Steve's Seaside Life

Monthly Archive: April 2004

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Tablet PC for Jennifer

This is a short article that I wrote for the occupational therapist who works with one of my daughters who has Raynauds and Scleroderma.

 

There are a variety of different types of technology assistance that would benefit Jennifer in an educational setting.  My perception is that a range of techniques will be required that reflect the unpredictable nature of her symptoms and the variety of different tasks that she needs to perform.  There is no magic bullet solution that meets all of her needs.

 

Writing

 

When Jennifer has to write for extended periods there are a number of issues that need to be considered:

 

1.       Her ability to dictate in a fluent fashion is limited at this age

2.       Her hands get cold

3.       Her hands get tired

4.       Sometimes the movement/dexterity of her hands is limited

 

What solution options are available in addition to traditional pen and paper?

 

1.       Voice recognition

2.       Hand writing recognition

3.       Simple gesture recognition

4.       Different types of keyboard

5.       text substitution

 

Each option is considered in brief below:

 

Voice recognition

 

Voice recognition is …

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Radio userland Kick Start

This book provides an introduction to using and programming Radio Userland.  I thought I would give it a read as it seems that radio userland is quite a powerful and flexible environment.  I have already played around with a few additional tools, particularly as I wanted a bit more power...

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What would I like?

In my previous blogs, I talked about my concerns over the neglect of employees productivity and my personal productivity challenges.  In this blog I talk about some of the simple things I would like.  Its interesting that lots of them sound quite easy to achieve, and some of them work right now if only the systems were configured that way.

  1. A single inbox, that works all of my email services and with the appropriate directories I need to access

  2. A single calendar, that aggregates and synchronises calendar information from different sources and allows me to interact with different resource reservation and freebusy services

  3. A single task list, that aggregates tasks from different sources and responds to the source with task progress and completion information

  4. A single contact database, that synchronises with the server side record if there was one

  5. A single presence/IM environment, that integrates with my contact database

  6. A single way to get subscriptions, RSS seems the likely candidate, whether its subscriptions to company announcements, or WSS lists, or search results, or changed web sites

  7. Then a place to make notes, link stuff together, annotate

  8. a way to record everything I have touched in any way, has written by me, …