Turning the corner?

[altivo]

We had a major shift in the weather, but I don't think it's permanent. This afternoon the sun put in an appearance and the air dried so that it felt more like June for a change.

Found a use for the high speed printer at work. I generally avoid the thing because it is so complex and doesn't do much that another printer can't do aside from producing many copies of an item quickly. However, it is also a document and image scanner. I had borrowed an out of print book through interlibrary loan and decided to see if I could create an "e-book" of it. It was a good subject for the experiment because the binding was loose enough to let it lie flat without damage and a two page spread fit nicely on one legal sized sheet. The scanner is able to store a whole sequence of frames in its memory and assemble them into a single PDF file, so after some experiments to set resolution and format, I flipped pages one at a time and scanned the entire thing. The results aren't bad at all, except for the fact that the print was fairly small, so I had to use a higher resolution, making the file quite large.

The tomatoes and peppers I started from seed a month ago are ready to plant. Unfortunately everything is too soggy for them. If the weather will hold for two or three days, then we'll be ready, but it looks like even more rain is coming tomorrow night.

The sword of Damocles is hanging over our arena roof too, in the form of a very large oak branch. I noticed this morning that the top of one of our tall oaks had broken during one of this week's storms, but rather than falling all the way to the ground it caught by one branch and is suspended about 50 feet in the air, upside down over the roof. Hopefully it will fall soon while it is still green and springy. Then the thinner branches and leaves will cushion the impact and bounce it off the edge of the roof. If it stays up there until winter, it may do a lot more damage. It's too high and inaccessible for us to do much other than wait for it to fall of its own accord. Guess I should try to get a photo of it in case we need to file an insurance claim.

Comments

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

That's probably a good idea about the branch, although one gum tree branch nearby hung broken for several months before it finally fell.

Is that how E'books are created? I've been tending to read more and more ebooks lately, although I wish I still had the print version for reading while moving about.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

For portability you can't beat a portable e-book reader. I have this one and love it. The screen is backlit, it has a working battery life of over 12 hours before it needs recharging, and it's no larger or heavier than a paperback book. With a 128MB SMC in it, you can store 25 or 30 complete books at once. Now there's the Amazon Kindle, too, but it's larger and costs more, and doesn't have the backlighting so you can't read it in the dark.

As for how e-books are made, most of them are generated from the machine-readable text that the publisher used. Optical scanning is only needed for older titles that are out of print, and even then many are actually re-keyed manually like the ones in Project Gutenberg.

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

Hey now that is snazzy :) Thanks for sharing that Hoss, it looks like just the thing to read on the move and 12 hour battery life is very good.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Check the fine print. I know at one time they didn't sell it outside the US and Canada, but that may have changed. I'm pretty sure you can get the the Kindle outside the US, but I don't know offhand about Ebookwise. I understand older models of PalmPilot are easy to get used, too, and they can be used to read ebooks from various sources.

I just checked. I've underestimated the number of titles that fit into the Ebookwise reader. I've got 60 on mine and it's not even half full. Some of those are short stories, though. It doesn't do wireless like the Kindle, but it has a built-in modem and can dial your internet provider to download titles.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

I've been waiting for a proper electronic paper reader, something that's not tied to the manufacturers systems like Kindle. I've been reading PDF formats with my 12" laptop, though the 2½ hour battery life is a bit limiting. Then again, I guess I'd read through the night if I didn't need to recharge that thing every now and then. :-)

Hopefully something suitable will pop out from China some day soon, there's so much to read... ^^

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I agree about the Kindle. Everyone has been talking about it as if there were no other practical devices, but there have been other good ones for a while. It's just that Amazon has more marketing clout and could generate more press and chatter. The lack of backlighting and the proprietary format put me off the Kindle for now.

The Ebookwise device is not proprietary in the same sense. You can load your own content to it, either by uploading to their website, which formats it for you, and then downloading to your device (no charge for the service,) or by getting free software they distribute (Windows only alas) that allows you to format text as you wish and load it directly to the device. I'm not sure they've actually published their format, as such, but at least you can easily load content of your choice and without cost. I've loaded several Project Gutenberg titles myself.

I imagine PalmPilot or similar devices that can run the "Plucker" format are easily available in Europe. People who use these for business want to upgrade every time a new model comes out, so there are lots of used ones available for fairly low prices. The same list of titles that are available in Ebookwise format can be had in Plucker, and again, your own text can be converted to the format.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

PalmPilots are unfortunately scarce, here in the land of Nokia everyone remotely businessy got one or two models of Communicator for that stuff. But something like Palm would probably be quite suitable for the task, at least if the material is in the pure text format. Scrolling around an A4-sized image wouldn't be that much fun anymore...

But well, it's just a matter of time before there's cheap copies of Kindle around, with double the features and a fraction of the restrictions. I guess the lack of backlight is a bit annoying, but if we somehow manage to tackle the old-tech paper books... =)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Actually I'd expect the plucker stuff to run on Nokia hardware. It's not limited to Palm, I just thought of Palm first. The description usually given is that it runs on "smart" devices, including cell phones and PDAs. I don't think of phones because mine is too limited for that sort of stuff.

I like the backlighted display because I can read it in the dark. Can't do that with paper books. It also makes the ordinary LCD display more readable under varying lighting conditions. Kindle's "electronic paper" display is a totally different technology, I think. It may not even be possible to backlight it.

[farhoug.livejournal.com]

Looks like there's no Symbian port for Plucker. Communicators would be interesting platforms for ebooks though, with their wide screen format. I'll have to get one of those some day, it might be handy for other stuff too.

I guess it's pretty useless trying to backlight an electronic paper screen, I gather it's usually based on electrostatically flipping "pixels" so that either their black or white side faces the user. It would probably just block most of the light.

I think I've read somewhere that an LCD panel with ePaper-like qualities has been made, so that it'll keep its image after the power has been turned off. *wants*

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Like planetary wind pattern hand me down...we get your weather
a little later.

Hail, lightning, thunder that starts distant, rolls in and
rattles walls and windows.

Glorious!

Of course all the flowers I planted are beaten to death
and shredded, along with the potted stuff I was going to
put in later. *le sigh*

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have baby tomato and pepper plants that I've been carfully nurturing along. I keep delaying putting them outside because they'll get flattened before they even have a chance, but soon I'll have no choice. They need full sun before they get all long and spindly.

We need hay too. The winter supply is nearly gone, and we're giving the sheep a mix that includes some two year old stuff. They can handle it, but they complain loudly about it. As long as this weather continues, there will be no hay. It needs four or five predictably dry days.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

It /is/ about haying time innit?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

It is indeed. And because the yuppie scum have used the futures market to run the price of corn up to the moon, expecting it all to be turned into fuel for their fat-ass SUVs, farmers around here are producing much less hay. They've plowed up their hayfields to plant corn, hoping for a windfall. I expect a 50% increase in the price of hay this year. The economic policies of the last eight years are about to plunge the entire nation into a depression to rival the one we had 70 years ago.

Have you noticed the price of beef lately? We already had cut way back on the amount of it we consume, but I never expected to see prices hit $12 a pound. The cost of oil for transportation is part of it, but the greatest portion is the price of corn for feed, and that is being raised artificially by speculators. The profit sucking oil industry is draining our entire economy of its life blood.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Tun a negative into a positive.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

What, you mean like incite the masses to rise up and assassinate the oil barons or throw them into a dungeon? Much as I like the idea, I don't think it will happen. Americans have grown much too short sighted to see what is really going on here.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

No, make your personal bad thing into a good
thing. The Revolution only comes when we all
work for our better interests.

Unfortunetly I don't believe people do that.

Humans, like all other animals, don't work
for whats rationally good for them, they
work for whats pleasurable. Its not Benthan,
its B.F. Skinner. Its not, "whats good for
us? Lets talk and plan, in our own best
interest" its "What can I do, right this
second, to kill someone and enjoy doing it?"

Yes, I do have a rather low opine of my fellows.

*rolls his eyes*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BUFYh2Xnj4