Technology has arrived when you no longer think about it

Conferences and iPhone batteries have traditionally not been the best of friends for me. I have owned the iPhone 3GS, 4S and now the 5s. While at conferences, I am usually checking/posting to Twitter, (i)messaging, emailing, looking things up, and using Maps/OpenTable/Yelp to find the best dinner place. The 3GS and the 4S would barely make it mid- to late-afternoon before they were dead.

The solution was usually to hunt for power throughout the day, sneak back to the hotel room to charge up (and catch up with the office) during an afternoon session, or pack an extra battery case.

I picked up the iPhone 5s when it was released back in September and have used it during three different conferences.[1] It has gotten me through the entire day. This despite the three conferences in cities, New York, Las Vegas, and San Francisco, that might have some of the worse cell coverage in the United States.

Running from the 7:00 AM breakfasts to the 1:00 AM last call, often I would be plugging it in with only a few percent of battery left, but I never got that sweat of imminent phone death. The whole time at all three conferences I remained on cellular data because wifi is always so bad at conferences.[2]

Certainly, the camera is great, the speed of LTE is wonderful, and the weight is nothing, but to me, my nearly four months with the iPhone 5s is its ability to get through a full conference day (and night). This is technology getting out of your way to just do what you need to do.

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1. I know three conferences between late September and now is a bit much.  ↩

2. There are difficult problems in this world, but why is it so hard to have good wifi in large public places with many, many people?  ↩

Papers 3 - A Change in File Structure

Aleh Cherp on trying out the Papers 3 beta:

All documents are stored together with meta-information in a bundle not accessible to other software.

Aleh did receive some clairifiaction from the developer:

If the Dropbox synchronization is not switched on there is still a possibility to control naming and storage of files, much like in Papers 2. However, the files are still kept in a bundle not accessible to Spotlight. The support staff says that Spotlight index will be added in future versions.

I am with Aleh Cherp over at Academic Workflows on Mac. I would really like to have both Dropbox sync and easily accessable/readable file structures for my PDFs in my reference software.

I know sync is not easy, but I am really looking for a great reference, storage and cite software that works across Mac OS, iOS and even windows seamlessly.[1] I have used Zotero as well for a long time, but it support on iOS is still painful and not user friendly.

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1. Ok, if you just do the first two great, you do not have to worry about windows.  ↩

Why as hard as we try, we still use Word in Academia →

Macademic Blog:

In the past [we] wrote about misuses of and alternatives to Microsoft Word. But we also believe sometimes Word is the best tool for the job.

While I would disagree with Word ever being the "best" tool, I do still concede that there are not always universally known tools to replace Word in academic writing. But we are getting there. In the mean time, Macademic points to some great resources for having to deal with Word.

Random Notes, Links and Catch Up

The school year is in full swing and the puppy is now 11 weeks old with her second round of shots, so a few notes, links and catch up items.

1. As most are very much aware, feedburner is dead or at least on its last legs. I swtiched the RSS Feed back to a direct link from feedburner. Feedburner still appears to be pushing the RSS feed at this point, but at some point, it will die and no longer work, so I would suggest switching over to the direct link. Point your RSS catcher of choice to the new link http://www.scottcline.org/rss.
2. I signed up for App.net during its initial funding process and was slightly surprised when it met its funding deadline. They rolled out an alpha during the funding stage and more recently dropped the price from $50 to $36 a year (not a big difference). I found though that even as an early adoptor, I still was not using it compared to Twitter until TapBots came out with NetBot. Think TweetBot for App.net. Actually, it looks eactly the same, excpet the color of the app icon. I have found myself using App.net since it is now much easier to post from an iPhone or iPad and it easily allows you to find the poeple you follow on Twitter on App.net. If you are on App.net you can follow me at @scottcline.
3. David Sparks and Brett Terpstra released the second book in the MacSparky Field Guide series 60 Mountain Lion Tips. The book is full of Mac nerdiness for making your workflows and processes faster and more efficient. My favorites are copy an email address without the extra [junk] and print to PDF with keyboard shortcuts. I use both of these many times a day, every day. Well worth the 6.99 in the iTunes Bookstore.

OK, those were some odds and ends that needed catching up on over the past two weeks.

The Nifty MiniDrive

I really like this Kickstarter project. It turns a MicroSD card into an additional drive in your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. It fits into the SD card reader of those computers, but instead of sticking out like normal SD cards, it is flush to the side of the computer.

While my computers are backed up both locally using Time Machine and to the cloud using CrashPlan (not to mention DropBox for documents and text and Evernote for PDFs to the cloud), backing up while on the road is not as easy. Since MicoSD cards now go up to 64 GB, this could serve as a decent backup. While this will not save you if your computer is stolen, since the card would be in the stolen computer, it adds one more layer of backup.

I backed it on Kickstarter.