I’ve been looking for a notebook/reader device for a long time.  So far the devices I’ve bought have either just been disappointing  (like the Tablet PC, though as a laptop it was fine) or sufficiently promising to make me wish they finished the job.

The Kindle is pretty fantastic as a way to consume narrative text.  It’s too clumsy to use for reference material (slow screen updates make it hard to surf/skim/search) and obviously it’s no good for note taking.

The iPad is an okay way to consume narrative text (the Kindle’s screen is just more comfortable for that) and is excellent as a web surfing pad (pictures, video, blogs, news).  I haven’t tried to use it as a reference device unless one counts “looking things up on the Internet.”  I haven’t found a good way to put notes and text into an iPad (and out again, since notes and all I need on my other computers).  The on-screen keyboard is fine for tapping out a quick note but it’s too clumsy for note taking and drawing with a finger is just not comfortable or precise enough for drawing anything other than rudimentary diagrams.  OmniGraffle for iPad is nice for drawing nice-looking diagrams but it’s substantially less smooth recording rough thoughts.  And it’s a different app than any of the text notetaking apps.  I’ve tried one capacitive stylus and it worked but was awful.  I really want the device to support a Wacom-style pressure sensitive two-ended stylus in addition to being a touchscreen.

I want a device that is pretty much like the iPad hardware with the addition of a camera (for whiteboard photography and note taking, not art) and support for a pressure sensitive stylus (but keep the touchscreen).  The software needs to support syncing to my heterogeneous computing environment including printing, an Android phone (or whatever I have then), Windows desktop, Mac laptop, a Linux netbook, web site – whatever I have.  It needs to be able to export in a variety of formats to facilitate sharing with people without the software.  It needs magic screen sharing/shared authoring with people that DO have the software.  It needs usable authoring software for all those environments even though the primary authoring environment would be the tablet.

The software needs to support linking and ingesting from the web – saving snippets and links both to facilitate tying references to notes but also to guard against linkrot.

It needs to support on-screen input but also external keyboards on the tablet as well as projecting from the tablet (however that works – VGA/DVI out from the tablet, software that pushes to suitably equipped projectors, even an accessory nanoprojector).

The software syncing needs to let me run my own instance of the “cloud” bits (as well as supporting a hosted version).  Ideally, the server-side portion would be a documented, open protocol with at least one open source implementation.  This is for the long haul and  information I’ve stored in my infopad can’t be tied to a single vendor.

The software should support integration or importing (as applicable) with/from other data stores such as mail or photo catalogs from special-purpose software such as Lightroom.

I think we’re approaching the day when the hardware for a suitable infopad tablet exists or mostly-exists but as far as I can tell we’re not really much closer to having the right software.

Finally just before giving up and working on something else for a while, I try to run it as an admin on a whim. It starts. !!!

So I go and check “this program wants to run as an administrator” in the properties of the start menu shortcut. Perhaps now it will actually work.

I did have to tweak the voicemail settings so the WAV files were actually audible without turning the PC speakers waaay up.  In /etc/asterisk/voicemail.conf, I set volgain to 8.0 (and installed sox).

Asterisk has “taken care of” 358 calls (callers with no CID or CID identifying them as toll free numbers) since I set it up early last month.  They went straight to voice mail without ever ringing my phone.  Very few of them left messages.

(Yes, I still plan to post something more descriptive with configs describing as much of my setup as seems reasonable.)

Despite being on all the “do not call” lists I still get too many (= some) unsolicited calls representing entities rather than people I know. My new crazy complicated answering machine can now route them straight to voicemail where they will not leave a message but also not ever ring my actual phone.

I don’t just blacklist them outright because once and a while one of those suspicious looking numbers is actually a call I want (“Dear Ken, Is it really you buying all this shiny? –your credit card”) but all of those DO leave messages.

It seems pretty nice so far. It compares favorably with VMWare given the price. I haven’t done much with it yet, though, so it may turn out to have rough edges.

I’m running an Ubuntu 8.04 LTS box on my Mac. The Mac version looks to be the least polished, since it’s the newest. VMWare Fusion has a lot more hardware support (e.g. sound). I need to take another shot at VMWare/Ubuntu v.latest to see if the guest additions are now supported.

I like the TiVo UI — my series 1 TiVo served me well for nearly 8 years and it still works fine. I only stopped using it because it didn’t do HD and I’ve been waiting for a good HD-TiVo solution that I was sure would fully work with my cable. Since I haven’t used the old TiVo in months I want to stop paying for it. (Yeah, the breakeven point for the “lifetime” subscription was years ago — oops, I never expected to keep this first-generation TiVo for so long. I was sure that something more compelling would come up from TiVo or someone else within 3 years…)

I’ve heard some horror stories about getting the CableCard TiVo to work with Comcast — getting it to work seems to hinge on how well the Comcast guys you happened to get were trained. Comcast is going to be fired too. This is too bad, since otherwise I would have picked up the CableCard-OK HD TiVo when the price dropped.

So I’d like to suspend service on the old TiVo. TiVo would lose me as a monthly customer, but I’d still be willing to pick up a new TiVo in the future. No problem, since TiVo has a pretty nice account management web interface. Except…

I can do everything except cancel or suspend service on the TiVo web site. I have to talk to someone on the phone to cancel — so far I’ve been on hold for 15 minutes once and then the support line hung up on me. Now I have called again and am waiting on hold again.

Making me call to cancel or suspend service is why I am unlikely to ever buy any more TiVo products in the future. It’s too bad, too, because without that I would still like TiVo despite the fact that they have no products that can help me right now. Perhaps they do not care about alienating customers that want to suspend or cancel service but it does seem to preclude the chance of any customers that leave ever coming back. I am sure to tell my friends about this experience, too, changing my recommendation that folks pick up a TiVo despite being offered a cheap but lame DVR from the cable company to just use the cable-provided DVR. The monthly fee is cheaper and there’s no up-front equipment cost.

I’m up to 15 minutes on the second attempt at getting a person to talk to. This seems designed to ensure I’m in a particularly bad mood by the time anyone ever answers. I suppose if they never answer the phone then they think I can’t ever cancel.

Update: At around 22 minutes, somebody answered. She was very polite, tried to get me to stay, pointed out that they had CableCard-enabled HD TiVos when I explained why my TiVo was no longer adequate, and apologized about the wait and the hang-up. I have no complaints about the experience once I finally got to talk to someone.

However, since the only reason TiVo forces a call for cancellation is to benefit itself with a “saves” mechanism then putting people on hold for a long time and having a buggy IVR that hangs up on them seems pretty counterproductive.

Of course, very few blogging tools make it easy to serve a redirect in place of the feed. Technical people still have no excuse.

It also makes me crazy when people just break all their old post references instead of serving a redirect to the new site.

It’s so much nicer when someone moving to a new site makes the effort to ensure no feed readers watching the old site get broken and nobody coming across links into the old site get disappointed by a 404.