Category: Thoughts
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Reading Infinite Jest on the Kindle versus dead tree pulp
When I was a younger man sans spouse and kids, I had more time for the more diverting pursuits, pursuits like reading post-post-modern, 1,000-page novels written by genius authors who loved footnotes. Exhibit A: Infinite Jest by the late David Foster Wallace. You can see the beast pictured here to the left. Ah, but those…
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God is god: Ron Moore’s most excellent end for BSG
So it’s over. Last night marked the final episode of one of the more original and fascinating television series to come along, Ron Moore’s thoughtful re-imagining of the cheesy 1970’s scifi classic Battlestar Galactica. In Moore’s hands, and made possible by a very talented cast, the newly-updated Battlestar Galactica, or BSG as they say on…
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Added a page of stuff I’m trying out
I just moved over from my old site a page I call “just messing with,” which lists software, web sites or gadgets that I’m giving a trial run. That’s followed on the page by a list of things that didn’t make the cut, under the heading “Canned.” Today, I just quickly cut and pasted the…
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Instapaper’s instantly useful for sending articles to Kindles
For a while now, I’ve found that the best way to read long-ish online articles and blog posts is to email them to my Kindle. This avoids the horrid eye strain from reading them on my computer and is more environmentally-friendly than printing them out on paper. Back in December, I even wrote a simple…
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Insanely great Kindle on iPhone needs one big improvement
(Updated 3/5) Wow – just wow. Pretty much ever since Amazon announced its nifty Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, people have been predicting that Apple would jump into the e-book game and blow Amazon away. Today, Amazon decided it wasn’t going to wait around and introduced an e-book reader program for the iPhone and…
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Dreaded HP inkjet printer cartridge problem strikes
Inkjet printers are, in many ways, a phenomenally positive testament to the power of Moore’s law and the advance of technology and all that good stuff. As I’ve mentioned before, around 1990 I bought one of the first Hewlett-Packard Deskjet printers, driving up to New Hampshire to save the sales tax on the $750 purchase.…
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The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading
Well, it’s been almost two months since Apple announced the huge expansion of higher-quality and DRM-free music in its iTunes Store “Plus” offerings and I think it’s fair to say that the upgrade process is an unmitigated disaster. Despite personally paying 30 cents per track to upgrade hundreds of tracks, Apple has erased my metadata,…
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Switching Time Machine drives easy but not quick
Back in December, 2007, when I upgraded my super-duper 24″ iMac to Mac OS X 10.5, I immediately turned on the Time Machine automatic backup program. Seeing as how I had a less-than-half-full 500 GB hard drive in the iMac, I figured I’d be fine using a 500 GB Western Digital MyBook Pro external drive…
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Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google
It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an…