Computers

OneNote has been written about ad-infinitum as a tool for note taking in meetings and classes, as a general information repository and as a collaboration tool but I'd like to introduce you to another use that I'm putting OneNote to.

Making holograms.

Or more specifically, documenting both the process I go through when creating a hologram and the results from that process in the form of notes and pictures.

As most of you will probably know, OneNote is a great repository for all sorts of information. It has allowed me to combine a number of sources into one place so that when needed, I can easily refer back to previous results when I'm making a new hologram.

Continue reading "Using OneNote to make holograms"

If you find yourself needing to take your laptop into the lab, you can make life simpler by making a safelight cover for the screen.

I know most of you who make holograms don't carry around a tablet and those who carry around one probably don't make holograms but for others who, like me, do both, here's a way to take the computer into the lab without having to turn the screen off while film is out and about and you can save your "night" vision for what is probably a dimly lit lab.

Continue reading "Safelight for the computer"

 No shit.

Even if you only implemented half the suggestions we've laid out here we think you could really turn things around. And we do, honestly, want you to make it through this thing. We want to love Palm like we loved it in the old days, and know somewhere, deep down, you've got some fight left in you. And believe you us, this is your shot. The bottom's about to drop out on the Treo, and if you can't make it happen soon, you may never get another chance to get a foothold on innovation.

Dear Palm: It's time for an intervention - Engadget

OneNote is a great tool for note taking and information management. It also is a good tool for recording meetings and conversations. If you haven't heard about ON's ability to search audio recordings head over here to read more.

ON does a good job of indexing audio which can then be searched much as you'd search a text file.  This is especially convenient in cases when you know someone said something in a meeting but you don't know exactly when.  By indexing your audio you don't have to listen to the entire meeting again as long as the audio is of good quality.

What none of the marketing info covers are the laws that affect your ability to record those conversations and what you can do with those recordings after you've made them.

More after the jump.

Continue reading "Recording Conversations With OneNote"

Last week there was a rumor that a beta of Vista SP1 was going to be released any day now.

This week the rumor (supposedly iron-clad) is that SP1 won't be out for more than a year.

Most people who've tried Vista would likely say that SP1 needs to come out this year.

Now there's another tech writer who's coming out of the closet and planning on switching back to XP.

Vista is taking body blows by ZDNet's Marc Orchant -- I've been on a bit of a blog and RSS hiatus the past couple of days and have been working my way through tales of destruction and distress (the 365 outage, not Lindsay Lohan's latest episode), news, and views. In my reading, there's a recurring theme that beats louder all the time. People are just not loving Vista.

I'll grant you that my four-day test of Vista shouldn't be taken as gospel.  That was enough for me to know that there weren't any features in Vista that I could live without and UAC I couldn't live with.  Add to that that Vista is slower and device support isn't as good and it was easy for me to see that XP was where I needed to stay.

Other people are finally coming around.

No, not YOU. These people:

Tracy Hooten

Warner Crocker

Eric Mack

OK, I don't really hate them. I'm jealous. With the exception of Tracy they get to play with new gadgets all the time and the latest making-me-drool gadget isn't the iPhone but the Lenovo X61. As a real-world user there are definitely times when I wish the rate of change in the tech world wasn't so high.

A few months ago I bought a Fujitsu T4215 and while I'm very happy with it, it's hard not to read about other fancier machines and not think about a trade-in.

Trouble is, I'd be doing that every six months.

*sigh*

Does anyone find this feature useful?

I've tried using it and all I end up with is an unconnected list of tagged sentences. All context is removed with no links back to the source material.

Consider the following from my own notebook:

those two items are from very different sections but even if you were familiar with the subject matter you'd find it difficult to find the source material.

ON can create hyperlinks to any page so why doesn't it do this automatically on summary pages?

Am I missing something?

As some of you have no doubt read, the audio quality coming out of the built-in Fujitsu T4215 microphone is bad at best. There is frequently a lot of noise even at low recording levels and the "Intellisonic speech enhancement" is completely useless, turning all speech into something that sounds like it's been recorded underwater. I finally gave up trying to make it work and bought an inexpensive external mic and was still getting too much distortion and the mic sensitivity was too low so I decided to give the SP-USB-MIC-1 microphone from The Sound Professionals a try. I'd seen one recommendation for it on the web but it appeared that people weren't gushing about it. It actually seemed like not many people were using what some people call "external sound cards". Either that, or they just weren't talking about it. Continue reading "SP-USB-MIC-1 Microphone"