This is just an experiment for now, we’ll see how it goes.

“The Manikins” is PigPog’s latest creative venture, a comic inspired by the wooden manikin that sits by my keyboard and stares at my fingers while I’m typing. If you’re going to post a comment please be nice, he has a fragile ego and is prone to violent tantrums.

Click on each pic to see a bigger version.

I’d like to thank you on behalf of The Manikins, and I hope we passed the audition.

There’s a new free online magazine on painting – Practical Painting. Still seems to be in the early stages, but should be updated every month, and it looks very good. Nice introductory article on what colour paints you should buy to start out.

(Thanks to Boing Boing.)

If so, Boing Boing has found the supplier for you. Urinals shaped like flowers.

Hmm.

Everyday Systems…

What is an everyday system?

An everyday system, TM, is a simple, commonsense solution to an everyday problem, grounded by a pun or metaphor.

What is an everyday problem?

A common, personal problem that is amenable to self-discipline.

(Thanks to Merlin at 43Folders, through del.icio.us.)

Here’s one for the GTD fans, and fans of the Hipster PDA.

Douglas Johnston has created the DIY Planner – a collection of templates to help people who like to do their GTD thing on paper rather than in Outlook or on a PDA. He has now released a version of the DIY Planner that’s compatible with the Hipster, as a free download on his site.

I wonder if it could be adapted for the one-piece organisational masterpiece that is the Cheapster PDA?

Update 2005-11-01: Adding link to DIY Planner site.

A few places have mentioned Microsoft’s new beta – Acrylic. Home Computer Magazine have taken the time to have a good play with it, though. They say it has a long way to go if it’s going to be any sort of challenger for Photoshop, but it’s certainly interesting.

Double posted the last entry. Sorry about that.

Oh dear, he’ll be at work thinking “I can’t leave her alone with that thing for five minutes”.

Been to the Patchings Art Festival today. It was the first time we’d been along to anything like this, as we normally prefer to avoid crowds and awkward parking. However, as this was a big creativity event taking place a 10-15 minute drive from us, we decided to brave the crowds and chance Flossie’s suspension in the car parking field.

The first thing we headed for was the Winsor & Newton tent, where they had product demonstrations and a big table set up with paints and paper. Well, it seemed rude not to, so while Michael took pictures of the brush making lady, I sat down and had a play with the acrylics. The main thing I’ve learned from playing with acrylics in the last month is that it’s a tough product to master. I also discovered today that it paints on clothing just as effectively as it does on paper. I put my embarrassing excuse for a painting on one side for drying, and we headed off to look some of the art on display, with me wearing my paint-stained jumper with pride.

To quote Monty Python, and many others no doubt, I don’t know about art but I know what I like, and as we wandered round the stalls of jewellery, stoneware and various types of painting, one stall jumped out at us. The artist’s name is Wendy Carlton and her speciality is big, bold floral paintings in oils and acrylics. That’s where we bought our first piece of art.

After that we found ourselves in the Aladdin’s Cave that was the Art Supplies tent, where money flew out of our hands and into the till of vendor after vendor as we indulged on pencils, paints, pastels and magazine subscriptions. In-depth reviews will appear very soon, but here’s a quick summary of the goodies we came away with:

• Derwent Graphitint pencils – New, not yet in the shops, soluable graphite pencils that can be used dry as good quality sketching pencils or used with water to create bold, vibrant tints.
• Derwent Aquatone – sticks of colour that can be used dry or with water.
• Chroma Artist’s Colour – an amazing new type of paint that can be used as acrylic, watercolour, ink or gouache. It’s the Variax of paint!
• Caran D’Ache Neoart Aquarelle Wax Pastels – basically an excuse to play with wax crayons.

As well as having a heck of a good time spending money, we also met some lovely people, and as they kindly listened while we gibbered on about the site, it seemed only fair to give them a plug here.

• Linda Wain – Wildlife Artist.
• Do Art – Arts and Crafts Suppliers.
• Don’t Bitch Stitch – Handmade hats and bags.
• Oddbods – cute ceramic cats.

Time for another update on my Tablet PC – a Toshiba Portege M200. I’m still getting on with it very well, on the whole. Certainly happy I bought it.

Screen Viewing Angles and Rotation

I found after a while that it was becoming uncomfortable to use in portrait mode. The viewing angle is quite narrow up-and-down – or side-to-side in portrait. When I was holding the machine fairly close to use as a slate, it was enough that one eye was seeing a much darker screen than the other, and it was quite off-putting – made reading difficult. I’ve now set the machine to run in landscape, but upside-down, when it’s put into slate mode. I find this comfortable to use. It actually fits better for use in the car, and works just as well anywhere else.

When using it at a desk, all plugged in, it also means I can just spin the screen and drop it flat, and use it as a tablet, without having to turn the machine around and move the cables. Handy. The only downside of this so far is that it screws up ClearType. There doesn’t seem to be a way of telling ClearType to use different settings when the screen is the other way up, but completely different settings are needed. I’ve had to turn ClearType off completely, which is a shame.

Another point is that the 12-inch screen is a bit on the small side to be running at 1400×1050 resolution. Them’s some small pixels. I found it much better with the DPI set to 120 – right click the desktop, Properties, Settings, Advanced, drop down the box and change to 120 DPI. A reboot is needed. This makes almost everything bigger. Text is bigger, the task bar is bigger, icons are bigger. Some things turn a bit blocky because of it (most noticeably, the icons in the task tray), but my eyes stopped hurting, which was a bit of an advantage.

OneNote, Journal and GoBinder

I’ve tried all three. Never really got the point of GoBinder – it never seemed to offer anything significant that OneNote didn’t already do. Maybe it would suit better for those it’s really aimed at – students.

I experimented with Journal for a while, returned to OneNote, then back to Journal. OneNote has its advantages. It’s just quicker to be able to swap between notes without ever leaving the application, and there’s things you can do in OneNote that Journal just can’t compete with – especially flags. Somehow, though, Journal just feels a bit more natural. The way OneNote keeps drawing boxes around what you’re doing, and guessing what text belongs together and what doesn’t, seems oddly disconcerting to me. Journal just behaves like a pad of paper.

The real problem with OneNote, though, is the way it displays folders and files as tabs along the top. It’s quick and easy to use, but it really falls down badly when there’s a lot of files or folders. It’s annoying to have to limit myself to only four or five files or folders in each folder because that’s all the application can reasonably display. It can scroll when there’s more, but that makes it awkward to use.

Bluetooth and GPRS Internet Access

Damn, this stuff is good. Mobile phone (Orange SPV C500, aka AudioVox SMT5600, aka Scoblephone) stays in my pocket, just tap Start, Connect To, Orange GPRS, to connect. A few seconds later, I’m on t’internet. Anywhere. In bed, in the car, out in the countryside. Oh, who am I kidding? On the toilet.

Ink Leaking

The concerns over the tablet OS memory leak haven’t turned out to be too real. I rebooted today when installing software, but my uptime before rebooting was nine days and eighteen hours. Not too bad at all. Certainly more than anyone on Slashdot would ever admit to seeing a Windows box running for.

Re-imaging

Still not 100% sure how I’ll go about re-imaging the machine when it needs it, but I have a couple of theories, and everything seems to work ok for them. I can boot the machine from an SD card, and since I have a 1Gb SD card, I can shuffle quite a bit of data to it even with the main OS unbootable. I think my plan would be to repartition, create a smallish partition (maybe 5Gb), and format it as FAT. Then copy the Ghost images Toshiba supplies to this partition, along with the software utilities. They’re broken into 600Mb chunks on the supplied DVD, so they could be moved over in three blocks (maybe less, the last one is smaller). Once that’s done, create a new NTFS partition taking up the rest of the disk, run the Toshiba supplied copy of Ghost from this partition, and write the images to that partition.

I’ve not actually tried this yet, but it sounds like it should work.

Happy?

Yes. Definitely. I can get stuff done anywhere, just as I could at my desk at home. A laptop can go a lot of places, but this just opens things up so much further. Add in the digitiser that lets you scribble notes on the screen as if it’s paper, and it’s a powerful combination.

One post, Hugh Macleod, Robert Scoble, and a Tablet PC.

I think the blogosphere just collapsed into a singularity. Cool. Should make it nice and pocketable.