This is about my personal reasons for buying an iPad. I think they are going to sell a gazillion of them, but for many different reasons. I’m not covering all the reasons I think the iPad’s time has come. I’m only covering why its time has come for me.

This is my current computing environment:

• a desktop (Ubuntu Linux on an AMD-powered HP Pavilion with a 20-inch screen).
• a Lenovo ThinkPad T500 (Windows 7/Ubuntu dual boot from my employer)
• a 3G 16GB iPhone

My favorite environment to work in is Linux (in spite of how poorly it handles Flash video at times).

Each has its pros and cons.

The desktop is a great work environment for coding, word processing, home server functionality, media storage, etc, etc, etc. However, to use it I have to go to the room it’s in, sit down at a desk and stay there until I’m done.

The laptop is OK for coding, casual surfing, email, word processing, etc. Its plus is portability, but it is not always on nor is it really all that portable, nor is it comfortable to use, nor is it big enough to put coding and output windows up simultaneously. In other words, it does about everything I need (except server functions), but does them poorly. Because of that, I mostly use it at work as a second system when I need to do testing and debugging.

My iPhone is great when I’m on the go. Connection anywhere! I use it a lot at home as well because it can always be near me, doesn’t have to be put to sleep to conserve power, and is therefore great for looking up a quick fact or checking for an important message. However, for anything substantial (even reading articles at the Times or Wikipedia), the tiny screen and dinky keyboard are not sufficient.

Then comes the iPad. It’s small enough to be wherever I am in the house, but big enough to use comfortably for reading articles, checking email, social networking, reading eBooks, etc. In fact, it’s big enough to do light duty as a word processor, blogging tool, and even for Remote Desktop to the office or Secure Shell into a server. For pulling up schematics when I’m working on a project it’s big enough to see clearly, small enough to stay out of my way. It also sports a plethora of casual (and some not-so-casual) games for a few minutes of downtime. In other words, I expect my iPad to become my primary computing device for non-work activities and an important secondary device for work activities.

What’s the big loser as I see it? The ThinkPad. Many people see the iPad as a fourth class of device and are asking “Why?” because we already have smartphones, laptops and desktops. The trick for me is to imagine having two devices: a smartphone and a desktop. If someone was to introduce a third device, would you rather have an iPad or a laptop? There are PLENTY of people that will say “laptop” or “netbook” or the like, but for ME, that third device would be a Star Trek-like pad that does all the casual things I want to do and does them well. For big jobs I’d have my desktop. For extreme portability, my phone. I can’t imagine (personally) choosing a laptop over an iPad as the sweet spot between desktop and smartphone.

Wow, but I’ve been busy…

We went to the mountains over the weekend (which was fun but more tiring than restful). Sunday we had to beat it back home as fast as possible before the coming late-winter storm. Even with that we barely made it down the mountain before the roads became too treacherous to travel.

Schools were closed Monday due to the snow, but we had an engineer coming in to help install our new data storage system (IBM N-Series 3300), so I had to be in at 8:00 anyway. That took all day Monday and much of Tuesday (and that’s just the installation work — there’s then a ton of work for me).

Last night, though, I got to take the ShopBot SBU (safety and basic usage) course at TechShop. Fortunately, they included a how-to and safety manual. I see to have trouble really learning things if I don’t read them. Too bad I didn’t have the text BEFORE the class.

In any case, it’s a fabulous machine — I can’t wait to use it for real!

In my previous post I mentioned fighting a winter bug.  Looks like it’s a flu bug.  Great…  The good news is that I did get a flu shot and think it has kept it shorter and milder.  I hope to be back at work tomorrow. I don’t like taking sick days, and they always leave me restless and eager to get back to work.  I can only stomach TV in small doses.

As I improved a bit I finished writing up my Arduino tutorial for Instructables.  My first instructable! Warning to friends and family that might wish to check it out — it’s pretty technical (not that I expect you can’t follow it — just that if you don’t own an Arduino you won’t want to!).

The tutorial takes you from an out-of-the-box Arduino board all the way through building a working Arduino project with the necessary programming.  Anyone actually going through the whole thing would probably need to set aside a couple of hours.

In any case, I learned a lot by creating it and now get the chance to pass it on. 

UPDATE:  Instructables bumped my tutorial to first page featured article status!  I’m ridiculously honored!

My Arduino…

Before long I’ll be making myself into Iron Man!

OK — in case you didn’t know, the Arduino board allows for a variety of analog and digital inputs and outputs and features a programmable controller to act upon the signals it receives.  The chip is programmable via a built-in USB port with a FREE programming kit available from the makers.  Very cool.  You can build unbelievable intelligent devices with this very inexpensively.  Mine ran only $34 (including shipping) from Adafruit Industries.  The owner, Lady Ada, also features significant tutorials on her website devoted to getting started with the Arduino.

In a house full of computers I’ve been slowing but surely consolidating my digital life around one system:  my HP Pavilion running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).  However, every week or two I pull out our old MacBook in order to sync my iPhone.  I could set up a Windows partition, reboot my Linux box to XP, run iTunes, sync and then reboot to Linux — but is that any better than pulling out the old laptop?

I think I finally have this annoyance fixed.  Here’s what I did (with a tip or trick for others trying to do the same).  I’ve set up iTunes inside a Windows XP virtual machine on my Linux box using VirtualBox as the VM server (better snapshot capabilities than VMware Player but still free for personal use).

First off, VirtualBox comes in two flavors:  a fully open source version and a closed source version with additional capabilities.  While I would much rather use the fully open source version, the closed version includes a key piece I need:  USB device support.

Here’s the quick and dirty cheat sheet:

1. Get VirtualBox and install it.  The deb file for Ubuntu worked like a charm.

2. Add yourself the the vbusers group as per the installation instructions.

3. Add USB support by modifying your /etc/fstab:

none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=664 0 0

4. Run VirtualBox and configure a new machine for XP.

5. Install XP (what fun! Microsoft products take more time to install than any OS I ever deal with.  Why is that?)

6. Patch XP.  Patch some more.

7. Install iTunes.

8. Copy the iTunes library from the MacBook (or whatever your previous source was) onto the XP VM.

9. Plug in the iPhone and sync it!

See how easy that was? (Yeah, right…)

Still, the work is worth the reward since I no longer need to boot up the MacBook.  My digital life is finally in one spot.  Sweet.