Bluetooth

IMHO Bluetooth is a very underutilized technology. At the very basic form Bluetooth is a data transfer technology over short range. Version 2.0 and above can achieve a speed of 2Mbits/s. Mind you it is Mbits and not MBytes. Depending on the class of the device the effective range can vary from 5 meters to 100 meters. For all practical purposes we can assume it to be 10 m (30ft).

Most often Bluetooth is used for mobile headset that people put on a single ear. Occasionally it can also be seen as being used for wireless keyboards/mouse/printers etc. All these uses make effective use of short range and modest data transfer speed. However I would expect innovation going beyond the basic data transfer. Let me explain.

USB is a wired data transfer technology. one of the features USB devices offer is to draw power directly from the USB port without the need for any battery or other power source. This has led to some devices which absolutely do not relate to data transfer. Think about USB fan or USB LED light or USB powered vacuum cleaner to clean your keyboard, USB powered Christmas trees for your office desk and so on.

Now how Bluetooth devices can be used in innovative ways which might not relate to data transfer, or only small amount of data transfer? Each Bluetooth device has a unique identifier which is used to pair with other Bluetooth devices. This feature opens up some interesting possibilities.

On Linux, there is an application called BlueProximity which runs a pre-configured command on the PC when it detects a specified Bluetooth device (e.g. your mobile) entering or leaving a specified range from the PC. By default it is configured to lock your PC when you walk away from it (with your mobile in your pocket) and unlock when you come back near the PC. you can as well play/pause songs that you are listening or mark your status away/available on your chat client.

Even the cheapest of the mobiles have Bluetooth which gives it a very wide existing userbase. In future it can be used for making payments using your mobiles or unlock your car when you come within the range.

Next on my TODO list if to search the net for innovative uses of Bluetooth technology

LibreOffice 3.4.3

A few months ago I complained about slow installation of LibreOffice 3.3. A few days ago I downloaded LibreOffice 3.4.3 and installed it on a windows machine.The experience this time was better. The download was around 50MB smaller and it installed in almost half the earlier time, i.e. 1.5 hrs. This is still a lot more than what I would expect (1.5 minutes) but good to see things improving.

The new LibreOffice is fairly good and I could create simple documents in it without much issues. However the biggest pain remains interoperability with MS Office. When I saved my .odt document as .doc there was visible ugliness in the formatting of the document. Bullets, for example, were changed to some other symbol than normal solid circles. Similar things happened when I opened .doc or .docx files using LibreOffice.

Mind you both the applications are very good for standalone use but interoperability of the formats remains pain in the neck. Microsoft obviously do not have any incentive to work on this aspect and in fact would do all in its capacity to hamper the same. And Open Source alternatives will always be on the losing side paying the catchup game.

So What are our options for this interoperability?
One way is to export the document to PDF format, which preserves the exact formatting on all the platforms.While this options works like a charm where we dont expect further updates to the document from the recipients (CVs etc), we have to look for alternatives for "collaborative editing".

From top of my mind I can think of using wiki or Google docs to edit online. I am also told that the Open Source software AbiWord, which is available on multiple platforms, seems to have a "collaborotion plugin" which allows us to edit documents simultaneously by multiple authors in real time.
Need to evaluate AbiWord. Added to the ToDo list. :)