My experience with tablets

2011-12-08 1 Comment

I had been able to avoid the tablet “craze” for a while, but the need for a more portable computing device that wasn’t under 4″ in size started becoming a reality after lugging a Dell XPS L502X around for 6 months.

I tried to survive using a GalaxyS and a Blackberry but the screens and browser experience was just not up to par with something a bit larger.

So I started looking around at the tablets available. I tried a Galaxy 10.1″, and the 7″ along with a Toshiba wi-fi tablet someone acquired from Dubai. They are all great devices in their own rights but they all suffered from the same lag issue I have with my GalaxyS, especially when flipping thorough pages.

I have now ended up with the only tablet that seems to do as advertised, provide a smooth stable consistent experience. First National Bank are running a promotion where you get a 16GB iPad with 3G for ZAR220 a month over 24 months which if you exclude the monthly cheque account is fee is R420 less than retail. BARGAIN!!!

I have now had the thing for a week and am wondering why it took so long to take the plunge. I am actually typing this post using the WordPress app, and am able to type at a fair tick, even though I am unable to actually “touch type”. Other uses I have found useful

  • Watching Podcast video
  • House shopping for the move end of the month
  • Reading my Google Reader and Twitter feed using FlipBoard
  • General Browsing

    • All in all I think I can safely give the iPad an A+ for doing what they say and doing it properly.

    The only con I have is OMG why did they bother with the cameras, these ones SUCK more than those in my old Blackberry 8520

    Filed under Rambling Tagged with

    Timesheets – You’re doing it wrong – Dominic White

    2011-11-21

    Dominic has this so right

    Timesheets – You’re doing it wrong

    When managing teams of “information workers”, I believe the use of time sheets is indicative of a management failure. Here’s why:

    If you have to rely on a timesheet to know what your staff are doing – you’re doing it wrong

    If you can’t trust your staff to work hard – you have problems a timesheet won’t fix

    If you believe you have too many staff to manage – get more managers

    If you think anyone completes them accurately – you drank the kool aid

    If you think the time it takes to actually complete them accurately is worth it – you hate your staff

    If you manage your business from these inaccurate stats – you’re making bad decisions

    If your senior people have PAs complete their timesheets for them – you’re a hypocrite

    If you spent millions on a new timesheet system, but didn’t make it any easier for the staff using the system – you just suck

    Posted by Dominic White in Life at 20:00 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

    via Timesheets – You’re doing it wrong – Dominic White.

    Filed under Why Oh Why

    A BreAduino nightmare

    2011-03-27

    This was supposed to be a straightforward build but things started going wrong, and it just continued.

    BreAduino

    After getting all the parts and putting everything in exactly as it was supposed to be as per the really awesome instructions at http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Standalone and then double checking I go and hookup 12v to the breadboard and poof. Smoke coming out of your only Atmega 328 controller you have is not something you want to be seeing. If you look closely (click on the first image) you can see the melted plastic where the reset button is. I actually moved the Atmega 328 down four rows just in case I had shorted something internally.

    FT232 Breakout Board

    FT232 Breakout Board

    After getting a couple of new Arduino boot loader preloaded Atmega 328’s I popped one in and hit the upload button. The only thing that happened was the following error message

    avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
    avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51

    A few searches later and I figured it must be due to not having a “auto reset” on my BreAduino, and it not being a Arduino Uno. After changing the the board to Duemilanove and a bit of experimenting I found that hitting the reset button immediately after Binary sketch size appears in the IDE an upload happened and worked. The RX an TX LEDs blinking at an insane rate is a good thing and made me happy.

    HD44780 LCD Display

    HD44780 LCD Display

    Now that I have a working BreAduino I went through the hookup process of a HD44780 16×8 character LCD display, using the pinouts in the Arduino IDE examples as a guide. Unfortunately I did not realise that I had the positive and negative supply the wrong way around until I had a look at the excellent tutorial at AdaFruit  http://www.ladyada.net/learn/lcd/charlcd.html. The saying a picture says a thousand words applies to electronics as well. At least I didn’t pop the entire display, it is now a 8×2 character to will have to make use of scrolling text more than I would have liked.

    At least I am now past stage two of the alarm system for the caravan, next step is to get all the parts working together.

    Filed under Arduino, Uncategorized Tagged with

    My first go with the Arduino

    2010-11-17

    I have some interesting plans, but to get there I needed to learn something about microprocessors and programming them. Just browsing around I realised that the Arduino seems to be the more popular and thus more “supported” architecture and bought myself an Arduino UNO from netram.co.za which for all intents is a beginners board. Read more of this post

    Filed under Arduino, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

    ← Older posts

    Newer posts →