It seems to me that, increasingly, once you’ve overcome the barrier to entry that is the cost of hardware, the next challenge is to find a reliable, secure and affordable data package that permits you to take your business on the go.

I’m very satisfied with the devices that I’m using right now - a Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a knock-off bluetooth keyboard cover that provides a full, sturdy QWERTY keyboard and portable protection for the tablet. Paired with a 3G handset, it provides the potential for a pop-up media station, offering recording of video, voice and text. Distribution is a snap. This really does have the power to change things, if we could get these kinds of devices in the hands of journalists around the world. Of course, Twitter is helping - but the depth of analysis and detail it provides (little) is a bit disconcerting. It facilitates newsbites, when often, the story or the tale is infinitely more complex.

KeePass Password Safe is a free software password management utility for Microsoft Windows, with unofficial ports for Linux, Mac OS X, and a variety of other systems. (Wikipedia)

They way I like to use this password manager, to ensure I don’t get caught out when on the move or using public computers is as follows:

1. Store KeepPassX (cross-platform port) executables for as many flavours of OS as is possible on Google Drive

College Board CSS Funding Profile – $25 per university Graduate Records Examination – $170 Going to university in the States – priceless?

I’m writing a final-year paper, much like most finishing undergraduates, and I find the following tools for Mac to be very useful:

BibDesk – a free, open-source bibliography manager which supports importing annotations from .PDF file. Outputs citations in BibTeX format (more on this anon). It permits searching JSTOR and library catalogues from within the application, meaning adding bibliographic records for books and articles requires little or no data entry, where existing records exist. It is even possible to connect to your local university’s catalogue, if they provide this service – that would mean you’d get local shelfmarks in your local reading list, which can be useful if you are offline.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqsIiGulf-CIdGxZNi1wSHhIemxCVnpvV2k4RUFPR2c

Guide to use:

‘Concerts’ tab includes all concerts, dates and soloists.

‘List of works’ tab allows filtering by composer, to select dates.

More features to come, if there’s a demand.

I turn my focus to a concert I had the pleasure to attend in the Hawkswell Theatre, Sligo. Just over two weeks ago, The Bad Plus performed – to a house of less than 30 – music which each time it is performed, betrays the dependence of so much of western art music on the figure of Igor. Stravisnky, of course, penned the Rite of Spring for a large-sized orchestra with a swollen horn section and The Bad Plus are (just?) a lowly jazz trio. A super small canvas for an expansive work with iconic timbral hallmarks.  The ultra-high bassoon opening was tackled by the sustain-deficient piano, perhaps marking the territory of this arrangement - impactful, and attack-heavy. Drummer Dave King seemed to create a world of his own, filling the gaps between the (already metrically heady) beats with illogical and virtuosic digressions. In toto, however, bass and piano reined in the beast and delivered a compelling slice of 1913 to the backwaters of Ireland, in the backwaters of Europe. 

Right, so we’re jam-packed with content. Being a viewer or a listener is as much about the process of triage as it is about the experience of the work itself. Gone are the days of piped content, decisions made in Montrose, Broadcasting House or further afield have decreasing influence on the media that we take the time out of our day to consume. Surely this is a liberating experience, what with the autonomy of selection firmly granted to the individual.

One of the tenets of the productivity oik David Allen’s philosophy of, well, productivity is that one should clear the mind of all tasks that are floating within by committing them to paper, thereby freeing up valuable brain cycles that were previously spent on worrying about what to do, and spending them entirely on doing them - or at least, slaking through a prioritised list and doing such things one by one.

Vimium

Vimium is a Google Chrome extension which provides keyboard shortcuts for navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor.

I’ve started to learn Python. It’s notoriously quick to protoype ideas for apps (we are told) and my experience this evening is that it is. My end goal is server-side web app development and to this end, I’ve also been investigating AppEngine. More on that anon, perhaps.

My main reference was a little bit jurassic class in Python offered here:

http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/index.html

Interest in aviation rekindled by stumbling upon some impressive home-built flight simulator decks, I recalled the METAR standard for meteorological reports. This short-coded form of forecast, I thought, was perfect for SMS – I’d like to have the one for Dublin Airport sent to my phone every 6 hours, I thought. Python, I thought.