Entries from April 2009 ↓

We still can’t have Kindles in Australia, and the price Dymocks is charging for their e-paper based reader is outrageous… so lately I’ve been reading a lot on my iPod.

I didn’t expect it at first, but ebooks are very convenient. You can have a wide selection in a small and light device (real books are heavy), you get the ability to search, you never lose your page because the bookmark fell off… one downside, of course, is that battery life is not that great.

Another is the screen size. The iPod Touch has a relatively small screen (which, of course, can be a good thing — it makes it very easy to carry it everywhere), but I found that you get used to that. Granted, you’re turning pages every few seconds, but that is not that much of a problem. What is a problem is that you do need books that are stored in a way that can be reformatted for your device, and that rules PDF out, as that file format was not made with reformatting in mind. There are PDF readers for the iPod, but you can’t realistically read a PDF file formatted for A4 on that screen; it’s ok for a quick glance on a reference manual, for example, but not for continuous reading. And that has some implications for content availability: lots of free content is distributed in PDF format (ebooks, scientific papers, e-magazines etc.), but that is not an usable format for the iPod.

I have been using two different applications: eReader and Stanza (see screenshots below; click to enlarge). They are both very similar, and they both offer the ability to easily download books straight into the iPod from a variety of sources, with both paid and free content; Stanza does seem to offer a much larger selection of sources, including technical books from O’Reilly, while eReader is more tightly connected to their own bookstore, ereader.com (which includes the mostly SF-oriented fictionwise.com; both are owned by Barnes and Noble).

The free content, which makes up the bulk of what I’ve been reading, include mostly out-of-copyright classics and Creative Commons-licensed books, but you do get the occasional surprise, such as Random House giving away free copies of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Red Mars”. As an aside, Stanza offers a desktop companion application that supposedly can convert PDF files into something readable on the small screen; my tests show that this definitely does not work well for most PDF files, even those that are text-only.

Both applications are very comfortable to use, and as a whole the experience is very good (although I have to say that I like eReader’s interface better, and I really like the little “progress indicator” for each book in the main window). Without a doubt, what I like the most about reading in this way is the portability, even if that means that the screen is significantly smaller than a typical book page; unless the book has relevant illustrations, that is not a problem at all. Battery usage does worry me a bit, though, since the backlight needs to be on at all times while reading (that is the main difference with electronic paper devices; in those, you only use power while changing pages); this is not a problem in normal day-to-day usage, but it may be if I try to read during a long flight (does any airline offer USB power on their seats?).

Yesterday I went to visit the Melbourne Aquarium for the first time. It was probably not the best day for this — at the end of a long weekend, and in the middle of the school holidays. And, yes, it was full of children (and parents with trolleys). It was still fun, although I expected it to be larger. Pictures follow:

One thing I did not like: they do their best to force you to follow one specific path and not turn back. There are places with escalators going only one way, and narrow corridors that make it awkward to go against the flow. That makes it very inconvenient to try to come back to something you couldn’t see (or photograph) very well on your first pass; it also makes it hard to try to be at specific places at specific times for scheduled events, such as the “snow storm” in the penguin enclosure. Sure, you can go all the way to the end and re-enter, but they don’t make that clear and you have to get a guard to let you in.

I surely have neglected this blog for a while… to make up for it, and to try to kick things back in movement again, here is a list of random stuff from the last few months:

• I have recently started playing with development of native applications for the iPhone (and/or iPod Touch); other than having to learn a slightly different flavour of C than what I’m used to, it’s not particularly hard, and it’s in fact fun (but, come on, the SDK is 1.8GB! that took forever to download)
• but, and I have to say this, Objective C has some weird syntax constructs
• I do realise that it’s been over six months since I wrote part 2 of the stories from my last holidays, and that at this rate I’ll go on holidays again before I’m done; I’ll try to rectify this
• speaking of which, I’ll be in the US for about a week in early July (in Las Vegas and its vicinity)
• I’m not sure whether I like the way Battlestar Galactica ended (no spoilers follow); my first reaction was that I liked it a lot, but then I started noticing “loose ends” or weird events, and I started liking it a bit less. A colleague and I even attempted to draw a timeline of the events of the universe of the series (from Kobol onwards), with some success, but that didn’t dispel many of my problems with the ending. I eventually decided to stop thinking about it, and re-watch the whole series in three or four years
• now, the ending of Life on Mars (American edition) was cool
• seriously, is the FIA trying to kill Formula One? who thought it would be a good idea to schedule a race for late afternoon in a place that gets monsoonal rains every day? I know it’s all about money and the European viewers, but one would think they would prefer to wake up a bit earlier and watch a full race instead of the half-race we had on Sunday
• I watched Monsters vs Aliens in 3D; while it had some cool moments, I’m not sure it adds that much to the experience; most of the time I kept thinking “this would be much better on an IMAX screen”… (you see, the narrower screen limits the extension of the 3D elements); anyway, fun movie, in 2 or 3D

Let’s see if I can keep this alive…