I have one model of all three major ereaders now, the Sony Daily Edition, the Kindle 1, and the nook. If you want an unbiased comparison, here it is.
For the Sony the strengths include touch screen, larger screen (at least the Daily edition has a 7″ screen), built-in case, and two memory slots.
For Kindle the strengths include two newly introduced word games, the most intuitive interface, best annotation, fastest page turn, clearest screen, Audible compatibility, read to me, and best battery life.
For nook the strengths include the games (sudoku and chess), the ability to read stuff in the store, the in store technical support, and all the promotion stuff. You get free books once a week. You get articles and short stories downloaded in the store. You get cafe stuff.
Looking at the key features, first is content. Kindle wins half credit because Amazon has the best selection at the lowest prices. It loses half credit because it’s the only one without library support.
If library support is a major point, and you want to maximize your flexibility, your best best is to buy the Nook, but never buy books from B&N. Use Borders instead. Even though they all use ePub, B&N uses a proprietary DRM scheme, so it’s not cross compatible. You can read Borders books on the Kobo, the Sony, and the nook, but you can only read B&N books on the nook. I’m only discussing dedicated devices, not apps. So get the nook and then fill it up with books from Borders.
For annotations, the Kindle is the best. Sony doesn’t let you tie a note to a particular paragraph, only to a page. Nook doesn’t let you put a bookmark on a particular screen (just the top of a page, and pages can run multiple screens), some books can’t accept annotation (you can’t know which until you try), and the interface is clunky. Kindle lets you highlight, bookmark a screen, and tie notes to a particular line. Rather than having the gray background that Sony and nook uses for highlighting, Kindle surrounds the text with a box.
For page turns, I ran them side by side, and the speed, in order from fastest to slowest, is Kindle, Sony, nook. Nook will actually post a wait message if you try to flip too many pages at once. Neither Sony nor Kindle will do that. Nook is far slower than either of the others on opening a book as well.
For interface, it’s a toss up between Kindle and Sony. Kindle has an intuitive interface, and buttons large enough to be invisible while reading. When you want to dog ear a page, you click the corner. Sony can get a bit odd with highlighting, and I find I overdo a few times. Stop one character shy of where you want to be and your fine. Dog earring is hidden in a menu option. But you can stroke your finger across the page to turn it and you can choose which gesture –> or <– turns the next page. Nook is a touch screen…kind of. The actual content area isn’t a touch screen, the bottom little screen that keeps turning off is. So you’re navigating like you would with the Kindle controller while dealing with the decreased accuracy of the touch screen. You can configure how long the thing should stay on, but that’s a trade off between battery life and convenience.
When buying an item in the store, Kindle buys it and that’s it. If it’s a mistake, just click a button for a refund. Sony asks you to log in to your account. Nook goes through this confirmation thing and then has a little OK you have to hit, and if you don’t notice it, the screen it’s hiding on turns off.
For clarity, the best is Kindle. Nook just doesn’t look quite as crisp, but it comes in second. Sony has the problem of the glare caused by the touch screen.
For storage, Sony wins. You can put an SD card and a Pro Duo card in, both at the same time, and it allows you to organize your books into collections. Nook allows for a mini SD card (smaller, but more expensive than a regular SD). It does not allow for organizing the content into folders. If you’re good at keeping track, or if you use a service like Goodreads, this is the second. Kindle has discontinued the use of a storage card, so it comes in third. It does allow you to organize your content. For built-in memory, it’s Kindle, nook, Sony.
For the fun factor nook wins. It has the games. It has the bright color display. It lets you easily customize your screen saver and background. Kindle comes in second with the word games and social networking capabilities. Sony doesn’t even have speakers.
I’ve been following this for a while, and one of the anti-arguments made me laugh. At issue is whether or not all Internet traffic should be given equal priority, much as phone traffic is today. The funny argument was that asking for net neutrality was like asking for all cars to be priced the same, from a Mazda to a Ferrari. It’s a good analogy, misapplied.
When you sign up for Internet access, you choose dial-up, DSL, cable. Maybe you add boost. Maybe you get a high-speed router. That’s where the “choice of vehicles” comes into play. Now, imagine you just bought a beautiful new Ferrari and you want to take it on the road.
It refuses to go over 10 miles an hour.
So you call the support line. “This car won’t go. What’s wrong?”
“Where are you trying to go?”
“To see a friend in Boston.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Your friend didn’t pay our ‘go fast’ fee, so you can only drive to them very slowly.”
“That’s not the point of buying a high-speed car.”
“I’m sorry. Perhaps you could pick a different destination?”
“Sigh. Okay. I’ll try Walden Pond.”
“Oooo. Walden Pond didn’t pay the ‘go fast’ fee either. You might hit 7 mph to them if you’re lucky though.”
“Well, where can I get to quickly?”
“Let’s see. In your area there are five strip malls and 17 pornography locations that have paid our ‘go fast’ fee.”
“So porn or shopping. That’s it?”
“Well did you really think the PTA would be willing to pay just so you could get to your kid’s school faster? That’s not going to happen.”
There’s how net neutrality is like car shopping.
Schools aren’t going to be able to pay the high speed fees just so your kids can get to the assignments they’re supposed to download. Libraries aren’t going to pay so you can find the book you want faster. Bloggers? Nope. Podcasters? Definitely not. Your local little league? Best put up a pot of coffee before even trying to hit the site. Where will your high speed Internet provider actually take you at high speed? Porn sites and online shopping.
Since I’ve had to do this a few times lately, I wanted to post some tricks on recovering data from a computer that will not boot properly. I have two tricks that work in most situations. These work for me, but data recovery can get tricky, so proceed at your own risk.
You will need either a flash drive that you don’t mind erasing (I used a 1 gig drive for this a few weeks ago and that was fine) or a hard drive enclosure available at most computer stores. Desktop hard drives and laptop hard drives aren’t the same size, so get the right one. Netbook hard drives are typically the same size as laptop hard drives. If you have any doubts, don’t bother bringing the whole machine to the store for advice. You can bring just the drive once you’ve taken it out, a process I’ll explain further down. You will also need access to a functional machine and a place to copy the data too, such as an external hard drive.
I prefer the flash drive method only because I almost always have a spare one of those around, and they can be reused afterward. This is good if the OS is corrupted, and you need to reinstall it.
First, go to PenDriveLinux.com. Download and run Universal USB Installer and follow the prompts to get a flash drive that boots Linux. This will erase your flash drive as part of installing the OS. You can use any distro of Linux, but I favor Ubuntu, and the rest of this tutorial will assume you have chosen Ubuntu.
Now, on the non-working machine, plug in the flash drive that you just installed Linux to and turn on the machine. Watch to see where it says “Press F– for Bios” or something similar. Different machines have a different function key to get into that, and slightly different wording. Hit that key. You don’t get much time, so if you must, turn the machine off and on again to try again.
Once you’re in the bios, go to where it lets you choose boot order and set USB above hard drive. Save and restart.
Now you’ll be in Linux. Go to the terminal (click on Applications->Accessories->Terminal).
You won’t want to write to the Windows drive as that might damage it further, just read from it.
Type
sudo fdisk -l
This shows you the list of partitions on your PC. You can find the partition you want by the size. If you haven’t partitioned your drive, the one you want is the biggest.
Now make a place to mount this to by typing
sudo mkdir -p /media/windows
Please keep in mind that Linux is case sensitive.
sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 {drive} /media/windows
where {drive} is the name of your hard drive (typically something like /dev/hd1)
and then mount it
If you have an old drive, formatted in fat, not ntfs (the fdisk command will show you which your drive is if you’re not certain) use
sudo mount -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000 {drive} /media/windows
Now if you look at your files, you will see a folder called /media/windows with all of the data from your Windows hard drive on it.
Plug in an external hard drive, and Ubuntu will mount it automatically. You can copy all the files you need from /media/windows to that drive. Just drag and drop the same as in Windows. It might take a while.
The enclosure method can be a little more expensive but a lot easier. Open the computer. The hard drive on a desktop is in the rack over by the CD or DVD drive. The hard drive on a laptop is usually over by the side. Grab a screwdriver and remove it.
Open the enclosure. Slide the drive in. Attach the drive to the enclosure by plugging the ports in (this is just a matter of clicking things in and it’ll be obvious when you see it, so don’t worry). The drive is now an external hard drive, and can be plugged into the USB port of any machine. Even if the boot sector of the hard drive is destroyed and the drive won’t start, it can often be read once it’s a secondary drive, and again, you can get your data off.
Yes, this does let it live as an external drive, but once it starts dying, I wouldn’t trust it not to go all to way to unreadable, so be certain to get your important information off.
A few of my friends received iPods of various forms this year. My new one is an iTouch (thanks Sharron). So I know a lot of people who are trying to migrate their content from their old iPod to their new one.
I do not understand the appeal of synching your iPod. Basically, if you do this you can’t move content to your iPod from multiple computers, and you can’t delete any music from your computer, or move it off, because if you do, the next time you sync, it’ll be deleted from your player. I have a friend who moved to a new computer and can no longer move podcasts to his iPod because he never transferred his music library. Until recently, I was using a 160 gig iPod Classic and a laptop with a 100 gig hard drive. I saw no reason to dedicate my entire computer to offsite iPod storage and throw out 60 gig of memory on the iPod.
If you don’t sync, transferring to a new iPod can be a tiny bit tricky, but it can be done.
First, back up your iTunes folder, just in case. Plug in your iPod and view it as a hard drive. View hidden files and folders. With Windows XP this is in folder options in Explorer. Go to the view tab and select “Show hidden files and folders”. With Vista you go into Control Panel, go into Appearance and Personalization, and under Folder Options, click on Show Hidden Files or Folders. In the pop up box, select Show Hidden Files and Folders again, click Apply and then Okay. XP gave you finer control over this, because you could set it on the folder level, but I don’t like my system hiding things from me anyway.
Go into \iPod_Control\Music. You will see a lot of nonsense folders named things like AB012 and CD345. They contain files like EFG98f.mp3, so you can’t recognize a file by its name, but you can play it, and the mp3 tags are still intact. That’s the key that’s going to help us.
Create a folder on your computer. For sake of this discussion I’ll same I’m creating mine on my C drive and calling it iPod-Stuff. Copy all of those strange folders from your iPod to iPod-Stuff. Now open iTunes and click file->add folder to library. Point to iPod-Stuff. This will import all of your music into iTunes, showing the names as they are contained in the mp3 tags. You can now transfer the music you wish onto your new iPod.
If you find any problems with any material you purchased from the iTunes store, you can use the “transfer my purchases” feature to copy your material back to iTunes, and then transfer to the new device.
Fair warning, if you do sync, this could erase your iPod. If you must do this trick your best bet might be to uninstall iTunes, grab your files, then unplug the iPod and reinstall iTunes. I’ve never tried that, but it’s the road I would take.
Jason bought Sharron a wireless adapter for her XBox, and Thursday I had the crazy idea of setting it up to connect via the network to Windows Media Player so that I could stream videos wirelessly to the T.V. The setup requested that I shut off Norton’s Firewall and depend solely on the Microsoft firewall. I also have a firewall on my router, so I thought it might be safe enough. It didn’t work, but I got so frustrated that I just went to bed leaving my computer on with just the Windows firewall running, Firefox on my screen showing Ravelry and Facebook.
When I woke up Friday morning, Firefox was no longer running, but Task Manager was, as was my biometric password manager (which I never added any passwords to), which was also showing its help screen.
I have no idea what the intruder was after, but I don’t store important password on my machine. At best, they can now access my Facebook page, my Twitter account, my Ravelry account, my Knitting Daily account (this is a free account that lets people download patterns from the knitting daily website), and access to update my blog and podcast sites. Because I had to reimage my machine for other purposes recently, I never reconfigured the passwords stored in the biometric password manager (that’s where you swipe a fingerprint in lieu of entering a password).
I did some investigating and the intruder changed my boot up options. I don’t think anything else was changed, but just to be certain, I reimaged my computer again, and spent the rest of the day, and much of Sunday, setting things up again.
It was a little strange, and a little creepy. I’m going to keep an eye on things for a while, to be sure there isn’t further trouble.
This is the woven bath cloth and soap sack kit from the Unique Sheep.
This is also sanity-saving knitting. I was doing this project while going through my annual anatomical maintenance program. My doctor is quite happy with my blood pressure, and I really think knitting is a huge part of why it’s so good. So the doctor poked me, measured me, and stabbed me with a needle. Then he sent me for a routine mammogram. There was no cause other than it’s a good precaution to test, so off to the test I went.
If you’ve never had a mammogram, it runs something like this. You can’t wear deodorant or any powder or lotion on the day of the test, which is kind of nasty and guaranteed to put most women in a bad mood to start. You then stand shirtless next to a huge glass vice. The technician positions your delicate breast onto one pane of glass and then makes a sandwich with the other. The unit then squeezes until you’re pretty sure the entire thing is about to pop like a balloon. An X-ray is taken, the vice releases, and you do the other side.
Then they do the sideways view. In this they turn the whole thing perpendicular to the floor and have to squeeze tighter “to support the breast”. Now I don’t know how heavy other women’s breasts are, but the first way is tight enough to keep a well-oiled ox from slipping. It doesn’t need to be tighter.
So there I was, half-naked, breast in a clamp, when the technician decides to ask, “Why is the computer doing that?” I’m perfectly willing to help out with any technical issues, but she really picked a pretty poor time to ask. I mean really, I coudn’t turn around to look at her screen anyway, and the situation wasn’t that conductive to concentration. Did she really expect me to say, “Hit ctrl-alt-del and go into device manager. By the way, should the skin be turning such a dark shade of blue?”
I have no idea why her computer was acting up. Once I got all my body parts free, I ran.
While I was building some stuff for my website (the larger project isn’t complete, but Ivy Reisner.com is finished if you’re interested) Sharron and I hit upon an odd game to play with the computer gremlins. It’s called “That Won’t Work.”
Don’t doubt the computer gremlins. They exist, ready to bring down your programs, or cause a perfectly healthy system to crash, just because they can. They are sneaky and spiteful beasts, but they aren’t all that bright. My coworker, a man with many years experience in the field, advises keeping a rubber mallet on hand to prevent technical problems. Just hold it and look threatening. The gremlins will back off.
He tells a story of a lady who was running a credit card machine, back in the early days, when the machines were more likely to fail than work. All around her people were struggling with machines that wouldn’t read the strip, machines that would drop the validation connection, machines that were just not working. Her machine hummed along perfectly, not giving her any trouble, and for a while she was the only one handling credit card transactions for the store. My coworker asked her how she kept it working so well, and she pulled a rubber mallet out from under her counter and waved it threateningly at the machine. “It doesn’t dare break,” she said. He’s been convinced ever since.
In fairness, I should add this story that happened to a friend of mine. We were in college doing PL/1 programming on the mainframe. He was getting frustrated with Wilbur (the compiler) and finally he said, “I have a 2,000 watt speaker magnet in my bag and I’m not afraid to use it. Compile!”
It compiled. It ran the code perfectly. Content his final project was done, he logged off, went about his day, and waited until the morning of the final, when he had to turn in the code, before printing out.
Well, the instant he logged in, the entire mainframe crashed, and didn’t come back up for two weeks. Computers will take their revenge where they can.
Anyway, as I was trying to get one small thing going with a server side include, Sharron suggested I just do it with ASP.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because this is on an Apache server running under Linux.”
“ASPx?”
“Oh sure. I’ll install the .Net framework on a Linux box and the server will contract Mono. What did it ever do to you?”
As I was talking, I decided to change the name of one of my links from “eMail” to “E-Mail”.
“Well I don’t think that will work in apache,” she said.
I refreshed to check the name change, and the part we’d been discussing suddenly started working.
One friend, who knows little about computers, said that changing the tag, is what fixed it. Another, quite reasonably concluded that the content I was trying to include had finally propagated and been found. Me? I know it’s the gremlins. They were at it the whole day.
Sharron showed me a solution that I thought was crazy. As soon as I told her it wouldn’t work, it did. I tried something I thought was crazy. As soon as Sharron said it wouldn’t work, it did.
Computers like to make fools of us. The best way to get someone’s code to work–tell them it can’t. This is especially effective if the computer in question doesn’t like you.
All of this is par for the course with computers. What surprised me the most is when I realized that, despite the number of hours I’ve spent on the machine this weekend, I didn’t boot to Windows once. I’m getting hooked on Ubuntu.
Jason talks about IBM’s Watson project on this week’s Block Party. He covers it very well. Give it a listen.
Honestly though, I’m not buying it. IBM claims this is a form of natural language processing. It’s not. The output is in a clean, formulaic pattern. “What is…” “Who is…” or “Where is…” All they’re doing is loading up a computer with a substantial database of terms. Then they’re performing a regular expression match on those terms and returning back the standardized question for the database entry that matches the majority of the key terms. Let Alex Trebek ask “So, are you excited to be competing here today?” or “Do you have a favorite programmer?” and let it answer that. Then we’ll see natural language processing at work. For now, the most impressive component is speech recognition, but they can cheat that a bit since there are ample recordings of the voice that will be asking the questions.
IBM claims “The research underlying Watson is expected to elevate computer intelligence” but this isn’t intelligence; it’s information retrival. Computers are great on that. Forget the smoke and mirrors about double meanings and irony. Irony means nothing to a computer. It doesn’t make the natural leaps that power puns or turns of phrase.
To understand the difference between genuine intelligence and what’s happening here, watch carefully how your mind processes this:
Kiklizers are blue.
What color is a kiklizer?
If you were a computer, or a well-trained parrot, the only answer you would come up with is “blue”. That’s nowhere near intelligence.
An intelligent response, the one that went through your mind so fast you might not have noticed it, would be “What’s a kiklizer?” or “Kiklizer’s have no color. They don’t exist” or “In this fantasy example, kiklizers are blue.”
That is intelligence, the ability to take in and analyze new information. Computers don’t have that. Jeopardy doesn’t test that.
Want to prove a machine is intelligent? Have it play charades. It can display a single human on screen against an empty background acting out what it would like people to guess, then it can use a camera to watch a human and guess what they’re acting out. For a computer, Jeopardy is way too easy.
When I first got into computers, I used to carry a box of floppies everywhere. They were the 5 1/4 kind, the ones that actually flopped. One floppy was my main disk. On this disk I carried a full operating system (DOS 5); a word processor (WordStar); a software development studio (Turbo Pascal); and a bunch of files. I could boot to that device and have all of my tools wherever I went, leaving no trail in passing.
I’ve fallen in love with portable computing, be it from a specialized device like U3, or any old flash device with the portable apps software downloaded and installed. Today, I took it all the way home. Now I carry a little flash drive case, and though I can’t claim to one being my main drive, I have one very like my old primary disk. I can boot to it. It runs a full operating system (Ubuntu 9); an office suite that includes, not only a word processor, but also a spreadsheet, graphics program, a database, and a presentation manager (Open Office, which, by the way, is far superior to Microsoft Office in my opinion); and a development environment (Perl and Java–there is Python too, but I don’t code Python); oh, and there is a web browser (Firefox); FTP client (Filezilla); podcasting studio (Audacity); IM client (Pidgin); e-mail client (Evolution); and a web server (Apache).
I’m curious what the next cycle is going to look like.
I was a child of the 80s, but I have to admit heavy metal music never appealed to me. Call me counter-culture, but I was a country music fan in the heart of New York City. That said, if this was what Metal was like, I might have gotten into it, back in the day.
This is just so right. It’s the Gatchaman theme song. If you want to hear the original, here it is.
To finish my computer adventure, I’ve decided to partition the drive 100/60 and install Ubuntu 9. I’m working on one last issue (videos are a bit choppy because I have an Intel video card and Ubuntu 9 still doesn’t support that well). Overall, I love it. It’s the Dell mini, which is working nicely at last.
