A colleague of mine at work shared some great resources with me today. My site sometimes works best for me as a living reminder of some of the things I should be doing, so I am going to list these resources here
LaTeX to HTML: Pandoc
http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
LaTex Extraction: PlasTeX
http://plastex.sourceforge.net/plastex/plastex.pdf
jQuery Mobile
http://qcd.nersc.gov:9080/nersc/default/demo
http://qcd.nersc.gov:9080/nersc
My Square Card Reader arrived over the weekend. Have not had a chance to play with it yet, but looking forward to seeing how this mobile credit card payment system works.
NITDroid (the version of Google’s Android operating system for Nokia tablets) is looking stable and worthy of installation on the N900. I think I may give this a go…
My Game Gripper for the N900 arrived. I was somewhat hesitant ordering this, but decided that this would be an excellent way to use emulators on my mobile ‘phone. And it is…. Combined with a TV-out cable this will be travelling with me every time I take a trip – a perfect way to while a way the hours in dreary hotels.
Interestingly, the instructions / disclaimer form that arrived with the package was a little defensive. The Game Gripper will increase wear and tear on my ‘phone. Hoping that any damage to the keyboard is minimal.
Purchased some very handy USB cables (with the somewhat unfortunate name of BONE Accessory Link Series) from Cyberguys. These cables are super short, so I can travel extremely light. Happy with my purchase.
It looks like the problem I had with the BT-1 webcam image freezing in ScreenFlow is associated with OS X 10.6.2. I tested on three other machines (Intel and PowerPC) running OS X 10.5.8, and everything worked. Have posted on the Telestream Community Forum. Hoping for a solution.
Yeh! LightScribe now works again for me.
Updating to OS X Snow Leopard resulted in each disk that I burnt with LightScribe coming out blank (not the data, but the printed image on the disk). Just found an update to the LaCie LightScribe Labeler, and now everything works again.
Crisis over….
Last week, I attended an IBM event at their Chicago Innovation Center. There were some great presentations, but there was one particular point that I found telling:
One of the presenters made an off-hand comment that his daughter used a Mac.
Now, the presenter has a high-level position with IBM, the room I was in was filled with Lenovo PCs. Even though IBM no longer makes PCs and laptops, I am sure that IBM employees are given Lenovo PCs and that the presenter probably had several PC laptops that his daughter could use.
I asked if he was aware of the apparent disconnect. He responded that the Mac/OS X was a clear better device/platform. His daughter definitely believed that. I think we are on the cusp of a generational inflection point.
I think we will suddenly see swathes of teenagers grow up and buy Macs rather than PCs. These users are going to push for Macs at work. Things will change.
Nintendo is one of those companies, like Apple, that excels in design. Over the weekend a simple calendar from the nice folks at Nintendo dropped through my letterbox. The images may be cheesy, but the concept is very clever – the calendar is basically a frame, holding a stack of cards. Each card represents a month, and can be shuffled backward and forwards as the year progresses. I like it.
Somewhat embarrassingly, my favorite piece of software on the Mac is ScreenFlow. I started using it a couple of years ago, when the program was sold by Vara Software (who were the purchased by Telestream in 2008). ScreenFlow is a screen capture and editing tool. I use it several days a week.
I updated to version 2 last week – one of those pleasant updates in which the program works well, looks largely the same, but does things better. Version 2 appears to be more stable, has improved editing functions, and has the option to export direct to YouTube. I’m happy.
One thing that I hope is improved with the update is the ability to use the BT-1 bluetooth web cam to record. I record every presentation that I make – and every class that I teach – with ScreenFlow. I had been using the Vado HD for filming (and then importing the footage in during editing), and hoped to use the BT-1 to speed up the process. For reasons yet unknown, the video from the BT-1 freezes in ScreenFlow after a couple of minutes. Part of me thinks this might be a Snow Leopard issue – things seemed to work before I made that update.