Well, I’ve just returned from a 10 day trip or so around Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France, and for once I didn’t take the laptop with me. Instead I brought my iPad along, and it served very well as a light-weight replacement ‘entertainment device’.

No programming at all, just consuming lots of different media, for which the iPad is more than up to it.

I watched a few movies on it using the Videos app, read a book using the Kindle iPad edition, and some comics on it via Comixology, and kept some spending figures in a spreadsheet using Numbers. I also used it a lot with Offmaps, an offline map reader for which I had downloaded the appropriate openstreetmap part of france before I left. It’s no match for a gps, but coupled with the GPS that is in the iPad it’s like map reading with the added ability of seeing where you are and zooming in and out of the map as you please. I really hate those small screens of the current gps devices, it’s so hard to get an overview of where you are going, with the iPad it’s just natural !

One thing I do miss is that I can’t download new pictures out of my camera like I do using the laptop with the SD Card reader although I believe there is a camera connection kit on the market.

The next few trips will also have an iPad as long as I don’t have to do any programming…

“Though my soul may set in darkness it will rise in perfect light.
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”

- from The Old Astronomer by Sarah Williams

I had my old “Greenway” electric lawn mower for over 10 years now, and it did it’s job, but it was time to get something that was a bit less hard to work and wrestle with.

So I recently replaced it with a Gardena Accu Lawn mower – no more wires to cut accidently through, a lithium-ion battery that does not run down over the years, and a very functional design that allows you to raise or lower the mower with just one toggle. Plus a manual that is well written and if you follow the instructions correctly, it’ll have you up and running in no time. It’s very refreshing to read a manual that’s exact and knows what it is trying to explain and does it so well !

All in all, a difference of night and day. I do have two issues though:

One: The Battery.
Today, in hot weather of more than 30 degrees, I decided to cut my lawn using the mulch function of the mower. Previously I could cut more than half of the surface of my lawn with the one battery, and since it is divided into 2 already, I didn’t mind. And the battery lasted about 40 to 50 minutes.

But now, the battery ran down after just 20 to 30 minutes, even before I could finish one half of my lawn !!!

And since I have only the one battery, I’m done for the day. Charging times are 7 hours or so to fully top them up, so I put my lawn mower back into the shed.

I knew that I would have to buy another battery to be safe for future years and do my lawn in one go, but this is just ridiculous ! I hope it’s the heat that made the battery less performing, but it was a serious disappointment !

Two: The fail-safe handles.
The handles have a button you need to press and on both sides, a lever you need to pull out, preventing accidental startups of the machine. I totally get this. But do those handles need to be so tight ? My hands are in continual cramps of clutching those 2 handles all the time. They are so damn fiddly, you need to press really hard on them to prevent an instant stop.

Apart from that, a wonderful machine.

I’ve analysed and graphed the last 30 days of twitter activity for the #nmbs hashtag.
You can immediately see that May 26 was a ‘special’ day…

Read the post at DataConnect.be.

Those Royal Society videos are actually really good to get the gist of something quickly! Here’s one that presents some findings about empathy and how this might affect us all in the long run.

How the time has passed!

He’s almost ready to cycle on 2 wheels, he’s totally different from Tom, has a big mouth but a small heart. He does things his own unique way.

Happy 5th birthday, my independent little man !

Quote: If you pay enough money to people to take money out of the equation, then people are motivated to focus on the job instead of on getting enough money.

Had a lovely breakfast in bed, prepared by my eldest son Tom with help of Dolores. Sam munged along. It’s nice to wake up to being 42 years old that way.

Oh and I posted a new article on my ‘serious’ blog :  Is facebook the new social control ?

I’ve set up a new blog connected to my programming efforts. It’s on DataConnect.be, the website I set up to store any tools/programs I making.

It’s a bit empty right now, and several links are still “dead”, like for example the demo, but I’m going to be adding more blog posts there that are program-related. I’ll note here any new posts that appear there.

On the progress front :

• I’ve made some progress on following keywords, storing them, and collecting twitter user information. Everything is running stable on my laptop, in text version.
• JQuery and JQuery-UI still rock, I’ve now found out how modal dialog boxes can be called up in a ajaxy way, which is really cool ! Coupled with cherrypy, I can initiate a dialog box that calls a page that does the db update and shows the results… really nice and much more user intuitive than being thrown on another page that tells you it’s done and you need to click “return” to see what changed.
• in the following weeks I’ll be setting up a database, some keywords and a cron job on my webfaction host – I’ll need to see how they behave and if there are problems or tweaking to be done
• still to do: setting up the graphics to show what I’m collecting, after all, text is not sexy.
• after that, it’ll be writing the demo pages so that at least I can show what I’m doing
• after that, the scary part comes – asking for feedback…
• further than that I can’t or won’t look at the moment

I also discovered quite a few programs that analyse twitter, and for some time I got into a funk about one especially called hootsuit. It is really very very good ! It’s also very free, and it’s a bit worrisome to my idea of trying to gain money from my twitter analysis program if there are such good and great programs that are free. Obviously, a lot of care went into that program, and it’s very smooth and intuitive to use. Higly recommended to get a good overview of your tweets and following up on who said what. There are other programs out there (Social Oomp is one) that I admire (and which does ask money for the pro version).

That said, my focus lies on the keywords and not on the individual tweets. What I want to implement is different from what they are doing, so I still see added value for what I’m doing.