Friday, February 27, 2004

Restoring Graffiti One type print recognition to the Graffiti Two (Jot) Palm devices

Google Groups: View Thread "Tungsten E and print recognition: what's your experi..."
I went through TealScript and ruthlessly deleted all the
variable strokes from my personal profile. The only strokes allowed
are now the ones I use -- the advanced high speed but often
undocumented G1 strokes documented in Pogue's O'Reilly books. I
defined all of my strokes as "standard".

I also deleted many of the "distorted" strokes.

Once I'd paired down the base strokes, I used TealScripts "train
profile" exercise from different angles to create a library of
distorted variants of my base strokes.

I think I could further refine this by tweaking the TealScript squelch
and cutoff settings. Shockingly the best advice I could find seems to
be in the manual.

Based on the manual I have set Squelch and Cutoff to 0 for all of my
"standard" strokes. If one of my standard strokes is being applied
when I don't want it, then

- if it's a simple stroke I'll boost squelch
- if the misapplied strokes is not simple I'll boost cutoff - esp. if
it's distort mismatch

For my distort entries I'll experiment with setting cutoff to 5-15 ...

One of the miracles of the US Robotics PalmPilot was that the pen character input worked. It worked because of Graffiti, a novel form of printing. The brilliance of Graffiti was that it asked the human to adjust to the limitations of the computer. With a bit of practice one could get pen input to work.

Unfortunately few were willing to learn Graffiti. Xerox won a patent fight about its origins, but it was a false victory. Palm abandoned Graffiti in favor of Jot -- a more familiar but singularly ineffective form of pen input.

Sad.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Got a machine lying around? Web Crossing Express

Web Crossing - Web Crossing Express Features
Web Crossing Express Features: free web/email/ftp server

Web Crossing Express provides unlimited Web Pages (HTTP and HTTPS), Email (POP/IMAP/SMTP), FTP services and WebFiles, and low-volume* use of the popular Web Crossing collaboration features such as such as WebMail, blogs, discussions, chat, wiki, Neurons and more. Web Crossing Express can easily replace a collection of other free servers such as Apache, sendmail, IIS, Exchange, and FTP daemons. It's an excellent choice if you're setting up an Internet presence and also want to try out Web Crossing's powerful collaboration features. You can upgrade your Web Crossing Express license to make greater use of all the collaboration services at any time, without reinstallation.

This runs atop Win95 and MacOS Classic 9.2. Great use for an old Wintel machine?

Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Ars Technica: Portable headphone roundup - Page 6 - (2/2004)

Ars Technica: Portable headphone roundup - Page 6 - (2/2004)
Sennheiser PXC250 (US$130): Sound = 7 / Value = 7 / Overall = 7

As the only set of headphones with active noise cancellation in this comparison, the PXC250 was at a bit of a disadvantage — generally active noise-reduction headphones show a significant price premium over their counterparts (The PXC250 is based off of the PX200, which is significantly cheaper). While the PXC250's sound was not terrific, they were at worst entirely inoffensive, and at best quite balanced and pleasing. Neither Jeff nor Matt had any major complaints about the sound. We would definitely recommend these to anyone that travels on planes a lot, works in a server room, or perhaps someone with a rather loud computer that they do not want to hear, but wants to hear other ambient sound. Just as the other Sennheiser PX series headphones were, the PXC250 is also very light and comfortable. The bottom line is that some people would get a lot of good use out of the PXC250s, but they are probably not worth it for people that do not need the active noise cancellation — better sounding headphones without noise cancellation can be had.

I bought some reconditioned AIWA noise cancelling headphones for $17, but these sound interesting ....

Panther Kernel crashes and BSOD - networks, sleep and location changes

MacFixIt - Troubleshooting Solution for the Macintosh
Mac OS X 10.3.x: Kernel panics upon location change
Yesterday we covered a reader report from Rob Tillyard that his PowerBook G4 has recently been experiencing kernel panics when switching between Network Locations (via the Locations submenu of the Apple Menu or the Network pane of System Preferences). Since then we've received corroborating reports of this issue from many MacFixIt readers.

I see this. No clear workaround except for Apple to fix the problem.

Smaller Panther PDFs - Colorsync option allows Quartz Shrinking (JPEG Compression)

Mac OS X Panther (10.3.2)
Dan Frakes Benjamin Drew wrote: 'How come the PDF's made in Panther are so large?...'

You could use any of a number of PDF 'shrinking' utilities, or even Acrobat. However, Panther has a built-in feature that can significantly reduce the size of Panther-generated PDF files during the creation process:

1. Access the Print dialog normally, but don't use the 'Save as PDF' command yet.
2. From the options pop-up menu in the Print dialog (the one that normally says Copies & Pages by default), choose ColorSync.
3. From the Quartz Filter pop-up menu that appears, choose Reduce File Size.
4. *Then* use the 'Save as PDF' command to create your PDF. (If you plan on using this option often, you may want to first create a new preset using the Presets pop-up menu in the Print dialog; this will allow you to create PDF files using this option in the future by simply selecting the preset before you create the PDF.)

This option won't reduce the size of PDF files as much as some of the third-party utilities on the market, but in some cases it works wonders... and it's free.