All Entries Tagged With: "GottaBeAStudent"

GBM Inkshow: Truc’s Back To School Hardware Essentials

It’s that time again for school to start back up. This Inkshow will focus on the hardware that I use in order to maximize productivity and stay organized. I also touch on accessories that makes life just a bit easier for me when I’m home and when I’m mobile. Take a look, leave some feedback, and stay tuned for the software essentials.

 

Update: Video is back up. I apologize for the errors in the previous video.

 

Microsoft Drops Office Ultimate Prices For Students

Microsoft is offering Office Ultimate to students for the unreal price of $59.95. All you need is to have a .edu email address and be registered for at least 0.5 credit hours in case MS decides to come asking for proof of your enrollment for whatever reason. Office Ultimate retails for $679, so this is a very significant savings. The beauty of Office Ultimate is that it offers the complete Office suite of software allowing for integrating files between different programs. For example, a OneNote page can be turned into an Outlook appointment. Similarly, an Outlook email can be sent into OneNote for editing. I’ll be showing the relatively seamless coordination between Office programs soon here in an upcoming Inkshow.

Via Digital Trends

Microsoft Office Live Workspace Has Great Potential - Now Only If It Supports OneNote

I was invited to sign up for Office Live Workspace Beta and gladly took the offer. I see Live Workspace as a perfect cloud-based collaborative tool, especially for the college environment where sharing ideas, class notes, peer edits for papers or journal articles, etc., are all paramount to the learning environment. Right now Workspace supports almost all Office software. Word files, Excel files, and PowerPoint files can be uploaded and downloaded straight from the cloud onto a local terminal for editing or collaborative discussion. One of the best things about Workspace is its ability to transform and streamline workflow.

This last semester, I was helping a classmate write and edit his research article and had to either wait for him to meet with me or wait for his email to come through. From there, I would have to download the file via USB flash drive or via email attachment. After editing or marking the draft up with suggestions, I would have to save the file, email it back, or put it on my flash drive and retransfer it back to him. Although this works, the file saving and re-saving sometimes meant I would litter my computer with drafts that are useless. The workflow definitely could be better.

Enter in Live Workspace. Workspace downloads and installs a toolkit where you can save and open directly from the Workspace. Cloud storage, meet Microsoft Office. Sort of. Although I can save and open from the Cloud, the program I use the most is not included (yet) in Workspace. Word, Excel, PowerPoint… but no OneNote 2007. It’s absolutely true that OneNote utilization at my university is painfully lacking, which is probably anecdotally true for the majority of people who use OneNote versus more familiar programs like Word or Excel. Collaborative learning and studying using OneNote or PDFs of OneNote files, note-taking and sharing only happened between 3 people in my classes. It only happened when we were all physically present and hooked up to the school’s network. That’s 3 out of approximately 200. Granted, having the option of exploring the limitations of OneNote in the Cloud should be included now while Live Workspace is still in beta form.

If Microsoft would implement OneNote support in Workspace, OneNote’s sales would greatly increase, especially if Microsoft makes a proper PR campaign touting the advantages of using Office within the Cloud. Cross-platform implementation where Apple users (a significant percentage of college students use Macs) can also use Live Workspace will definitely help foster a truly collaborative learning environment that is software based and will boost sales of Office software across platforms.

In the coming weeks when school starts up again, I will be revisiting this topic. Hopefully I can get a few of my classmates to join me in the Live Workspace Cloud and I’ll report back on how well things work between computers and the Workspace Cloud. If there are things you’d like for me to look at in Live Workspace, or if you have suggestions on how to use Live Workspace, please share them. I’m always looking for ways to improve workflow.

GottaBeAStudent: Myth of Battery Life

Andrew Ferguson is an author at StudentTabletPC.com…when homework and exams permit. This is the first in a series of guest posts for GottaBeMobile.

This article was originally going to be about batteries and battery management. Well, it still is. But not in the way you might think. I wanted to write an awesome article about how I changed a few settings and all of a sudden I went from an hour of battery life to five hours of battery life.

This will not be that article.

I have a confession to make. Most of the time when my tablet is on, it’s plugged into the wall. At home, I drop it in my port replicator and it basically becomes a glorified desktop. I have a separate power cable in the living room that I plug into when I do homework. Another brick remains in my bag for when I’m out and about and I’m pretty sure I have a fourth one floating around somewhere “just in case.”

In short, my life revolves around power cables and where the electrical outlets are. This is somehow fitting considering that I’m at college to become an electrical engineer.

It seems to me that a lot of emphasis is placed on trying to get über long battery times. I’ll often hear users wanting to buy a computer with a battery that will last them all day without having to plug in. This is not an entirely unreasonable request and with a battery big enough and a device that consumes a small enough amount of power, it can readily be accomplished.

I’m not going to bore you with the technical details about my power consumption. Instead, I’ll provide a brief overview of how I run my ship:

• I usually keep my monitor brightness at 3/8 to 1/2 brightness.
• There are three programs I almost always have running: OneNote, Mathematica, and Firefox. There are also a slew of programs running in my tray, such as Skype, Pidgin, AVG Antivirus, Mozy, Google Desktop, etc. My base RAM usage is around 900MB. I honestly have no idea how it got that high and I’m sure there is some memory leak somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet.
• The lectures go pretty fast, so I need demand the maximum performance/speed from my machine so that I can switch between programs without issue and not miss a beat.

Running in the “Normal” power saving mode with the brightness cranked up one notch fits the bill pretty well. But as I alluded to earlier, it also takes its toll on my battery.

Most days, I get just over an hour of performance from my battery. All my classes are 50 minutes in length, so I can easily go a class period on a charge. However, the next class I’d have to plug in. On the first day of class, I make it my personal mission to find all the plugs in the classroom. From there, I can decided where to sit. I usually get pretty lucky and can find a plug in the front 1/3 of the classroom. Thus, my typical day ends up looking something like this:

1. 9am - Fluid Mechanics - Battery
2. 10am - Digital Logic - Wall
3. 11am - Advanced Eng. Math - Battery
4. 12pm - Lunch - Battery/Wall
5. 2pm - Information Systems - Battery/Wall
6. 3pm - Eng. Circuit Analysis - Wall

If I’m near a socket, I’ll usually plug in, even if I don’t need it. Might as well keep the tanked topped off.

A couple things I should note. First, I’ve going on four years with this computer and over two years with this battery. My tablet has regularly gets a good workout as I take it with my pretty much wherever I go. The point being that my battery has gone through and continues to go through many cycles.

A quick sidebar if I may: Most portable devices use Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) batteries. Li-Ion batteries have a fantastic energy density (around 600000 Joules/kg), over twice that of NiCad and NiMH batteries [1]. Practically no memory effect and a slow loss of charge [2] have made the technology the de facto solution for devices that need portability.

However, for all its greatness, Lithium Ion batteries are ancient by today’s technical standards, having been around for over 15 years [2]. While small leaps and bounds have been made in battery design, most of the advances come from better power management. Inevitably, even with perfect power management, greater computing capacity will require more power. To have more power available within the confines of the same device will require a battery with greater power density. Thus, in my opinion, the future of better battery life is not better management, but better technology.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-ion

Andrew Ferguson is an author at StudentTabletPC.com. If you have any questions or would like to send him a new battery, you can contact him at andrew@studenttabletpc.com.