Robin Sloan wrote a book and then Emily Cooper remixed it to produce some amazing 3D renderings

You can enjoy them in their original goodness or get a glimpse here if you have Silverlight installed.

To navigate around drag and drop using your mouse or you can select an individual image from the drop-down in the top left hand corner. Zoom in and out using the -/+ icons or your mouse wheel and you can select the full screen experience using the icon in the top right hand corner (just press [Esc] to go back to normal mode)

Okay. this is quite a departure for me. I don’t normally get the urge to write these days and when I do I don’t feel it’s good enough to share publically but this… well, it just felt like it wanted to get out.

So please enjoy. Comments welcome (be gentle) – hopefully they will inspire some improvements (but I probably won’t be giving up my day job any time soon).

Image credit: Amy Kane

As I move slowly along the beach I can feel the wind from the sea trying to blow me from my path. The gusts are sometimes forceful and I have to lean into them, often glancing out over the water as I do so. At my age I try and stay away from the water.

Despite the incessant wind I continue on my patrol looking, as I do every day, for signs that others have been this way. Today, as yesterday and for many days before, the only marks on the sand are from the crabs and the birds that prey on them, and the traces of my previous passages.

The wind whips up a flurry of sand and, momentarily blinded, I turn away from the sea towards the dunes. The spare grass that helps keep them in place is fighting a losing battle. Over the years the sand has moved further up the rise and is piling up against the low wall that separates the beach from the tended land beyond. I wonder how long until the wall, and then the pristine lawn, succumbs.

I reach the limit of my endurance and turn to seek refuge, and as I do I catch sight of a a stick embedded in the sand. No. Not a stick. The color of an old tea stain and long scoured and polished smooth by the action of wind and water, it stands both as memorial to my charges and testament to my failure.

Rotors tilting into the wind I return to my roost to recharge, pondering the irony of an airborne autonomous sentinel defeated by a virus borne over the sea on the very winds that outlasted mankind.

I have to add a note of thanks to Robin Sloan and Hugh Macleod for inspiring me with their daily creativity. I suspect growing up reading books by William Gibson, Iain M Banks, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams probably had something to do with it as well.

Updated: Just for fun I published this as a Kindle eBook … I will be very confused if anyone actually buys a copy…

Frame by frame, the scanner’s spidery arms reach down, grasp page corners, peel them back. I’ve never seen anything at once so fast and so delicate. The arms—I can’t tell if there are four or eight or sixteen—stroke the pages, caress them, smooth them down. This thing loves books.

It could have been a description of me (well, apart from the number of arms) but it’s actually a description of a book scanner from Robin Sloan’s short story Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store which I stumbled upon recently.

The story really caught my attention and left me wanting more.

That’s when I discovered that there was an option to help that. Robin is using Kickstarter to solicit patrons for his first full length novel. If he hits his target our contributions (hopefully including yours) will go towards the costs of publishing, distribution and promotion.

By contributing to Robin’s project you get a copy of the book as well as an inside peek into the creative process. The premise of the story intrigued me: “Imagine a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. All the really good cases are on the internet. And Holmes is a woman, and Watson is an A.I., and San Francisco... oh, poor San Francisco...” so I decided to pledge.

Even if Robin’s work doesn’t grab your attention you should check out Kickstarter to see if there are other projects where you can support and become a patron.

Computers are great for storing and sharing information but sometimes the easiest way to get the point across is the old physical medium of pen and paper.

The problem with taking notes that way makes it hard to share with a group, and if you write on a whiteboard it can be a challenge to get an accurate copy of those notes saved. Also with the whiteboard if you need to mark up an existing document it can be tough to see.

Papershow has an answer to the problem. It combines the flexibility and ease of use of pen and paper with your computer to let you utilize a natural input medium, mark up documents but share them with other users and even project the changes live in a meeting.

The technology in the pen is however not quite the same as a disposable sharpie!

Similar to how the Pulse pen works the supplied paper contains a nearly invisible pattern of dots which allows the infra-red camera in the pen body to identify where you are on the page and transmit that information back to the the PC.

The connection back to the PC is wire-free. The kit comes complete with a USB Key that doubles as both as a Bluetooth dongle and storage for the application (it runs right off the key, no need for an installation so you can use it on any Windows XP or Vista computer).

The dot pattern on the paper is unique so it knows when you switch to a new page, and because the pen positioning is very precise they are able to print a small menu on each page that allows you to select what color the pen "writes" in on-screen, how thick the line should be and even assist you draw perfect circles or rectangles or arrows to annotate your drawings.

You can even print on the paper so you can see the actual document you're marking up while you project it on-screen.

The pen is amazingly responsive and works in very varied lighting conditions. Though it's sold as a business tool to liven up meetings I've had a couple of artists say great things about it.

Once you've finished a session you can export it as a PDF or Powerpoint. There doesn't seem to be an option to export as GIF/PNG/JPG or automatically upload to a sharing site though these seem like things that would come with a simple software release.

One feature I'd love to see if the ability to pair multiple pens with a single machine so you can record who writes what in a session, and also have a shared whiteboard version of the app so people in different locations can see the notes and annotations as they are drawn (and know who wrote them) and also contribute remotely.

With any first release you expect some rough edges but this is pretty solid. Although it works fine with WinXP and Vista I did have some issues getting it to work on Win7 Beta - the trick is to set it to run as Administrator and in Vista SP2 Compatibility mode (in the applications settings).

There is no OSX version yet, though Mac users shouldn't despair as they say that there's a version coming.

The other hiccup I found was that you have to use the Bluetooth dongle. If you already have a laptop with built-in Bluetooth you need to be able to disable it (if all else fails Device Manager in Control Panel will let you disable the driver for your Bluetooth) - I hope they work out a solution to coexist automatically to save fiddling around.

I've been using the Lightscribe Pulse pen for a while now and while it's great for disconnected use when I'm away from the PC the lack of live capabilities has bugged me so I can see a real use for the Papershow system. The Papershow pen also seems to work better in uneven lighting conditions.

In an ideal world I'd love a system that combines both - offline note taking and storage with a cradle to re-charge and sync and an online mode where the pen connects via Bluetooth and can be used to drive a meeting (and use the same paper in both modes of course).

For now - the Pulse pen will live in my bag, and my Papershow pen will come with me to meetings where I know there will be a PC to project from.

Oh, and you can buy from www.shoppapershow.com or online from Staples A complete kit (pen, printer and flipchart paper, USB key, software, ring binder and pencil case) costs $199

Although I have terrible handwriting I often prefer the free-format nature of taking notes with pen and paper. The problem in today’s electronic age is that they are hard to share, index, archive and search unless you go through an obsessive process of scanning everything – time consuming and pretty painful.

I have tried using tablet PCs and UMPCs with software such as OneNote, InkSeine and Evernote but never found anything that felt natural and didn’t require a compromised way of working.

My latest attempt to solve the problem is the Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe.

The smartpen is deceptively simple. It is about the same size and weight as a good fountain pen (in fact it feels very similar in the hand to my Mont Blanc) but it contains an embedded computer, an OLED screen, memory (1GB and 2GB options), microphone, speaker and a camera.

All that technology allows it to monitor what you are hearing, track what you are writing or drawing and, by using the camera to recognize codes embedded in the paper, perform functions and execute small applications (eg calculator or currency conversion)

At the end of a “session” you simply connect the pen to it’s USB docking/charging station and everything you wrote and the audio you recorded along with it gets synchronized back to the desktop application where you can then chose to upload and share.

It’s not perfect yet, though this is the first release of the device so hopefully they’ll address some of these as time goes on.

The physical form factor is great, but it uses special ink cartridges and the method of swapping them (and to insert a stylus) is a bit clumsy. Ideally it would have an option to swap from ink to stylus and back again easily – as you need to “double tap” on your work to replay audio or perform certain functions you can end up with weird marks on the page.

The reliance on the paper embedded with the Dot Positioning System means you can’t just grab any notebook and write. Though they do supply both notepad and journal sizes (lined and unlined) so it’s not that big a restriction.

No OCR support. Although you can search documents within their desktop application it doesn’t support full OCR or export to OneNote or Word. They do say that 3rd party tools are coming to extend the platform (they have a developer program if you want to explore) but to my mind this is a pretty important piece of functionality I was surprised to find missing.

It’s not 100% reliable. Unless there’s a good light source and you write carefully enough it does sometimes miss letters or parts of them. It also doesn’t cope very well with shading – once you’ve drawn over the Dot on the paper it’s not very good in picking up when you shade over the area. There’s also no pressure sensitivity which also limits the usefulness for sketching (though block diagrams etc are easy)

It’ll be interesting to see if I can get by without my laptop – just using the Pulse Smartpen to take notes in meetings this week… could it be the beginning of the electronic office ;)