Blink, always with the Blink…

Posted on November 5, 2010 by blogmywiki

A while back a friend said to me “You Moffat-ites are all the same, you all cite Blink… yeah, yeah, time travel, big deal…”

Well, yes we do cite Blink. I think it’s not just the best episode of Doctor Who ever, it’s one of the best bits of TV ever.

Blink was on BBC Three tonight. Again. We all watched it. For probably the 17th time.

I love it more than ever. Yes, the great lines: “What’s so great about sad?” “It’s happy – for deep people.” “Why does nobody ever call the police?” “Life is short and you are hot.” “It’s a phone number. Not a promise. Not an IOU.”

Yes, the music and shots of the angels at the windows of Westerdrumlins are spooky and Diana-Rigg-era-Avengers-worthy.

Yes, Sally Sparrow is the greatest assistant the Doctor never had. But Sally Sparrow is gone.

Tonight the sheer pathos of the line “Life is long and you are hot” hit me, delivered by Billy later on the same day that Sally first met him, but – literally – a lifetime away for poor Billy.

And then it struck me. And I am probably going to regret this. But part of the thing about Blink was that it was, at the time of first transmission, the first rampantly heterosexual episode of Doctor Who in some time.

Posted in BBC, Doctor Who, media, TV | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

More Kindle finds & features

Posted on October 4, 2010 by blogmywiki

More Kindle 3 features

Found a few more things out about the Kindle 3 today:

  • You can choose, navigate and skip around MP3 files by putting them in the ‘Audible’ folder – so you can have MP3 audio books. Or, presumably, music.
  • You can do a screengrab by pressing Shift+Alt+G – it puts a GIF in the root folder.
  • There’s a hidden Connect 5 and minesweeper game – Shift+Alt+M
  • There is a hidden image viewer. To use it, you have to make a folder called ‘pictures’ in the root and your images must be in named sub-folders. The folders then show up in the main home menu list of items – you may need to press alt-Z to rescan the folders. Apparently, on previous Kindles Alt-shift-O used to add a picture as a screensaver. I tried it on the Kindle 3 and a bar like a ruler scaled from 1 to 9 appeared at the bottom of the screen. I couldn’t work out how to use this, if it has any function – perhaps this is something to do with the order of screensaver images? Or maybe it’s just a ruler!
    Interestingly, using the image browser puts ‘.manga’ files in the images’ directory, suggesting there was, at one time, a comic-reading function planned for the Kindle.
  • You can enter numbers using Alt plus the top row on the keyboard. This means…
  • You can enter the magic 3 digit codes. Go to the home menu, then settings. Using alt and the top row you can enter codes like 311 to switch carrier (I cancelled this pretty quickly!). Code 126 used to list the developers at Lab126 who designed the Kindle, but I couldn’t get this to work on the Kindle 3.

Useful links

Neat Kindle 3 review – so much better than mine: http://paulstamatiou.com/review-amazon-kindle-3-wi-fi-reading-device

Kindle 3 keyboard shortcuts: http://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/2010/08/29/kindle-3-shortcuts-hot-keys-and-hidden-features/

Guide to hacking previous models of the Kindle: http://igorsk.blogspot.com/2007/12/hacking-kindle-part-3-root-shell-and.html

Kindle 3 tear-down. Well, this rather excitable antipodean gentleman took the cover off and filmed it, which is more than I’ll be doing. The mysterious socket on the left is just where you plug in the cover with the built-in lamp, so don’t get excited. It’s no iMac mezzanine slot.
http://www.eevblog.com/2010/09/03/eevblog-109-amazon-kindle-3-3ggsmwifi-6-teardown/

Posted in computers | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Amazon 3G Kindle first impressions

Posted on October 1, 2010 by blogmywiki

Kindle displaying BBC News web page

I finally got my Amazon Kindle today – here are my first impressions. It’s my first electronic book-reader – partly because it’s the first one to come up to snuff, but I also bought it because I was intrigued with the technology, the free 3G connection – and the low price tag. At that price, it would have been rude not to…

Display

The display is just stunning. I have to confess that when I got it out of the box, I tried to peel what I thought was a printed instruction label off the front of the unit. It wasn’t a printed label – it was the display actually working. The electronic ink technology really is fantastic.

It was much smaller than I expected, but that’s no bad thing… the size of paperback, only thinner. Crucially, it fits in my inside jacket pocket.

I bought it via my Amazon account, so it came pre-registered and knew who I was – which was nice. I have the 3G version which downloaded a few free books (Sherlock Holmes, natch) pretty quickly – though the choice of free books is a bit puzzling at first glance. I can get Pride & Prejudice for free, but I have to pay for Emma? Odd. I guess there may be ways round that.

Power

Charging is via the usual USB charger – a neat small mains plug with the Amazon logo. The lead that plugs into the Kindle itself has a USB micro B plug on it. It took about an hour to charge it fully, but I was able to pay with it while it charged up. I am quietly confident the battery life will put my iPhone to shame.

Get connected

Getting it hooked up by wifi was a bit trickier – mainly because my wireless LAN password has numbers in it, and there is no numerical keypad; you have to press the symbol key and navigate with a cursor to enter numbers. Very fiddly, but once I’d managed to type the right password in it connected to my wifi router straight away. You can manage wifi connections much as you can on a laptop or iPhone, and when it loses a wifi connection, the 3G model will revert to Vodafone 3G, EDGE or GPRS. My iPhone’s 3G coverage on O2 is pretty ropey, so it’ll be interesting to compare – the main question being whether it’ll work on my desk at work.

It comes with the Oxford American English dictionary, but while playing with it I noticed there’s an Oxford British English dictionary as well, which you can make the default resource for looking words up as you read. Having a decent dictionary always to hand is very neat – I wish OS X had a British dictionary.

Kindle displaying BBC News web page

Web-browser

Then I had to crank up the web browser. This was actually much better than I expected, but this really is where the lack of a trackpad or a touch screen becomes noticable. You have to navigate using the small 5 way cursor arrangements, which hops between links on the page.

The BBC News web site and Twitter were perfectly usable, if a bit fiddly. The keyboard is tiny and a bit prone to bounce. No-one will be writing long notes or emails on this device – it’s just about ok for a tweet, but my iPhone is much more usable for this. Pages render quite slowly, which is a limitation of the display technology I suspect – but when you zoom in, they look pretty good. Photographs are rendered in a pretty impressive, crisp greyscale.

I hope they continue to develop the browser, because with free contractless 3G internet, I think this is actually a very handy resource – especially when the Kindle wants to charge you a quid or more a month just to download a blog.

MP3 player

The music player sounds very good out of the tiny speakers – you just drag MP3s from your computer into the ‘music’ folder on the Kindle – but it just plays songs in its own order (not sure how it decides) without telling you what they are. You can skip to the next track and turn it on and off while you read, but I think that’s the only control. There don’t seem to be any playlists. I wonder if that’s to discourage you from listening to MP3 audio books rather than paid-for Audible content? They call it ‘background music’, so I’ll probably just be transferring my Durutti Column and Jan Gabarek CDs. Just joking. Well, about Jan Gabarek.

Ooh the screensaver just kicked in – a photo of one of my favourite writers, Virginia Woolf, just appeared. Did it know? Pity there are no free Virginia Woolf books now she’s out of copyright…

Getting stuff on and off again

When you plug the Kindle into a computer it becomes a USB drive and you can’t use the Kindle itself (unless you eject it from the computer, in which case it’ll carry on charging). You can copy files on and off – so it’s more open than an Apple device – but, as I then discovered, it’s not as open as it first seems.

As an experiment, and without reading the instructions, I dragged 5 text files at random from my laptop into the Kindle’s document folder: a plain text TXT file, a PDF, an RTF-formatted document, an HTML text document and an ePub-formatted ebook I had made myself. Only the plain TXT file and the PDF showed up on the Kindle. Navigating PDFs is more difficult than reading plain text or Kindle-formatted books, as the text keep’s the document’s original formatting and pagination and cannot easily be made larger or smaller.

It can read documents in other formats like RTF, Word documents and HTML, but they have to be converted by a slightly odd process that involves emailing them to your Amazon account’s email address – and there can be charges for this conversion process if they go via 3G rather than wifi. I still need to get to grips with this, but I’m a bit disappointed it can’t seem to read an RTF or HTML file transferred directly.

You can avoid charges in two ways – always send them to a special @free.kindle.com address which will only transmit the document over wifi (not 3G), and set your maximum charge limit to £0.00. I do both. A sample RTF document arrived quickly, but I wish I could just drag and drop, especially as I use the RTF format a lot for my own writing (in the excellent Bean OS X word processor). The formatting of the original document wasn’t completely intact either – the Kindle only has a couple of fonts built in, but it knew which bits of the document were serifed and which bits sans-serif. Tabbed indents at the start of each paragraph didn’t make it across though – I’ve had this problem with eBook formats and Blurb books before. I don’t understand what’s so tricky about a single bloody tab indent!

I cranked up the Kindle app on my iPhone and found the books I’d downloaded from Amazon waiting to be loaded onto my phone – but none of the documents I’d transferred myself.

More thoughts as I play and fiddle… and maybe even do some reading ;-)

Posted in computers, fiction, literature | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Will you sign my Kindle?

Posted on September 19, 2010 by blogmywiki

King of the AntsThe other night I ordered a 3G Kindle. I admit, it was late, I was bored… but in the cold light of day I’ve still not cancelled the order.

I’ve never hankered after an electronic book reader before – this will be my first. Partly it’s the price – a sense that, like my Nikon D40 camera and my Lenovo S10-2 netbook, ‘at that price it would be rude not to’. Partly it’s the free 3G aspect. Partly the technology – the idea of this gizmo with electronic ink that consumes so little power. And partly it’s because it’s not made by Apple, and I feel I am sticking it to The Man – The Man in this case being Steve Jobs, whose empire is becoming increasingly cult-like in its marketing and whose beautiful toys are just too eye-wateringly expensive. (Disclaimer: I do own an iPhone 3GS – which I love and use all the fricking time.)

Also, I read a devil of a lot more nowadays than I did even five years ago. I’m not sure why. But physical books are swamping our house again, and I can never bear to part with them. I box them up to sell at boot fairs, and then end up picking out half deciding I want to keep them after all. And I always buy more books at boot fairs anyway.
DSC_8783.JPG Yesterday my sons and I got a handful of Charlie Higson books signed by the author at Foyles bookshop in London. Charlie pulled a copy of his new book, The Dead, out of a tank of rather shy piranhas. It was a nice event and, as at Camp Bestival, he took loads of time to chat to everyone and sign anything they brought along, and pose for photos.

I asked him “do electronic books spell the end of book signings? Would you sign my Kindle?” He said no, he thinks people like a physical object, physical books will survive. The lady from Foyles joked that when they had Stephen Fry in, they thought they might have people wanting their iPads signed, but she thought as well that events like book signings will help keep the printed word alive.

I’m not so sure. Music and photography have almost entirely ‘gone digital’ now, and as electronic book technology improves – and the new Kindle is the first one that comes up to snuff as far as I’m concerned – wouldn’t it be a foolish person who didn’t bet the farm on the written word eventually going the same way?

Posted in Apple, fiction, literature, thrift | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Crap Book Club

Posted on September 11, 2010 by blogmywiki

Having been amazed by the popularity of the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy, given how badly-written and even badly-plotted the books are, I’ve decided I want to start a Crap Book Club.
We could read a popular book and then have some fun slagging it off online or over a drink. For example: what’s the worst or most ludicrous bit of Stieg Larsson? The lengthy description of the tech specs of Salander’s iBook gets my vote for worst bit of writing, and Salander’s boob job is the worst plot development. I mean – she would never do that! I was screaming “Stieg, go back and read book 1 and take notes about Salander’s character and try again.”
I guess anyone can slag off a blockbuster, so extra kudos goes to books which are critically acclaimed, but are, in fact, crap.
Here are some suggestions I’ve already had for a reading list – more please!

  • The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson
  • The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
  • Restless by William Boyd

Posted in fiction, literature | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Monologue of Evil

Posted on July 21, 2010 by blogmywiki

I’m mulling over writing another book – this one will be a proper grown-up book and one of the themes will be Good and Evil and whether they are two sides of the same coin. And then I just accidentally read this:

The Monologue of Evil by Augusto Monterroso

One day, Evil found himself face-to-face with Good and was on the point of eating him up to put an end to their ridiculous dispute once and for all. But when he saw him looking so tiny, Evil thought:

“This can only be a trap. If I now eat up Good when he looks so weak, people will think that I did evil, and the shame will make me cringe and shrink so much that Good will not waste the chance to eat me up, with the difference that then people will think that he did good. For it is difficult to free them from their preconception that what Evil does is evil, and what Good does is good.”

And so it was that Good got off scot-free yet again.

Posted in fiction, literature, recently read | Tagged , | 1 Comment

New neighbours

Posted on July 16, 2010 by blogmywiki

Two removal vans have carted our old neighbours’ possessions off in two separate directions to two different houses, and later today we’ll be getting new neighbours.

I just dropped a welcome card through their letterbox. I did consider writing another pseudonymous card to freak them out:

Hullo. We’re Nigel and Julie from across the street. Welcome to your new home! We’re sure you’re going to love it here, and we admire the fact that you’ve not been put off by the incidents in your house. Still, I’m sure the police did a good job of putting the garden back as it was.

We’ve put you down for car parking-watch duties on Mondays and Tuesdays. You can collect your tabard and clipboard from Number 17. Just like to point out that we don’t allow barbecues or bonfires and no loud music after 7pm.

Key party nights are every third Monday night. This month’s theme is leather.

All the best, Nige & Jools x x x

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

That Apple Presser in Full

Posted on July 16, 2010 by blogmywiki

Today Steve Jobs shocked the world by making some unexpected apologies at a press conference in Cupertino, CA.

He announced to a stunned press pack, “I am sorry. We lost our way.”

As reporters dropped their iPhones in shock, he continued, “We made too much money and became too complacent and arrogant. Too many of our employees behaved like Comic Shop Guy out of The Simpsons. Too many of our products contained design flaws which we denied until the bitter end. This will change.”

“For too long I pursued a petty feud against Adobe, forgetting that without Adobe, the Macintosh would never have been a success even in its niche design markets. Today we are allowing Flash on iOS. We are launching low-spec, low-cost versions of the MacMini and MacBook, and we are cutting the cost of the iPad. We’d like to apologise to everyone whose iTunes accounts were compromised. And we promise to answer the phone when you ring us up.”

“One more thing,” he added after a pause.

“We will allow any track on an iPhone to be used as a ring tone or SMS message alert.”

Ok, ok, I made this all up. That last one is utterly ridiculous.

.

Posted in Apple, computers, fiction, iPhone, MacOS X | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

OS X parental controls on a netbook

Posted on June 1, 2010 by blogmywiki

My kids want to use my Hackintosh netbook – a Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 running Snow Leopard. One of the great things about OS X is its excellent built-in parental controls, but on a netbook with a small 600 pixel-high screen, the buttons for setting them up are off the screen.

I tried using an external monitor – with amusingly mad and useless results… then I found this trick. Open up a Terminal window and type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8

This makes the next window you open small enough to see the required buttons. Set up the parental controls, type
defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1
in the Terminal command line.

Sweet!

Posted in computers, lowendmac, MacOS X | 5 Comments

Recently read

Posted on May 30, 2010 by blogmywiki

I only ever meant my ‘Recently Read’ sidebar to have three books in it at any given time, but after a while I found myself reluctant to delete them as I liked having a record of my reading. I probably should have started a reading blog, but purely for my own benefit, here’s a dump of the books I’ve read over the last 18 months or so:

Caedmon’s Song by Peter Robinson. Picked up for a, ahem, song in Oxfam but oddly disappointing. Plus partly set in a village near where I grew up and the place descriptions don’t feel right to me.

The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton. Patrick Hamilton is the man.

Before the Frost by Henning Mankell.

Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights by Sophie Dahl. How could you not love a cookery book whose first proper section starts “We begin in the autumn because that’s when everything changed. Autumn is a season I love more than any other; for its smoky sense of purpose and half-lit mornings, its bonfires, baked potatoes, nostalgia, chesnuts and Catherine wheels.” On the other hand a (female) friend of mine points out that the only people who like Sophie are men. She also describes Sophie as a ‘simpering blonde’. Like that’s a bad thing…

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell.

Before I Die by Jenny Downham. I wasn’t going to cry. Right up to the bottom of the last page. Then I read the last line and I cried and cried.

The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell. Much more complex than the TV adaptation.

Every Atom Belonging by Dan McKinnis – on Authonomy. Unfinished but I love it.

JPod by Douglas Coupland. Edgy. Or do I mean ASCII 101,100,103,121? Worthy sequel to Microserfs.

Sidetracked by Henning Mankell

Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton. So wonderful. London between the wars through the eyes of three very different characters who meet in a pub called The Midnight Bell.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark. Diabolical. By which I mean: pertaining to the devil.

The Ill-Made Knight by T H White. Superb.

The Witch in the Wood by T H White. Just marking time – for me and the author I think – until we get to the real deal – the Ill-Made Knight.

Twilight in Eden by David Budd. A wonderful, surprising book. Just wish he’d change the title – but I’m working on that.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. In boot fairs and school fairs I am rebuilding the Alan Garner boxed set lost from my childhood. Trouble was – I just didn’t like this. Not a patch on The Owl Service or Red Shift. Will try Elidor next.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. So good. So, so good. Thumbs up. 10/10.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Warming to this very much as I go… dead sinister subtext but deceptively simply told.

Killing Me Softly by Nicci French. Good, but would she, would she have gone off with him like that?!

The Sword in the Stone by T H White – without this there would have been no Harry Potter. Taking me even longer to read… too heavy to read on the train as it’s part of the whole Once And Future King sequence in one volume.

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton – love the writing, the style, the tone. Took me ages to read, though. Very different to the film.

Gemma Bovery by Posy Simmonds. Just perfect, even if I’m not sure about the punchline. But then you need something to smile about at the end.

Bye Bye Birdie by Shirley Hughes – a graphic novel for grown ups by a great children’s illustrator

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds – oh Tamara Drewe, how do I love thee, let me count the ways… always loved Posy Simmonds since The Silent Three strip back in The Guardian but this is on another level. A work of genius, a truly great graphic novel.

Les Belles Images by Simone de Beauvoir

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

A Necessary End by Peter Robinson

A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson

The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett

Bitter Medicine by Sarah Paretsky

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

Aftermath by Peter Robinson – one of the best of the half dozen or so Inspector Banks novels I’ve read

Raking the Ashes by Anne Fine

Gallows View by Peter Robinson

The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine

The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell

Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

The Complete Peanuts 1955-6 by Charles M Schultz

A Song of Stone by Iain Banks – oh soddit I’m giving up on this on page 77. Over-written. Annoying. I really only like 2 Iain Banks books: ‘The Crow Road’ and ‘Complicity’.

The Hanging Garden by Ian Rankin

Death is not the End by Ian Rankin

Craven House by Patrick Hamilton (wonderful, beautifully written and observed, much funnier than I was expecting but this is an early work before he got bitter)

Canal Dreams by Iain Banks (the trouble with this is that other people’s dreams are never that interesting… I ended up skipping the dreams just to get to the end. Just read that Banks thinks it’s his worst book and I can see why.)

Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (some great ideas but not quite sufficiently well-executed – unlike the characters from Jane Eyre, Mr Fforde’s own characters fail to spring to life)

Posted in fiction, literature, recently read | Tagged , , | Leave a comment