Monday, June 27, 2011

A month and a bit on

Well having bought the tablet for work I use it mostly for reading.

I am of mixed mind as to whether I bought the correct device or not. Windows 7 is good as it lets have me multiple applications open , but Windows 7 would really suck without a pointing device and I do find that it can be a pain to do stuff without the mouse buttons.

The iPad content model is I think a great model for everyone to emulate. Provide a means by which anyone can put create an app for the great unwashed and then give a portion of the payment to the author, would be neat if the author got the lions share.

Not aware of much in the way of tablet apps for Windows 7 but maybe its out there, I have not really been looking. Have been impressed by some reviews for some ipad stuff but sadly no good for my tablet.

Saturday, June 11, 2011

more on viruses

I had thought I had purchased a licence for AVG, turned out I had purchased a download program that allowed me to download AVG, now if I want to license AVG I need to pay them.

It obviously pays to read the text that goes with the Download button. Or rather you pay if you don't.

So, anyway went to connect my tablet to my PC with synergy and I could no longer see my PC, dicked around for a while trying to find where I could enter set IPs to be allowed, but ultimately gave up and decided to de-install AVG and go elsewhere.

Decided to go with the Microsoft freebie, Microsoft Security Essentials, its free and a co-worker said that its very good.

Microsoft Security Essentials is now installed, thank you Mr Gates !

http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/security_essentials/default.aspx

I can see my shared drives again, yay !

Saturday, June 4, 2011

mouse

Why would a tablet want a mouse, because its windows. I don't much like the little rubber thingy in the keyboard so I got a bluetooth mouse from ebay for a few dollars. Luckily it was cheap as i have not managed to get it to work yet.

So for the moment am just using an old USB mouse or my desktop mouse if I have synergy running.

Virus and such

Well I connected to the internet and 2 seconds later had some rotten malware that was hijacking links on my browser to weird and wonderful pages, basically you click on a link and end up somewhere other than where you wanted to go. If you copied the link and pasted into the address bar it worked fine.

Used Norton Power Editor from safe mode to clobber that ( I hope ) and then forked out $26 for a license for AVG.

There needs to be a wall that we could line up all the malicious bastards who create these, trojans, malware, virus and adware, against which they could be shot. Or, if we could find a nice empty someplace,somewhere we could send them there, the moon perhaps. Call it New Botany Bay and reintroduce flogging.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Keyboard dock and external power

I think I would have liked the external power to either be able to be plugged into either the tablet itself or into the keyboard dock, not just the tablet.

If it were in the keyboard dock then I would not have to pull the tablet out of the dock and also unplug the power to walk away from my desk and vice versa when I come back.

If I choose to work with the tablet laying flat or holding it, then the ability to plug it into power is needed, but, powering through the dock would be nice to have.

The dock is weird. I don't understand why acer could not have spent a few more dollars on the plastic case so that you could simply close the tablet down as if it were a laptop/netbook and then open it back up again. But no you have a silly system where you have to unplug the device and then place it carefully and lock it on. When you want to put the tablet back in its keyboard slot, you have to lift up folding covers. If you have finger nails its easy enough to do it but it seems a bit clunky.

screen rotation

A not so impressive part of the device.

There is a switch to lock the rotation and presumably to unlock it, but it seems to me that every time I unlock it the rotation stays where it was locked. It appears to work ok if you have it unlocked, power down and power up and do NOT lock it.

The other thing that is screwey is that when you power up the device and its sitting nicely in its keyboard it comes up and you may get an icon pop up that indicates that the rotation lock is on or off, why it pops up is beyond me, if its in its cradle and its the right way up why would anyone care what the lock says. Rotate it and you might want to know that its locked and the screen can't be rotated but otherwise it should not throw up un-needed notifications.

I also get the rotation icon displayed when I remove the tablet from the keyboard. So it detects that movement is happening but then the rotation is NOT adjusted.

webcam

I am not impressed with the Acer Crystal Eye Webcam, it seems to me to be very slow to start and then finally becomes responsive. Once its up and you press the camera icon to take a photo it can take seconds to do anything and the first time you click it, it may do nothing. Also I found that because of the delay between moving the camera and getting the picture on the screen it was difficult to frame your shot.

So I went looking for something else and found AMCap, whilst I am only using the freebie at the moment it seems to me to be much better than the Acer Webcam. The refresh rate is much quicker than the Acer Webcam, works with both the front and rear webcams. It is neat because you can tell it to put the image directly into the clipboard.

I found I could not take a picture by pressing enter until I changed the Video mode, then it worked well Capture->setup->options->Video select VMR7 Windowed


some of the shortcuts from Help
F11 toggles the menu bar
F12 toggles always on top
Enter takes a picture ( no delay )

I think that it would be nicer if it could be tabletized, some icons for snap,start,stop,play,pause etc but I can live with out them, just need to have the online keyboard up.

If you don't purchase a licence, you get an orange box with diagonal stripe across your image but it works really well, $29 US, I will probably put my hand in my pocket eventually.

Using Am Cap with one note
Launch OneNote open your note
Launch AmCap
Bring up the keyboard
Press Enter (AmCap must be the selected current window ), that takes the picture and drops it into the clipboard
Touch OneNote and select the character cursor
touch the note where you want the picture placed
Select from the keyboard Ctrl then C
Picture is pasted . Geez its almost like the Microsoft Courier videos.

One Note


Well I got my OneNote2007 installed and the license sorted and its working not too badly. Spent a bit of time working out how to do things:

selection
You can't select in onenote when you have the pen selected but you can when the cursor is selected

snipping part of a screen or a window or the whole window
with the item you want on the screen, select start->snip tool->select your snip type,
take your snip, then go to OneNote page , select the insert position with the character cursor and Edit->Paste
OR
you could use the OneNote Insert->Screen Clipping


The snipping tool when its launched brings up a window to allow you to select the snip type, then after you have taken your clip, another window is displayed asking what you want to do that needs to be closed. The clip goes to the clipboard and you can paste it.
The OneNote Insert->Screen clip closes your onenote page and makes your screen semi opaque, you then select the area ( rectangular only ) and then one note pos back up with the screen clip captured and labelled
I guess its horse for courses,
My personal preference is to use the Snip Tool, however I think I would like a less in your face tool, something that you say Clip grab the clip and its done sitting in the clipboard ready to paste where ever you want it pasted, pbrush or OneNote.

(life was much easier with Ctrl/Print Screen Ctrl/C Ctrl/V , but no keyboard so no key combinations, I need a shortcut app that you can bring up like the keyboard, so you can run key macros - maybe it exists and I just got to find it )
(one night on - silly me, found that Ctrl/C Ctrl/v and Print Screen do exist on the onscreen keyboard you just have to press the keys one at a time, go figure , so I can copy and paste in pretty much the same way as I do on my desktop)

delete one note objects
with onenote page object displayed, bring up the onscreen keyboard ( this normally happens if you click with the curser icon on an empty part of the screen) , select the object with the text icon not the pointer icon then click del on the onscreen keyboard


Inserting a photo using Acer Crystal Eye Webcam

OneNote is open and you want to take a picture and drop it into the open note
open the Acer Webcam app and take the picture ( this app is really quite slow)
on one select the insert point with the char cursor
OneNote Insert->Picture from files and the picture should be the last file in the Pictures library
OR
you could use the snip tool
( I often take a snip chuck it into paint - edit the pick, select and copy part of it from paint and then drop onto the note that I am working on )

I think there is a bit (a lot) of work to do until its as easy as the Microsoft adds for Courier, but it works.

Early days


I really wanted to buy a ASUS 121 and have a 12" windows screen with digitiser and a pen that works well, but, being a cheap skate I decided that I would buy the acer Iconia w500 instead for half the price and see how it went. So I ordered it online and it turned up two days later.


My first thoughts when I got the Iconia was that I had made the wrong decision, but time will tell.

The first thing to note is that Windows 7 on a 10 inch screen gives you very small controls and if you have big fat fingers making the device do what you want is a bit trying. So today I raced off to the shops and bought a $19 stylus for an Ipad, which works wonderfully. If the $3 pens that I ordered from ebay earlier in the week work as well I will have pens up the warzoo, but I couldn't wait. So I recommend that you order one or more pens from ebay so they arrive when you get your w500. I went to the apple shop to get a pen and no they don't sell them but all of the sales people have them on the neck strings, Mr Jobs would probably turn in his grave (if he was dead), I am sure he said something to the effect that no one wants to use pens on tablets.

So what you get is a Windows 7 tablet with a Acer skin.

The Acer skin gives you access to some games ( which I have no interest in ) the built in cameras and keyboard, quick links to social networks, a calculator and a couple of management tools thats it. If you want the tablet to be useful you have to configure it yourself.

First few things I did was plug a network cable in and connect to my home network.

Next was to setup synergy on the PC so that I could share my keyboard and mouse, synergy is neat it allows you to use one keyboard and mouse over multiple PCs. Had some dramas doing this due to the firewall on the Iconia but fixed that by turning it off. Will need to turn it back on eventually.

So you want an ereader. I tried Kindle for the PC but that only works with Kindle books so that went into the recycle bin really quick. Then I tried Calibre, Calibre is good in portrait but not so good in landscape, Calibre can handle all sorts of ebook media and fits my needs. Issues that I have with it, it is its not really designed for working on a tablet, runs ok but the buttons could be bigger but as I want the w500 as a work productivity tool the erader is secondary so it will do nicely.

Because my intent is to have the iconia primarily as a tablet and not a laptop I have maximized the icons on the workbench ( right click on work bench select view select large icons ) , this way the big fat fingers will be able to select the correct icon. Your not going to get too many big fat icons onto the workbench so I created a folder on the workbench for those apps that I use all the time and create shortcuts to all of the apps that I wanted. Click on start select All Programs and then press ctrl and click and drag a copy of the shortcut to the app to your application folder.

Skype, I started skype and found that I could not connect, fix was easy, went into Start->ControlPanel->Programs and deleted skype and downloaded it again, installed the software added my username and hey presto up she popped.

I have this thought that I will be able to replace my paper jottings at work with the w500 by using w500 pen and OneNote, so to that end I am installing OneNote 2007, I already have it installed on my laptop and I find that OneNote is terrific, will see how it goes on the w500.

Next thing to do is to try and get remote access to my desktop / laptop working but I am not sure that I will be successful, I read something that I need Windows 7 Professional and the w500 has Windows 7 Home Premium so that may be an insurmountable obstacle - I shall see.