All entries for Monday 21 June 2010

iPad Day 4, Sunday

Follow-up to iPad Day 3 from Rudo's blog

Main item: [Dropbox] This is a lovely tool (see John Dales comments) which basically connects a free 2GB cloud/skydrive resource with your WinPC/MAC and the iPad/iPhone. Put any document on the PC/MAC and you can find it on your iPad/iPhone ready to synchronize (and also the otherway round!). Assuming that you have network access, then you have those files available for download.

Which means that I now have the tools to have my library of PDF papers inside my dropbox with easy access from the iPad, the iPhone as well as my Win7 laptop and my Vista home desktop. I tried and tested it and "yes", it works quite well over Wi-Fi (as I do not have a 3G SIM available to the iPad, I cannot test the speed on this connection type).

I also used the iPad outside in the sun. This works, but the screen is reflecting, so it can get annoying after a while. Still, the screen is *better* then a normal laptop and hence the iPad would be my preferred device for webbrowsing and email.

Also, installed [iSSH], an ssh client which also support X Windows. Tested it on CSC machines, made a connection to foo and godzilla. All works, even the X11 comes up after you type "startkde" or "startkde3". The speed on the X11 is not great (after all, this is not an NX client) and the mouse integration seems questionable. Still, I managed to get some jobs running on the CSC PBS queue and to check their status. Again, a useful application of the iPad.

When the weekend ended, I had not missed my laptop at all. I think I will now leave it at work mostly.

Rudo Roemer : 21 Jun 2010 16:24 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

iPad Day 3

Follow-up to iPad Day 2 from Rudo's blog

Day 3 and it's the weekend. Installed some more Apps [Google, Free Wi-Fi, Google Earth, AccuWeather and ClassicFM]. I ended up spending much of my time browsing for nice free books on [stanza] and then reading until late at night. For me, the iPad works well as an ebook reader, both for actual books as well as scientific papers. This is excellent! If your work is reading many papers, books, etc.  then this can be quite a useful gadget for you.

Battery life seems to be about 2-3 days on average use, 2 days when reading a lot. One problem which I can see is that upon reading late at night, I really do not want to get out of bed again to plug the iPad into a charger. So this is a device which is crying out for a simple to handle cradle-type of charger.

Rudo Roemer : 21 Jun 2010 15:12 |  Tags: Ipad |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem