Reviews – Page 6 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Book Review: Windows 7 Inside Out, Deluxe Edition by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, Craig Stinson; O’Reilly Media

Book Cover - Windows 7 Inside and Out Once again, I’ve gone and selected a monster tome from O’Reilly to review on their Blogger Review Program. And once again, after months wading through it, I’m impressed.

I’ve owned a few Inside Out volumes over the years, so had high expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. Whatever you want to know about using Windows 7, you’ll find it in here.

Novices can start with Part 1 which introduces the OS, goes through installation and basic configuration, explains how to find your way around, personalise your settings, add and remove programs and the like. The sections then delve progressively deeper into the nuts and bolts of Windows 7, all nicely divvied up according to what you might be trying to do in particular: organize your content, backup/restore, share media, set up a home network… Experts can skip towards the back of the book for the finer points of networking, security and tuning your system for optimised performance. Every section details the variations you can expect between different versions of Windows 7, so it really is a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re on Starter at home and Ultimate in the office, it’s all covered here.

Even after more than a decade and a half using Windows, there was stuff in here for me to learn, and I might be kidding myself, but I’m almost positive my laptop has been more responsive and less badly behaved since I worked through some of the tuning tips.

Highly recommended to users of Windows at all levels.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Bus Time Dublin App

I love the new signs at the Dublin Bus stops that list the next N busses and tell you how long it’ll be till they arrive. The only thing better than them is the free Bus Time Dublin iThing app I recently discovered.

What it does:

Uses GPS to figure out your current location and tell you what bus stops are nearby, as a list or on a map as you prefer.
Lets you search for bus stops by street name or bus stop number, if you have that information.
Lets you add particular bus stops to a list of Favourites for convenience.
Shows a much longer list of imminent busses than the signs at the stops, and shows data for stops that don’t even have the new signs.

What it doesn’t do:

Tell you which stop a given bus goes from.
Tell you which bus goes where you want to go.
Tell you the intermediate stops on any route.

But if you’re already in posession of this information, then this app makes the actual catching of busses that bit more efficient – 10 more minutes gossiping by the water cooler (or clocking up billable time, if you’re the more driven type) instead of standing in the rain. It’s all good.

TV Without a TV

BBC’s Global iPlayer app for iPad launched today – hooray! It’s a free app, but requires an in-app subscription to access anything beyond demo content. Subs are €6.99 per month, or €49.99 for the year. A nice touch is that you can download episodes to watch later when you’re offline – handy for commuters, holiday makers and the like. The selection is good, but could be, and hopefully will be, improved. Most noticeable gap for me is the dearth of good children’s programming – virtually the only channels we watch on traditional-format telly these days are Cbeebies and CBBC, and it would be great to be able to stick a few of their programs on the iPad for the kids to watch when we’re on the move. BBC iPlayer can be accessed through a web browser on a regular computer here – TV programs aren’t accessible outside the UK, but many excellent radio programs are.

Note: I tried accessing the BBC iPlayer Radio site through Safari on the iPad and iPhone, but on the iPad got an error that I had to switch from 3G to WiFi for it to work (3G wasn’t turned on), and on the iPhone got an error that I was outside the UK, although that’s not a problem when I access from my laptop, so I guess the site doesn’t play well with iThing browsers.

While I was enjoying the BBC iPlayer app, I decided to install the 4oD Catch Up app too. Although the blurb says it doesn’t work outside the UK, I’m watching an episode of Spaced (comedy gold) through it as I type and it’s working fine. You can watch 4oD in a regular web browser here.

ITV don’t have an iThing app yet, but have a web-based player here. (Doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) Content is only available in the UK, though.

And last, but not least, RTÉ also lack an app, but have a web-based player here. (Again, doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) A limited selection of their programming is accessible internationally. Aside from News programming, I’ve barely looked at RTÉ live since they launched their Player. It must be getting popular, as they’ve started including ads in many (/all?) of the programs now, which was a rarity when they launched.

So there we go – welcome to the future – TV on demand, without a TV – hooray!

Book Review: Documents, Presentations, and Workbooks by Stephanie Krieger; O’Reilly Media

Documents, Presentations and Workbooks Book Cover I recently joined the O’Reilly Blogger Review Program, and the first book I downloaded to review was this one: Documents, Presentations, and Workbooks: Using Microsoft Office to Create Content That Gets Noticed by Stephanie Krieger. For the most part, I really enjoyed it – it’s a huge book with a vast amount of useful information, and it’s made me more interested in working with Office than I have been in most of the past decade.

One particularly nice feature of the book is that it’s written to cover both Microsoft Office 2010 on Windows and 2011 on Mac, each of which does things slightly differently. Each version also has some special platform-specific features you won’t get in the other one, so it’s useful to know when you can achieve something interesting by switching platforms (if you have that option). I think this may be the first book on Office I’ve read that’s dual platform – I hope it won’t be the last.

Another thing that appealed to me, as a Tech Writer, was that the author included plenty of pointers on documentation best practices, rather than making it all about the tools and features. I hate when tool advocates recommend doing something really fancy, just because you can, rather than because it adds anything to the doc.

A top tip from the author is her recommendation that if something is too hard to achieve in the software, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it. She advises to investigate whether there’s a more straightforward way to achieve the same thing, and to undo and start over when things get too complicated. “Always use the simplest option for any task.” Wise advice. Especially if you’re producing a document that will be maintained in the long term. She also goes into explaining how the software actually manages a document managing formats, objects and stories. Knowing all this is a great advantage when deciding how to structure a document and understand how and why Word does what it does to the content later.

She also has advice on identifying the most appropriate tool for the job, depending on what content you want to present (including when PowerPoint might be the best choice for producing a book, rather than Word), how to transfer/re-use data between programs (and from 3rd party programs) effectively, how to reinforce style and brand, and how to present information in the way that will maximize its value to the intended audience. It’s not all “the tool lets you do X, so you should do X”, it’s more “the tool lets you do X, but you’d be mad to do that instead of Y, which is more straightforward and logical.”

There are plenty of practical tips on using the tools too. Here are just a few of my favourites, ranging from trivial to less trivial:

Customizing existing ribbons, or better yet creating your own custom ones.
Knowing that the undo cache is preserved for each Excel/PowerPoint 2010 document you’re working on when you save, so you can resume undo-ing next time you open. This is a really nice feature, and I wish every product included it.
Using SkyDrive (or SharePoint) and Office Web Apps for remote access and to share projects with multiple authors/editors. (If multiple authors work in parallel, the area each author is currently working on is blocked for other authors.) Potentially useful, though I found SkyDrive a bit flaky when trying it out. I’ll certainly use it again, though, for non-critical stuff.
Usefully, the author lists what features will and won’t work when editing different file types using Web Apps, which could save on a lot of head scratching and frustration.
Using Broadcast Slide Show to deliver a presentation over the web.
Using Backstage view to check what hidden/personal information you’re sending out in your docs.
Applying and customizing themes to reinforce branding across documents.
Using Picture Tools to manipulate images in situ instead of editing them in a graphics package first. There are a lot of nice effects and tools available.
Recovering earlier versions of a document, or even – get this – documents you closed without saving! I love this!

There were only two things about this book that I didn’t like, and the first is half-praise, half-criticism:

I found out about so many Office features I’d not used before, and that I just had to try out right away, that it took me forever to get through the book. In fact, at the time of writing this review, I have to admit I’m still not done.
For the most part, I read the book on a Kindle, which wasn’t an ideal format. It was frustrating to read a book on good presentation which wasn’t ideally presented itself. I’ve found this to be a generic problem with technical texts, though. Graphics were indistinct, tables ran outside the screen area, and notes took up sufficient screen space that they distracted from the flow of the main text. It was also difficult to dip in to the text and pick out interesting items to look at in isolation.
The PDF is much prettier, and in traditional print I’m reckon it would’ve been a quicker, easier read.

All in all, it’s a good read, and worth a look. While it wouldn’t persuade me to discard FrameMaker as my tool of choice for technical documentation, I would feel happier and more confident using Office products for smaller projects and presentations now.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Roomba

It was the Cheerios that broke this camel’s back, and after the bazillionth morning in a row of scraping the damn things out of the carpet after getting back from the school run, I decided to succumb to the lure of Roomba’s robot-y goodness. We’d recently discovered that not one but two of our friends had already gone over to the robot side and couldn’t speak highly enough of their pets, so we decided to give it a go.

A bit of online price comparison, and my order was in by lunchtime. I ordered a 555 model – a few of the bells and whistles that might make a difference, but not too fancy. Two days later, Roomba had arrived, and an overnight charge later my life transformed forever.

How Roomba Changed my Life

Roomba can be programmed to run automatically once on each day of the week, or be left to manual kickstart as and when needed. I’ve set ours to run when we’re doing the school run during the week, and left weekends to a push of the button so he doesn’t get in the way of breakfast or play. (Actually, the manual weekend runs are more for his good than ours, since the smallest person in the house loves to follow him round and kick his bumper to make him change direction. This way, we can wait till there’s no one who wants to play around before letting Roomba out to do his thang.)

The joy of the automatic weektime clean is that after rushing around delivering everyone to where they should be for the day, I arrive in to a spick and span living room and office, and can settle straight away to my work without fussing over the state of the place. It might only save minutes of labour each day, but the mental wellbeing and clarity is worth a lot to my productivity.

Everyone has been warned that any toys or papers left on the floor are liable to be eaten by the robot and won’t be coming back (no, it won’t really eat your stuff, but don’t tell my kids that), so everyone joins in a quick 2 minute pickup of “stuff” before Roomba springs into action, and even that daily contribution means that the house is neater and more organised than usual.

Also, since the place is generally clean, small spills/messes seem worth cleaning up, since the tidy patch left behind no longer draws attention to how dirty the rest of the floor is. He even gets underneath the furniture, so no mounds of dust festering and waiting to surprise us the day we relocate the bookcase in 5 years’ time.

Finally, as someone pointed out in a review I read on another site – having the downstairs clean on an ongoing basis means less dirt dragged upstairs on the bottoms of shoes, so upstairs needs less cleaning too.

Every little helps.

But is it Eco?

Our upright cleaner uses ~1200Watts. Before Roomba, I would use this anything from once a day to once a week (depending on how mess-sensitive I was feeling), for anything from 5 to 20 minutes at a time. Let’s take a ball park figure of 45 minutes a week, so 900Wh/wk used.

Roomba runs once daily and keeps going till it’s used up its battery reserves, then it recharges. The charging station uses 30W and the battery charges fully in ~3 hours, so 90Wh, 7 days a week = 630Wh/wk.

That leaves me 270Wh of regular vacuum time per week for top-up cleaning. Though since Roomba’s arrival, the regular vacuum cleaner has been sitting forlornly in a corner being ignored, so I reckon that on balance we’ll be using less electricity annually for our daily clean with occasional top-ups than the sporadic vacuuming we were already doing.

What does a Roomba Cost?

Refurbished series 500 Roombas go on eBay for ~€250, but all seem to come from the US. By the time you’ve added shipping, waited weeks for delivery, potentially paid duty on the lot, and bought an adapter for the plug, it’s tempting to just buy locally and know that it’ll be less hassle to get support if you have a problem. We bought direct from iRobot’s Ireland site who throw in free shipping, which is nice. The 555 cost €370.

Cleaning the Roomba

Of course, it’s not all happy happy joy joy. Roomba needs to be emptied and cleaned too. His bin is small, so the emptying is daily (in our home at least). The silver lining is that this gives you a chance to admire just what a good job he’s doing – he easily picks up as much fine dust and fluff as a Dyson, which I wasn’t expecting – I thought it would get the bigger dirt only. You’ll want to tap the fine dust out of the filter periodically to keep suction levels up, and maybe even give it a gentle wash (there are videos on YouTube). The brush and beater need to be de-haired and de-fluffed at least every other day if you’re running the Roomba on carpet. It comes with a tool to comb stuff out of the bristles, but you might need a tweezers or decent finger nails to get the stuff that wraps itself around the ends. The first time we cleaned the brushes, hubby and I both took turns picking bits out of different parts of the brush and beater over about an hour, but every time we popped them back in Roomba would complain they needed cleaning again immediately. Eventually, Dave figured out that hair had snagged behind the bearings, so popped them off and cleaned in the crevices, and everything was dandy again. Since that first day, we’ve got the knack and now it takes ~2 minutes to clean both brush and beater thoroughly.

Take Home Message

The Roomba’s a good little guy to have around. He won’t do all the work, but his presence encourages me to spend 5 minutes a day doing my bit to facilitate him doing his bit, and the overall result is greater than the sum of its parts.

Finally, I’ll leave you with an earworm: Roomba mm mm Roomba doobie doo doo Roomba oo oo ye-e-eah… to the tune of M-bop by Hansen. Enjoy the rest of your day! 😉