Blog Launch: Tablet PC - A Student’s Perspective

21 October 2007 Posted By: Robert
Posted in: News

Breaking cover during the past week is a new blog coming courtesy of student Anirudh Saraf. His blog, entitled Tablet PC - A Student’s Perspective, is one well worth keeping an eye on. Planning to blog mainly on “notetaking, OneNote and OneNote powertoy development” Anirudh has already got his blogging ball well and truly rolling with a progress report on his development for a much needed ‘treeviewer’ for OneNote and an excellent ‘doodling during class’ tip for OneNote.

Congratulations on the blog launch Anirudh and on behalf of StudentTabletPC.com I’d like to wish you every success ::discovered via GottaBeMobile

Student Discount on Bluebeam Revu PDF Software

15 October 2007 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Software

Bhaltair on our forums points out a major discount on the pen-friendly Bluebeam PDF Revu (similar to Adobe Acrobat).

If you’re a student, you can get the (standard) version of Bluebeam’s Revu for $30.  This will support all Office 2003, 2007 programs etc.  It’s a GREAT PDF writer (print to PDF) - in fact it’s better than Acrobat’s.  I’ve done actual color printing from PDFS and it wins hands down. You can buy the CAD system BlueBeam Revu for $50.

I just wanted students to know you can get a huge discount if you write them and buy it as a student.

Fitting a ‘better’ Cornell page template into OneNote

11 October 2007 Posted By: Robert
Posted in: Note-Taking, OneNote

Well my migration over to OneNote is going pretty good. I’ve used it exclusively now in both of the scheduled 3 hour seminars I’ve attended so far, along with numerous other note-taking tasks, and I’ve got to say I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience and that’s without even getting my teeth into, shall we call it, the ‘power features’ of OneNote yet, such as side notes and note flags etc.

Of course a large part of the ‘moving in’ process has involved a ‘custom fitting’ tweak of the interface i.e. re-positioning OneNote’s toolbars, the removal and addition of buttons etc. and a ‘figuring out’ session on how to incorporate my established electronic filing system, but everything has been straightforward and hassle-free.

Tablet PCs Software for Drawing and Art

9 October 2007 Posted By: William
Posted in: Software

I love to draw. It’s what I do during my boring lectures. It’s what I do to relax. The tablet pc as a drawing tool was a huge part of the appeal when I was first looking at buying a tablet and seeing that we’re having a bit of a ’software week’ here at STPC I thought I might give a rundown on what is available and what works best for different drawing styles.

I’m going to look at a number of packages including MsPaint, Artrage, Alias Sketchbook, Flash, Corel Painter, Photoshop and I’ll add a rundown of any drawing software that I get sent.

Adding RAM and the Memory Configurator

5 October 2007 Posted By: Andrew
Posted in: Other

It’s been a pretty hectic last few weeks, a handful of exams and lots of homework.

A couple weeks ago, I added some more RAM to my tablet, Apollo. Apollo originally had 512MB (2x 256MB); a couple years ago I added a gig stick, bringing the total to 1280 (1x 1GB, 1x 256MB). Over the last few months, I was frequently going into my paged memory. So I decided to add another gig of RAM, bringing the total to 2GB (2x 1GB).

Jim Vanides - Tablet PC Tips

5 October 2007 Posted By: Robert
Posted in: News, Tips / Tricks

Jim Vanides, HP’s Worldwide Higher Education Philanthropy’ s Program Manager (wow great title!) is picking up speed with a video series of Tablet PC tips orientated towards educators. He’s already posted one on using a Tablet PC to annotate Powerpoint and his second helping, looking into using MS Journal as a viable alternative to Powerpoint, has just been released.

Sure Jim’s series is aimed more at educators than students but as a student who has to give endless presentations, I find that Jim’s video tips are providing some valuable insights. I’m sure many of you will agree.

Making OneNote Printer-Friendly

4 October 2007 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: OneNote

One of my major gripes about OneNote is that the pages will get longer, but they won’t tell you where the page will cut off if you have to print it to paper. For random scribbles and day-to-day operations, this is fine, but if you’re getting ready for that open note test, being able to easily print without equations/diagrams getting cut in half is important.

Here are two easy ways to make your life easier for those moments when you’re forced to surrender control to paper printouts.

Out with the old (sob!) and in with the new

4 October 2007 Posted By: Robert
Posted in: Hardware, Low Budget Tablets

Well it couldn’t have happened at a worse time i.e. a few days before the start of my new term, but recurring battery problems have finally caused me to lose faith in my trusty old Acer C300 and as a consequence I’ve sent her packing to the Tablet PC retirement home (well actually I’ve passed it on to my daughters who will still hopefully gain a limited ‘tethered to the mains’ benefit from her). I’m truly sad to let the ‘old girl’ go. She was my inking partner for well over 2 years and during that time she helped me greatly to get through some pretty intense bouts of academic workload. However when a machine becomes more and more prone to instantaneous bouts of ‘electronic narcolepsy’ you just have to do the right thing and let it go.

So given this unexpected setback I had to rush out in ‘panic fashion’ to get my hands on another Tablet PC and fast. Not being prepared for the sudden expense I definitely had to err on the side of finance and not wanton desirability. That meant instead of reaching for a more cutting edge solution such as a Lenovo X61 (like our glorious leader - pokes out tongue :o)), a HP 2710p or a Fujitsu T2010 etc. I had to set my Tablet PC buying sights a little bit lower (aahhhh….the wonderful, gritty world of the poor student eh? :o)). So in the end I ended up going for a Toshiba Portege M400, which following the arrival of its more powerful bigger brother - the R400, has made it a more cost effective, yet still reasonably powerful, solution than it was previously.

Fun With Embedded Fonts

1 October 2007 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Blog Related

If you visit this site through conventional means, you may have noticed I’ve been playing with embedded fonts. Let me know if it’s cool (in small quantities, of course) or extremely annoying

DocuPen on the Way

1 October 2007 Posted By: Tracy
Posted in: Scanning

Quick update that I have a Planon DocuPen RC800 coming my way for review purposes. I really can’t wait to try this thing out on my own as I’ve heard very mixed reviews. It seems like a great solution for students, but does it really work?

We’ll see!