Monthly Archives: March 2006
Further scanR tests
This time with a 2MP camera (by the way the “after” looks a little shorter because I cropped it badly and I don’t feel like fixing it 
)
Technorati Tags: scanR
Optimise your paper trail with scanR
I saw a link to a service called scanR (another case of lost letters) in the geeknewscentral newsletter today.
I decided to give it a bit of a spin and was pretty surprised by what I found.
What it does:
In a nutshell it allows you to send in photos taken of a whiteboard document or fax and will then clean it up for you a little and send back a PDF document pre tagged with words found in the scan for easy searching in tools like Google Desktop.
How do you use it?:
Simple, take a picture with your > 1 megapixel camera phone (or by whatever other means) and bang an email through to the service. The first step for a new user involves a confirmation email and there after its smooth sailing.
What could it be handy for?:
This looks like it could be handy to take a quick snap of a whiteboard after meetings to save the time in writing down, I have done this a couple times and if this will make the resulting snaps easier to use it seems like a bonus. It should also be nice for people on the road to send through digitized copies of documents if they don’t have access to scanners. There may also be nice applications for keeping digital copies of a business paper trail due to the searching element.
Overall I think this is quite a smart idea, I don’t think that this will ever replace proper OCR and archival tools in business but it a nice bootstrapper solution for private individuals and corporates on a tight budget.
I included a before and after sample of a crappy cellphone image test.
Before:
After:
Poor results before, poor results after but you get the drift. As with everything else its a case of garbage in, garbage out and I think this is due to the poor lighting and crappy low resolution image taken by my phone, maybe 1.2MP is still too low?
US pundits say that Internet technologies are not yet ready for TV
Mark Cuban has in interesting post where is citing a a testimony by Craig Moffet stating that the US internet infrastructure is simply inefficient for the demand that will be placed on it in the next couple of years.
As we are entering the domain of REAL broadband applications like Internet TV and downloadable movies as the PC is slowly becoming an integral part of the home, it seems inevitable that the speed demand is going to move from the business and into the home, current over hyped technologies like WiMax will just be totally inefficient and copper/fibre technologies will reach their limits at around 20mbps. New technologies will need to be developed but they always carry prohibitive costs. Moffat states that he believes TV over Internet is not going to replace traditional broadcasting in this decade.
What is more worrying from a South African perspective is that we are still stuck on a measily 1mbps connections and firing it up to its full potential is the domain of the rich and famous.
We need to move to catch up or I for see a technological dark ages in our dear South Africa.
Technorati Tags: Technology, Broadband, Cuban
Vista and the saga of the impossible rewrite
One of the more interesting things to come out over the weekend is an article written by renown Australian journalist Dave Richards, provocatively titled 60% Of Windows Vista Code To Be Rewritten.
The article states that the Microsoft Vista team has undergone a large scale restructuring in order to meet its deadline for the CES show in January 2007. It then lists an internal memo verbatim that underlines this restructuring and the vision for the new team.
Let me say first off, before quoting others, that while it is believable that MS is rushing to get the final changes and tweaks done before going to the presses, it seems ridiculous and sensational to claim that any major OS is going to get a 60% rewrite at this stage of the project, the fact is that people have been running Vista betas for months now out there in the real world and it certainly doesn’t seem like a product that needs to be near rebuilt. In terms of time frame this is just not feasible and if these projects are run properly there should be absolutely no reason for this to happen at this late stage.
In a further development today, Richards cites Mr Raymond Vardanega, MD of Acer Australia as having confirmed this rumour and hints that the problem is contained somewhere in the Media Center portion of Vista.
Robert Scoble is currently denying all reports and quotes the X-box team as having unvalidated the comments on them giving up developers towards the Vista cause.
Further more this quote from the Xbox blog:
In fact, Vista is feature complete – meaning the code writing process is essentially over. The next phase of development focuses on security, testing and fit/finish – not writing new code. Vista is on track for business availability in November 2006 and consumer availability in January 2007.
At this stage it is unclear what is exactly going on at Redmond, but for now it seems unlikely that there really exists such a massive problem on the code base and I am going to dismiss this as rumour mongering for now, at least until Microsoft takes up an official stance on the problem.
Further rumour based reporting at the inquirer.
What ever happened to getting both sides of the story before running with it? Is this the effect that blogs are having on mainstream reporting? I hope not. Is there still something to be called integrity and accuracy in reporting, or have blogging made it obsolete? I am not saying that there is no semblance of truth in these articles, merely that at this stage no one really knows enough to make any real concrete comments, its all word-of-mouth until Redmond takes an official stance, which is not Scoble’s role btw.
BarCamp Cape Town has a new logo!
Have you signed up yet? Visit http://barcamp.org/BarCampCapeTown/ today!
Big thanks to Damien and Mark for the effort, it looks awesome!
Technorati Tags: BarCamp, BarCampCapeTown, SouthAfrica
ShoZu, takes the effort out of camera phoning.
Its true that there are ways of getting camera phone photos uploaded to your favorite service, mainly revolving around email, or alternatively downloading to your PC and then uploading , but it has always seemed a little like voodoo to non technical people. (Most people find even MMS difficult)
Along comes ShoZu an application enabling direct-from-phone uploading to four popular photo sharing/blog services:
1) Flickr
2) Buzznet
3) TextAmerica
4) WebShots
I was happy to see a large list of supported phones including mine, the Sony Ericsson V600i (K600).
During registration on the site you provide your phone number for the service to SMS you a download link. The SMS arrived instantly and the 216KB Java application proved easy to download and install.
After installation you are presented with a neat Java application that allows you to view all the photos on your phone, add tags, descriptions and titles and then upload these images to your photo service of choice, I chose flickr. A handy feature is that you can modify the meta data on the image even after the upload. Videos uploaded via the will be forwarded to an email address you can specify.
Its all very simple and easy to use, and its definately worth a look if you use your phone a lot.
Well done to the folks over at ShoZu!
iBurst Phone
PCStuff has the scoop on an IP phone designed to run on the local iBurst network.
The graphic he has of it looks somewhat “dubious”, but still seems like an interesting proposition.
The weird thing is that you need to plug in your iBurst PCMCIA card on the top of this thing so you will look kinda dorky with a massive brick stuck to your ear and then of course you have to make sure that stay within the reception area. Then there is the price of that darn modem as well…
Oh well, its a start I guess.
Technorati Tags: iBurst, SouthAfrica, VoIp,
Why the internet is cool – Part 2
Man the quality of non-mainstream content is so great nowadays, and some of it is really funny.
Check out Ask a Ninja , I laughed so hard. Good stuff
The Internet is cool.
Battle the bloat
All this talk around the “noisy” or “bloated” blogosphere had me thinking about a strategy to manage ones Attention distribution. I have a regular J-O-B and my spare time is very limited between a young wife, sideline projects and sleep, so I need to make this is efficient as possible.
Lets have a look at my reading habits:
In general the type of reading I do can split into 2 large categories, firstly there is the current news category which consists mainly of up-to-the-date info on current affairs, if you read it a week later it would be old news. Secondly there are the feeds that I read (not too many!) of a bunch of local bloggers as well as others that post more long form, insightful and interesting posts, which will have a longer shelf life.
So this is how I think I will manage this lot from now on:
* Assign 3 slots for current news sites like Engadget and memetrackers, I find that having a lower quantity of these is ok as long as you pick the right ones. These get handled the same way I read newspapers, first thing in the morning.
* Assign a limited number of slots for other regular sites containing more long term value (Think Doc Searls, NewSome.org here), with these sites it won’t matter if I don’t hit them everyday, I can always catch up later. I think around 30 slots will suffice. These become like the novels and non-fiction works on my bedside table, I get to them when I get to them.
* Rotate these slots, once a month pick one or two feeds that you don’t like as much as before or that have gone dead and swap out with a couple if interesting ones that may have come up via other sources (I find a lot of new stuff via links on the blogs that I read), it may be worth keeping 5 or 10 up and coming feeds in a B-Pool for later upgrading. Remember you can always swap back an old favorite if you feel the need.
* Try and read in some sort of order, it is often tempting to go to your top 10 feeds first, but try and cycle through your list of 30+ in an orderly fashion, this way you won’t get into a situation where you have tons of unreads on some and other privileged feeds are up to date, remember there may be JUST as much value elsewhere, and remember, you have time!
Tips to bloggers to keep my Attention:
* Give me full feeds, its way more productive than having to click and load a blog site.
* Get to the point, long form post are nice, but keep it under 2 minutes of reading time.
* Stop writing to me as though I am an academic, remember that huge portions of the world do not speak english natively, I like a nice vocabulary as much as the next guy, but there has to be some limits, ok
* Tell me what you mean by actually saying it, don’t write long complex posts wrapped up in metaphors that only you and your immediate circle of friends “get”.
* Don’t get into stupid blogospats, they just waste my time. Be constructive, not destructive.
* Appear human once a while, crack a joke, tell me about your weekend, make me feel like a friend not a statistic.