Recently, a Slashdot submission in this context was:

“Lately I’ve been rethinking my personal security practices. Should my laptop be stolen, having Firefox ‘fill in’ passwords automatically for me when I go to my bank’s site seems sub-optimal. Keeping passwords for all the varied sites on the computer in a plain-text file seems unwise as well. Keeping them in my brain is a prescription for disaster, as my brain is increasingly leaky. A paper notepad likewise has its disadvantages. I have looked at a number of password managers, password ‘vaults’ and so on. The number of tools out there is a bit overwhelming. Magic Password Generator add-in for Firefox seems competent, but it’s tied to Firefox, and I have other places and applications where I want passwords. And I might be accessing my sites from other computers that don’t have it installed. The ideal tool in my mind should be something that is independent of any application, browser, or computer; something that is easily carried, but which if lost poses no risk of compromise. What does the Slashdot crowd like in password tools?”

The response is filled with witty replies and interesting views and suggestions as per usual.  Nothing really new usually surfaces when someone asks this on Slashdot, since it seems the capacity to have passwords for online banking, social networking, work computers, home computers, blogs and whatever else grows and evolves faster than the ability to keep track of them all efficiently (and securely).

A while back, I wrote about my solution to this problem after having tried to solve it different ways.  In that post, I detailed my evolution from a Java application on a USB keychain to a website called Clipperz.

Well, I have been using Clipperz for almost 2 years now.  It is immensely useful and efficient.  I have had ZERO problems.  Yes, none, nada. NO problems whatsoever.  How many things can you say that about?

Clipperz does seem to be growing in popularity, since the last time I remembered the question asked on Slashdot, hardly anyone recommended Clipperz.  This time, a few people mentioned Clipperz on Slashdot.  However, its been 2 years and Clipperz still has the “beta” status.  Granted, Google Mail was in beta for years until they became “production”, but still…

Not just oh-we’ll-find-a-way-to-fix-or-deal-with-it bad, we’re talking a downward spiral that slopes deeper the further we decline until we have reached “terminal velocity”.  The bottom is not yet in sight.

Why?  Well, I’ll tell ya why…  in a minute.  First, I’ll put things into perspective by shedding a bright historical light on the subject.  This is not to mean that the history of email is dark or bad — but the present state of email certainly is, compared to its early days.

Email (not E-mail, since words that are introduced into the English language are often comprised of multiple words that stand on their own, separated by hyphens, normally lose their hyphens as the new words gain wider acceptance) as we know it today, was originally created in the early 1970’s, purely as an experiment, though in a slightly different form.  To put this into proper context, we’ll go back just a bit further. Email (at this time E-mail, or “electronic mail”) only existed in self-contained systems.  People would log into one specific machine (a time-sharing device, which was basically a big expensive computer that a group of people shared at different times) to perform their work, and would occasionally leave messages for one another to read whenever the next person would log in again.  This concept of “self contained” email would eventually evolve into other implementations of the same use — such as Microsoft Mail, which was designed as a central system, namely in an office building, that people would use to talk to only other people in the same office.  I digress…  but, even in its first use case, Email (and E-mail) was used as a convenience.  Some would say, a luxury tool — to save people from leaving yellow sticky notes somewhere, or picking up a phone to talk to someone that may not have time to talk to you.  In tech-geek-speak, email is asynchronous communication:  I can talk to you as much as I like, and you can reply back to me, but it is pure coincidence if we happen to talk to each other at the same time  (there is a variable delay between one person talking and the other person replying).

From being an easy way to leave messages for other people sharing the computer, it turned into a way of leaving messages for people using other computers — no longer “self contained” email, but networked email.  At this point, email diverged into two uses:  local “self contained” messaging on one computer, and “networked” messaging.  The two remained distinct for quite a while, as there were people sharing central computers that had very little need to communicate with people sharing other computers, yet there were people that had a valid need for such distant communication even if “distant” meant “the computer right next to mine in the same room”.  Still, it was viewed as leaving an electronic sticky note on the screen for whenever that person logged in again.  As such with StickyNotes, eventually the glue on the paper dries and at that point it no longer sticks to anything, falling off the surface to become lost when the cleaning lady vacuums the floor.  This was the expectation for early email — “Joe, I left you a quick message about the widget, if you have concerns just give me a call.”  If the email message was lost, deleted accidentally, or was never delivered, it was no big deal because the communication was eventually going to take place in person anyway, and there was no guarantee the intended person would ever read the message in the first place.

As the novelty of communicating with other people on other computers evolved, so did the implementation of email.  To send an email message to someone outside the shared computer, a person needed to know *which* other computer the recipient used.  The @ was born, since that seemed like the most logical delimeter to distinguish “user” from “computer”, and since neither could contain the @ symbol.  For similar computers, the method was “user@computer”, to properly address an email message.  For different systems, it wasn’t so clear.  In fact, it became downright complicated and confusing.  If a person needed to send a message to a distant computer, but the distant system could not accept “user@computer” (possibly it used the @ for something other than a delimeter), the sender of the message needed to know not only who to address the message to, and *which* computer that user used, the sender also needed to know the path the message would take when it was sent from computer to computer to computer.  UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy) was born.  Imagine instead of smith@accounting it was  !cenvax!westnode!accounting!smith.  Gateways from one type of email system to another type had to be erected, to handle the messages and translate one address into another.  Yet, even then, email was still viewed as “fire and forget” in the sense that whenever the recipient got the message, IF they got the message, they will eventually acknowledge by replying in some fashion as courtesy.

Back in my early days of email, I worked in the military in the computer support office.  Then, email was more a novelty than a necessity.  I vividly remember a sergeant I worked with would get daily phone calls after creating a new email account for someone.  Someone would normally call him up to complain “its been 3 days since you created my email account, and I haven’t got any email yet.  I think its broken.”  He would always reply with the same thing:  “you have to send email to get email”, which basically was his smartypants way of saying “it isn’t broken because you didn’t get anything.  You probably didn’t get any email because no one knows you have an email address, or they have nothing to say to you, or all the people you want to talk to don’t have email themselves.”   He would hang up the phone and we would have a chuckle, then I would joke about how the first person in the world with a fax machine probably wondered why he invested so much money in a device that strangely never prints out any faxes.

Slowly, email became the “killer app”.

[For the uninitiated, a "killer app" is an application (a program or function) that is just so utterly cool and awesome it is NEEDED so much that the purchase of an expensive device is justified, simply to use the application.  The other programs and software are bonus, and not needed as much, compared to THE reason the computer was purchased.]

Everyone seemed fascinated with the ability to talk to ANYONE (as long as they were “on email too”) for FREE.  Its better than long distance calling!!  No more busy signals or answering machines!  And its FREE!!

“Move over word processor, I’m going to communicate with the world!!  Shrink yourself into a microscopic icon, Mr. Spreadsheet, EMAIL is the real reason I have a computer!  Now, if only I knew what to say, and who to talk to.  Maybe someone will figure out how to contact me, so we can send messages back and forth.”

Today, no one really needs to know the path a message takes to reach its intended recipient (in some instances, even the recipient need not be known) because we address email to “user@something.somethingelse.com” and we trust the system to do the Right Thing to deliver the message.  To the right person.  At the right time.  “When it absolutely positively needs to be there…”  within the next 15 seconds else I’m going to wonder what the HELL is taking so long, and why haven’t they replied yet because I just got a message that says they’ve read it and it better not have been marked as spam because it wasn’t spam!!

Email has become the primary method of daily communication.  No longer do you “need to send mail to get mail”.  If your email address is on a web page, business card, or if you have ever used your email address to log into a website, YOU’VE GOT MAIL.   Whether you want it or not.  We email each other about meetings, to talk about email.  We email appointments, contact information, political opinions, love letters, chain-messages, advertisements.  The type of content goes on and on.  The problem is no longer about how we communicate with the right person on the right computer, but how to silence the noise to get to the legitimate messages that we need to read.

In the past, whether it was “self contained” or sent from the other side of the continent, each message was read and discarded soon thereafter.  Lately, email is received and almost immediately archived for “safe-keeping”, sometimes without it even being read.   It seems the focus now is not the immediate meaning of each message, but that a potential need might arise in the future where we might need to re-read the message.  Email used to consist of one file, appended to whenever new messages arrived — older mail was at the top of the file and newer mail was at the bottom/end.  Email now has folders, sorting, searching, tagging, categorizing, filtering, and archiving of all types.  We rarely, if ever, delete email that we’ve read.  Sure, it was really nifty when Google unleashed GMail to the world with its “2GB and growing” size limit on the amount of email one person could have, but if we’re only talking about purely text-based messages it amounts to billions of messages. (By the way, it is no longer only 2GB — its more like 7 or 8GB now.)

Email is no longer just the “killer app” in the sense of being able to communicate with anyone.  It is a presentation moniker; an address with @gmail.com is not as prestigious as it once was, but an address with @yourreallastname.com is.  It is a storage mechanism; people have figured out a way to use free online web email accounts to store documents, MP3s, and photos.  It is a calendar; if you’re using a particular email system that is tied into a shared calendar, you can send/receive appointments, and reminders of upcoming events.  It is a ToDo list; some people have an email folder with messages they have sent to themselves containing the errands they need to perform in the course of a day.  It is a webpage; modern email software will accept HTML in the body of an email message and interpret the language of webpages, even in the sense that images need not be attachments to the email but can be referenced to elsewhere on the Internet.  It is submissible legal evidence; there is legal precedence where email messages are a form of evidence, able to be subpoenaed by a court of law.

How did we get this way?  What changed so radically that “e-mail” could come from an experiment on the ARPANET (a solution looking for a problem), to “email”, a common term of the layman’s vernacular so much that it is no longer a privilege but a rite?   How could a function of computer networking change the way we communicate, yet itself change so little?

How is it that email is no longer a novelty method of asynchronous communication, but is now a basic human necessity in the modern world, measured not in its content of communication, but in cosmetic appeal of its address and in its storage size limit?

I haven’t even got to the bad part yet.

SMTP, or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, was basically an afterthought in the broad historical map of the creation of the experimental networks that were the grandfathers of the Internet we know today.  SMTP is the most widely accepted and “standardized” method of sending and receiving email.  It was essentially created to bridge the gap between unlike electronic messaging systems, back when “e-mail” was growing in popularity and usefulness.  The unfortunate part of the story, though, is that SMTP was created back when there was no real malicious threat or intent proliferating through the networks.  Users basically trusted other users in the sense that everyone followed the same rules because that was what it meant to “be connected”.  After all, if you behaved badly on the network, people would want to network with you less, until eventually you would be partitioned from everyone else in such a way that you gain a decreasing benefit from being part of the network.  It was a self-governing system, yet relatively unofficial.  “Netiquette” dictated good form and respectable practices toward other network-citizens, which mainly consisted of college students and faculty among connected higher education organizations.  SMTP was very trusting back then, and still is.

To this day, anyone can still send email as anyone else — so easily that specialized software is of little concern.  Simply connecting to a mail server with a bare terminal (Telnet), typing the correct sequence of commands and syntax, and voila!  You just forged an email message.  If you’re lucky, someone will believe they’re talking to whom you pretended to be.

What does all this mean, then?  Put together all what I’ve said so far, and it paints a rather dark and confusing portrait.  Email is *everything*, yet flimsy in it being unreliably verifiable.  Email messages pass from machine to machine across the room, or across the hemisphere, and yet they are “essential communications”.  They are submissible in a court of law, yet easily forged.  Messages are quickly and easily created and more easily deleted, yet we archive them for years or even decades with the possibility that we might need them later even though we already know what each message means, resulting in a liability if they are ever subpoenaed, and requiring constantly increasing storage.

How do we end this accelerating downward spiral, or at least slow it down so we might recognize and begin to approach the problem?

When will added functionality, storage space, and guarantees of quality be enough for this old and simple luxury of slow and insecure communication?  When will we finally realize that we have already outlived email’s usefulness and begin using the next electronic communication “killer app”?

If anyone reading this knows the answer to any of the above, drop me an email. 

[3 Oct 2009 Edit: I JUST found out about Google Wave!!  Go here, here, or here to learn more about it.  It is in closed invitation beta right now, but I hear its going to be released this year.]

There is a stretch of the highway along my commute, near my house, that has blooming flowers each Spring.  The flowers seem wild, but they aren’t.  They are an introduced species, named Carpobrotus edulis, or Ice Plant, which is a succulent plant originally planted in Southern California to help stabilize the soil and reduce erosion.  The flowers are rather nice, to be driving along and see waves of different shades of purple and pink flowers along the roadside.  I’ve often wanted to take a photo (or two) of the flowers during the day as well as when the flowers close during sunset.

So, that’s what I decided to do.  Right after my son’s soccer practice, I dropped him off at home, grabbed my tripod and camera and headed back out.  I picked what I thought was a rather nice location to capture the closing blooms right as the sun went down in the west.  I was a bit late, because by the time I got set up and started shooting, the sun had already dropped behind the mountains.  I had got only about 6 shots done, low to the ground right next to a 30-foot lamppost that was just out of frame, when a California Highway Patrolman pulled up behind my truck.

Well, I was done at that point.  He was in the shot I wanted to take, and CHP don’t normally stop to admire the flowers or make idle conversation.  As soon as he got out of his vehicle, I picked up my gear and told him “Okay, I’m leaving.  I just stopped for about 5 minutes, but I’m going now.”

He motioned for me to stay, with his overgrown masculine/overcompensating flashlight/nightstick.  “This is for emergency stopping only”, he shouted at me over the roar of the highway traffic passing by, as he drew closer. “I don’t think taking pictures is an emergency.”

“Well, no, its not.” I replied.

Before I could get another word in, he asked me for my driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance.

“Sure, hang on, I’ll get it,” I said as I took my license out of my wallet and handed it to him.

I started digging in my glovebox for my registration and insurance paperwork, when he shined his pole vault pole of a flashlight into the glovebox (presumably to make sure I wasn’t packin’ heat).

“Havin’ trouble?” he asked me, as I rifled through my glovebox looking for the paperwork to fulfill his request.

“I have it all here, somewhere,” I told him. There is a lot of stuff in my glovebox.  None of it could be considered a weapon.  I pulled out my registration from 3 years ago, and another from 2 years ago, and yet another that expired last month.

He saw that I had multiple registrations from years ago, looked at the ones expired in 2007, 2008, shook his head, and saw the one dated 2009.  He said, “Ah, there ya go.”

I noticed it had expired last month, and pointed that out to him.

“Yup.  You’re right.  Have a current one?”

“Well, I’m sure I do,” I said, “just give me a minute, I know its here somewhere.”  Finally, I pulled out the current registration, which is actually smaller than a 3×5 card, believe it or not.

“Proof of insurance?”

“Oh, right.  Sure, hang on.” I replied, as I continue rummaging through all the stuff my glovebox has collected.

I managed to hand him GEICO insurance papers from 4 years ago, 3 years ago, 2 years ago, and last year, but couldn’t find the current piece of paper that said I was insured.  Crap!  “I know I have it somewhere, but I just can’t find it at the moment.”

“Well, make sure to tell them that in court,” he said with a sideways smile.

I continued to put my photo gear away while he went back to his squad car to make sure I wasn’t a sereal killer, wanted in multiple states, or had a record for random acts of violence.  After I put my stuff away, I noticed that he started writing, and occassionally would glance over at me while I leaned against the side of my truck while I waited.

Finally, he came back over to me and explained that I am not allowed to stop on the side of the highway unless it is for an emergency.  He pointed out that I could be hit by a drunk driver, or worse.  I calmly retorted that it was barely 7:30pm, that I was next to a 30-foot lamppost, and that I could easily run up the embankment to dodge anything coming at me.

“No, that wouldn’t help ya.  I’ve seen everything,” he bragged.  “So, what are you taking pictures of, anyway? Flowers?”

“Flowers.  Sunset.  I even got parts of the road, to make a scene.”

“Its cloudy.  And the sun went down.  These flowers close up after sunset,” he explained to me, as if I was out of my mind.

“Well, yes.  That was my plan.  Overcast clouds tend to subdue the sun, making it seem larger but not brighter.  Sunset, coupled with the flowers closing up for the night alongside the cars passing by might make a nice photograph.”

He shrugged and restated that it was dangerous to be parked on the side of the road.  I wanted to ask him that if it was dangerous to be parked on the side of the road, and if it is for emergencies only, why shouldn’t we move, but I decided to not say anything because I didn’t want to get into an argument.  What I had planned to be a 10 minute photo shoot ended up taking me half an hour, and didn’t want to make things worse.

The citation was for … and I’m not sure since I can’t read his handwriting …   parking in an emergency zone (side of hwy), and not having proof of insurance.

I asked him, “So, I guess this is a fine?”

“Yes.  Its a fine.”

“I see,” I said.  “How much are we talkin’?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know.  That’s something that’s specific to the county,” he told me.

See, the California Highway Patrol only operates, and has jurisdiction over, the state highways, which run through different counties in California.  So, depending on where and which highway they stop you, you may be subject to different fines and/or court process.

Well, seeing as I hadn’t really accomplished what I set out to do, have a citation to boot, and I didn’t even have time to look at the photos I had already taken, I was anxious to get home.  So, I left.

As it turns out, after looking over the 7 photos I managed to capture, they weren’t horrible.  Not entirely what I wanted, but they didn’t make me vomit.  I should’ve changed lenses and taken slower shots with more exposure, to brighten up the flowers and sky.

Over my years of photographing (over 20 years now), I learned that photography is not just the study of light.  It is the capture of something that most people either take for granted or simply don’t notice.  It should provoke an emotion, and draw the viewer into the photograph so that they can feel what was felt at the time it was taken, or feel something different altogether.

What I was going for was: the flowers closing during sunset, while people whizzed by, most of them paying very little notice.  I’m not sure if I got that much in the photo.  What I get by looking at the photo is “that one time I got a ticket near my house for taking a photo of flowers.”

A Picture is worth a Thousand Words, and 1 Traffic Citation

Recently, on a plane trip, I sat next to a kind gentleman that started to read a Kindle in the middle of the flight.  I heard good and bad things about these devices, and my curiosity piqued.  I didn’t want to disturb the guy, though.  You don’t see people commenting or asking questions about a book someone begins to read because its generally rude and disruptive.  I decided to ask him anyway, “Do you like reading on that?”

His head popped up, looked at me, and smiled.  He paused what he was doing and proceeded to tell me all about his device.  “I imagine most Kindle owners would love to talk to anyone about theirs,” he explained, so I would feel less guilty about interrupting him.  He explained that it was an Amazon Kindle 2, and he was reading a free ebook.  It seemed like everything he explained to me about his electronic reader was good, and I probed further to find something bad about it.  Finally, he told me that the 5-way rocker switch, used to control the menus and select text, was a little too small for his fingers and that he would sometimes accidentally press down instead of left or right, so he figured the best way to overcome this was to use the sides of his fingers and fingernails.  This was hardly something bad about the device, and he made it seem like it was more a problem of his anatomy than with the device itself.

“I can buy books anywhere, and have them in 30 seconds,” he told me.  He explained that the Kindle 2 has wi-fi built in, and he could get on the Internet, go to the Amazon store, buy books, and download them to the Kindle faster than you can boot a computer.  I was impressed.

I asked him if he could download the ebook later on, if something happened to the device or the ebook.  It seems that once you buy an ebook from Amazon.com, its yours.  You can download it as many times as you like, which I had heard was a problem with previous incarnations of ebooks from various book stores in that once you buy a ebook and download it, you’re on your own.

Then, I asked him about the battery, since I was curious about how long a device like this can operate without needing to be recharged.  He told me that he has used his for weeks before, without needing to be recharged.  Again, I was impressed.  It is mainly due to the screen display technology, called “electronic ink”, or e-ink.  It is made in such a way that the screen doesn’t need to be refreshed frequently, relieving the battery from being needed all the time — the battery gets used really only when the screen gets refreshed, when the page is changed.

“Can you put other things, besides books, in it?”  He told me that he could put MP3s in it to listen to, and also visit websites, but it kinda sucks as a web browser.  I explained further, “What about like PDFs, or other documents?”  He explained that he could email PDFs to Amazon, which would convert them into something to be read on the Kindle, but it wasn’t always perfect and it wasn’t entirely free — 10 cents a document.

He seemed to absolutely love his Amazon Kindle 2.  After I was satisfied that he answered my questions, I thanked him for showing me, and tried to leave him alone.  After that, it seemed like he was searching for more things to tell me about his ebook reader.  He showed me that he could take notes on pages, search for text within a book and across books, and that he could store about 1,000 books.  He also demonstrated that, if he wanted to, the Kindle could read the books to him via the text-to-speech.  I listened to it for a few phrases, then he turned that feature off.  That didn’t impress me very much, because it sounded really robotic and reminded me of a Speak & Spell.  It isn’t something I would want to listen to for very long.

I thought it was a wonderful device, and how that must be handy to carry so many books around in such a small form, with the added ability to take notes, search, and buy more books whenever you needed.  The thought of having such a device rolled around in my head for the next few days or so.

. . .

I’m the type of reader that frequently reads technical books.  Oh, I’ll read a good biography or historical fiction, sprinkled with a few humor books now and then, but mainly I read non-fiction.  Programming languages, Internet and technology concepts, and even some computer security books for good measure.  Usually, I have more than a couple bookmarks in the books I read.  I’ll get a book, read it cover to cover, and then put placeholders in and use the book as a reference until it becomes obsolete or innaccurate.  Other books I read, I’ll read them once or twice, and won’t have any bookmarks at all other than a placeholder if I get interrupted.

Since I read technical books, I subscribe to O’Reilly’s Safari for my fill of computer geek-reading.  I pay a monthly fee to have a number of books on my electronic bookshelf, and can download a few chapters here and there to read offline.  The chapters are downloaded as PDF files, which makes them relatively portable since PDF viewer software is readily available pretty much anywhere.  How awesome, I thought,  would it be to have a handheld device with these PDFs in them.

. . .

As with most technical purchases i consider, I research quite a bit.  Mostly, I try to determine if the purchase I might make is technically solving my needs, but then I look at it from a cost analysis — will the thing I buy be the most/best I can get for the money?  Things usually aren’t that cut-n-dry, though.  If something doesn’t solve my need/want, I move onto something else.  If something solves my need, I look at price.  If it costs too much, I weigh the price against the features, deciding if the feature is worth the price.  If a feature costs too much, I might weigh that feature against the possibility of a future need.  Then, I look at how long I plan to keep the purchase, how much I plan to use it, and weigh that against the total cost of purchasing.  In other words, it had better have all the things I need, not much else, and be usable for the entire time I plan on using it, and not be too expensive for what I plan to do with it, but if its more expensive than I expect it should have things that justify the cost.

I’ve done quite a bit of research in purchasing an eBook reader, thinking about how I might use one, and reading/listening to what other people say about them.

Amazon Kindle (1 & 2) don’t justify the price, for my needs.  Kindle 1, the first iteration, is about $289.00. Kindle 2 is about $359.00  They both have e-ink, wireless transfer of books, searching, built-in dictionary, and weighs roughly 10 ounces, with a battery life measured in weeks (actually its measured in page-turns, so your use depends on how much you read rather than the device sitting around idle).  This seems like a pretty good deal, as long as the main thing you want to do is buy and read books from Amazon.com.  Outside of Amazon, it gets sketchy.  Amazon says the PDF reading portion is “experimental”, and requires you to email your PDF files to Amazon as there is no software to convert file formats that comes with the Kindle.  This seems like a pain to me, especially if the PDF ends up not readable.  I’m not even going to go down the path of considering limitations in email (what if the PDF I want to read is too big for email?  what happens when someone spams the email address?).  Since I was used to writing and taking notes, I was sorta looking for something that would let me do that.  The Kindle does have note-taking abilities, but you have to use the tiny Blackberry-style keyboard.

The next device I researched, after many different forums here, here, and here, was the Cybook by Bookeen.  Not entirely a bad device, actually.  Comparitavely priced with the Amazon Kindle, and has similar features sans the ability to buy/download books directly from the device.  My main concern here was it seems to be Mobipocket-specific, as it relies on that format for the books within.  While Mobipocket is a well known ebook format, and has a rather extensive library, the Mobipocket book store didn’t seem to carry much of what I would typically read.  Also, the Cybook seems to rely quite heavily on the Mobipocket Desktop Reader software to do much of the conversion from other formats like HTML and PDF.  Also, it has no touchscreen, and the only ability I can see as far as note-taking is in the form of bookmarks, but the documentation isn’t very clear if you can attach a note to the bookmark.

Another ebook reader that seemed to be within my price range was the Hanlin eBook V3.  It seems to support a very large variety of formats — actually the most aside from the iLiad, which I’ll talk about next.  The potential drawback is that the Chinese company that makes the Hanlin, Jinke, decided to create its own proprietary ebook format, Wolf, to be its primary ebook format for the device.  While this is typically what large manufacturers do so that they can proliferate their devices and lock-in customers for future products, Jinke is a relative unknown in the United States.  Also, I have no idea what I would do if I needed to send the reader back “to the manufacturer” if it ceased functioning under warranty, and the Jinke Support Forum is disturbingly sparse, but riddled with complaints like:

When the developer is going to begin answering questions about units already bought (LBook V8)?
Thank you.

…from a few years ago.  No touchscreen, also relies on Mobipocket, and has no note-taking ability.  Surprisingly, it isn’t even USB 2, it is ancient USB 1.1, which would make transferring of large ebooks a sit-and-wait process.  Not worth the $300 price tag, in my view.

In stark contrast is the iLiad, by iRex.  This thing is a monster.  Anything that you can print from a PC can be read on the iLiad.  Touchscreen.  Not just a touchscreen, though.  You can write on the screen, to take notes.  The notes can then be transferred to a PC or another iLiad where you can have other people annotate your notes, and then transferred back to the iLiad.  It had games — crossword puzzles and Sudoku, if you want.  It has a wireless connection, like the Amazon Kindle, but runs on Wifi rather than a 3G network.  There is very little you cannot do with this baby, it seems.  Price?  Are you sitting down?  This monstrosity will set you back about $700.  (read: approaching the price of a brand new Tablet PC)  It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), this thing is way out of my price range.  Yes, it has a ton of features, and will most likely be able to read just about anything I throw at it, but the price is just too high for the device, considering a few of the features are not that important to me and thus will probably not end up using.

So, what did I finally settle on?

Sony PRS-700. It has a long list of supported formats, a touchscreen (with on-screen keyboard), a built-in front light for reading in the dark, and bookmarks and note-taking capabilities.  All for around $350.  Now, fans of the previous incarnation (PRS-505) will tell you that the PRS-700’s screen is dark and full of glare, but they say that when they compare it to the PRS-505, which doesn’t have a touchscreen or a built-in light.  I went for functionality, and features, trying not to compromise readability too much.  It has electronic ink, but you’re reading it through a touchscreen, on a recessed panel so that the lights are able to shine onto the panel from the side.  I would imagine the $700 iLiad suffers from the same problem, but not many people have those obscene devices, so really it came down to what I wanted the device to let me do, and not necessarily how good it looked.  Speaking of how good it looks, the looks of the device (and the PRS-505) are sleek and professional, which impressed me more than the Amazon Kindle.  Granted, the Amazon Kindle and the two Sony readers were the only ones I actually have been able to hold in my hands, I was most impressed with the PRS-700.  Sony is marketing the 700 as an upscale version of the 505, and not a replacement, mainly for the reasons I just stated.

[Update: It occurred to me that there's an entire string of stuff I haven't talked about, which actually pushed me over the edge to get the PRS-700 -- 3rd-party software.  A very smart individual created an Open Source application named calibre.  It runs non-concurrently (alone and separate) from the software that comes with Sony's eBook Reader, and is VERY handy.  The function is basically that it catalogs the ebooks you buy/download from various sources outside of Sony's ebook store.  It also allows you to convert it into one of 3 formats suited for the reader device, from a large variety of formats that are foreign to the Sony reader.  In all actuality, Sony needs to send this guy a check, because he has increased the device's usefullness exponentially, opening the reader to a vast inventory of possibilities for content not just limited to Sony's ebook store.]

I love it.  It is Sony, and while I’m generally not a huge fan of Sony’s computers, all my home appliances (TV’s, DVD players, VCR, etc.) are made by Sony.  They have an attention to detail that is hard to beat.

In case you’d like to do all the research about these yourself, feel free.  A good starting place is the huge matrix of eBook Reader devices.

One thing you might want to keep in mind, however, is that it is an evolving market.  As new devices are released, the manufacturers typically align themselves with content partners (ebook stores, which are associated with publishers).  So, depending on the device you decide on, you may be locking yourself out of specific content.  Also, the larger manufacturers tend to produce the device such that it works best with their own proprietary format of books, so be careful.

Since it is an evolving market, there seem to be a few ebook reader devices about to come out, but have yet to be released.  There is the Plastic Logic Reader, set to be available in 2010. Also, there will be the eSlick Reader, releasing in May for $260, which claims that you can convert any document to PDF and read it, implying that it only relies on ebooks being in PDF form.

That’s all I really have, and should go because I have about 50 books loaded up and have started reading about a dozen of them already.

If you’re unfamiliar with this service, prepare to have your socks knocked off.

First of all, the service is based on a particular number that you give out to people that want your phone number.  That phone number actually calls GrandCentral, which then calls your cell phone, announcing the call — either with CallerID of the person placing the call, or something to let you know that GrandCentral is handling the call.  From that point on, you can choose to take the call, let the call go to voicemail, or listen in on the call (as if it were a home answering machine).  If you choose to take the call, you still have options.  You can record the call by pressing a button or two, at which point both parties in the call will hear an announcement stating that the call will be recorded.  When you’re done recording, press a button again, and another announcement states recording is off.

The in-call recording, and all voicemail that goes through GrandCentral actually gets recorded at GrandCentral, after which time you can go to the website and listen to your messages.  No software to download (other than maybe a Adobe Flash plugin, which you likely have already if you’ve ever visited Youtube).

It goes without saying that, yes, you can totally block callers easily.

You can also input your personal contact list and associate people that call you into groups, and then specify ringtones, greetings, etc., based on group or individual person.

If you get a TON of phone calls on your cell phone, like me, this service is well worth having.  Even though its free, I would likely consider paying a few bucks a month just to keep it.  There are rumors that it will become a pay service…  but more on that later.

One other neato-mosquito feature of GrandCentral?  If you have multiple phones, GrandCentral performs a bit of technological magic.  Say you have registered both of your phones with GrandCentral…  and you get a call on one of your phones through the service…  if you want to switch phones, you just hit a button on your cell phone keypad.  GrandCentral will call your other phone, you pick up, and presto-gizmo the call is automagically transferred.

And now for the news…

Back when I was invited to the beta for GrandCentral, Google had just acquired the service.  Google, essentially, has been working on making it their own, in relative silence, for almost a year now.  Well, they’ve finally re-released the service as Google Voice, though still in closed beta.  “How do you know this,” you might say…?  “From what fountain of knowledge have you gleened this nugget of information, Dave,” you might inquire…?

Well, its all over the Internet, here and here, and here.  Oh, and also because when I logged into my GrandCentral account, I got this notification:

Your account will soon be available for upgrade to Google Voice. Thank you for your patience

The Google Voice Team – Read the blog

In my original post, I noted that it would take some effort to change the way I use my desktop.  BumpTop, while very well thought out, and a genuinely original idea both in solving a problem and implementation of the solution, doesn’t fit well with how I personally use my computer.  This is not BumpTop’s fault.

For decades I have been using computers with different OSes, desktop orientations, window managers, looks and feels, constantly searching for “Desktop Nirvana”, which is to say the desktop state that mixes function with style and elegance while taking into account an optimal amount of practicality.  In other words, I’m all for eye-candy, as long as the eye-candy serves a purpose, even if that purpose is simply a “cool” factor.  As with all “cool” factors, it comes at a price, whether it be slower screen refresh rates like a 3D desktop [see Compiz], or more CPU resources consumed [see Google Desktop], or possibly even reservation of a portion of desktop real estate [see Rainmeter & Enigma].  BumpTop, on the other hand, seemed to not be so much eye-candy, but actually be more functional than cosmetic/stylish.

The problem BumpTop attempts to solve is that of desktop organization.  The analogy is a physical desk with papers and magazines sitting on a desk, in piles, with each item spacially relative to other items on the desk.  This is a brilliant way to see the problem, actually — arrange things spacially however the user of the items uses them, rather than “in a grid”, or “in a folder” as modern desktops coerce users to do.  For example, if I place things into a folder, and keep the folder on the desktop, yes I can organize the items, but I can’t SEE the items until I open the folder. However, if I organize things into a “pile” such as a physical pile on a shelf, I can SEE what items are in the pile without actually doing much at all, and I know which items are in which piles, whereas if they were in folders I would have to open each folder until I found what I was looking for.

This is all great in concept, and in implementation, and is precisely where BumpTop shines.

But, what if you’re like me, and have been organizing your desktop the same way for years?  Ever since Windows 3.0, I have been organizing my desktop to reduce (or eliminate) clutter, more or less in the same manner.  Along comes BumpTop, blazing the way in desktop organization, and I have almost nothing on my desktop to organize.

So what do I do?  I start putting things on the desktop!

I quickly found that while BumpTop solves the problem, I didn’t have the problem it solves.  This became quite annoying for me, partially because I had to adjust my way of doing things on the computer, but also partially because BumpTop is not a desktop — its an application.  BumpTop does not *replace* the desktop, but sits on top of your normal desktop, and hides the desktop that the operating system (Windows) provides.  The desktop that comes with the OS is optimized and made to mesh with the rest of the operating system.  BumpTop is a 3rd party application that acts as a go-between, wedged in the middle of the original desktop and YOU.

While the concept of organizing things on the desktop into piles, groups, and the like, is a sound concept that is proved through its use, the fact is that it is still “just another application” that has to interact with the desktop/operating system.  This makes it slower than your original desktop, and vulnerable to crashes, bugs, and other nuiances like computer resource reservation, installed applications are vulnerable to.  In other words, BumpTop solves a particular problem, but the solution comes at a cost.  The cost is running another application all the time that hides your original desktop — It does not make your original desktop go away; it only hides it and helps you organize things in a more “human” way.  This makes the application slower than if it was the desktop itself, which would elminate the orginal icon-laden desktop altogether.

Interaction with BumpTop was much less responsive than with the original desktop.  Keeping in mind that I only tested the beta, and things are bound to get better overall, BumpTop will still remain an application and not a full desktop replacement that completely eliminates the original unorganized workspace.

…an application that does not solve a problem for someone like me.

Since I have mentioned it, I’ve been using Enso, which almost completely eliminates the need to have icons on the desktop at all.  After a few keystrokes, I’m using whatever software installed on my computer, whether I have a desktop icon for it or not.  It has become second nature in the way I interact with my computer, so much that I have found (don’t laugh) that when Enso isn’t running, for a few seconds I enter a state of panic because I have forgotten how to launch the application software I wanted to use.  Caps Lock, O, “Open:  “  Fire — “Firefox? Mozilla Firefox?  Windows Firewall?  OpenOffice.org Impress?”  Amazingly, “Firefox” is usually at the top of the list, because Enso has remembered the last time I said “Fire”, Firefox is what I wanted.   If I want to run Photoshop, I just Caps Lock, type O, then type “photo”, and I see a list containing: “Adobe Photoshop CS4?, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.2?, Photosynth?, Windows Photo Gallery?, etc”.

When Enso is not running (because it crashed, or hasn’t fully launched yet), I do…
Caps Lock…   Caps Lock light is now on.
Uh oh.
Ok.  Firefox is on the “Quick Launch” bar, so I’ll just click that.
I need to run Photoshop, now.  Caps Lock…  Caps Lock light is now off.
Uh oh.  Umm….   ok, I think its in the “Start Menu”…   Start ->  Adobe….  something…  oh, there it is.  Adobe Photoshop CS4.  Got it.  Luckily.

For people like me, who have pretty much always organized their desktop, BumpTop, albeit a wonderfully thought out piece of software, is probably not for you.

For people like me, and even people not like me, I highly recommend Enso.  BumpTop and Enso are not competing products, and solve completely different problems, but they do both help with the human-to-computer interaction immensely.

I have it installed, and will be trying it out as much as I can.  Ironically, I don’t normally have very much on my computer desktop, because of the problem BumpTop attempts to solve, but I’ll try to get out of the habit of keeping the desktop clean so that I can think of things in a new BumpTop way.

…my actual physical desktop is usually pretty cluttered, though.
I wish there was something that would let me keep papers, magazines, and bills as organized as in BumpTop.

Things don’t work in the beta exactly like the video below, but the concepts are the same.  In addition to what you see in the video, there are “photo frames” on the walls that can be slideshows of photos on my computer, or elsewhere on the web.

So, you might know about how panoramas are created without a panoramic camera…  Take a bunch of photos on a tripod while panning around a scene, then put them all in something that can interpret the photos as sort of meshing together to create an extra wide photo — a panoramic photo.

Photosynth is kind of like that except it doesn’t work on just 2 dimensions (height and width), meshing the edges of the photos…  it works in 3 dimensions, to create a virtual space by calculating where the camera was that captured the photo (among other magic stuff).  Imagine being in a courtyard, taking photos while turning yourself around.  Load those photos into Photosynth, the software extrapolates the edges and portions each photo has in common, and it creates the courtyard in 3d that you can virtually walk around to examine the features as if you were actually there.

VERY cool stuff, indeed.

It was created by Microsoft Live Labs, and you need to download the software in order to view the “synths” as well as create them.  There’s also a handy guide for tips on taking photos that work best.

Lately, though, things have started to pile up…  Maybe its because it is that time of the year, or maybe it is something else, but suddenly I have a ton of things to do.  So…  I’ve begun looking for help in keeping track of what needs to be done.

This is not a new problem for me.  I bought a Palm Pilot years ago for this reason, but it outlived its usefullness because I don’t always keep ToDo lists.  Sure, I could use it for contact management, but in those days it was easier to just keep a sheet of folded paper with names and numbers.  A few years ago, I tried d-cubed, and found it useful.  It is based on TiddlyWiki.  The idea is that there are tasks arranged into projects that contain actions.  The projects and actions are inserted into a wiki that is self-contained in one file, making it portable to be read offline in any web browser (meaning it works in Linux, Windows, etc.) This is an overly simplified explaination, but that’s the gist.  It really helps with organization of tasks.  d-cubed is a software implementation of GTD (Getting Things Done), which is a method of organizing and accomplishing tasks.  A bit better than just a ToDo list.  I’ve never actually read GTD…  yet.  Using something like d-cubed, I feel I don’t really need to, since its pretty straight forward.

Recently, though, to help in my plight to organize my tasks, I found a better version of a TiddlyWiki implementation in the context of GTD…  monkeyGTD.  Its a pleasure to work with, once I got comfortable with the controls and the terminology of “projects”, “next actions”, and “ticklers”, it helps me organize quite a bit.  I can even schedule a fuzzy type of thing called a “someday maybe/future” task, which is like a task that I might want to do eventually.

…someday maybe/future read GTD, and get even more done…

In fact, I like it so much I have monkeyGTD on a USB key that I carry around with me, updating my tasks, along with TiddlyWiki on the same USB key so that I can keep notes about things that interest me.