Category: General

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General

Living the ebook dream

Four years ago, I was looking forward to an ebook future. Well, four years have passed and I’m happy to say that we’re finally there.

I picked up an Amazon Kindle when I was in Seattle earlier in the year. Basic summary: awesome.

Everyone has an opinion about what the Kindle is going to be like – typically, they enumerate the ways in which paper books are superior. But it’s interesting to see how my friends have reacted when they finally played with the device. The e-ink screen is a pleasure to read from. It is slightly different from paper because it has a slight plastic-y sheen to it, but it’s easy to read from in the same way that paper is. The page flickers briefly as you change pages, but it’s something which you stop noticing quickly.

I decided to write about my experience because I’ve just done my ebook litmus test: I went on holiday for a week and read only from the Kindle. It was a good experience!

Now, I bought the Kindle in the US and brought it here to the UK so I can’t actually buy any books for it. However, there are quite a lot of old out-of-copyright books available in Kindle-compatible format on the internet and I can copy them onto the device via USB. So my holiday library consisted of lots of history, science and engineering books from before 1950. But, hey, that’s what I mostly read anyway so it’s no bad thing.

First big win: I took about 40 books on holiday with me, and they all fitted into the space which one paperback would take up.

Second big win: You can highlight passages in the book you’re reading as you go, and then view all of the highlighted passages together on a summary page. I used this to mark sections which I wanted to research further, and also to mark out the ‘key’ paragraphs in the book. I’m one of those people who hates scribbling on a book with a pencil. But I also learn best when I’m interacting with the text rather than reading it passively. So I have unexpectedly fallen in love with the highlighting feature on the Kindle.

Third win: Variable font size. I usually wear contact lenses. If I don’t have my contact lenses in, or if it’s low light conditions, I just bump the font size up and read in comfort. You can’t do this on paper.

Fourth win: Ergonomics. When the Kindle was launched, it didn’t wow anyone with it’s looks. However, once you start reading with it, it starts to make more sense. I hold the Kindle in at least two different ways – in my right hand with either my thumb hitting the right-hand ‘next’ button or my fingertips curling round to hit the left-hand ‘next’ button. I very quickly forget that I’m holding “a device” and just tap the button to turn the page. I find it much more pleasant to hold a Kindle than a paperback book because you don’t have to continually hold the pages open. My hands and arms are much more relaxed when reading the Kindle.

That’s the good stuff. Now for some downsides.

I had to recharge it once during the week. I get good battery life because I have the network turned off. Actually, that’s almost part of the problem; the battery life is so good that you forget that the device needs charging and then it comes as a surprise.

The “library” part of the Kindle isn’t very good. It should have different areas for “currently reading” and “read recently” and “unread” and “read”. When you hit the ‘go home’ button on the keyboard, it currently always goes to the first page of your library – it should remember where you were last time. The “read” section is psychologically important. There’s some small part of my brain which likes putting a completed book back on the shelf like some kind of trophy. When I finish a book on the Kindle, there’s no fanfare or celebration. It’d be great to see some kind of cheap trick here – maybe it could tell you when you started reading the book, and how long you spent reading it. Anything, really!

I’d like an easy way to see how much further it is to the end of the chapter – ie. should I go to sleep now, or stay up reading for another ten minutes. I do this all the time with paperback books but it’s not very easy on the Kindle.

The ‘highlighting’ feature doesn’t allow you to span pages, as far as I can tell. This is annoying if I want to highlight a paragraph which spans two pages.

I had two crashes during my week’s holiday which required me to hit the small reset button under the back cover. I guess it’s early days for the software still.

I use highlighting all the time, and never use notes or dictionary. I’d love to customize the click action during reading so that it goes straight to highlight mode without going via the menu.

The number of books available on Kindle is still a limiting factor, although obviously Amazon are working daily to improve selection. The last time I went on holiday, I took four print books and none were available on Kindle at that time. On this holiday, I played to a Kindle strength. There are a huge number of old out-of-copyright books available digitally and, it seems, there’s a lot of really good old books out there!

That’s all the downsides I encountered. Overall, it is a brilliant device for reading. It’s also a game-changing device too. In the US it connects to the amazon store using mobile phone like technology. This means you can browse and buy books from the Kindle without needing a PC. In other words, the Kindle is a true ebook device not “one of those computer things”.

The future is here. The Kindle rocks.

Categories
General

Flying upside down

Someone asked me a while ago how aeroplanes can fly upside down. After all, the wings normally ‘suck’ the plane upwards. So if you fly upside down then surely they suck the plane down to the ground?

The trick is that you don’t just flip the plane over and try to fly horizontally – if you did that, you would get sucked down. Instead, you also point the nose a little bit up towards the sky so that your wings are passing through the air at the same angle as they would do in normal flight (somewhere between zero and fifteen degrees).

Of course, that’s all just theoryschmeery until you see someone actually doing it for real. Awesome.

Categories
General

What’s an electron, anyway?

An electron is one of those tiny negative particles, right? Well, that’s not how things were originally.

The word itself comes from the greek for amber (ήλεκτρον) because that’s how people first noticed the phenomena of charged objects. For some reason, scientists throughout time have been obsessed with rubbing various objects with cat fur to see what happened.

I’ve been reading the 1917 book “The Electron” by Robert Millikan (of the oil drop fame). He identifies George Stoney (in 1891) as the person who first suggested the word. However, this was in the days before anyone had identified an electron as a distinct object. When Stoney used the word ‘electron’ he defined it to be a “unit of electricity, namely that quantity of electricity which must pass through a solution in order to liberate .. one atom of hydrogen”. So, in 1891, Stoney wasn’t talking about the electron as a ‘thing’ but as an amount of charge, which today we’d measure as coulombs.

At some point the meaning must have changed, presumably after JJ Thomson discovered his ‘corpuscles’ in 1897 and Millikan measured the charge on them around 1909.

However, I was surprised to read the following line in the later chapters of the Millikan book:

“We have concerned ourselves with studying the properties of these electrons themselves and have found that they are of two kinds, negative and positive, which are however, exactly alike in strength of charge but wholly different in inertia or mass”

So it seems that in 1917 the word ‘electron’ was being used to collectively refer to what we now call electrons and protons. I have no idea of exactly when the meaning finally shifted to the modern version.

Categories
General

BBC invents new SI unit

BBC News reports: “The Mars Phoenix lander touched down … after a 680-million-km journey”.

I’m amused by “million kilometre” as a unit of measurement. What happened to the gigametre? Why mix french and greek? Perhaps this is actually a clever new idea. We could start measuring hard disk capacity like “350 million kilobytes” to emphasise just how mindbogglngly large they are.

Categories
General Programming

Netscape; hindsight is foresight

I have been enjoying reading “Architects of the Web” (see it on my Amazon bookshelf), a collection of stories from the early days of Netscape, Yahoo and the like. Perhaps in an attempt to avoid the doom of repetition, I’ve been reading a lot of “software history” recently … Seattle Public Library has got plenty of cool books.

Chapter one follows the founding of Netscape, from the early days of NCSA Mosaic, the fortuitous meeting of Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark and the beginning of the browser wars. I remember this from first time around, but I didn’t really understand all of what was going on.

The book progresses to follow the start of the browser wars, AOL beginning to bundle IE, Netscape launching the communicator suite …

And then the Netscape part of the book ends.

What? The end? But what about the browser wars? Microsoft getting sued by their own government? The AOL buyout? The Time Warner merger? Open sourcing of mozilla? The doldrums of tangled source code? And finally the rise of firefox?

As I flipped back to the opening “acknowledgements” page, I suddenly understand.

It was written in December 1996.

OMG. This book is a history of the web from the world of 1996. They had no idea what was coming next. Napster was nearly three years away. iTunes and the DRM wars would wait another few years beyond that. Skype, blogs, Flickr and web2.0 weren’t even on the radar yet.

But then again, what would happen if I wrote a ‘history of the web’ book today? Twelve years from now, someone might pick it up and say “Wow, these guys had no idea that X, Y and Z were just around the corner”.

I remember during the early days of Napster, I thought “this is basically illegal and will get squished”. But it took me a while to understand that (although Napster itself would ultimately be doomed) a genie had came out from a bottle and wasn’t ever going back in. Napster itself would end up dead, but so would the “old way of thinking”. It maybe took over a decade, but now stores are selling DRM free digital music and making lots of money doing so. People voted with their feet and it’s hard to stop a crowd.

So it occurs to me that in order to have a chance of seeing the new X, Y and Z before they creep over the horizon, you probably want to try letting go some of your ‘immutable assumptions’ about the world, and see what’d change if the assumption didn’t hold any more. Here’s some which pop into my head: ‘you need to have a bank account to put your money into’, ‘computers are not disposable items’, ‘companies need to keep stuff secret from their competitors’. Coincidentally, I’m also reading a book about Einstein’s life (on my bookshelf) and he’s the posterchild for the the “what happens if we ignore this fundamental assumption” school of thought.

So I’m now wondering: which ‘truths’ will have their demise chronicled in the history books of the future?