Blogs

Touchpad Keyboard - Good, Bad, and Ugly

in tech    8 min. read

August 6, 2011

While there is no doubt that software for the HP Touchpad is in its infancy, it is hard not to see the great usefulness and potential. There are a few good writing apps for the Touchpad, including those for WordPress blogging. I’m composing this in the WordPress App for WebOS tablet. Any of these are much easier to use with a hardware keyboard, than attempting to type quantity on a virtual keyboard. The HP Touchpad Keyboard is mostly a success. …

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Loading mobi books into Touchpad's Kindle App

in tech    3 min. read

August 5, 2011

I have purchased many ebooks and created others manually in the .mobi format. This is very easy to load onto my Kindle device to read. Unfortunately, the current Kindle app on the Touchpad does not allow loading ebooks other than downloading from Amazon. This is unfortunate and makes the Touchpad a poor replacement for my Kindle.

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Playing for Pizza by John Grisham

in reviews    3 min. read

August 2, 2011

I have to admit that I was intrigued when I read the summary of this book. A novel by John Grisham about a third string NFL quarterback, escaping his terrible past to play professional football in Italy. Nothing about lawyers? This sounds interesting, if not just to figure out why John didn’t write about lawyers. Normally the novel isn’t quite as good, when an author writes completely out of their “comfort zone”. That is definitely the case here. …

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Touchpad WiFi - Hidden Passcode Hell

in tech    2 min. read

August 2, 2011

I have just spent the last 30 minutes trying to get our complex 64 character WPA key into my HP Touchpad so I can start the setup procedure. The password field for the WiFi key is frustrating. The last character is only shown for a second or two, then it too fades into the dots of obscurity. This is fine in normal use with passwords you are used to typing, but a WiFi key is complex and entered only once per new device.

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Treason by Don Brown

in reviews    5 min. read

August 2, 2011

This used to be offered as a free book for the Kindle and was one of many I added to my account after receiving my Kindle. (If its free, its for me, right?) When reading the author “Don Brown” on the cover of this novel, I was mistaking it for a more famous Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code). As I read the military themes unfold, my mind then played further tricks on me as I made a connection with Dale Brown’s military styled novels as the author. None of …

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HP Touchpad

in tech    1 min. read

July 1, 2011

July 1st is the day that many WebOS users have been waiting for. The day that HP releases their first WebOS tablet, the Touchpad. I preordered through Amazon and was delivered my own spanking new HP Touchpad tablet this evening. Overall it is an amazing piece of technology. Slicker than any Android tablets that I have tried, but not quite as polished as an iPad. However, for me the usability is far above an iPad, whose “multitasking” is a joke …

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Enhancing the AVR ISP II

in tech    4 min. read

May 23, 2011

The AVR ISP II is a device to program an AVR microcontroller using a 6 pin header in a circuit. It does not contain any capability to power the circuit being programmed. This could be very handy. Dave Jones at the EEVBlog has a video about adding power to the ISP cable, using an LM317 to provide both 5V and 3.3V. The issue with this, as he stated, was that the 5V source was very close to the required dropout voltage of the regulator to get the …

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I Miss You, Dad

in personal    3 min. read

May 15, 2011

My father fought cancer for decades. He was the strongest man I have ever known. It was hard to see him wither with a body not able to do what his will desired. His suffering finally ended during the early morning of April 20th. Despite knowing that the cancer was terminal and preparing for it. Death is never easy. It tears a hole through you. The storm was heavy. No matter what I did, I couldn’t keep the ship from going down. Long weekends …

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WebOS From Homebrew to Catalog: tips learned in the process

in tech    7 min. read

March 1, 2011

I’ve been a developer, on many different platforms, for just under two decades. Like many code monkeys, I enjoy learning new architectures. I’m not exactly sure why, but programming for WebOS has me more excited than I’ve been since working with GCC on the Palm Personal. The idea of building apps with web technologies on a portable device sounded interesting. I knew that certain things would be easy and others hard. That is always the case with …

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TouchStone Theories Confirmed

in tech    2 min. read

February 22, 2011

Precentral.net read through the initial TouchStone theory post I put up and asked HP about my theories. As they posted in this article on the site, HP confirmed the identification to work as I assumed. The new TouchStones will use the 3.1 MHz frequency to pass a unique key to the new WebOS phones, which will enable them to know where it is docked. You will obviously have to tell the phone where each dock is located the first time you use it. …

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