StenoWeb

Tonight, after going out to dinner, Megan and I stopped by the Target to get some badly needed supplies. New pants, shampoo, toothpaste, mouthwash, along with some milk and pop tarts.

The most important part of the trip though, was definitely the awesome little LEGO guy I picked up for about $5.

I bought it for two reasons. Firstly, as noted by noted cartoonist Dave Willis, it looks a lot like David Walkerton and UltraCar from the web comic It’s Walky!

The other reason I grabbed it is I’ve been wanting to use LEGO minifigures as characters in an alternate form of web comic. There are a variety of things I could do, and what I was going to do is kind of a general “day in the life” type of comic similar to Questionable Content.

I need to get a few more LEGO sets, and I would like to have a place established where I can keep the LEGO stuff set up. I also need/want to find a new container for the legos so I can get more characters and a few settings. There are definitely a few sets I want to get at some point, so I can look more closely at starting up some kind of story with LEGO Minifigures. Before I start that I may need to look at some copyright stuff in order to make sure that nothing will go wrong with it.

I’ll admit, this particular post is a bit of a cheat. I wrote it originally as a reply to a thread started today on a forum where I moderate/administrate. The jist of the thread was “iPad: Is it or is it not an epic fail?” Naturally, I think it’s not a fail, for a lot of reasons. This is just a fairly small selection of thoughts, and as more happen, they’ll either be on my twitter, or in this journal/blog. The post I wrote (with a few additions and edits) follows.

It’s not fail at all. I don’t know what the rest of you were thinking today would be like, but honestly, there was no reason ever to think that this was going to be anything other than a rather large iPod Touch, with a software keyboard that has been re-adjusted for the fact that this is so much larger than the iPod Touch (and iPhone) is (are.)

The iPad definitely looks great, when you consider what it is and what it is supposed to be. The target market is anybody who wants an inexpensive portable computing device that can do a variety of fairly nice productivity and fun things. It also has a faster processor and more powerful graphics than any of the current iPod/iPhone devices, which means it won’t be long before iPad specific games that take advantage of the hardware will show up. This thing could be better than the PSP or the Nintendo DS if the right people begin developing for it.

I know several people I can imagine using an iPad. People who might want something with them on the couch all day, people who don’t want to buy a smartphone or are always near wifi and want a good organizer/email client, but don’t want to haul around a laptop.

As a specific example, one of my high school teachers would benefit from this thing by replacing her current with it. She has specifically complained about the very short battery life of her laptop, she tends to hunt-and-peck anyway, and mostly what she wants is something ot look at her calendar/email with, or reserach something that’s going on on the television, or just browse the web for general interest.

With the iWork apps available for it, she would also be able to write up assignments, enter grades into spreadsheets, and create presentations that she can then show at the school using the g5 tower or an mbp hooked up to the projector.

Plus, with the keyboard dock, she could make it easier to use either at her desk at home or desk at the school, for even more efficiently typing emails, assignments, calendar events or whatever.

Even-more-additionally, the school district has a Microsoft Exchange setup, so she’d be able to synchronize her contacts and calendar with that system, or with a personal google account if she wanted.

The iPad is also something I can imagine one or more of my parents having, or even my brother. Their use of the computer is essentially single-tasking, and tends to be limited to Internet browsing, e-mail, and spreadsheets for management of personal information (I keep track of my mobile phone bills with Excel, something I could easily re-create in Numbers or MobileNumbers if I had an iPad or a Mac, just as an example of how a consumer might use a spreadsheet in their home.)

In all of those cases, of course, I can not really imagine the iPad being the person’s only computer. My photo teacher would need to have it synchronize either with her PC at home or her Mac at the school, and any of the other people I can immediately think of using it (my dad, my brother, my dad’s girlfriend’s mother, etc) would probably synchronize it with a desktop (or functionally) desktop computer, except in a few cases of people who don’t currently have computers or Internet connections I could see using it primarily with the (most likely AT&T) 3g connection. Things like the camera connection kit also make it seem a bit more likely that somebody would be able to use it as their only computer. The biggest worry there is that somebody would have to purchase the largest iPad (which costs almost as much as the lowest end MacBook) in order to store a decent number of photos on it, along with videos/music/whatever-else.

All of that having been said, I can not see iPhone OS ever replacing the current desktop Mac OS for desktop or full-strength mobile computing. What I can see happening is the need for desktop computing diminishing signicifantly. Two or three years ago I would never have thought of saying I could see anyone having a device like this as their only computer. Today, I could indeed see a few specific types of people using this not only as their primary mobile computing device, but as their only computing device. iPod Touch and iPhone/iPad devices are definitely able to live most if not all of their lives separated from a computer, and with the iPad, it becomes easier to see, both with and without 3G.

The other thing is that it’s no secret that the current Mac OS is based on NeXTSTEP, and is all the better for it. Mac OS 9 was almost completely unusable in 2003 when I finally switched to Mac OS X from system 8/9, and I imagine I would’ve been even happier if I’d had a nicer, OS X capable mac earlier. Mac OS X runs a few very advanced applications whose functionality may one-day be enhanced by multitouch, but are unlikely ever to be able to run fully multitouch. Great examples of this, I think, are Aperture and Final Cut Studio, which require fairly good precision, huge amounts of processing power, and work best with the most gargantuan of displays.

As far as “vs. the iPod Touch” — the iPad has a physical keyboard add-on available, which means that the productivity apps and web sites such as this one where you might enter a large volume of text, are easier and more efficient to use. There are a few other accessories available, and I’ll admit I really like most of what I’m seeing about it.

I’ve personally thought for a few moments about whether or not I will want to get one. I have already started a new wireless contract for a smartphone with VerizonWireless, so one of my thoughts which was “use a dumbphone or cheap featurephone for phone/text and an iPad+3G for data purposes” isn’t applicable to myself, but the $30/month unlimited data plan is definitely something I would have considered purchasing with or for the device.

Even if I do get an iPad at some point, without activating an AT&T line on it, what I may do is open a new AT&T account (or reopen my old one, i don’t know the mechanics of that) and activate the data on a month by month basis — which would be incredibly helpful in a situation such as “I’m going on vacation somewhere I know there’s cell signal but there won’t be wifi” (which has happened to me before.)

One role I’ve considered recently is that I have what I call a “bedputer.” It’s a very small, older ultraportable laptop (IBM ThinkPad X24) that hangs out underneath my bed in case I need to check my email over by the bed, or I just want to use a small computer. An iPad would be suitable for this role as I tend to use it while sitting down, primarily for reading or writing short blog posts, tweets, facebook statuses or forum posts, along with watching videos (hulu or podcasts or whatever) and checking on and updating my schedule.

Whether or not it’ll be a success in the long run, I don’t think there’s any question. Who will buy it? Unless we’re currently in dire need of something like this, I don’t think it’ll be people like us, but I do suspect that people like us will help our parents, friends and other acquaintences get into the idea of an iPad, and purchase and configure them.

This week has been nothing short of absolutely crazy. Megan and I went to Kingman last Sunday to drop stuff of at my storage locker in Flagstaff, immediately after which Glenn and I finally went on our shopping trip to prepare for what we’ve been calling “Winterpocalypse.”

Winterpocalypse, to put it lightly, has been a winter storm of, well, epic proportions, which is why it’s called winterpocalypse.

On Monday, the snow began to come down, making getting to work on Tuesday a little bit of a bother, and by Wednesday morning, NAU was calling a delayed start. The university had called a delayed start for Thursday by late Wednesday evening, and by 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, the university had canceled the rest of the day, and within another hour, Friday was fully canceled as well.

Around the state of Arizona, extremely high winds, torrential downpour raining and either snow or just generally cool temperatures have caused most Northern Arizona cities (such as Flagstaff and Williams) along with the state as a whole, as per the Arizona Department of Transportation.

On the NAU campus, as of mid-Thursday, most of the stuff is somewhat walkable, but by no means is the campus in a condition I wish to persist. Most of the pathways are at significantly reduced width, some of them are straight-out unavailable, and it seems as though no effort is being made to improve the condition of the pathways and roads at the university. The official line is that for safety, we should stay inside.

The other thing that happened on Thursday evening is that all forms of communication onto and off of campus, other than the land-line telephone (we think) have been deactivated. Fortunately, Glenn and I have discovered that we can still use sites local to the university such as the portal, the faculty/staff e-mail site, and our online class content management system. Fortunately everything within my ecosystem at home (the flatdell/superslab relationship, essentially) was working properly. Now I just needed to wait to be re-connected to the rest of the universe.

Other than working, Friday shall be spent either making up for lost time on the Internet, or possibly doing something productive such as finishing up my NaNoWriMo novel, or some of the homework for my mountain of economics classes.

The latest news as of Friday is that some businesses around Flagstaff have had their roofs collapse, and some other businesses are opting to remain closed until they can get the snow cleared from their flat or nearly flat roofs.

It’s just generally craziness.

Yesterday, Megan and I went ahead and took a trip down to Kingman with a modest car-full of stuff that I have been wanting to remove from the room. Among the things were two computers in the “zone of old computer suck” and a variety of things including some peripherals and a whole lot of paper-type products that I don’t need or want around anymore. One of the things that does indeed tend to happen to me is I decide for whatever reason that I really need or want something out of my storage area to come with me to my dorm. This particular time, I am fairly proud of myself as I was able to minimize this.

Rather than bringing a different pair of computers to replace the two I put into storage, or even a single machine, I decided to make the only things that came back to the school with me be a bag of brand new socks, about which I was incredibly excited because I’ve been wanting to buy new socks, along with a curious little piece of computer goodness, an Asante Micro EN/SCSC. This particular little device is great because it happens to be very small, and it adds a fairly significant amount of functionality to one computer I have around.

The computer in question is Mortimer, my Apple Macintosh PowerBook 180. It was new in 1993 or 1994 and it has a 33MHz Motorola MC68030 processor in it, along with 14 megabytes of memory and a 120 megabyte hard disk. The ’030 processor is fairly modest by today’s standards, with most if not all moern cellular telephones containing more powerful computing hardware, but in 1993, it was a formibable chip, especially when considering that it was in a mobile computer. The Asante Micro
EN/SC is a SCSI ethernet adapter that provides the machine with, well, ethernet. I was able to transfer the drivers and some TCP software to the machine with AppleTalk over the serial port, and now have both AppleTalk and TCP/IP going in and out of the machine over SCSI. I installed Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 4, but I think my favorite application for this system is working out to be MacSSH.

For a system with such modest processing horsepower, I was somewhat worried that it might be a hardship to handle an SSH connection, but when I dropped the SSH connection from SSH2 to SSH1, it was able to manage just fine. The system is running a bit warm, which I suspect simply means that SSH is indeed using a lot of the system’s resources.

I do have other 68k Macs in the storage locker, if it weren’t such a hardship to bust some of them out and use them, I would definitely be interested in seeing how some of the other systems handle. I can imagine the most interesting of the systems being the Macintosh LC, which has merely a 16MHz ’020 processor and 10 megabytes of memory. I can imagine that the lack of an FPU would also make a difference in the performance of an SSH session.

Depending on the types of things I can now do with the PowerBook 180 now that it has a quick, TCP-capable network connection, I may or may not swap it with tacgnol as the bed-computer. Most of what I do at the bed computer is just open an SSH session to flatdell anyway, so having tacgnol available somewhere else may be useful, that or I can put it away for a bit, in order just to have more computational variety.

For now, I’m mainly using Mortimer (the PowerBook 180) as an SSH client to flatdell which is nice becaues the monochrome screen is actually very readable indeed, and the keyboard is really quite nice.

One of the things I have been working on this year is really reducing the amount of physical clutter I have in my dorm room. Part of this is that I need to look at and consider things I have laying around such as extra papers, receipts, statements, silver halide based photos and film, along with magazines, books and other things.

Because I am renting a storage locker, the actual process of simply removing things from my dorm room is fairly easy, however one of the auxiliary processes that I would like to consider is that of digitizing media and other information that I currently have in physical, space-consuming forms. These, as mentioned before, are things like magazines, books, pieces of software, receipts and statements, and other things that fir better on SD chips than in physicality.

One of the things that I did bring back with me from the garage to the room is a few magazines, like maybe eight of them, some of which are fairly old and are already starting to fall apart, a few others are fairly modern (maybe 3 to 4 years old at most) and are in really good condition. The question is when I start thinking about the exact process by which I’ll be digitizing them, if I should choose to do so. Some of the oldest ones that aren’t in the greatest of shape, I would definitely like to get those scanned, however the big problem that arises is that I do not currently have a scanner, flatbed or otherwise.

One possible solution to the last problem is that I go to the lab and use their scanner (which is extremely slow) for several hours, if not potentially several days, just to get one magazine scanned. Another potential solution is that I purchase a scanner, however doing that will depend on how much I decide I can spend on a project like scanning magazines (and other papers I want to recycle or shred and recycle) just because there are fairly few other things I can imagine using a scanner for on any kind of regular basis.