thousands. There aren’t many things it can’t say properly,
given the right ASCII tickle. So a toast is in order, I suggest. To Eloquence. To Dr. Hertz and to all those other great people, to the JAWS developers
who bridged the technologies - and as I lift my metaphorical glass, I’d also like to thank these people. I’d never enjoy a good book in the same way if
it weren’t for you.