(   )
                          (    )
                           (    )
                          (    )
                            )  )
                           (  (                  /\
                            (_)                 /  \  /\
                    ________[_]________      /\/    \/  \
           /\      /\        ______    \    /   /\/\  /\/\
          /  \    //_\       \    /\    \  /\/\/    \/    \
   /\    / /\/\  //___\       \__/  \    \/
  /  \  /\/    \//_____\       \ |[]|     \
 /\/\/\/       //_______\       \|__|      \
/      \      /XXXXXXXXXX\                  \
        \    /_I_II  I__I_\__________________\
               I_I|  I__I_____[]_|_[]_____I
               I_II  I__I_____[]_|_[]_____I
               I II__I  I     XXXXXXX     I
            ~~~~~"   "~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thu, 07 Jan 2010

Some Light Reading...

I'm taking the family on a long-overdue vacation up to Vermont next week. In anticipation of doing lots of reading, I picked up two of R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms trilogies, 'The Dark Elf' [0] and 'Icewind Dale' [1]. If the reviews on Amazon and bn.com are any indication, they should be quite entertaining.

posted at: 16:12 | path: / | permalink | Books, Fantasy, ForgottenRealms

Sat, 02 Jan 2010

Kickin' it Old School

Going through my desk drawers recently I came across my 10-year old Palm IIIe [0]. I threw some batteries in it, and lo and behold it still worked fine. Luckily, Palm connectivity under Linux was stable ten years ago [1] - five minutes and a USB-to-serial converter later, I was installing plucker [2] and some of Cory Doctorow's novels [3]. Here is what it looks like:

Palm IIIe

Despite the small screen (160x160), it's actually nicer to read ebooks on this than any backlit-LCD screen of today (although the Palm IIIe does have a cool illuminated-green-text "backlight", I don't use it as it tends to eat batteries rather quickly).

The Palm IIIe interface is very fast and will hold 4-5 full-length novels in plucker format. This isn't a lot by today's standards, but it only takes a few minutes to swap them out for new ones. I can download any book from project Gutenberg in plucker format for free, and can convert other books from HTML format right from the web with plucker-build (until commercial ebooks come without DRM, I won't be buying any, nor will I lock myself into one platform as with the Kindle).

posted at: 20:13 | path: / | permalink | Ebooks, Ereader, Palm, Plucker