Answering the Engadget Questionnaire

The Engadget Blog has a questionnaire that they love to put to influential people. Unfortunately I am not one of those influential people, but I thought I would fill it in anyway, and post the results.

My name is Darryl Smith, B.E., VK2TDS, and I am the founder of Redshift Wireless.

What gadget do you depend on the most?

I would say my iPad. Well, the iPhone and the iPad, but I would not call the iPhone a gadget. The iPad has released me from needing to take a laptop when I exit the house. I initially bought an iPad 1 on special when the iPad 2 came out, not knowing if I would really use it. Then, when the iPad 3 came out, I bought one with 3G and it has revolutionized my life. Sometime I will just have it in the case, just in case. I also love my AppleTV, and use it a lot. I have an extensive collection of purchased digital media, and the AppleTV’s allow me to access it on something slightly bigger than the iPad.

Which gadget do you look back on most fondly?

I love my old 128k Microbee with dual 5.25″ floppies, but that really is not a gadget is it? One of the gadgets I do look back on most fondly is my first GPRS card. This was a liberating experience. Using it, and then the following 3G cards I have done all manner of liberating things. Doing remote desktop to fix problems in hospital waiting rooms and on the side of the road is somewhat liberating. It should be noted that when I first started with GPRS I think I pad $50 per month unlimited, which went up to $100/month on 3G with some type of cap. Without GPRS I would have not been able to run my small business and look after my sick mother with cancer at the same time.

One fun fact about the GPRS card. Once mum got better she took a trip to Broken Hill in the Australian Outback. This is a town of about 20,000 people. Security at the airport were surprised (in 2004 or so) that this woman in her 60’s was taking a laptop on her holidays. When she got there her room did not have a phone, but she had a laptop with GPRS and Voice Recognition. So, we got these long emails sent from a cheap motel in the middle of nowhere.

What company does the most to push the industry?

Right now the big companies really are making incremental changes to the gadget industry. Smaller ones are doing all the pushing. I agree with Lady Ada in her Engadget interview that Apple is doing a lot to push the manufacturing side, but I don’t know that that is causing any push in other areas.

O’Reilly and Associates is doing a lot of work on helping the Maker community, and that is where probably most of the push is coming from at the moment.

What is your Operating System of Choice?

My main computer runs Mac OSX most of the time. I also run Windows XP, as a virtual machine, mostly for the accounting software, and on a remote desktop for some other stuff. And I have a NetBook running XP that I use for taking onto site where a Windows Computer is needed – generally for industrial controls.

My house runs on a Linux box, and I have been using Linux since my Minix hacking days, so I guess I am a Unix type person at heart.

I love Mac OSX, because making Unix user friendly was simpler than debugging Windows

What are your favorite gadget names?

I really don’t have any favorite gadget names. Well, apart from the Redshift Wireless product line.

What App do you most depend on?

The big ones are an email program and a web browser. I use Microsoft Outlook and Firefox mostly, but move to Chrome when I need to use Flash. On the iPad I use Safari and Mail. I use Excel occasionally, and Numbers even less often on the iPad. Under Unix, I love the JOE text editor.

For pleasure on the iPad, I spend too much time on the ABC TV iView app, AirVideo and AceSpider Solitaire.

What traits do you most deplore in a Smart Phone?

I love my iPhone, but there are a few things that I would change about it. First, I would not lock it, but I understand why Apple do lock it, and support them for doing this. It really does improve the user experience for most users. This locking down leads to a few options being unavailable. It would be great to have an icon on the main screen that allowed me to go right to the correct settings screen to turn off email every night. Also, the screen is far too small, but that is an issue with physics more than anything.

What is your idea of the perfect device?

I really don’t have a perfect device. Often when I look at a device I will think, great, but it could have been even better if feature ‘x’ was added.

There is a key feature in the perfect gadget. That is an API that I can use to make it do things the owner never intended. I love combining features from gadgets to make them more powerful, so the API is vitally important to me.

What is your earliest gadget memory?

I started playing with Lego when I was very young, going things with wheels that you were not supposed to do with them, turning them into gears. From then on I would find gadgets all over the place. Old toys bought at fete’s and garage sales. I remember getting a pair of telephones for $2 when I was about 8 or 9 and having great fun with them. The first gadget I made was a volume control for a headphone. Exactly why I needed this remains unknown, but I had fun getting it to work, and it did work.

What technological achievement do you most admire?

Wireless data is probably the advancement I admire the most, and within that Packet Radio. This was really why I got myself a Ham Radio license, and running TCP over Ham Radio at 1200 bps half duplex was a great learning experience.

What fault are you most tolerant of in a device?

The fault that I am most tolerant of is probably the connectivity issues. Us RF Engineers love to say that radio is an art, not a science. I tend to know why there are performance issues, and they don’t tend to upset me. I suppose this is why it took me over a year to get WiFi running again after I installed a new alarm system that not only willed off the 2,4 GHz spectrum for me, but also my neighbors.

What device do you covet most?

I love mechanical things, so if I had the money I guess I would buy a heap of new equipment for the workshop, including a CNC Mill. The other device I probably covet a lot is a book scanner. I also need to replace my sheet feed Fujitsu scanner. My existing unit has done about 100,000 pages in the last 10 years and I need a new one. The next gadget I will be getting will be an iPhone 5 sometime in the next month.

What does being connected mean to you?

Being connected means having access to information when I needed, where I need it. It should not matter if I am in the Australian bush, or in an aircraft, if I want to know something, I should be able to access it. In the past I have googled medications in hospital rooms and all manner of other things. One of the surreal experiences was updating Facebook from a plane at about 10,000′ above the Nullabour Plain – an area with a population of about 20 in the area we could see.

When did you last disconnect?

I really don’t disconnect much. If I am unwell I will spend a few days where I might only check the email once or twice a day. Apart from that I might disconnect if I go away on holidays. Even then, these days, I rely too much on the connected world.