Alright, I’ve read the reviews. I’ve the read Cory’s piece about open-ness and closed platforms (and I agree, open is better). I’ve read from the nit-picking details to the high level geekery, and I’m here to say, the iPad is an important device. Of course, some have already heralded it as the inflection point in “tablet” computing, and it is that – but the reason I think it’s important is actually a bit larger.

I truly believe that the models of human-computer interaction (”HCI”) that all of us grew up with are going to change dramatically in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. I believe it so much that Brad and I are working on it as a third show. And the reason that the iPad is such an important device is that it is a decisive break from the keyboard/mouse paradigm that we’ve been living in for 45 years (yes, the mouse is over 45 years old).

With this device, grandmas and doctors and “people on the street” will suddenly make the jump away from computing as a keyboard and mouse. In fact, the mode of interaction (and it is interactive, even if you’re passively viewing media content) is *completely* different. Multi-touch, tablet, portable — in much the same way that it’s hard for me to describe how I interact via a keyboard, so it is similarly hard to describe interacting via an iPad. But I think it comes down to this (fittingly, I’m writing this on Easter, in case there are any amateur theologians out there): Once computers went from pure business applications (numbers) to something “people” used (and this includes the entire advent of the internet), the primary mode of expression was the word. Text. Dare I say it, “logos.”

Accordingly, the HCI mode was textual. Even the mouse was built to point at text links; highlight text links; manipulate textual (and sometimes numerical) objects.

The iPad blows right by that (and it should given that what the video revolution has brought to the web). Sure, there’s email on the device – but it’s a secondary application. This HCI mode is built to interact in a way where the “word” isn’t the defining object. And that, my geeky friends, whether your inner early adopter is fully satisfied or not, is a game changer. Yes, there are iBooks and apps with text — of course! But the mode of interaction has moved beyond the word as primary HCI mode. Granted, it’s in some weird, hybrid, not fully formed, purgatory universe of user interaction — but the move has been made. And it’s been made on a device that “everyday people” are going to use. [sidenote: this thing is going to CLEAN UP in the grandma/grandpa and kid (4-8) gaming markets. CLEAN UP.]

By the way, saying that the iPhone/Smart phone market did this first really doesn’t work. Phones always had different modes of interaction (voice). We brought computing *to* them. Most people don’t think of their phones as computers. So, the iPhone – yeah, it softened up the marketplace. But the iPad – it’s a *computer* that no longer feels like “a computer.”

At the end of the day, sure there are problems with it: it doesn’t multi-task; I can’t ever achieve the speed of typing I can on a keyboard (though I’m an edge case, since the Department of Defense taught me to type north of 120 words per minute eons ago); it doesn’t have the USB port I want; it needs video/camera. NONE of that matters. That’s details. That will all come. This devise is an inflection point because it marks the moment where the dominant human-computer interaction model of the last 50-100 years began to fade in prominence.

And that’s why the iPad is important.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

A week ago we asked readers to tell us how they’re using Google Wave in their daily lives, and despite a bit of “ha! no one’s using Wave!” snarking on the Twitter, we got lots of interesting responses.

Unsurprisingly, most Wavers use it as a real-time wiki, but some take advantage of features unique to Wave, like inline and private replies, public tags, and gadgets. I featured the most unique use cases I got in a brand new chapter just added to The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The following is the text of the just-published Chapter 10, which describes ways in which a few people who don’t work for Google are using Wave to get things done—with screenshots.

So far you’ve learned the finer workings of Wave in great detail, but there’s a big difference between understanding how to swing a hammer and building a house. In this chapter, you’ll meet regular people who are already getting things done with Wave in their daily work and life. You’ll learn the Wave techniques they’ve developed through trial and error, and the specific Wave features they use to get certain jobs done. Finally, you’ll create wave templates you can use and reuse for your own purposes.

Take a look at some real-world case studies of Wave in action.

Wave as a Group To-do List and Daily Work Log

Justin Swall runs Swall’s Associated Services, a small company which provides computer repair and consulting for small businesses. Justin uses Wave as a daily to-do list that he and his co-workers update to track who has done what. He makes use of the “Copy to New Wave” feature to transfer undone items from one day to the next, as shown in Figure 10-1.

Here’s Justin’s Wave workflow: every day he uses a fresh wave that contains that day’s tasks, ordered by priority, and what time they’re due. Over the course of the day, Justin’s group updates the wave to reflect the current status of each task.

Justin says:

During the day either the initial wave is edited (usually by me) to add additional items to the list, and everyone else uses inline replies to update when items are completed, or if additional information needs to be conveyed back and forth. At the end of each day I copy the day’s wave to a new wave, change the date to the next day, remove the items that were completed the day before, add new items or notes to the list, or move items from secondary to primary. Wash, rinse, repeat.

By creating a new wave that carries over the outstanding tasks left on yesterday’s wave, Justin leaves behind a daily work log that he can reference later.

Justin prefers Wave to discuss tasks because it’s a single, hosted conversation.

For various reasons, Outlook tasks never seemed to work for us. Emailing is a nightmare (I either keep thinking of more things to add to the list and end up sending out five or more messages by morning, or I’m so afraid of doing that I keep it open as a draft so I can keep adding to it then forget to send it at all).

If you’re interested in using Wave to manage projects beyond daily tasks, see the later section in this chapter, “Wave for Project Management.”

Wave as an Event Planner

Wave is a fine productivity tool, but it also can help you have fun, too. Fifteen-year old Sean Cascketta uses Wave to organize weekend get-togethers with his classmates.

Sean explains:

If I’m formatting a Wave for organizing an event, it usually comes with a basic list of the details (like who, what, where, etc…) as well as a Yes/No/Maybe gadget, which is perfect for these events as we can both constantly check on the RSVP status of people, and they can use the status feature to give any extra details (like if they’re bringing along some party favors, electronics or such).

Sean used Wave to create an invitation to a viewing of The Goonies, as shown in Figure 10-2.

Brunch-lover Jed McClure uses Wave to organize his weekly “Brooklyn Brunch Club,” a group of friends who brunch somewhere different in Brooklyn each week, and RSVP whether or not they can make it.

Jed describes the process:

We have a pretty dedicated group of brunchers here in Brooklyn, and many brunch options. But the onerous task of coordinating usually ended up resulting in people getting left off the email list. With Google Wave, the idea was to maintain a permanent Brunch wave, where people in the group could check in with and see where the next brunching would happen, and then reply if they were going to try to make it. We also set up a map widget and filled in all the spots we like to hit, to help when making suggestions (and to avoid the dreaded brunch rut).

The Brooklyn Brunch Club wave consists of maps, inline discussions debating which brunch place to hit up next, and a Yes/No/Maybe gadget to collect RSVPs, as shown in Figure 10-3.

Jed says:

So far it has worked pretty well. The threaded nature of the dialog means that it needs to be ‘pruned’ after each brunch, so that the relevant info remains at the top of the wave. And also train people to look in the history for past brunch details.

With maps and Yes/No/Maybe built in, party, vacation, brunch, or any event planning is one of Wave’s most obvious use cases.

Wave as Holiday Gift List Tracker

Hal Wilke has two young children, and when the holidays approach, he gives gift suggestions for his kids to their grandparents. This past year he and his wife used Wave to share and update the list.

Hal explains:

We always email Christmas lists to Grandparents, and then get emails back sometimes to me, sometimes to my wife. Or phone calls at odd times telling us what they bought, so we have to track notes that we write about the phone calls. It was much easier this year [in Wave] because the grandparents could edit the wave as they purchased gifts, and we did not have people buying duplicate gifts, and didn’t have to track multiple lists of purchased gifts. Pretty cool that the grandparents were cool with using Wave.

The kids’ gift wave included Hal’s wife, but Hal used Wave’s private reply feature to discuss a surprise gift for her with the kids’ grandparents, as shown in Figure 10-4.

Wave for Collaborative Meeting Notes

One of the most common suggested uses of Wave is taking collaborative notes^[1] during meetings, classes or conference sessions, and Indiana University employee Manjit Trehan does just that. Manjit’s meetings usually have about 10 people attending, and four or five are in Wave, taking notes.

Instead of everyone co-editing a single blip, Manjit separates agenda items into their own individual blips.

Manjit says the process evolved from trial and error:

What I learned after a few meetings [of taking notes in Wave] is that it is best to enter one agenda item per blip. This allows a separate thread to progress below each item. Say we are meeting about ordering some hardware, and there are three open items to be discussed. Vendor selection, Installation schedule, and deployment schedule. Each of these would end up in a separate blip.

Manjit says meeting note waves can get lengthy, but he created a sample meeting wave with separate agenda blips, shown in Figure 10-5.

Wave for Project Management

You’ve already seen one way to use Wave as a daily task tracker; you can also manage a more complex group project in Wave. This very book, produced by a team of six people-including the authors, our copyeditor, designer, tech lead, and project manager-used Wave to track and manage its production process.^[2]

Create a project workspace in Wave using an agreed-upon tag and a saved search for waves with that tag. For example, when we started managing the book project in Wave, our group decided that every book-related wave would get the “cwg” tag (short for CompleteWaveGuide.com). Each of us also saved a tag:cwg search and referred to it to see only project-specific waves, as shown in Figure 10-6.

When you’re managing a project in Wave, create a new wave to discuss each topic, task, or facet of the project. For example, for this book project, we used one wave per chapter to discuss chapter-specific questions and edits. For each new edition, we’d clean out the chapter wave of old blips, and start anew, knowing that old conversation was still archived in the wave’s playback should we need to see it. We kept other separate waves to draft the style guide, discuss pricing, and see cover image revisions.

Wave as a Conference Backchannel

A smart use of wave tags works well in public waves as well as private ones. Tagged public waves make it easy for anyone to find a relevant place to discuss news or a current event, as it happens, in real-time. In fact, many tech-savvy conference organizers publicize a unique tag for its attendees to use when they post status updates to Twitter or photos to Flickr about the event. Attendees can use that same tag in Wave to create and add to event-specific discussions, too. (Those who aren’t at the event can eavesdrop on those public waves, ask questions, and add to the discussion from afar.)

For example, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in November of 2009, I (Gina) gave a keynote presentation called “Making Sense of Google Wave,”^[3] and invited attendees to wave about it using the public, agreed-upon conference tag w2e. Before I took the stage, I started a public wave and tagged it w2e so that anyone who searched for with:public tag:w2e could discuss my keynote or any other session they attended, as shown in Figure 10-7.

This technique has been used at events beyond Web 2.0 Expo; bloggers at both eComm Europe^[4] and the MediaWiki conference^[5] noted that attendees used Wave to take minutes, discuss sessions in real-time, and collaborate on notes.

(Watch a video of the 15-minute “Making Sense of Google Wave” keynote at http://goo.gl/7cK3.)

Wave for Breaking News

The live, real-time nature of Wave makes it a natural fit for collaborating on breaking news as it happens. In fact, when Seattle police were on the hunt for a man suspected of shooting four cops, the Seattle Times used a public wave to rapidly publish updates about the manhunt^[6] and solicit information from reader in the process, as shown in Figure 10-8.

Granted, most people aren’t conducting a manhunt for a suspected killer, but we all have a reason to broadcast and get live updates on events as they happen to us-like when your sister-in-law goes into labor, or Aunt Martha’s undergoing surgery, or Mom in New York is worried about how close the forest fires are to your home in San Diego and whether you’ve been evacuated.

Wave for Q&A

Wave’s inline reply feature makes it a solid choice for having conversations that require back-and-forth on individual points: like an interview. Question and answer interactions can happen very easily in Wave, because the interviewer can start a wave with multiple questions. Then, the respondent can reply to each question inline, and the interviewer can optionally follow up to the response right below it without disrupting the flow of the series. The result is a readable Q&A in the correct order, as shown in Figure 10-9.

Create Wave Templates for Reuse

If you create waves with the same formatting and gadgets often, create a “template” wave for reuse to save yourself repetitive work. For example, if you plan a recurring event in Wave, create a new wave, and format your event title, description, and details area to your liking, and add the Yes/No/Maybe and maps gadget. Save that wave in a “Templates” folder you create.

Then, the next time you need a wave to plan the event, open the template, and select “Copy to new wave” from the timestamp drop-down. Fill in the details for the event in the new copy.

Public Wave Templates

Googler Pamela Fox did just that and made her templates public and read-only, available for anyone to copy for their own purposes. Visit the read-only, public wave which lists her templates at http://goo.gl/GNUw, like the event planner wave template shown in Figure 10-10.

References

1. ↑ When to use Google Wave, Google.com
2. ↑ How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave, Lifehacker.com
3. ↑ “Making Sense of Google Wave”: Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009, Web2Expo.com
4. ↑ How to Use Google Wave for Collaborative Conference Notes and Conversation, Emerging Tech Talk
5. ↑ MediaWiki conference uses Wave to work on minutes, Mediawiki Wave
6. ↑ Another Google Wave Use: Manhunt, TechCrunch.com

Post is from Lifehacker, by Gina Trapani

Wave combines features from email, instant messenger, Google Docs, wikis, and forums and throws its own spin on things. For a quick visual of its offerings versus similar tools, check out this feature-by-feature comparison table.

You’ll notice that Wave doesn’t have a green yes in every cell in its column; it’s still missing functionality that’s holding it back from being a viable alternative in a production environment—specifically, user permissions (everyone can edit everything) and the ability to export a wave or publish it so that anyone can see its contents (not just folks logged into Wave).

This table is slated to go into chapter 1 of the first edition of The Complete Guide to Google Wave, so give me a shout if you’ve got ideas for how to polish it up before we rev up the printers.

GeoHot, one of the fathers of the iPhone’s jailbreak community, has just released the exploit that’ll unleash all sorts of promising PS3 hackery, just like he promised. We can’t wait for the homebrew and, frankly, piratical features this enables.

From the source:

This is the coveted PS3 exploit, gives full memory access and therefore ring 0 access from OtherOS. Enjoy your hypervisor dumps. This is known to work with version 2.4.2 only, but I imagine it works on all current versions.

You can find it at his page for now—try it out, let us know how it works!

Courier is a real device, and we’ve heard that it’s in the “late prototype” stage of development. It’s not a tablet, it’s a booklet. The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre.

Until recently, it was a skunkworks project deep inside Microsoft, only known to the few engineers and executives working on it—Microsoft’s brightest, like Entertainment & Devices tech chief and user-experience wizard J. Allard, who’s spearheading the project. Currently, Courier appears to be at a stage where Microsoft is developing the user experience and showing design concepts to outside agencies.

Microsoft has a history of collaborating with other firms, especially in the E&D division: Zune and Xbox have both gone through similar design processes. (And plans for the Microsoft Store leaked through a third-party agency were confirmed as genuine prototype layouts and concepts.) This video is branded Pioneer Studios, a Microsoft division within E&D that specializes in this kind of work, working with another agency that’s a long-time Microsoft collaborator on confidential projects.

The Courier user experience presented here is almost the exact opposite of what everyone expects the Apple tablet to be, a kung fu eagle claw to Apple’s tiger style. It’s complex: Two screens, a mashup of a pen-dominated interface with several types of multitouch finger gestures, and multiple graphically complex themes, modes and applications. (Our favorite UI bit? The hinge doubles as a “pocket” to hold items you want move from one page to another.) Microsoft’s tablet heritage is digital ink-oriented, and this interface, while unlike anything we’ve seen before, clearly draws from that, its work with the Surface touch computer and even the Zune HD.

Over the next couple days we’ll be diving much, much deeper into Courier, so stay tuned.

Chrome OS is a promising cloud-based operating system, but the big complaint most people have about it is that Chrome OS is entirely browser-based. New netbook OS Jolicloud is a lot like Chrome OS, but with the addition of killer desktop apps.

Before you even consider Jolicloud, you may want to look at their big list of compatible devices. It’s pretty huge, and I’d also suspect not complete. I’m actually testing it in a virtual machine and it’s working just fine, and it would probably work on a fair amount of other hardware.

Think you’d like to try it out? You can install it easily from Windows using a simple installer. Rather than wipe out your Windows installation, it simply carves out some partitioned space on your hard drive so you don’t have to worry about ditching Windows altogether just to try it out. Ready to give it a try? Once your Jolicloud installation is complete, you’ll end up at the login screen.

Enter the username and password you created during installation, and when you log in, you’ll end up staring down the Jolicloud netbook launcher screen.

You’ll also be prompted to set up your Jolicloud account at this point, but unfortunately the specialized Jolicloud accounts—which is part of what makes Jolicloud so cool—requires an invitation code, so you’ll probably want to sign up for one ASAP. If and when you do sign up with a Jolicloud homebase, you’ll get access to the Jolicloud App Directory pictured below.

It’s from this directory you can install your favorite programs—from Skype and Dropbox to Boxee and Spotify in a single click. When you’re logged in to Jolicloud, you’ve also got access to your social stream:

…and a convenient update manager:

In short, Jolicloud is a very impressive looking netbook operating system. Sure it’s just a specialized interface running on top of Ubuntu and powered by a lot of Mozilla Prism packages. The App Directory makes the operating system—as TechCrunch accurately put it—feel like an iPhonesque OS for netbooks. And unlike the current state of Chrome OS, the current alpha release of Jolicloud is actually pretty well supported.

It’s probably a little unfair to compare Jolicloud to Chrome OS, since they are ultimately very different in their approach, but they are both aiming for the same market—your netbooks. If you’ve given Jolicloud a try in the past or just want to weigh in on its looks from the screenshots, let’s hear your thoughts in the comments.

Trixbox CE je open source softwarová VoIP (Voice over IP) telefónna ústredňa (PBX). Trixbox CE je postavená na Asterisku a operačnom systéme Linux CentOS. Keďže je to open source software, je možné ju voľne stiahnúť z internetu a nainštalovať na ľubovoľný hardware.

Trixbox CE má všetky vlastnosti, ktoré sú potrebné pre enterprise prostredie. Je možné ju bez problémov nasadiť aj do veľkých firiem so 700 klapkami (samozrejme na dostatočne výkonnom hardware) a dokáže splniť všetky požiadavky na veľkú telefónnu ústredňu.

Domovská stránka Trixbox CE obsahuje software samotnej telefónnej ústredne, ktorý je možné stiahnúť, dokumentáciu a má vynikajúce fórum, na ktorom nájdete odpovede na všetky otázky a taktiež tipy na riešenie rôznych požiadaviek a problémov. Zatiaľ všetky požiadavky mojich zákazníkov na funkcionalitu, táto VoIP PBX dokázala splniť.

Samozrejmosťou, okrem pripojenia cez SIP a IAX trunk, je aj možnosť pripojenia do PSTN na pevné linky a ISDN rozhrania. Kombináciou s vhodnými VoIP telefónmi, odporúčam Cisco SPA radu (pôvodne Linksys) dosiahnete optimálne a kvalitné riešenie za rozumnú cenu. Je možné používať aj open source software VoIP telefóny nainštalované na notebooku alebo PC, ktoré sú taktiež kvalitné a naviac grátis.

VoIP telefónnu ústredňu Trixbox CE ponúkam od 220 euro bez DPH v mojom shope. Samozrejme hardware konfigurácia sa môže meniť v závislosti od počtu požadovaných klapiek.

V prípade záujmu o komplexné/kompletné VoIP riešenie, ma prosím kontaktujte. Navrhnem Vám spôsob zapojenia, najvhodnejšieho Slovenského VoIP operátora aj s tarifami (viac možností) a zrealizujem celú inštaláciu aj s konfiguráciou VoIP telefónnej ústredne na kľúč.

Výber a dodávka VoIP telefónov v prípade celého projektu taktiež nie je problém. Následná podpora a konzultácie po realizácií projektu sú samozrejmosťou.

V hlave mám už dlhšiu dobu myšlienku, postavit si na zahrade pár solárnych panelov a napájať z nich napríklad počitače doma, alebo niečo, jednoducho to vyskúšať. Myslím si, že táto oblasť má určite budúcnosť a perspektívu, veď sa len pozri na svoj účet za elektrinu.

V týchto dňoch prebieha súťaž Solar Decathlon 2009 pod záštitou U.S. Department of Energy. Je to súťaž 20 univerzitných teamov, ktorý majú postaviť funkčný, atraktívny dom napájaný a fungujúci na solárnu energiu.

Hodnotí sa 10 oblastí a každá má pridelený určitý počet bodov. Projekty sú prepracované architektonicky aj design-ovo do detailov a určite stojí za to si pozrieť ku každému video, foto a prečitať si pár riadkov z ich domovských stránok.

Osobne ma zaujali projekty Silo House od Cornell University a Refract House od Team California. Súťaž má ja vlastný kanál na YouTube. Sú tam pekné videá z montáži a demontáži celých projektov, naozaj zaujímavé.

Myšlienky a sny sú na to, aby sa realizovali. Verím, že tie solárne panely na záhrade jedného dňa budú stáť a fungovať.