Posted by Jerry on March 19th, 2006 — Posted in Journal
General comments
Travelling with a laptop can be a pain – especially with the airport hassles – whereas a handheld device fits in a pocket, is always with you when you need to take notes, and these days, can do pretty much everything the laptop can. Enter the Psion – I bought a Psion series 3 in 2000, and decided it was quite good, but it really needed a decent keyboard. Enter the Psion 5mx with its integrated keyboard with keys large enough almost to touch type, but certainly quite practical for note taking. Even now I get impressed comments when I pull it out and start typing – usually about how small they are making computers these days. I then point out that Psion stopped making them in 2001 – so the most recent ones are now five years old. Well – not quite: they are still being made in limited numbers and you can still buy them new. But the technology is at least five years old.
And so to the iPaq2750. I had issues with getting the psion to print to a canon BJC50 printer, and I had heard how with wifi you could use email facilities and web access at airports and hotspots, and that with the new handhelds you could get keyboards as extras, so I finally succumbed to the lure of an iPaq 2750 and Freedom keyboard.
On my way home from that trip I browsed the web and sent emails from London’s Heathrow airport while sipping coffee in the lounge area. I found a third-party printer driver and the iPaq happily printed formatted pages on the canon printer – the Psion still has issues, although other users report having no problems printing to that printer.
I still maintain that if the psion had gone to a USB connection, installed wifi and bluetooth connectivity, put in a colour screen, and stayed with the latest iteration of the Symbian operating system, I would willingly have paid double what I paid for the iPaq. In other words, if they had kept up with the handheld technology, the form factor would have beaten all other competitors.
The iPaq and keyboard together make a package that is more than twice the bulk and weight of the Psion, and what tips the balance is the newer technology. The iPaq will dock happily to the mac (using third party sync software), and will also connect to the mac via bluetooth. Both the iPaq and Psion have IRdA and compact flash card storage – the iPaq also takes smart media cards.
Battery life
For battery life, the Psion wins hands down, and because it uses two AA batteries, replacements are available at every corner store in most countries – and they last between a fortnight and a month depending on usage. With heavy note taking and report writing I find that the batteries last an entire week-long trip, including the flights from Australia to Europe and back, whereas the iPaq is struggling to last one of the flights without recharging.
Form factor
The Freedom keyboard is neat, easy to use, and the bluetooth connection to the iPaq is generally very stable – notwithstanding the driver issues I had when I let the iPaq batteries run down. The keyboard requires a solid surface – such as an airline seat table or cafe table. Take a hardcover book if you want to use it just on your lap. The Psion integral keyboard has real keys (not buttons) and is easy to almost touch type on. The Psion keyboard is not articulated, so it can be used on your lap.
Both the iPaq and Psion have touch screens, and with third party software you can input text to the Psion via the screen using a stylus – but it is awkward to do so as you also have the keyboard to deal with. The iPaq is clearly designed with stylus-only input in mind.
Internet
Both can connect to the internet – the iPaq has built in wifi, bluetooth and IRdA for direct connection at hotspots or connection via phone or bluetooth modem. The Psion can be connected to a landline connection via an infrared modem. Internet Explorer for the iPaq is excellent, and web page display is clear and bright and in full colour. The Psion – forget the built-in browser – called Web – and install the Opera browser. Again good layout albeit in greyscale – 16 shades.
Writing
Writing – the iPaq has all the features of Microsoft Word and is fully compatible with the desktop equivalents. The Psion Words application has many of the more commonly used style elements of MS Word, but is not natively compatible – using nconvert (a third party piece of software) you can convert to rich text format (rtf) for easy transfer of formatted written documents.
Spreadsheets
For spreadsheets – the iPaq is again more compatible, having a version of Excel pre-installed. The Psion Sheets application has many of the standard spreadsheet features, but again requires third party conversion to produce compatible files.
Images
The iPaq easily takes images via CF card from the camera, although I have not been able to establish an IR connection with my phone to download images via that route. The Psion also can take images from the CF card – but slow processing speed means it can take several minutes for an image to display – and then only in 16 shades of grey. Strangely, the Psion has no difficulty whatsoever connecting with the phone via IR and readily transfers images from the phone. The Psion’s readiness to connect with the phone makes it easy to type an SMS message and send it via the phone – something I have yet to do successfully with the iPaq.
There is no doubt that the iPaq wins hands down on its features – it has one of the brightest full colour screens on the market, it has excellent connectivity with a wide range of options – wifi, bluetooth and IRdA, and it has pocket versions of most of the microsoft suite. And it takes both CF and SD media cards. It is a pity about the form factor and the battery life.
On form factor, with its integrated and well-designed keyboard, full width screen, the Psion wins hands down. The IRdA connectivity – especially with the sagem phone is excellent. The reliability and easy of use of the applications is excellent, and the battery life is truly amazing on the Psion. As a lightweight pocket substitute for a laptop, I greatly prefer the Psion form factor. If I could somehow shoe-horn the iPaq internals into the Psion – even with the sacrifice of battery life, and add a colour screen: I would buy it like a shot – in the meantime, I shall take both travelling, knowing that if all else fails, the Psion will remain a reliable workhorse.
Here is another review of the Psion compared with palm and pocket PC devices.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 18th, 2006 — Posted in Journal
Some time ago I mentioned that I had finally succumbed to the lure of wifi and bluetooth in my travel technology with the purchase of a Hewlett-Packard iPaq2750 and a Freedom Keyboard – as a replacement for the trusty Psion 5mx. A few weeks ago I was about to head off to Darwin and dragged out the iPaq which I hadn’t used since the trip on which I bought it. Hmmm – I had let the battery completely drain – bad move… the machine had reset itself to factory settings – which did not include the drivers for the keyboard. What about the CD? That’s fine if you have a PC, but I’m a mac user and so .exe files are useless to me.
Next stop the Freedom keyboard site – no problem, they have a downloads area – including of the .cab files for those like myself who use macs. Loaded up, pressed the soft reset and set about establishing a bluetooth connection with the keyboard: “cannot connect to this keyboard, please check the power status and try again”. I tried – new batteries to no avail. So back to the Freedom site and put in a ticket to their service centre. I had a response very quickly to say that the .cab file on the site was an old one, and that the new one was in the .exe file – but they would extract it and send it that afternoon. Wow, I thought – that’s good service. A week passed and with no further response I put in another ticket.
Another fast response apologised for the delay, and then said a new driver was being written and would be available in about two weeks. Well this was more like it – an honest reason for the delay. And sure enough almost a month to the day since I found the problem, I got an email with the new .cab file as an attachement – and it worked perfectly!
Well done Freedom Keyboard! I understand that programming drivers can take time, and I appreciate the fact that I was not just given a story and palmed off – and that your service department provided genuine service. I shall now feel more confident in taking the iPaq and keyboard away on trips – albeit with a copy of the driver on a CF card.
As for the Psion 5mx? Yes I took that instead and despite its age (made in 2000) it worked perfectly to take notes and write up the trip. It also will continue to travel with me as a backup to the iPaq.
So now they are working, how do they compare? That will be my next blog post
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 7th, 2006 — Posted in Journal
Sharon pointed out a delightful post by The Embroideress titled “Deconstruction Run Amok“, on the work of Stephen Sollins and I would have to agree with her that there is still a dominant tendency to cast ‘high art’ as somehow ‘superior’ to craft. I also agree with her statement that:
“It would have been far more interesting to me if he [Sollins] had reversed this order and examined the issue of craft as a greater value than art.”
In some ways I think this is what Australian artist and entertainer Rolf Harris aimed at in his ‘painting by numbers’ community art project in Trafalgar Square in London last year – Rolf on Art.
In some ways, what Rolf did was a playful reworking of the traditional painter as workshop concept – in this case taking an iconic ‘fine art’ image of Holbein and rendering it as community art. This is a far reaching and more philosophically interesting version of the operation of deconstruction than that of Solens – who seeks to somehow reassert the dominant vision of high art.
Rolf’s project sets out to make high art accessible in a way that throws a spotlight on the techniques of the old masters – but less about that actual painting techniques, but rather the workshop system that made such paintings possible.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 4th, 2006 — Posted in Journal, Writing
With my birthday came a wonderful gift from Sharon – a Visconti Van Gogh (vanilla colour) fountain pen and three of my favourite Moleskine squared paper notebooks 🙂 The pen came with an ink converter so I was eager to test this pen, with its broader medium nib as against the Waterman Apostrophe’s fine nib to see what the difference would be on Moleskine paper – especially given the extended discussion on the use of fountain pens with Moleskine notebooks.
Visconti pen and Moleskine notebook
I filled the Visconti with Parker Quink blue-black and gave it a try:
Visconti with Quink ink on Moleskine paper
And the Moleskine soaked it up like blotting paper! Noting that the Waterman has never had problems, I thought perhaps the issue might be the type of ink, or the ink flow. So I removed the converter by gently unscrewing it, and inserted a Ryman cartridge – same as I use on the Waterman.
Visconti pen with Ryman ink cartridge on Moleskine paper
What a difference! Yes there are still a couple of minor whiskers, but nothing like the quink! The rest I guess is down to the greater ink flow of the medium nib – I have the fine nib on order and hopefully it should arrive in a week or two.
The funny thing is that the young lass in Pepe’s Paperie gave me a stern warning: “For heaven’s sake don’t take it on an aircraft” I astonished her by saying that I have never had leakage problems using the Waterman pen – are Visconti pens so vulnerable? or is it just the ink they have been using?
Anyhow, the pen is beautifully balanced, fairly light (only slightly thicker and heavier than the Waterman Apostrophe) and has a very smooth glide over the paper – it is a real delight to use!
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 2nd, 2006 — Posted in Journal, Writing
I can barely count the number of times that the term ‘deconstruction’ has been used – perjoratively – as a synonym for ‘destruction’. Such writers immediately mark themselves out as having not read the primary literature, or they have willfully miscast the term, or merely aped some of the poorer secondary literature.
Like energy, deconstruction is not about destruction, but rather, reconstrual (see my cheat-sheet on Derrida here). Deconstruction offers a tool that is more sophisticated than just reversing seemingly ‘natural’ binary hierarchies. It offers a way of making explicit the conditions under which such hierarchies seem to be natural, and does so without simplistic oppositional tactics that leave themselves open to the criticism that the assumptions remain the same, just the players have changed.
The value of deconstruction is that it provides a tool with which to genuinely rethink a ‘given’ order of things. And it really isn’t that difficult.
Warren Hedges provides an accessible guide to deconstruction which offers in part:
“deconstruction works “within an opposition,” but “upsets [its] hierarchy by producing an exchange of properties.” This disrupts not only the hierarchy, but the opposition itself.
For any given set of binary terms:
- good/evil;
- man/woman;
- democracy/totalitarianism, and so on,
one could reverse the hierarchies to show that:
- evil is stronger than good;
- or women are smarter than men;
- or that totalitarianism shows strength and resolve against the lowest common denominator of the popular vote.
But to do so leaves the binary in place, merely reversing the power structure.
One could instead deconstruct the binaries:
- good and evil are interdependent and relative terms which cannot be defined without reference to each other and in relation to the context in which they are defined, and depending on a subjective perspective;
- cultural differences in the way men and women are educated can lead to assumptions about intelligence being gender-based;
- democracy and totalitarianism are two kinds of political organisation that each have strengths in different contexts.
Each of these statements addresses the opposition that it depends on, by neither reversing the opposition, nor destroying it, but instead deconstruction reveals the inherent instability of the basis on which the opposition rests.
There is a mistaken view that this approach leads to pure relativism, and that therefore there is no basis for judgement, or values. It is true that deconstruction is an aspect of contemporary sceptical philosophy, but it is relativistic only insofar as it is anti-foundationalist – that is, it rests on the assertion that there can be no absolute universal position on which to base truth claims. Deconstruction and other anti-foundationalist approaches deal with the mess of human culture here and now – embedded in history and in context.
Deconstruction sees absolute values as an abdication of human responsibility – a recourse to religious faith for absolute values is a way of not taking responsibility for one’s behaviour, but rather of deflecting responsibility to a set of ‘god-given’ rules. It avoids the need for thought and for responsible judgement. Deconstruction takes the view that values are historically and culturally determined – and essentially contested – so growth and change is possible in accordance with changes in human circumstances: the operation of historical processes. Ethics depends therefore on what is culturally appropriate at that time and in that context. But it allows for differences between cultures, and differences across time and in different contexts.
The basis for ethics and values for a deconstructionist (one who practices deconstruction) therefore lies in the sedimentation of human history and cultural circumstances. It is essentially political insofar as each person at each decision point decides to reinforce the dominant cultural practice, or to resist it – so it requires people to take responsibility for their own actions, rather than claim ‘it is written’ or ‘it is God’s will’. It also avoids the excuse some offer for not taking action, or for not taking a particular course, that ‘it is only natural’ – sorry mate: it’s only cultural and we don’t all have to agree.
Cheers
Jerry
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