HP Ultrabook 850

Nothing was exactly wrong with my old HP laptop, but I cannot say that I'd be the least bit sorry for getting a brand new work laptop. Especially one as nice and sleek as the HP Ultrabook 850. It's thin, lightweight, got a backlit keyboard, battery power for 7 hours with basic battery, and what best: a touchpad similar to the macbook trackpad!

My Macbook-loving husband asked me why was it worth its while to get a laptop that was as expensive as a Macbook, and in many ways a quite shameless imitation of the Macbook experience. Why not buy Macbooks instead? Two words. Micro and soft. I cannot very well do my MSWork with a Macbook. I am bound to Windows via SharePoint and Visual Studio and... even if I mostly use a remote server.

Besides, I have problems understanding the OsX. But I do love the trackpad! And now I have something truly similar in my Win-powered sleek Ultrabook, that is not a nuisance even while slouching on the couch with it. Not heavy, not overheating all the time. And it's quiet - no fan going wild all the time either.

So in summary, I love my Ultrabook <3 And here's the tips for the touchpad-trackpad-mouseDevice:

• two-finger tap: you get the quick menu (normally right mouse click) by tapping the pad
• two-finger swipe: scrolling - and you can do it either vertical or horizontal
• three-finger swipe (or flick): scanning through browsing history in browser, or images in image viewer etc. this I needed to activate myself in the mouse settings, it was not enabled by default
• pinch zoom: zoom in browser by pinching, but also e.g. in Word and other Office apps
• rotating with two fingers: handy when doing a lot of photo work and needing to rotate images

There's other options too, but these are my favorites!

 

 

 

OneNote for Free

Definately worth a share: Microsoft offers OneNote (one of my very favorite apps ever, both in work and personal use) for free on all the most common platforms, except for Unix and Linux. That is, for PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android, and the Web. The free version lacks some corporate features like e.g. connections to SharePoint and Outlook.

OneNote is excellent for keeping your notes organized and shared between your devices. I myself use it on PC, iPad and Lumia (820), sharing&syncing the notebooks via OneDrive (Pro) and it works excellently. I have my travel plans, the kids' school schedules, work projects, work notes etc. all in OneNote workbooks and it's easy to find what I'm looking for and check things wherever I am on my phone etc. Sales pitch ;) But I truly do love it!

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2014/03/17/microsoft-launches-free-onenote-mac-freemium-onenote-windows-onenote-cloud-api-apps/#!Aw8tf

Download OneNote: http://www.onenote.com/

Agravating Photo Sync

After getting the camera kit for my iPad, I have happily been mostly juggling my photos via the iPad. So convenient to be using a little bit of PhotoShop Express to enhance some pics and creating some nice collages with e.g. PicCollage or InstaCollage and then using them in blogs, uploading to Flickr etc. iPad has all the right apps for all that activity (minus the adding videos to blog posts in Blogsy...).

My active photographing - whether it be with my proper Samsung or my Lumia, which I have been using increasingly lately since it's so readily available in all situations - and fiddling with the photos in different apps for different purposes, results in approx. 10000 photos a year (and this was the case even before the iPad...). Which means that my iPad quite frequently is running out of space and I need to delete some photos - ok, a lot!

But never before copying them to my hard drive, of course. Usually, I have done this via iCloud and my photostream. But the iCloud has a mind of its own, and I cannot control what is in the photostream and what is not and what and when is available on my laptop. And this agravates me big time. At least when it is not doing what I expect it to do.

I have accepted, that it has its own operation queues and my photos are not necessarily available on my laptop immediately (or even almost) after taking them (unlike e.g. the autoupload to OneDrive from my Lumia). Mostly, I can live with that, for be as it may, mostly, the photos have been available at some point. At least on my work laptop. For whatever mysterious reason, the photostream mostly refuses to sync itself on my personal laptop.

A few weeks ago, after having been on sick leave for several weeks, I opened my work laptop to do some of this photo transferring. But the iCloud would not sync. Eventually, I disabled and enabled the whole iCloud sync, and, well, it synced. but not the whole 1000 photos as it should. Now I have 300 photos in my photostream and a couple months missing from both the stream and my hard drive. And iCloud will not sync them - nor the newer photos again...

So, yey, I had two options:
1) connect my iPad to my laptop and fiddle with iTunes or
2) copy photos to Dropbox on iPad and then transfer them from Dropbox to hard disc on laptop

Guess which one I went for? Did I ever mention that I hate iTunes and all the other similar apps that are meant for convenient backupping etc. of the devices, but seem to do whatever they please instead of letting me be in control, and have a confusing UI & UX on top of it? Yeah, I added approx. 800 photos to Dropbox. 670 remaining to be uploaded. We could have a faster wi-fi, you know.

I would be cool to be able to connect the usb hard drive straight to the iPad. And it would be cool to have a working cloud sync. OneDrive offer autoupload of the iPad camera roll nowadays too, did you know that? But it still does not include th camera uploads from my Smasungs to the iPad, and some app-modified pics either. In many ways, the logic of what is in "photos", what in "camera roll", whart in "photostream" and how all of these are linked and cloud synced, is still a total mystery to me on the iPad.

Juggling

It used to be so simple. You had the one PC, stuck in the corner between the desk and the wall, and in order to do whatever you did on the PC back then, play Pacman or Tetris or whatnot, all you needed was to somehow pressure the other one playing Pacman or Tetris or whatnot ot abandon the PC and let you have your turn. This was more or less the case still in the first years of the internet for the masses, up until people started to have the truly peersonal computers, the laptops.

Ok, the same still applies to many, e.g. my kids need to share one laptop. And more often than not, I need to share my iPad or Galaxy Tab with them (for quite a while, I do not intend to get them personal ones just yet), which actually brings us to the topic I originally was going at. The multitude of dedvices to juggle between. When I'm not sharing the gadgets, I more or less find use for each one of them, switching back and forth.

So what's with the juggling? I prefer the Tab when reading a book on Kindle, because it is more lightweight. But then I notice the notification, I have new email. Instead of reading it on the Tab, I set the Tab down and read it on the iPad. Why? Because the Tab does not really do multitasking. I could open the email on top of the book, nut getting back to the book is a strain for the back arrow takes me through the email app instead of taking me back to Kindle.

While I'm at it on the iPad, I check Facebook. There's a video there that I'd like to watch. But darned if I can't play it on the iPad! Decisions decisions, to ditch the book and check the video on the Tab, running the risk that it actually doesn't, or to dig out the laptop from, eh? the daughters' room where she's been playing the Sims on it.

There are so many other examples too, like uploading photos from phone or one of these other mobile devices to Flickr, then needing to open the laptop to organize them fuether. Or pitching a pdf document to dropbox on PC after downloading it from, say, learning center or such, in order to read it more conoveniently on the Tab or iPad. And so on.

So are things more simple with these devices or does the possibility to choose simply make the life with them more complicated? Like with photos streaming from here and there to diifferent folders on the PC, instead of me uploading then from a single camera? I don't know. What I do know, is that none of the devices are good for all things. And the dedvice world is far from being ready. And the instances dealing with all or any ddevice platforms as in internet pages, internet technologies, and applications, are far from perfect.

Probably never will be either, when everybody is pulling their own way, of course.