marypcbuk | Entries tagged with tom's guide

Maker Faire was a little bit more like work this year as we did more scheduled interviews than usual and concentrated a little more on companies we could write about, but there was plenty of just really cool stuff as well.

I wrote up a piece for Tom's Guide that I pitched as the quirky side of tech - robotics (robot plant waterers, robot camera tripods that follow you around filming), DIY hardware, 3d printing, tiny computers like Raspberry Pi, milk jugs that tell you when the milk goes off, conductive paint (so you can literally draw a circuit board), electroluminescent screens you can print like a T shirt and the future of the kind of hardware projects that will show up on Kickstarter. You can read about all that and more over at http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/373-maker-faire-diy-projects.html

We interviewed Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi foundation and reminisced happily about 8-bit computing and game writers who made so much money they bought Porsche's they were too young to drive; that's coming soon on TechRadar.

I took lots more photos than fitted in the feature, many of them of delightful flaming sculptures; we also got to watch the solar eclipse through a handheld safety viewer, a pinhole in a sheet of card, a stretched sheet of mylar, the shadows of the trees and a proper telescope with safety filters that let us see a sunspot.

More pictures on my SkyDrive

The weekend was great fun as usual, very tasty thanks to 4505 Meats whose 'pork; the noun not the verb' T shirt is in my future as a tribute to deep fried mac and cheese with bacon-studded frankfurter & sweet chili pork rinds, and exhausting. It was so nice to tumble into a hot tub afterwards. This whole trip has been fun, informative, tasty and exhausting and we're only halfway through. So far:
- we flew to LA (I met a charming raconteur on the plane who regaled me with stories about mass lobster dinners and the music business), tried a new breakfast place with maple bacon biscuits, drove to Vegas via Barstow and the usual excellent cheap Mexican restaurant
- walked about 4 miles a day and wrapped out heads fairly thoroughly around the possibilities for managing Windows 8 & Windows RT as well as how System Center and Intune will manage iPhone and Android. Dinner at Shibuya, birthday lunch at Olives with a table on the patio to see the fountains, the ever-reliable BLT and lunch with spikeiowa and Tom who were in town for Corflu, at Morel's Steakhouse at Palazzo which is outside on the strip, with a view of the Sirens, excellent Blood Orange margeritas and very nice food but slightly too small umbrellas on a bright bright day. The impressionist garden in the Bellagio and the impressive fountains outside were photographed.
- we headed back to Barstow and on to Paso Robles where we fitted in two new wineries (Looking Glass where they have a lovely garden to taste in and Sculpeterra where they have sculptures and pistachios) and dinner at Artisan (sweet potato bacon tater tots with ramps dressing and rabbit sausage) and then on to San Jose so we could get up far too early for
- the Creative Suite 6 announcement in the de Yonge museum accompanied by inflatable CS logos that were so inflated they nearly lifted the fountain they were tethered to into the sky, and drink-n-interview time on the top floor of the de Yonge tower where you can see out to Point Reyes up the coast and over the hill to the tips of the Golden Gate Bridge. Ritual Coffee and purchasing of my lovely insulated tea glass and then down to San Jose for a week sitting in Barefoot Coffee and writing furiously
- got up far too early to fly to Orlando and talk to RIM about BlackBerry 10; the new CEO has a convincing mien and talks well but didn't have time for the kind of one on one interview where we can really assess how he thinks, but we did have time to talk to Dan Dodge, the QNX founder who impresses us a lot (and laughed heartily when I said QNX reminds me of Plan 9). RIM is working like a startup, with late nights and pranks and more energy than it's had in years. Nice ideas we said to them; now you have to execute. Then our plane was delayed over three hours by potential fog which I hope isn't an omen for RIM. The Virgin America gate staff kept the passengers amused with quizzes (guess the cumulative age of the gate staff) and paper airplane contests and we took off late but in a good mood. Watched Tower Heist which was funnier and more poignant than I expected. Alan Alda continues to rock my world. Landed at 1am SF time, took an hour (an hour!) to get the luggage and the rental car and got to San Jose in hem-hem record time
- proceeded to sleep off the trip, sit in the hummingbird-visited sunny garden of friends writing furiously, enjoy hanging out and catching up, fit in a few meetings with security companies, visit the Facebook campus, visit Parc (a Xerox company), queue for the longest time for a crab/shrimp/crawfish boil that was very yummy, have lunch in the excellent Mayfield Bakery restaurant in the Town & Country (much more than a bakery - fantastic chicken and steak sandwiches and a refreshing pomegranate lime spritzer) and pop over to San Jose to pick up some rose at David Bruce (where we got to meet the winemaker and hear about the chardonnay from the Judgement of Paris he'd tried the previous week). And dinner at Dish Dash (yummy Mediterranean)
and dinner with friends and dinner at Caffe Ricci where the sculptures are screamingly funny - the washerwoman is a woman with a washer-drier on her head
- we decamped to downtown San Jose for the Nvidia GTC conference: virtualising GPUs, learning the reason for locust swarms (can't stop, locust behind me will eat me) which the daily newsletter reported in the style of a con newsletter, and pondering the amateur lunar rover that will launch on a Russian rocket next year. Ate at *all* the downtown San Jose restaurants; Original Joes, Il Fornaio, The Grill on the Alley AND McCormack & Schicks. Do you get points for restaurant bingo? The event party had roulette and blackjack (which I know how to lose at) and poker and craps (which I don't) but we watched the excellent jugglers instead. Nice patter, nice pattern juggling, and chainsaw juggling to the music and pace of The Blue Danube.
- thence a day of writing and errands and on to Maker Faire for the weekend, followed by a two-day drive to Santa Barbara (coffee, cherries, fried chicken and crab and lobster we hammered into submission at Arch Rock Fish) and on to Laguna Beach (scary LA traffic is crazy and scarey) for this week's conference, Future in Review. This is a treat, although a conference that starts at 8am and carries on through conversations and film showing and dinner lectures until at least midnight every night is exhausting as well as fascinating. It covers everything from cloud to the language of prairie dogs, melting glaciers to the uniquely US approach the FTC has to privacy (speedbump to innovation on the information superhighway to how technology could help human trafficking to interviews with Mark Hurd and George Dyson, plus David Brin and Kim Stanley Robinson bringing their towels on stage. Chatting to them afterwards turned into lunch talking SF and different cultures and then a walk on the beach picking up shells and testing the water temperature. Special mention to O Sushi in the mall across from the hotel, which has excellent sushi, sashimi and rolls, all made with real crab the way I like them, plus cripsy fried antenna. I feel like my antenna are crispy fried now (we've been writing this week as well) so bed calls.

If I can clean spam out of my inbox automatically, why do I have to push a vacuum cleaner around by hand? If I can have a robot do the work of cleaning and scrubbing the floors, emptying the cat litter, clearing the cutters, cutting the grass, washing the windows, scooping the leaves out of the pool and grabbing the garbage, why would I ever do it by hand? To find out exactly how good the robots have become, I set up robot vacuums, floor mops and cat litter scoopers and left them to it. I also look at the range of other domestic robots on the market from the practical to the peculiar, and explain why the Japanese are so keen on humanoid robots.

Most of us are no Mike Rowe. If there's a dirty job, we'd prefer if someone else took care of it. So instead of paying for a landscaper or a maid, how about buying a robot? Cleaning the floor, dealing with the trash, scooping the cat litter. Can you turn over the nasty jobs to a machine now?

We’ve been waiting for a robot butler since Rosey appeared in The Jetsons, and while that’s still very much science fiction, there’s plenty of research into general purpose humanoid robots, some of which look disturbingly human. What you can buy today are robotic devices for the home that do one or two specific things, automatically or with minimal human interaction. Robot vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers, robot mops and cat litter robots. Are they really robots – and are they any good?
Read the rest at Tom's Guide

EDIT
And in all of this I should add that it's Simon who does the majority of the cleaning. The one thing he would most like a home robot to do is folding the laundry, which is what iRobot CEO Colin Angle most wants as well. There is a verrrry slow towel folding prototype in the piece...

For the last month or so, Simon and I have been sporting an unusual array of gadgets; pedometers, sleep, activity, heart rate, stride and calorie monitors. I've been sleeping with a Zeo EEG headband on and hanging a DirectLife measure round my neck, Simon's been jogging with a heart rate monitor and weighing in on a tweet-your-weight scale, we've both been counting paces and checking our activity flowers...

What did we find out? You can't change what you don't measure and while just measuring things doesn't change anything, it can remind you that you wanted to make a change. Digitising information means you'll have a baseline in five years time when you're wondering why you have more/less energy/time/whatever. You can also obsess about measurements rather than what you're doing; moderation in all things (including moderation). And the privacy issues around this data are as big an issue as the opportunity to derive really useful information (and properly anonymised) about trends and broad health questions is tempting...

In a great deal more detail, the full piece is over at Tom's Guide.

Want to get fitter, sleep better, bring down your blood pressure, lose weight, meditate more often, remember take your medication on time or change anything else about your life? Forget will power; use technology to help you achieve your goals.

We’re getting keener about measuring ourselves: everything from how active we are to how happy we are. Whether you think of it as personalized health, health as a game or a life-size science experiment, self-tracking is hitting the headlines.

Here's what you can track yourself and what you need to start tracking...

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Fitbit-Adidas-Health-and-Fitness,review-1673.html

I also want to thank Larry Smarr, who has been tracking himself for several years, for weight loss, to understand his blood tests and to eventually diagnose himself with Crohn's disease, and to fulfill his job of 'living in the future' (you may know Larry from his previous job, running the NCSA where he supervised a graduate student named Marc Andreesson and evangelised this emerging Web thing to companies). I used his charts tracking several test results (complex reactive protein and lactoferrin), but the rest of his fascinating presentation is at http://lsmarr.calit2.net/presentations?slideshow=8115272

I use a tablet PC every day, for handwritten notes and diagrams, or just using my finger to scroll or tap a button. But a pen isn't just for writing; it's for drawing and sketching and painting. There are some superb art apps for tablets on all the different platforms and it's surprising how much being able to experiment and undo unleashes your creativity. I've always thought I can't draw or paint, but I'm pretty sure I could learn to be a lot better at it than I am, especially using the right tools.

I spent a couple of weeks painting and sketching and wrote up the software side - and the opportunities, with a followup on the tools that make a difference, like the awesome Nomad Brush.
Tablet artistry - making art on screen http://www.tomsguide.com/us/tablet-artistic-paint-software,review-1669.html
Better than a finger - the right tablet tools http://www.tomsguide.com/us/tablet-artistry-stylus-brush,review-1676.html

And here's the kind of art I was making

Windows 8 wishlist

We only know some of what’s in Windows 8, but here are a few things we’d just like…
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/windows-8-features-wishlist,review-1637.html

Wireless power changes everything

This time around we might actually get wireless power that makes a difference – and it won’t just be near-field coupling: wireless optical power and long-distance options…

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Wireless-Power-Tesla-Fulton-eCoupled,review-1641.html

From increasing the DPI to tweaking the delete gesture to something proofreaders will recognise. I'm amazed OEMs don't do most of these as standard on touch tablets, although what Windows 7 really needs is a pen and touch combo screen. If you can't afford that, or you're using a touch only screen until the Asus Eee tablet turns up, check out my tips at Tom's Guide.

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Microsoft-Windows-7-Tablets,review-1629.html

Is the Samsung Galaxy Tab a nicer tablet than the Archos 10? (no, but it has better accessories)
Can taking most of the copper out and messing up the impedence on purpose make a cable work better? (yes, with this lovely piece of design and I can't wait to get some SmartCables)
Is the Lenovo wireless USB remote control an admission of guilt? (if this is what you need to navigate a UI remotely, heaven help us)

There's more details and another seven really cool things in my CTIA roundup on Tom's Guide; what's your favourite?

Well, all the Windows Phone 7 '7 things' features are flying about this week..

If you’ve always used Internet Explorer simply because you've always liked its Web slices and accelerators, or have been fond of the fact that it was the first browser to run in protected mode for security, or because in IE your online banking site reliably works; whether you’ve stuck with it from inertia, or because you need it for a work site – whether you love or tolerate IE today, we think you’re going to love IE 9 beta. Here's my nine reasons

Windows Live Essentials are all the extra apps Microsoft is no longer allowed to bundle with Windows; you can include Paint and WordPad but not Photo Gallery and Writer - or a mail client. And the name is odd; on the one hand, Microsoft needs a home for all the extra tools that co-ordinate with the Live services (Hotmail, Messenger, Spaces, SkyDrive, MSN and to a lesser extend, Bing) - but on the other no-one is going to claim that the Bing Bar is an essential tool when just about every browser has a search tool you can set to use any search engine you want. The Family Safety tool ought to be essential, but it's still too complex (link all the users to Live accounts by hand) for what it does. Writer would be great but it still doesn't understand LiveJournal properly.

But Live Mail and Movie Maker are excellent at what they do (I maded a funny cat video in Movie Maker but luckily for you I ated it). The new social pane in Messenger is now how I read Facebook (and I wish Twitter would get its head out of its policy so I could read Twitter through it). I set up Sync and forgot about it and now my IE favourites and my Outook signatures are the same on both machines (I want it to do ribbon corrections and AutoCorrect settings and other customisations as well though) - and if I wanted to, I could remote desktop into any machine with Sync on. I do miss the 5GB of sync space from when it was Mesh; 2GB is mean so I'm only doing peer-to-peer syncing, but I'll use that to migrate everything to a new PC any time I get a new PC to work on because it's blissfully simple.

And Photo Gallery is great; it doesn't make me import all the images into another library, it just indexes them. All my favourite bugs are fixed (when I import photos I can pick tags from the existing database rather than typing them in wrong by hand, I can pick and choose which things are fixed when I use the automatic fix tools (contrast yes, straightening no) and I can open any image folder, not just the ones I've told Photo Gallery about). And the nifty 'combine the heads' tool that Bill Gates previewed back at CES 2007 (!) is finally available. This is me, making all the Google Wave team look happy at the same time...

For a more considered review with details and images that show the features in action, check out my piece on Tom's Guide. There's a companion piece about Five ways Hotmail beats Gmail - it's interesting to watch Google add in as many of the features Microsoft has put into the new Hotmail in Gmail since the announcement, but with a much more Google interface (ie ugly) - if Apple UI makes Microsoft UI look bad, Google UI makes Microsoft UI look amazingly friendly and smooth; if only Microsoft could put this consistently into all the products and not fall back to its own butt-ugly old-fashioned dialog boxes.

Also, if I see one more dialog asking me to make MSN my home page there are going to be consequences!

We're still sitting on our thumbs in Barcelona, not at all sure what to do or how we might get home or when (Tuesday 7am? overnight ferry? never?) and I was thinking about the really cool tools in Photoshop CS5. I often wish that life had Ctrl-Z - when I drop the plate on the tiled floor, when a cat knocks my potato into a dust bunny - and now I wish I could just select the ash cloud with simple seelction and use the content-aware fill...

IE is never going to use WebKit; get over it. You don't want it to; the fewer browser rendering engines there are, the less innovation we'll see in browsers. (When there were 13+ browsers in the mid 90s there was more development going on than there was when we only had IE and Netscape). What we want is a version of the IE Trident rendering engine that does more, better, faster, more compatibly.

At first I was disappointed by the IE9 preview; I'd wanted a beta I could use as my main browser. After talking through with the IE team what they're doing in IE9 and why, I'm seeing a minimalist wrapper around the Trident engine as a good way of getting to a version of IE that can deliver all of that. Look under the hood and you can see how much the IE team wants to do and how far they've got so far. Here's my tour of the things in IE9 you'll care about, as far as the page engine goes.

I've been a big fan of Live Search Mobile and the Bing version that replaced it for Windows Mobile. I put it in my top 15 WinMo apps recently, I use it for directions instead of Google Maps Mobile and I tout it of another example of how Bing gives you answers rather than information. Not any more it doesn't.

The new version that Bing asked me to download this evening sports a new (grey) interface with Bing styling, instead of the colourful - and nicely obvious - icons. Movies gets a big ad at the bottom of the screen; just like the old icon for finding movie times but somehow more important than anything else Bing can do (judging by the fact that it's twice the size). News pushes its way in, because obviously I want to search for that on the move more than anything else (not). And the 'always a day out of date but still incredibly useful' service comparing gas prices at local garages? (i saw gas not petrol, because it only worked in the US). Gone. It's not even hiding in the transportation section, which has no category for petrol stations, gas stations or garages of any kind (Microsoft seems to be suggesting you park the car and take a ferry to reduce global warming); it's just gone. As is the option to tell Bing when I'm in the US and want to get US services and results and when I'm in the UK and don't. So that's about half as useful for a start. That's a first; updating an app and making it less useful. Bing is all about taking data and turning it into useful services, so why take them away from the phone where you need them most?

This is as bad as Microsoft unveiling its other flagship Windows Mobile app, the beta of Office 2010 and giving it the sum total of maybe 5 new features (and a business only Sharepoint app). Dear Microsoft: it appears to have escaped your notice that the smartphone marketplace has a great many consumer users in, and they're increasingly picking other platforms? WinMo has 9% market share, 3% share of apps and Web pages with ads on served through the AdMob network and a glorious future behind it. Or more briefly...

Dear Windows phone team. You're doing it wrong.

I was so keen to get Windows Mobile 6.5 on the Touch Pro I was using earlier this year that I tried a developer ROM on it and definitely preferred it to 6.1; but I've been so happy with the Touch Pro 2 that I almost didn't want to update it. In the interests of science, I upgraded both that and the Toshiba TG01 last week - you can read what I think of the new version on Tom's Guide Windows Mobile 6.5: worth upgrading?

And then I went shopping at Marketplace: the new WinMo app store: again for Tom's Guide I looked at how it works, what you get and whether Microsoft should do its own app store at all.

There is yet another Facebook attack going around (that weird URL someone sent you? Phishing, if you couldn't already tell). I commented on a comment on Facebook and of course it's turning into a major discussion I don't particularly want to continue (does that sound rude? - but I know about the attack, I've given my view and hearing lots of people say 'oh, I saw that' isn't that interesting). Outlook 2010 will let me mark an email to be ignored and everything that's a Reply All to it will hit the bit bucket too, leaving me more time for the interesting conversations I can actually contribute something further to.

Everything else I know is going to be in Outlook 2010 (and the rest of the next Office) is covered over at http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/97-microsoft-office-2010.html

Current Location: Coronado Island, CA

There are some things I like about the iPhone and some I loathe (I curse it about as much as I curse any computer I use, even Windows 7 when the multiple monitor support is poor (which I am increasingly thinking is a problem with the Intel graphics in this HP)). I covered several of the irritations and poor interface choices in iPhone apps over at Tom's Guide and there's a lively debate between people sharing their own peeves and those who think the iPhone is so good we should put up with what isn't so good without complaining ;-)