ebooks: the verdict so far

no kindle for me. not yet. want, but not want enough to pony up the cash.

however, i've recently been carrying around jesse's netbook because he wasn't using it and it's teensy and adorable. and about the weight of a book anyway. plus, i recently noticed that the cross-the-water buses (aka the MAX) have internets, which occasionally comes in handy... and/or distracting.

anyway, since i was carrying book AND computer around, i thought i'd give combining the functions a go. after a little shopping around, i found that ereader.com had digital editions of some of my current brain candy series (jim butcher's dresden files, for the curious) for cheaper than most.

and now i've finished that book. and bought another. and have a couple things off project gutenberg stored for good measure.

for now, though, i'm still keeping a real book on me, too. minor irritations i find with reading via the netbook: bootup time (hear that dedicated reading devices don't have much of this), not so great in full sunlight (again with the kindle fixing it), shortish battery life (go go dedicated devices), and having to keep electronic devices off for big portions of airplane flights... the ones that really bug me, though, are the not being waterproof -- not that conventional books are terribly waterproof, but reading in the bathtub or by the pool or carrying a book around in the rain is risking a book, not my entire library and a pricey device! -- and feeling conspicuous. the latter will improve with time, but right now it's a bit of an issue... if i'm sitting out in the open reading along on the netbook, people seem compelled to talk to me and ask questions about it, which is pretty much the opposite of what i want when i'm trying to lose my environment in favor of a book. i expect that any of the fancier dedicated gadgets would just make this one worse. jesse suggested that the easy way around this is putting in a pair of earbuds, even if they're not playing anything. guess i'll give that a go on ebook #2.

there's plenty to love, though. #1, weight. the process of packing up the apartment is making this one hit home... i get attached to books, i have a hard time bringing myself to sell or donate the ones i've read and loved; if i can keep 'em in (pretty smallish) files, problem solved. on the other hand, however, lending gets a bit messier. (tangent - anybody want to "borrow" any of the novels i've read recently? for long-term to forever? jesse's asked me if thinning the bookshelves would be possible, and i figure handing things off to friends would be easier on my packrat instincts.)

an offshoot of the weight issue, if i can keep the battery running, i'm not going to realize halfway through the trip to work that i'm at the end of my novel and have nothing to keep me entertained the rest of the day's trips...

for the netbook, anyway, low light is no problem. it at least feels less disturbing on nighttime flights or in cars than the little spotlights.

the eyestrain isn't bad. granted, i haven't been sitting down for hours-long reading marathons lately, but with the adjustable-size font i think it may actually be less straining than a typical paperback if you're not out in the sun.

as a good little environmentalist whenever it starts to get convenient, i don't think i'm really concerned that they're charging as much for a bunch of electrons as they do for a paperback. print media publishers are struggling, a little profit's not going to kill anyone. and with ereader, anyway, i don't think the books actually are as expensive -- most of the full prices are comparable, and they apply a little credit to your account with each purchase to go towards the next one. and it's quite a bit cheaper when you're too antsy to wait for the paperback edition.

if we all switched to ebooks, i'd miss the physical bookstore experience -- i admit it, i love going, grabbing some overpriced coffee, browsing my way around slowly, reading backs of books. i love the conversations that start when you go to a bookstore with someone.

but anyway. so far, tentative thumbs up on the ebooks.

AC adapter woes

i woke up this morning to find my computer had turned off. (passed out by my laptop, as tends to happen weekends when jesse's working nights -- i try to stay up to adjust to his schedule a bit and fail.) it didn't want to come back on. it was acting like the battery had drained, except it was plugged in.

my instant reaction? go login as a guest on jesse's laptop, start shopping for new AC adapter cord.

fortunately, i ran across this article before i bought anything.

internal circuit breaker. that was it. is this a part of standard laptop ownership training that i missed? i wrote a thank-you note to the guy who wrote the article.

linux on the laptop, round 2

i last tried installing ubuntu linux on my computer last september. the lack of sound made it a little impractical -- the primary things i use my laptop for are internet and music, so it didn't last all that long.

a year makes all the difference. now all the drivers work straight from the cd. back in college, when i regularly used linux (mandrake-flavored!), it pretty much took a fairly knowledgeable geek to deal with it. my tech skills have deteriorated, but it's a nice surprise -- ubuntu's user-friendly! i've only gone command-line so far for a few bouts of moving files around, and that's just because i've missed doing it that way.

i was intending to go dual-boot, but, um, "experimental" is probably not the ideal method for figuring out why a windows vista partition isn't shrinking properly. the internet tells me -- too late -- that it's better to use vista's built-in partitioning tools. i think my oops would've been fixable, but i couldn't find my windows cd. (ransacking the apartment did reveal some floorspace we hadn't seen in a while, though...) i finally decided to just go for it. i'm very very glad that jesse talked me into finally getting a backup hard drive; i tend to reformat when frustrated, and having another copy of everything significantly reduced the associated angst.

tonight's project? see if i can get itunes playlists imported over and set up so i can DJ off this system without having to sort all the music again. preferably by thursday! amarok looks promising, and i actually already managed to get from the itunes library xml file to m3u form playlists... they still point to windows filepaths, though, so learning a teensy bit of perl might be in my future.

(and yeah, we skipped the dancing last night... jesse was tired, and i was wanting to play with the fresh operating system. i don't know what was leading to all the confusion yesterday, but not going out was NOT meant as a political statement!)

we're online!

and the utility closet (opens from the patio) that the cable guy had to get into to get the data cable hooked up was scarily full of feathers and dust... i wonder how long it'd been since anybody had opened the door. i think it might be enough of a hazard to justify a maintenance call?

winamp remote

i don't use winamp a lot. it's mostly my previewing-while-DJing software.

still, i updated it the other day. and while updating, it mentioned a little innovation: as long as your home computer is internet-connected, you can get password-protected streaming access to your music library from the interwebs at large. left my laptop on at home today, and i'm trying it out.

thus far it's pretty sweet. fewer interruptions than most web radio i've tried (um, make that "none" so far), and you can even dictate a streaming speed. (i told it to stick to 125 Kb/s so as not to get too spikey on the internet hogging charts here.) my only big issue thus far is that i don't see a "play something random" button and i forgot to port over any long randomized playlists, so i'm having to actually pick what i want to hear -- less awesome for background soundtracking, but easily remedied.

'k, back to being overwhelmed by all the stuff that didn't magically get done while i was out sick yesterday.

short-lived victory

in my hurry to get away from the office yesterday, it seems i left my laptop's power cord there. oops. oh well, at least it'll be network-capable for the half-hour or so before it dies.

take that, network!

it doesn't take much for me to impress myself anymore. guess i'm getting long past my heydey as a physics geek with full computer skillz.

my parents have DSL with a wireless router, but all their computers are wired. i think i must've always "borrowed" internet access from the neighbors on previous trips with laptop to here--i'd come home and hop on the first unsecured network i found, assuming it belonged to les parents. turns out, none of the networks i'd previously used are on this time around, but their network is definitely still connected.

yup, it's secured. and i'm currently celebrating minor victory because i figured out how to get into dad's router configuration and grab a WEP key.

whee! now if only i could figure out how to make my cell phone work from here... think that's a bit beyond my ability, though.

babelfishies!

for a minor language geek... you have no idea how much fun it is to have babelfish-like translation bots available in google talk. not that it's hard to get to ye olde babelfish, but putting things right in the email window i always have open is nice. i don't really regularly chat with anybody who doesn't speak english (yet!), but i can amuse myself for hours with this stuff. now waiting on the swedish-speaking bots so my friend mats can tell me how much of a garble they make of things...

geek joy!

i installed ubuntu linux on my laptop.

all my computer-related geekage is about 7 years out of date, and the laptop's pretty new with not-so-plug-n-play drivers, so it's been an adventure.

as of this morning: wireless works (the biggest fight! i had to ndiswrap a winxp driver, which i couldn't find in 64-bit -- vista drivers freeze el laptop; a few other issues finally led me to install 32-bit ubuntu. who needs dual processing when the system's not being dragged under by windows anyway?), dvd player works, things are pretty. i just discovered that picasa comes in linux flavor now too. life is nifty.

sound still doesn't work, but it will just as soon as i grab a well-supported usb sound card. and lots of people with the same card are complaining, so i wouldn't be surprised to see it supported soonish.

figuring out linux again is kinda like total immersion in a foreign language. well, total immersion with access to google. i get an error, i go copy it into google, i find someone else who got the same thing, find out what "they" said to do about that, eventually the random attack commands start to make sense in contexts.

now if only it weren't so freakin' time-consuming!