Sunday, November 20, 2005

Distribute Personal Information

With my new Tablet PC I developed the wish to have my personal information managed with multiple PCs. Outlook seems to be the only mainstream choice of PIM client still. It syncs with my PDA and "mostly" with my cell phone. But to share the Outlook.pst content with multiple computers I would need to setup an Exchange server... on a Windows server... hmm, nop, too much Microsoft. So I'm probably gonna look into Sync4j some day.
EMails, I should read only per web interface I guess. But maybe I want to look up an old Email when I'm not online... or write lots of offline Emails to send in one go...
For my bookmarks I've found netvouz to be a quite usable service. It would even provide a RSS feed for live bookmarks in Firefox, but I miss the hierarchy with categories for that purpose. So I use the web interface to work with and manually export the bookmarks as XML for a local backup.

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Remove Tablet Input Panel (TIP) from Taskbar

Finally I've found a way to get rid of the Tablet Input Panel (TIP) short-cut from the Taskbar.

regsvr32 /u "c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\ink\tipband.dll"

Under Tips and Tricks on the Tablet Creation site you can find other useful stuff too.

Tablet PC TC1100

I've got my new Tablet PC!
Even thought the TC1100 seems to be quite an old model already, it seemed to me the closest to a "tablet". Others are heavier and/or bigger. Because as a gonna-be tablet-user I don't plan to use the keyboard a lot, I don't mind the small, maybe a little fragile TC1100 keyboard. With convertibles you always carry your keyboard with you, making them bigger and less handy.
Here some pros and cons fed by my first impression...
...on Tablet PCs in general
+ really no mouse needed anymore
+ "mouse" gestures are handy (eg. extension for FireFox)
- active digitizer ("mouse hovering" not really needed, is it)
- Ctrl-Mouse-Click features not usable
...on the TC1100
+ nice and small
+ robust glass screen
- only 1024x768 (check-out Toshiba Portege M200 with 1400x1050)
- non-mappable, useless screen-switch-button
...on Windows XP Tablet
- still Windows ;) (some day I have to give Linux on TC1100 a try!)
+ handwriting recognition
- speech recognition
- how to get rid of the TIP toolbar in the taskbar?