All entries for July 2010

recently installed iPad apps

Follow-up to iPad on a holiday from Rudo's blog

Some more info on useful apps:

[App Tracker] Free app which allows better browsing of the available apps than the Apple App Store.

[Air Sharing HD] App which allows access to many file-transfer protocols and sites, including SFTP. Hence this allows access to files which are behind proper SSL/SSH/SFTP/FTP-SSL controls. A bit cluncky when dealing with the files, but certainly allows access to files on the CSC servers.

[Periodic Table] Nice and quick summary of properties of all elements in the periodic table. Good reference.

[Dictation] Converts speech to text which can then be used (mostly copied) into other applications. Not sure this is really useful for me, my German accent is clearly a challenge for it.

[iFractal] Plots Mandelbrot and associated Julia sets. Allows "pan and zoom" to zoom into the images. Nice to show the beauty of fractals (to my 10 year old daughter).

[Molecules] PDB viewer for large protein structures. Quick and allows download of .pdb files from the Protein Databank.

[Clinometer] Does what is says on the tin, nicely and graphically: measures angles and inclinations.

[3D Sun] Download past and "current" (from today) images of the sun. Beautiful images and movies of sun flares and more. Should be a runner for our CFSA people.

[FreeFTP] converts the iPad into a Wifi FTP server for quick and easy (if on the same Wifi network) access to data.

Rudo Roemer : 31 Jul 2010 20:21 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

iPad on a holiday

Follow-up to iPad, one month on from Rudo's blog

I took the iPad with me on a holiday (lovely, thanks). Loaded it up with (i) work stuff such as PDFs and (ii) in-flight entertainment such as movies, podcasts and songs and also (iii) books.

On the plane, the iPad was *much* better than any laptop. It is so small and slim that it is no problem to take out of a bag when sitting down and quickly back in after landing. During the flight, it easily fits into the seat-storage. The flight-mode setting is also easily accessible. Watching movies/podcats/etc during the flight is easy, the iPad can be held in various positions which makes the whole experience very enjoyable. Same during the airport waiting times. A bit of a problem since Wifi was not available, so the initial download of data was needed.

During the holidays, it was a great advantage to have just one iPad and not many heavy books and papers to carry. Read a 500+ pages book (Lee Smolin, "Trouble with Physics") and half a dozen scientific papers (PDFs). All worked great and was a pleasure.

No Wifi during all of the 7 days of the trip, but had downloaded enough off-line content before to be quite content.

Summary: the iPad is great for travel, particularly when you need to read manuscripts, papers and more as well as books.

Rudo Roemer : 31 Jul 2010 20:10 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

iPad, one month on

Follow-up to Dropbox on the CSC linux machines from Rudo's blog

Just back from a conference. Except for the presentation, I needed no laptop at all and in fact left it in the hotel room. But I did take my iPad. With the iPad, I could easily keep in touch with my research group, do pretty much all of the necessary email work, browse the web and do my editorial (hence serious) work. In addition, it was great for taking notes at the conference talks (which I could then with a simple click share with the people at home).

Originally, I had also planned to use the iPad for the presentation itself. For this, I invested in the [Keynote] app, Apples presentation software. But since I did the original presentation under MS Powerpoint, I needed to convert. In principle, Keynote can do this, but the result for me was appalling: format and position of material in the slides had been changed, no video play seems to be available in keynote, etc. So if you do presentations with PPT and then want to convert, expect unpleasant surprises. If you use fancy transitions and animations in PPT, again these may not work in Keynote. For more static content, this might be ok, but then why not use the PPT to PDF conversion and simply show PDFs via GoodReader?

Don't get me wrong, I expect that when one imports a Mac Keynote presentation, then things will work ok. It's just that with PPT, the current conversion is not good enough. Oh, and one more thing: presentation import has to be via iTunes, Keynote does not support DropBox, googleDocs or any other free service. I expect it will work with meMobile or iDisk, but then I do not use these Apple products.

What else? As the iPad does not have a USB dock, transferring files onto it outside of iTunes (and when you are travelling, you cannot simply expect iTunes to be installed everywhere) is a pain. Now I am using the FTP server [freeftp] which turns the iPad into a WiFi FTP server. So one can quickly move files onto the iPad and off again as long as WiFi access is assured. I also have some movies installed on the iPad via iTunes. Was watching them while on the train coming back from the conference. Works rather well and is a good way to entertain your tired mind on a train.

Rudo Roemer : 17 Jul 2010 17:39 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dropbox on the CSC linux machines

Follow-up to iPad week3 from Rudo's blog

Dropbox, the 'it just works' file syncing service, released their Linux client recently. Unfortunately, it has a heavy Gnome/Nautilus dependency. If you don't use Gnome, you can get Dropbox to work without that baggage with these steps:

1. Download the closed source Dropbox Linux client from http://www.getdropbox.com/download?plat=lnx.x86 (x86_64 for 64 bit)
2. Extract the contents and you should get a .dropbox-dist folder out of the archive. Move the folder to $HOME
3. Run ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd.

The first time you run the dropboxd daemon, a wizard will prompt you to configure the client for your machine. By default, Dropbox syncs the contents of the ~/Dropbox folder and as long as the dropboxd daemon is running, it will transparently sync that folder with your Dropbox account. To ensure that the daemon runs whenever you use your computer, just add a symlink to it in your ~/.kde/Autostart/ folder or equivalent location.

You don't actually need to do anything beyond that since it 'just works'. But if you feel like getting hold of some of the info that the Nautilus client provides, you can download this command line utility that some kind soul has written. Hopefully, someone out there is working on KDE integration even as I write this!

(comment taken from http://antrix.net/journal/techtalk/dropbox_kde.comments and reproduced for all our benefit here. I tested and yes, got it to work just now.)

Rudo Roemer : 05 Jul 2010 13:00 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem