Chronicling the depravities of the State.
OK just a heads up for anybody who read Google released a beta of Chrome OS, it’s a hoax. Somebody posted a Google Sites page with a virtual machine image and ISO download of “Chrome OS” which is actually SuSE Studio with Chrome installed. The site has since been disabled.
When Google releases Chrome OS trust me, they’ll post it on their official blog.
In the post I made previewing the Barnes and Nobel Nook eReader device I mentioned the lending feature. Well it appears the lending feature is completely gimped.
Well it appears each title you have can only be loaned out once and only for 14 days. Note that the wording seems to imply you can loan a title once period, not once per person. The other strike against this feature is a book can only be loaned out if the published allows this behavior. I can officially strike that feature off as something cool.
Joe Huffman does a quick Internet approved survey to determine popularity between the gun rights crowd and the anti-gunners. He uses the number of followers each have on Twitter which is the Internet excepted method of determining everything.
Well we’re winning. In fact the Brady Bunch’s actual Twitter account is almost eclipsed in popularity by Mr. Huffman’s own daughter. Of course Mr. Huffman doesn’t take into consideration another possible meaning behind this. Anti-gunners are too stupid to understand how to use a service that involves sending 140 character messages. I guess typing is hard for any group of people who are using both of their hands to cover their ears while they scream, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU LA LA LA!” at the stop of their lungs.
It’s no secret to those who know me that I read a lot. I also have a habit of reading several books at the same time. According to my girlfriend that’s messed up but alas I usually have several topics I’m interested in at the same time and depending on the interest that’s most peaked at the time I’ll read a different book. Due to this I’ve been following the e-book reader market.
I bought an Amazon Kindle about a year and a half ago and have absolutely loved it. It’s nice being able to carry my entire library with me wherever I go. It’s also convenient since I don’t have to either drive to a book store to purchase a book or order it online and wait for the title to be delivered. Before getting my Kindle I spent a lot of time in Barnes and Nobel carousing books. Now I stop in there maybe once every couple of months to browse their non-fiction titles since the Kindle store has a pretty horrible selection in that department.
Well Barnes and Nobel yesterday (or maybe the day before I forgot) announced their entry into the e-book reader market, the Nook. Of course this requires a comparison of the two products.
The Nook stands out from the Kindle in a few areas. The first, and most obvious, is the LCD touch screen located below the ePaper display. This is where you do all your navigating and controls. More on that in a bit. The second difference is the Nook uses AT&T’s 3G network instead of Sprint’s. But to alleviate the pains of using AT&T’s network (seriously their network has less coverage than most bikinis) the Nook also includes Wi-Fi. Two other features the Nook has that the latest Kindle doesn’t (although the previous model did) is a replaceable battery and a memory card slot.
I guess I’m going to cover my thoughts on the differences. First I want to talk about the LCD touch screen being touted as the chief wham-bam feature of the Nook. I don’t like it. Yup you heard me right I don’t like it. My reasoning is three fold. First LCD screens suck power every second they are one. Displays using ePaper technology only use power while they are actively switching pages meaning while you are reading a page no power is being used by the display. That means the LCD screen on the Nook will drop the battery life and long battery life is one of my favorite features of e-book readers.
The second issue I have with the LCD is viewing it outside. See ePaper displays work very well in direct sunlight so you can comfortably use the devices outside. LCDs on the other hand become very difficult to read in direct sunlight so the Nook has a contrast here. The main reader works best with a lot of light while the navigation screen works best without direct light hitting it. This seems like a duality in usefulness to me.
The third issue I have with the LCD screen is the fact LCD screens are backlit. This means the LCD screen is going to be much brighter than the ePaper display that you actually read from. The problem is the human eye is drawn more towards bright items then items having no source of light. Unless there is a way to easily kill the backlight on the LCD while reading a book I would find this to be quite an annoyance after some time. Again this is coming from a person who can plop down and read for a couple hours straight, I doubt it would be any sort of issue if you only read a few minutes at a time (but if that’s you why waste your money on an e-book reader?).
I hate AT&T’s network. You don’t hear this often but I love being on Sprint’s network. Why? Because I get data coverage almost everywhere and phone coverage in even more places. I can get high speed data in a podunk little town like Winona, Minnesota and basic data in Caledonia, MN (where AT&T coverage is practically non-existant). When my friends on AT&T have coverage issues I have three or four bars normally. Hell my phone works in my apartments garage. So needless to say I really like being able to purchase books on my Kindle from practically anywhere without the need for Wi-Fi. But having the option of Wi-Fi for times when data service coverage is unavailable is a great idea which I highly approve of.
With that said there are some features of the Nook I really like. There is a method of loaning books to friends which the Kindle completely lacks. Honestly I don’t really lend books to friends but it would be nice to have the option should the situation arise. The truth of the matter though is we need to eliminate DRM all together. Of course I believe it will take the publishing industry many years to figure this out. Hell look how long it took the music industry until they started allowing DRM free MP3s to be sold and later songs sold on the iTunes music store.
The removable battery is a huge plus in my book. I still have the first generation Kindle and hence a removable battery. But alas I’m not one to phase our my devices overly often unless a new device has new features that can justify an upgrade to me. I do run into battery failure issues with my devices and do desire a method to replace the battery myself when that occurs. This is one of the issues I have with the iPhone and iPod series of products. With that said I can’t imagine a situation where I’d need to replace a battery in an ePaper device due to depleting the battery through use. Seriously I can go a couple weeks with my Kindle without needing to recharge it so long as I keep the wireless switched off.
Barnes and Nobel is claiming 1,000,000 e-books when their store goes live. Amazon’s Kindle store currently proclaims 350,000 titles. Depending on what titles Barnes and Nobel is claiming (for instance they mention free e-books which are probably out of copyright titles which means I can also get them free on my Kindle) this could be a huge boon. I know the Kindle store has some odd gaps in their titles (Jurassic Park still isn’t available). If Barnes and Nobel can get a larger selection of titles that would jump them ahead pretty far.
The Nook does support native PDFs by the looks of it. Many papers I read are in PDF format and I can get them on my Kindle after a dance involving a free e-mail address that sends the PDF to Amazon to convert it. The Kindle DX natively supports PDFs but it’s also a huge honking device compared to my paperback sized Kindle. The more natively formatted formats supported on a device the better in my opinion.
I’ll hold my final judgement until the Nook is actually released but I really don’t see any major advantage it has over the Kindle and the LCD is a huge disadvantage on a dedicated reading device in my opinion. But one fact is certainly true competition is good and the Nook will give some heavy competition to the Kindle.
Barnes and Nobel are also claiming special in-store features. This is really meaningless to me since one of the advantages, to me, of an e-book reader is not having to go to a store to gain any features. But again I highly doubt any main feature of the Nook will depend on going into a Barnes and Nobel store to use it.
Nothing dreadfully much to report here but Apple finally released a new mouse. I know not a big deal it’s a fucking mouse. But this one finally eliminates that damned trackball that always ended up not functioning after a short while due to dust and other crud getting under the ball. Instead this one is a multi-touch mouse which means no buttons are on it at all and the mouse works off of the same touch gestures as the trackpad on newer Apple laptops. I’ve been waiting for a company to do something like this for about ten years now, honestly was it really that hard?
Well it appears as though the anti-gunners have been handed a new weapon. I say that in a rather snarky manner as it’s really a new weapon handed to everybody online, at least in the state of Texas. Texas’s H.B. 2003 law took effect September 1, 2009 and the first arrest under this law has occurred:
The new Texas law criminalizes online harassment on social networking sites and through e-mail or text messaging. H.B. 2003 states a person commits a third degree felony if the person posts one or more messages on a social networking site with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate or threaten another person.
You read that right if you post more than one “harmful, fraudulent, or intimidating” (quotes are donating idiocy not direct quoting) post on a social networking site you are a felon under Texas law.
Why do I say it’s the anti-gunner’s new weapon? Because they are usually whiney assholes who would use such laws as are most people who base arguments on emotions instead of facts. Remember according to anti-gunners just mentioning the word gun can be threatening to them. Anyways if you’re in Texas just beware of this law before you post anything on any social networking site.
Further Research
Once in a while I like to post useful or interesting tools I find scattered throughout the Internet. Well I will openly admit I hate Adobe Flash. It’s a massive resource hog that generally does nothing useful but certainly gums up a web page. But every so often (YouTube) it’s useful.
On Firefox I deal with such things via NoScript. But most of the time I’m using Safari and I haven’t found a nice lightweight tool to accomplish the same thing. Happily I can say I found such a plugin called ClickToFlash. It’s simple, instead of Flash code loading on a webpage you get a little box that says “Flash” in it. If you want to play it you click on the box and the Flash loads. You can whitelist sites, like YouTube, so all the Flash content will load without you haven’t to do anything for that single site.
Anyways it’s useful, small, and single purpose which are the type of tools I like.
So I tried Google Chrome yet again on my Mac. For those of you not in the loop Chrome is still in development on Steve Job’s platform. Either way it was pretty nice, certainly faster than Safari and didn’t beach ball of death me for minutes at a time. The problem though? Well it has two helper processes that soak up 100% of this MacBook Pro’s processor. Honestly it was completely unnoticeable so the processes must be at a pretty low priority but once I was running on the battery and my little power indicator went from it’s usual 5.5 hours to 2.5 I figured something was up.
Yup it certainly isn’t ready for average users quite yet but is getting closer. Most of the features are there minus a few things like certificate management and plug-in support.
Good news everybody Yahoo is finally doing something to help improve the Internet. News was brought to my attention that GeoCities is being shutdown. To this end Yahoo also release the most useful help file on their site.
I’m sure most of you know of GeoCities. Although there were sometimes little nuggets of great information somebody pounded together in 5 minutes you had to hope the site wasn’t over the 3kb (at least that’s what it seemed like) limit imposed by Yahoo. Likewise you had to hop there weren’t so many adds injected into the site by Yahoo that it would make your browser take a big dump (remember we didn’t always have those super fast JavaScript engines).
Well good riddance. I only wish I could do a Spartan kick in GeoCities’s chest to send them down an apparently never ending void.
I’m a little paranoid about my data. I perform complete system backups to external hard drives on a regular basis but that doesn’t cover my apartment complex burning down. No for real data integrity you need a copy of your data offsite. To that extent I perform a nightly backup of my most important data to Amazon S3.
When accessing your Amazon S3 storage there are two keys you need. The first is the access key and the second is the secret key. Well a little over a month ago Amazon changed my access key meaning that if I lost my configuration file for my backup software I’d be boned as I could no longer generate or view the secret key for my previous access key.
This of course irritated me as I had to re-upload all my data using the new key to ensure long term survivability of my backup. Well Amazon just released a feature allow you to rotate access keys and most importantly view all your previous keys and their accompanying secret key. Yup that’s a great feature, sure would have loved to have that about a month ago.