Window Shopping for Computers

My capacity for wasting time on computers seems to be boundless. I would love to make a new one. My latest guilty pleasure is hopping over to the Microcenter web-site and putting together a shopping cart of all the components I need. It's a good thing the store is more than an hour away, in Cambridge. (And that when we lived just across the river from it, I never even realized it was there.)

I've worked out a bare-bones but expandable system for $387 right now. That means using an old keyboard, mouse, and the bulky old CRT monitor from our Dell Dimension (circa 1999) with its faded color, but since I already own all that stuff, it makes sense to use it for as long as possible.

What it comes down to is, I absolutely don't need another computer for anything; it's not like I actually get any proper work done on the machines I have, so introducing another one into the mix is actually going to make me less productive. The main point of the exercise would be the pleasure of putting the thing together and getting to tinker. There's almost nothing I enjoy more than mucking about in the guts of computer hardware. I'm not sure why this is, but we all have our particular fetishes, don't we?

So if I truck up to the city and come back with a station wagon full of PC components, my pleasure's going to last me five hours, maybe ten. A pleasure bought at the cost of about $40 an hour. I suppose there are more dear and destructive dissipations. This one will even leave me with a fully up-to-date computer that can run Kubuntu with all the shiny bells and whistles on. 

But given the state of my house, the free time and money should really be going towards glazing putty and roof shingles.

I know what I'll do, since the anticipation's always greater anyhow. I'll jot down all the component product numbers and check back in a month to see how much cheaper all those electronics have gotten. And I'll hang around on Mandla's blog, Motho ke Motho ka Botho, looking for more ideas on how to hack my old Sony Vaio into another perfectly good machine I don't really have time to use.

World Sunlight Map is a Pleasure and a Comfort

I love this desktop wallpaper application that shows a projection of daylight across a satellite photograph of the world, and auto-updates it every 30 minutes. (It updates the cloud data every three hours.)

It reminds me of my small place on a small planet; it's easy to forget that we're spinning about at such astonishing speeds for ever and ever. It's satisfying, somehow, to say, "well, the sun is setting across Norway and Brazil right now, and the Mongolians are just seeing the dawn;" also, to give shape to our longer summer days with the projected sinusoidal curve of shadow, and to watch it invert itself as the seasons change.

Kind of neat how it works.  This is why I love Linux; lots of good folks making interesting things and sharing them.  I couldn't find a similar application for Mac or Windows.

A Little Roofing to Prepare for a Lot of Roofing

I put the roof on the chicken-house addition to the Wife's barn yesterday, which was my contribution to this rather ambitious project.  (Not an ambitious project as building the barn itself, which she did with some proper builder help a couple years ago.) 

She's really perfectly capable of doing this work herself, except that she's afraid of heights.  So, any time she's in a building mood, I know that there will come a time when I have to be the ladder man.

There's so much I don't know about roofing, but I managed to unroll the tar paper and then hammer in 18 courses of shingles, score and bend some aluminium flashing into approximately the right shape, and then top that off with some siding and enough caulk to, hopefully, keep the water out. 

When you don't know what you're doing but you want to make it look like you do, there's nothing more masculine and confidence-inspiring than running a bead of caulk.

All in all, a good dry run for the time this fall when we've got to replace the rotting wooden shingles on this 300 year old house, and perhaps a great deal of the plywood or whatever they used before plywood, underneath.  When it rains, the leaks are manifold.  And roofing contractors want some serious money to take care of our problems for us. 

The good news is -- and this came as a great surprise to me -- even though I may not know a good deal about roofing, all of the instructions for doing it properly are right on the packages of shingles.  The same way there are instructions for properly applying paint on every can, and for changing your oil right there in the owners' manual of your car.  You don't have to call a contractor or check the internet or attend vocational school to learn this stuff. 

You can just buy the product and read the directions.  It really is deceptively simple!

(Although my aching legs and back would beg to argue.)

Close, But No *Ding*

This will no doubt be all over the typosphere within a couple of days (we are by no means the fastest group on the internet) but so far I only see it on boingboing, where I discovered it.

Michael Winslow takes us through the history of the typewriter using only his voice and a couple of microphones.  It would be cool to see the actual machines for comparison (and leaving out the carriage return bell seems like a major omission), but the faces he makes while he works are priceless.


History of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow from SansGil—Gil Cocker on Vimeo.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I actually sat through the entire 20 minute video.  

Gadgets and Self-Selecting Communities

I'm reading more than ever now that I have this electronic reader.  Why is a book more compelling when it's blots on an electronic screen?  And why is this kind of screen more compelling than a PC or laptop?  Is it just the size, the ultra-portability, the comparatively simple, single purpose design of a device that's for reading only?  Maybe it's just the sense of control it provides, knowing you can carry thousands of books and access any of them without getting out of bed.  There is this momentum that sets in by the end of a good book which compels you to just click through to the next one without pause, and keep reading -- provided any leisure time remains. 

A friend of mine has one, too.  She lent it to her mother for the weekend and it came back loaded with three romance novels.

Interesting how the introduction of any new toy brings out a crop of blogs, web-sites, and forums devoted to the exploration of its possibilities.  We long for these communities, of course, as human beings.  In the past we were limited in choice of community to which churches we could walk to and which neighbors we ran into at the farmers' market.  Now, we hook up online with the people who play with the same gadgets we do, regardless of physical location.

We gain a great deal of specialisation and depth this way, translating it into pure pleasure with the objects of our desire.

We lose, I guess, the chance encounters, the exposure to subjects and interests that we'll never know would delight us, as well as the chance to win over converts to our own causes.  We also lose out on every channel of communication besides text.  The inflections, facial expressions, perfumes and body odors, casual flirtations and early warning signs of disapproval -- we're numb to all of those online.  Even in a three-dimensional game-space like World of Warcraft of Second Life, the most gorgeously rendered avatar can't hope to convey any of those nuances, when their inputs are merely strings of text.

But this is me merely railing against change, as usual.  My psyche requires some guilt and reservation in the face of each new pleasure. 

It's a New Englander's characteristic, I think, to be unhappy in the absence of struggle, to distrust ease, to suspect that every joy will be punished by swift and calculated misfortune.   New Englanders seek for comfort in the past, a past whose joys have expired so long ago they cannot possibly be punished by any current accounting.

Or a past whose joys have been paid for already.  "Things were better then," we say, "when we had to wrest boulders from the soil in order to plant our crops.  The work brought us exercise and enduring stone walls."  The pleasure of those harvests long paid for, we can dwell in their memory without fear of reckoning. 

To enjoy a book, today, without even the struggle of paper and printing -- it's an abundance that makes a New Englander suspicious.  Oh, we'll enjoy it, since we have to, but we'll pretend, for a long stretch, that we don't. 

Until the next thing comes along to enjoy and worry over.

Spring Smells

The World Outside has gone from grey-brown to green, green, green, and the air is full of the sweet-grape scent of the locust blossoms.  Their flowers which last for three or four days at the most and then scatter tiny petals to the lawn and the gutters.  This is the smell of summer vacation riding in, of knowing you've only got a couple more weeks of walking past the locust trees to the bus stop to endure the too-close crowds of your classmates and the interminable, droning lectures of teachers who don't want to be there any more than you do.  It's a Friday night smell, the smell of something great on the way, all the sweeter for the raw potential before the break really hits and bogs down with all the little details of how you're going to go about enjoying it, when it's 90 degrees and humid and you're just too tired of swimming to spend any more time in the pond, and you know those lawns aren't going to mow themselves while your spending money is waiting on it.


The lawn here's all mowed, though, and just in time for the afternoon shower to come and apologise to the grass, and pat down all the dust and pollen kicked up by the rattletrap mower my stepfather found at the dump and pieced together and then passed along to us.  Lord, but that machine kicks up the stones and the dirt.  We leave the dogs inside to protect them from stray pebbles and if I didn't wear glasses I'd put on safety goggles.  There was a cloud rising from my metal roar, today.  The station wagon's gone from black to yellow and back to black. 


There's no more summer vacation for us, of course, no matter what it smells like.  At least, no vacation to stretch from June through August.  That's all right, though.  We've still got plenty to look forward to.  There's something to be said for the pleasure of mowing your own lawn after a childhood of cutting grass for others.

Narrator Submits to the Times and Purchases Barnes & Noble Nook

The hypocrisy!  After all the railing I’ve done against conspicuous consumption, gadgets, and waste, I’ve done and ended up with a Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader. 

Forgive me if you can.  At least before you condemn me, consider the paper that I’ll save and the tiny amount of current I’ll sip from the grid while I power the low wattage e-ink display.  I can only hope that not too many civil wars were waged over the mining of the coltan and gold and other minerals utilized in its circuitry. 

(And I must shed a tear for all the sacrificed lower case letter “e”s which are going to perish in the future as we discuss e-titles, e-readers, and e-ink.  Seriously, can’t we come up with better words for all this crap?)

So, with the requisite guilt and hand-wringing out of the way, I'm happy to report that over the past couple of weeks I've grown fond of this device. This despite that it's a channel for Barnes & Noble to sell me products – and after cutting out television and radio, believe me, I was pretty reluctant to introduce another channel of advertising into my life. Indeed, taking an entire store into my home – over a million titles available for immediate purchase, items which I don't even have to haul my ass out of bed to purchase – is remarkable and terrifying. It seems very similar to the videocassette that circulates in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, the videocassette which contains a movie so entertaining, once a person begins to watch it, they sit entranced, neglecting their bodily needs until they expire in their own filth, entertained to death. (Only in Wallace's novel, watching the video didn't automatically bill the viewer's credit card as it entertained and killed them.  Barnes & Noble no doubt wants us alive as we’re more lucrative that way.)

So yeah, I’m entertained by this device.  But I’m also pleasantly surprised by the potential for thrift with it.  For something that’s clearly supposed to convert users into dedicated customers of one company, it’s remarkably open to other channels of content. 

Plugging it into a computer brings up a simple file structure with folders like “My Wallpapers” and “My Music.”  Files you dump there are easily accessible from the device once you disconnect and navigate to the appropriate menu.  So even though it is convenient to purchase an ebook from B&N with their simple interface, it’s not really that much more difficult to drag and drop a free .pdf or .epub file you download from Project Gutenberg or Manybooks.net.  And while the Nook does allow you to download free copyright-expired ebooks directly through some partnership with Google, getting these titles to display correctly seems hit-or-miss.  I’ve had better luck with the downloads, and I’ve actually been reading for over a week now without radioing in to Barnes and Noble. 

One of the first things I tried when I got this thing home was using it to borrow library books.  I’d been told this was possible but again, it seemed unlikely.  Why would B&N open another channel for reading without paying?  Fortunately, I was wrong.

You can connect to your local community library by downloading and installing Adobe Digital Editions (free, though sadly only on Mac and Windows so far – no Linux).  Most municipal library systems allow you to “borrow” electronic editions of their titles for a limited time.  The Adobe software manages the DRM so that after a week or two you’re cut off from your borrowed book and the next person waiting gets it. 

(I have almost universally negative feelings about using DRM to hinder digital content, but in the case of libraries, it makes some sense.  The more people that line up to borrow digital books, the more digital (pretend) copies the libraries will purchase.  This seems like a pretty good-faith way to support your favorite authors and maybe your library, too.)

The latest surprise I’ve stumbled on is Calibre, which is available on Linux (as well as your more common operating systems).  I discovered it when I started looking for a way to convert longer HTML files into Nook’s native .epub format.  It does a great job of this, and Calibre recognizes the Nook when you plug it in, just as easily as Adobe digital editions does.  It even simplifies the drag and drop process to a “publish to device” button. 

My biggest surprise with Calibre is its ability to connect to hundreds of news sources from around the world.  I’m not sure how it does it, but it dropped issues of Newsweek, Time, and Wired onto the device.  These seemed to have just about all the content from the print issues, complete with a navigation structure you can manipulate with the touch-screen. 

I’m not sure how long this situation’s going to last.  B&N only offers about a dozen magazines and newspapers for purchase on the device, so I’m sure they can’t be too happy to have hundreds available for free to anyone who downloads the Calibre software.  Nor can the magazines be happy to have their content – stripped of advertizing – dialed up and delivered for free. 

I suppose there’s nothing they can do about it.  As Cory Doctorow says, information is never going to get harder or more expensive to copy in the future.  Still, B&N might want to get off their tails and at least offer a few more of these publications for purchase.  The rates on the magazines they do offer are reasonable, so for those who don’t want to be troubled to install software and hook up to their PC to manually manage downloads, and those who feel some obligation to compensate the fourth estate for their efforts, there’s value to be had in wireless, automatic delivery of your subscriptions.

It’s only a matter of time before I start using this thing to purchase content.  There’s too many good books coming up these days for me not to.  But the fact that the Nook is open to so many other channels of content is kind of endearing. 

Anyone else out there setting aside the codex that has served us for the past thousand years or two for something new-fangled and shiny?  How are you liking it?  What are your thoughts?