July 2017 – frans goes blog

Note on working with PDFs and digital signatures

Adobe Global Guide to Electronic Signature Law

Portable Document Format (PDF) files are a pretty standard element in academic and business life these days. It is sort of a compromise, a tool for living life that is partly based on traditional paper documents and their conventions, and part on new, digital functionalities. A PDF file should maintain the appearance of the document same, as moved from device to device and user to user, and it can facilitate various more advanced functionalities.

One such key function is ability to sign a document (an agreement, a certificate, or such) with digital signatures. This can greatly speed up many critical processes in contemporary, global, mobile and distributed lives of individuals and organisations. Rather than waiting for a key person to arrive back from trip to their office, to physically use pen and paper to sign a document, a PDF document version of the document (for example) can be just mailed to the person, who then adds their digital signature to the file, saves, and sends the signed version back.

In legal and technical terms, there is nothing stopping from moving completely to using digital signatures. There are explanations of the legal situation e.g. here:

And Adobe, the leading company in electronic documents business, provides step-by-step instructions on how to add or generate the cryptographic mechanisms to ensure the authenticity of digital signatures in PDFs with their Acrobat toolset:

Digital ID: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/digital-ids.html
Certificate-based signatures: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/certificate-based-signatures.html
Validating digital signatures: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/validating-digital-signatures.html

According to my experience, most contracts and certificates still are required to be signed with a physical pen, ink, and paper, even while the digital tools exist. The reasons are not legal or technical, but rather rooted in organisation routines and processes. Many traditional organisations are still not “digital” or “paperless”, but rather build upon decades (or: centuries!) of paper-trail. If the entire workflow is built upon the authority of authentic, physically signed contracts and other legal (paper) documents, it is hard to transform the system. At the same time, the current situation is far from optimal: in many cases there is double work, as everything needs to exist both as the physical papers (for signing, and for paper-based archiving), and then scanned into PDFs (for distribution, in intranets, in email, in other electronic archives that people use in practice).

While all of us can make some small steps towards using digital signatures and get rid of the double work (and wasting of natural resources), we can also read about the long history of “paperless office” – a vision of the future, originally popularized by a Business Week article in 1975 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office and the 2001 critique by Sellen & Harper: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/myth-paperless-office).

And, btw, a couple of useful tips:

There are useful new tools like Kami (https://www.kamihq.com/) that facilitate move to “paperless classroom”, with their easy to use functions for drawing, editing, and commenting on PDFs (Adobe’s business oriented solutions are not the best answer to all users and situations)
If you are using a tool like Adobe Acrobat in review and paper marking, do yourself a service and learn few of the useful single-key shortcuts – they really speed up moving from browsing to adding emphasis, or comment in PDF, and back: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/keyboard-shortcuts.html.
In pen-based computing, Microsoft OneNote shines, and you can import PDF documents into OneNote for reading and commenting (really long, book-size documents might be too much for it, though): https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Insert-or-attach-files-to-notes-f11eac68-144d-48bd-946f-c42d9104b17e.

Brydge 12.3, Surface Pro 4

Surface Pro 4, with Brydge 12.3 and MS Type Cover

Getting the input right is one of the most challenging issues in todays world of pervasive, multimodal computing and services. Surface Pro 4 is an excellent multitouch tablet, and with the Surface Pen it is perfect for review and marking (key elements in academic life). The problem with a tablet as a main computer is that much of the productivity oriented tasks really call for a mouse and keyboard style approach.

There are pretty good add-on keyboards for today’s tablet computers, and one can of course also attach to a Surface Pro a full size keyboard and mouse combo. However, a keyboard cover that is always with you is the optimal companion for a tablet user. The official Type Cover by Microsoft is a really good compromise: it is thin, light, has decent keys, excellent touchpad, and backlight, which is really important for business use. There is certain wobbly, flexible quality in the keys though, and writing a whole day with one can create certain strain.

I have now tested a new, much more solid alternative: Brydge 12.3 keyboard cover. It is made of strong aluminium, has 160 degrees rotating hinges that create a firm grip on the corners of the tablet, and its island style keys also are backlighted. According to my experience, the usability issues with Brydge relate to the unreliability of Bluetooth connection on one hand – sometimes I would spend several minutes after tablet wake-up waiting for keyboard to re-establish its connection. Other thing is that the integrated touchpad is rather bad. It is hard to control precisely, pointer movement is wobbly, and not all Windows 10 mouse gestures are supported. It is also very small by today’s standards, and clicks register randomly. The sensible use for the Brydge is to use it alongside a wired or wireless mouse – this, however, diminishes its value as a real laptop replacement option. The trackpad in Type Cover is so much better that in regular use that in the end it trumps Brydge’s better (or at least more solid) keyboard. The plus side of using Brydge is that in tactile terms, it transforms Surface Pro into a (small and heavy) laptop computer.

It is apparently hard to get a 2-in-1 device right. However, multiple manufacturs have recently introduced their own takes on the same theme, so there might be better options out there already.

Linux on Vivobook X202E

In January 2013 I bought a Asus Vivobook X202E, a small, budget class, touch screen laptop. It has now served me almost four and a half years – an eternity in ICT terms. For some time it has been upgraded from Windows 8 into Windows 10, which in principle operates rather well. It is just that the operating system eats almost all resources, and it is painfully slow to do anything useful, with contemporary web apps and browsers particularly. Even a Chromebook serves better in that regard.

Last night I tried installing Linux – Ubuntu 17.04 version – into multiboot configuration to X202E. There were certain hurdles in the setup: it was necessary to disable Secure Boot, get into the UEFI/BIOS (fast F2 pressing in boot sequence), disable Fast Boot, enable Lauch CSM (disable Launch PXE OpROM), and enable USB options, in order to make the system bootable from an USB installation stick. (Also, my first attempts were all failures, and it was only when I tried to use another USB stick when the boot from USB disk option came available in UEFI/BIOS.)

Currently, all seems to be ok in Ubuntu, and laptp works much faster than in the Windows side. The battery of this laptop has never been strong, and in its current condition I would say that 2-3 hours is probably maximum it can go, unplugged. Thermal cooling is also weak, but if run ‘indicator-cpufreq’ tool and drop the CPU into slower speeds, the system stays manageable. The reality is, however, that the realistic life cycle of this little machine is coming towards its final rounds. But it is nice to see how Linux can be used to breath some new life into the aging system. Also, the touch controls and gestures are better today in Ubuntu, than they were only few years ago. Linux is not a touch-focused operating system by design, and gestures work rather badly in e.g. Firefox – Chrome is better in that regard. Windows 10 is much more modern in that area, and pen-based computing is something that one can really integrate in one’s daily work flow only in Windows 10. But writing, coding, and various editing tasks for example can be achieved in a small Ubuntu laptop quite nicely. Chromebooks, however, are also making promising steps by opening the vast repositories of Android apps that is good news for hybrid devices and touch-oriented users. Linux remains strong as a geek environment, but when user cultures and mainstream users needs are considered, other software and service ecosystems are currently evolving faster.

Testing Steam Link

It is my summer vacation period now, and during a rainy week, it would be nice to play also some PC games – either alone, or together as a social experience, if a game from a suitable genre is available. To bring the PC experience from my “media cave” to the living room, I installed Steam Link, a small device that is designed for remotely streaming and accessing the PC games, running on the gaming desktop PC (which is equipped with a powerful graphics card) in the basement, from the living room large-screen tv.

The idea is pretty plug-and-play style simple, but it actually took over an hour of troubleshooting to get the system setup right. Initially, there was no image in the television screen, apart from the blue Link boot symbol, and the trick that finally solved this issue was to change the HDMI cable to another one – the Link box appears to be a bit picky on those. Then, my “Xbox One Controller with the Wireless Adapter” did not work with Steam Link (it works fine with the PC), but my old PS3 Dualshock controllers appeared to work just fine, both in wired and wireless modes. Finally, there was an issue with “Dota 2”, the game I first tested, where the game got stuck with every dialog box, and did not accept any input from either the gamepad or from mouse/keyboard (one can connect also Bluetooth devices to the Steam Link) – I had to run downstairs to access the game locally from the PC to get over it (I wonder what was behind that one). Oh yes, and finally it appeared that there was no game sound in the living room television, from any game running in the Steam Link. This could also be fixed by going downstairs, and changing manually the Windows 10 playback device to be the living room television set – the Steam software appears to get confused, and automatic configuration will end up muting and/or playing sounds via wrong audio devices.

But after those ones, we got some nice, all-family gameplay action with the “Jones on Fire” PC version. And there are now several more games downloading from the Steam store, so developing and selling – rather cheaply – the Steam Link box appears to be a smart move from Valve. Now, if only the multiple components and services in a typical h0me network would play together a bit more reliably, and the support for wireless game controllers (such as the wireless Xbox One version) would be better, this would be an excellent setup.