I have a small hardware budget. So, I spent some of it.
LEGO Mindstorms NXT
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First, a LEGO Mindstorms NXT has arrived. This small platform provides sensor inputs, actuators, and a Bluetooth radio in a lickable plastic shell. It’s excellent for experimenting with, and will become a new flagship environment for the Transterpreter. Yes, it is a toy. But it is an incredibly useful toy in terms of the research that I’m interested in (doing lots of things, safely, apparently at the same time, on small devices). Having robust, well supported hardware to work with is an important part of that work. |
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Irex Iliad
Second, I ordered an Irex Iliad. This is a light (400g) eInk device, sized to an A5 piece of paper, with 1024×768 resolution. I stole a picture or two from here to give you a sense for what it looks like:
The second picture is to demonstrate that the device can be drawn on. My understanding is that the Iliad will support the annotation of documents with a touch-sensitive stylus. My assumption is that I’ll eventually be able to read PDFs on the reader, annotate them with the stylus, and export the documents again with those annotations intact. This way, I can carry my entire library of research articles (in PDF format) on a compact flash card, and have them always available, along with any notes I choose to make.
Either way, I’m very excited about the reader. So many of the reasons I carry a laptop can be subsumed by an ebook reader capable of handling plain text, HTML, and PDF. “To do” lists, calendars (printed to PDF), RSS feeds (rendered to XHTML or PDF), and more can all be carried around for easy reference, as well as a huge library of work/research related reading material. Taking things further, I can imagine that my teaching workflow can be greatly improved if I’m able to collect electronic documents from students (code, essays), comment on them electronically using the Iliad, and then ship back the annotated document. Portable, easy, and environmentally friendly!
Who knows… maybe the Transterpreter will run on the Iliad as well… 