So, I thought it might be useful to update on my progress with the Bebook. I have finished one novel on the device and I’m happy to report that it is a comfortable device to work with. Reading is easy, navigating is easy. In fact when you have to put the book down, whether you like it or not (!), you don’t lose your place. There’s no fumbling with bookmarks or worries about losing your page. You simply close the book and open it again when you’re ready to pick up where you left off. Simple. If you want to read something else for a while, the device remembers where you were in your previous book. You don’t need to find your page again, the device remembers it for you.

This makes picking up from where you left off to reading a simple and pleasurable task. In fact, you get back to reading with a minimum of fuss.

I’ve been reading on the bus, at lunchtime and in the evening before sleeping. The Bebook is great for all of these situations. A crowded bus is probably where the Bebook comes into its own. No fumbling with pages. You can read one-handed – one had with the Bebook and one hand holding onto the rails – something you need to do with Sydney’s bus drivers!

The Bebook has only crashed twice in the week. Not really sure why but a simple reset solves the problem. This interrupts your reading for about two minutes. All in all the Linux-based operating system is pretty robust.

If there is only one complaint it’s that the screen background is not a little whiter. I’ve found that reading by lamplight, such as reading in bed, can be a little difficult. The text appears a bit dim. The flip side of this is that in bright light or sunlight reading the Bebook is just fantastic. The text is crisp and easy to read. I guess it’s difficult making the screen look perfect in every light situation.

I may well get a purpose designed reading lamp to use for bed side reading.

Today I downloaded two new books to read and I can’t wait to get started on them. Downloading books has proved to be quite easy. I’m using DRM books with the Mobipocket format. It seems to work okay. There isn’t a huge selection of book in Australia but Dymocks sells on line and I’ve purchased some from eBooks.com.

If you’re thinking about getting a Bebook I’m pleased to say that week two of owning it is not making me regret the decision one bit. In fact I’m looking forward to more reading with it. Plus I’m saving on the purchase price of hard copy books. I’ve already saved about $35 with my first purchases.

Bebook. Ordinary name but a most un-ordinary product. I received my Bebook last week and have been playing around for a few days with this intriguing device. Intriguing? Well maybe not in terms of its technical application and sophistication, but intriguing because of what it portends for the future of books and reading.

Why did I choose the Bebook as the first to review. Mainly the price. At AU$400 this is at a price point that the poorer geeks among us would be willing to pay. Competitors such as the Iliad and Sony’s offerings are priced seriously higher.

So what of the Bebook?The Bebook is delivered express post from Europe. It took about two days for mine to arrive. It comes in a neat package no larger that an A5 novel.  In the box is the device itself, a battery, a usb cord, headphones and instruction manual.

The Bebook itself sits within a leather cover and is light yet reasonably solid to the touch. It needs to be charged before use and you must do this via the usb cord plugged into your computer. In fact that’s the only way of charging the device short of using an (optional) adapter to plug in to the mains electricity. But to be honest, the charge of the device lasts so long that this isn’t really going to be an issue - this is not a device that you’ll need to charge every day or even every week. I’ve gone all week with the device and the indicator is still showing that it’s fully charged.

It has a fairly simple layout of buttons that works pretty well and enables you to navigate through the device easily. Most menu functions and files are only a few clicks away. On the left hand side of the book are the two arrow page turning buttons - these buttons are repeated at the bottom right of the device just near the OK and ‘Return’ buttons.

The navigation menu is reasonably intuitive and after a few uses you’ll be able to find your way around the device quickly.

At the bottom of the device are the usb and headphone jack, on the side of the device are two volume buttons and on top of the device is the master switch and the slot for an SD card.

The screen uses the new Vizplex E-ink film and is a really good resolutions. It is easy to read in most lighting conditions. What is amazing about the technology is that you can still see the image clearly in strong light or direct sunlight. In fact, the screen looks better when there is more light, such as under flourescent lights in an office situation or outside. My only concern is that in dimmer lighting situations the contrast between the ‘paper’ and the text is perhaps not as great as it could be.

This isn’t a huge problem and it can be easily be fixed by increasing the font size of whatever you’re reading. But with a good reading light the Bebook is great.

Part of the attraction of the Bebook was the range of formats that it will read. These include pdf, mobi, prc, epub, lit, txt, fb2, doc, html, rtf, djvu, wol, ppt, mbp, chm, bmp, jpg, png, gif, tif, rar, zip, and mp3. I have to confess I haven’t tried all of these  but pdf, mobi, lit and text all render very well.

It also reads fb2 files, which are a new open source ebook format. While there still isn’t a lot of books around in this format those that have been converted render extremely well using this format but I have to say the proprietory Mobipocket reader renders pretty well.

So all in all I’m enjoying the Bebook experience. If you want a reasonably priced ebook then give it a look.

Stay tuned for more updates as I continue to use this device.

Having installed Windows 7, I was keen to see whether the speech recognition function had improved.  I’m happy to report that the speech recognition function has indeed improved.  In fact I’m writing this post using the speech recognition function and I have to say from my perspective its accuracy and ease of use are greatly improved.

It works fairly well with Internet Explorer but I’m afraid to say that speech recognition works not at all with Firefox, which is disappointing but I suppose hardly surprising.  Voice recognition is probably a pretty complex thing!

What is noticeable is that the speech recognition seems to have improved enormously in its accuracy (of course having said that, it took me four or five goes to get “in its accuracy” right - oh the delicious irony). But apart from that I think the potential benefits of speech recognition are terrific.  It does seem that the ambient noise problem of earlier versions seem to have been somewhat overcome and this version is picking up very well on vocal signals rather than background noise.

The odd bit of traffic noise in the background will still make my speech recognition system think I have said something but rather than insert a word it will simply ask the question, “what did you say?”.  This is a much better solution than inserting gobbledigook.

But frankly, I never really had the time or patience to stick with speech recognition because even for this simple article I’ve probably spent about half an hour longer than I normally would have trying to correct all the mistakes that the speech recognition system has made.  One suspects that speech recognition is a little bit like typing in that you really need to train and then keep practicing regularly to really see results in accuracy and ease of use.

I’ve always thought speech recognition would be useful if if you suffer from RSI or some other injury that left you unable to type.  If you really needed to use it then you would have the patients to train and get it right.  But for me, for now, speech recognition seems to take longer than typing. I suppose if you’re willing to invest the time and effort then you may find that speech recognition holds the promise of easy navigation and simple and accurate text manipulation/editing it has always promoted.

And one more thing before I go, speech recognition in Windows 7does seem to be on a par with other software packages such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, which as you probably know, come at a premium in terms of price.

Here’s a nifty solution to the clutter of chargers and wires that you can end up with if you have numerous devices all needing charging. The Bluetek multicharger can alleviate some of these problems for owners of particular devices.

It’s important to note this is a multicharger not a universal charger. So it will be compatible with some devices but not all. It works with iPod, iPhone and iTouch, Blackberry, Nokia mobile phones, Nintendo DS Lite, Sony PSP and with selected digital cameras and GPS units. However, the last non-branded list will be more luck that anything else.

However if you have a range of devices from the branded list then you may just find that the multicharger is a useful addition to your collection to reduce charger clutter. They neat this about the Bluetek multicharger is that it can charge five devices at once all from one power outlet.

So if you are an Apple device person, own a Blackberry or Nokia phone and a personal game device then this may well be the perfect device for you. Or if you lost a charger and were looking for a replacement then this is worth a look. It retails at around AU$50.

If you don’t own the listed devices then you’ll need to check the connectors to make sure they will fit with your device.

If you have more than one Twitter account then hootsuite is a service that deserves a closer look. It enables you to set up mulitple accounts and tweet to those accounts in one go. hootsuite also enable users to have multiple logins to one Twitter account, meaning that you can have more than one editor for your tweets without having to use the same login.

You can manage users access to Twitter accounts and their role. It really is a neat idea. There is not much more to tell about this resource. It does what they say it will do and it does easily and with a minimum of fuss.

I guess at some stage they will start charging people for the service but at the moment it’s in beta and so its free. Get in early from some hootsuiting sweetness.

Give it a try at hootsuite.

I’ve been looking at Twitter in more detail of late and you’ll see on this site some recent additions that take advantage of this technology.

Now you don’t need to have a browser open to keep up to date with the tweets that you’ve been following. twhirl is a program developed using Adobe AIR that you download onto your desktop (you’ll need to install Adobe AIR first) and they use to follow your favourite Twitterers or your favourite Twitter searches. You can also follow some other services like Twitter using this tool, although it doesn’t aggregate them - you’ll need a separate window for each one.

This tool is particularly useful if you like following live micro-blogging surrouding a particular issue or world event. Recently WEEver was following G20 developments on Worst Episode Ever and if you visit you’ll see it arranged through another neat tool called ScribbleLive.

twhirl gives you this functionality right on your desktop. It also has another great feature that sldes up tweets onto your desktop when the twhirl window is not showing - so you can keep up to date with tweets while you’re doing something else - that’s called multi-tasking or distracting depending on your point of view!

I think twhirl is a very good looking tool, well laid out and easy to use. If you are already familiar with Twitter I think you’ll find it a most useful interface. There are a number of other tools out there that I’ve tried but none were quite as intuitive and simple to use as twhirl.

If you wanted to aggregate a number of social networking sites and tools then twhirl isn’t probably what you’d choose, but if you rely on Twitter as your main tool then I think you should have a look at twhirl.

Well, the world of wireless N and gigabit LAN was too much of a temptation. But at this price it wasn’t going to break the bank to give it a try. I had never heard of Edimax before today. But I have to say, the ease of set up shows just how far wireless technology and home networking have come in the last few years.

I had the whole thing up and running in less that half an hour. It easily plugged into the ADSL modem and the wired connection to the internet was working in a flash. In a few seconds later I had set up a WPA key and had secure wireless access for my laptop. Windows 7 found the router in a flash - in fact I used the SSID and password from the old wireless set up and the laptop found it all by itself.

The unit was purchased for $145, which makes it one of the cheapest gigabit wireless routers on the market as far as I can tell.

The wireless laptops in the network certainly seem to be loading pages a little faster even though my laptop doesn’t have a N wireless card - sadly, still using G. But the signal from the router is strong and it seems stable. I’m looking forward to joining together some network attached storage and the desktop at gigabit speeds so that moving large files will be pretty quick.

I haven’t tried streaming media across the wireless network yet but I’ll let you know whether there is any improvement on that front when I have a moment to try it.

So this is very much a first couple of hours review. I’ll update this shortly with some more detail.

Well, I’ve been using Windows 7 for some weeks now and thought that it was probably worth updating my original review. Overall I have to admit that the experience of Windows 7 remains positive.

The tablet PC function with Windows 7 does not seem to be too crash hot - but that is probably driver conflict issues with ASUS - you can use the pen on the screen but the R1F doesn’t detect when it is in tablet mode or notebook mode.

As don’t use tablet mode very much this isn’t a huge problem for me.

I am still impressed at the speed with which it boots up. I have put most of my favourite programs on the system and it doesn’t seem to be making too much of a difference. In Vista the whole laptop almost ground to a halt at boot up. But this seems to be going okay.

The overall speed of the system is reasonably good and a marked improvement on Vista. I haven’t suffered any crashes of the system, no freezing up. And occasionally a program will stop working - you can shut that program down without too much hassle and Windows 7 just keeps going.

Wireless and bluetooth seem to work fine. With the advent of the new version of Skype and Windows 7 I can finally use my bluetooth headphones as a headset for voice calls. This worked straight off the bat - with Vista it took a long time of fiddling around and testing to get the headset to work for one minute.

I’m getting used to all the different ways to interact with items on the desktop and whilst running programs - finding the shortcuts to doing things. This is kind of neat and there is always something else to discover by accident. I think this is a nice way of making the experience a discovery  - although I imagine some folk will just hate it.

All in all I’m pleased to report that the experience is so far still superior to Vista. I won’t be going back. Windows 7 has sold me on that front.

I’ll keep ‘betaing’ away with Windows 7 but I reckon its an OS that Microsoft users can rightly be looking forward to - especially if you’ve been lumped with a Vista system.

The Logitech Harmony 525 is the first universal remote from Logitech that I have used and reviewed. I like what I see. It sits quite well in the hand, but the big news for me was the internet based set-up of the device. Maybe I’m a little slow to catch on here, but the concept of not having to reprogram a learning remote everytime something goes wrong or you lose power is something of a revelation!

The remote itself is somewhere in the middle of the range of the Harmony remotes from Logitech. I was looking at the Harmony One but it’s kind of expensive - ranging from AU$180 on the internet to a ridiculous AU$500 at Harvey Norman (where else!?!). The Harmony 525 comes in at AU$77 at the moment at Dick Smith’s. So the internet set up is the secret to the usefulness of this device. From a huge database of over 80,000 AV devices - yes apparently there is that many - you’d be hard set not to find the one that sits on your shelf or entertainment unit.

I was pleased to even find my DSE switch box - that is notoriously odd to program. A bit of tweaking and the Harmony can select the right input number for the correct device. This had been driving me mad for the last few weeks.

It has a rather small LCD black and white screen but a generous number of hardware buttons more that makes up for this. The most useful function is the ‘activity’ switch. This neat feature means you can program particular activities such as watching TV, or watching a DVD and the Harmony will turn on and off the right components of your set up. And it does this quite accurately. If you do happen to get out of sync with some of your devices the remote is smart enough to fix it for you via a ‘help’ button. I don’t know how it works, but is seems to know what to turn on and off if things aren’t working properly.

The internet interface is highly configurable and buttons can be changed to different functions. Once you have the internet settings all done you simply connect the device to your PC with a USB cord and voila the settings can be downloaded to the device.

It sits pretty well in your hand. Some functions will take two hands, but the majority of normal use functions - volume, channel, navigation pad - can all be done with one hand.

This is a really nifty device. As long as you are comfortable with internet and remote programming you should have no trouble. If you have difficulty setting timers on a VCR you’ll probably find this a little challenging but perserverance will pay off in terms of having a remote that controls all of your devices simply and logically.

My only gripe is that the navigation pad doesn’t have a ‘hold down’ function in Foxtel mode to scroll through the channels. You’ll need to click it each time you want to see what’s on. It’s only a small thing and it’s certainly not a deal breaker.

I’ll keep using this great device an let you know if I find any other difficulties with it. But so far so good.

I have heard a lot about a thing called Meebo for the last 8 months or so. As is the situation with new tech I hadn’t really had a chance to check it out. I knew it was something to do with social networking, but wasn’t really sure. Well having now found a moment to look into it, it is to do with social networking, but more importantly it offers a way to aggregate all of those annoying, different instant messaging accounts you have into one web-based solution.

I have to admit, it’s a really neat solutions. And not just for instant messaging but it seems for chat rooms too. Users don’t need to be logged into Meebo to take advantage of the chatting functions - now this is a huge benefit as it means that people can just participate as a guest if they don’t like logging in and signing into something that they might only use occasionally.For those of us who do use these things for business or pleasure it means that we can interact with folk online without too much hassle. I’ve got Facebook, Windows Live and Google Talk all in front of me at a glance - so I can see who’s online and who’s available for a quick chat.

Meebo also provides widgets to embed functionality into other websites - check out my own IM widget on the sidebar of this site. If I’m around, you can IM me as a guest or logged in. Quite cool.

The only thing missing is a Skype IM function. I’d love to see that at some stage - then Meebo would be the perfect solution.

The other important thing to note is you don’t need to install any software on your computer if you don’t wish too. I’ve installed a Firefox add-on that makes it all quite cool.

So give Meebo a try. I think you’ll find it most useful.