Odd Lots
- A lot of Catholics (and doubtless a few others) would like to see some rabbit control on Easter.
- That said, Easter has done much better resisting commercialism than Christmas. Basically, the Christmas story is unreservedly delightful, whereas the Easter story is sobering. Happy beginnings are easier to come by and much more common than happy endings, as I’ve noted here before. The real message of Easter is solidarity with God, who is born, lives, suffers, and dies, like all of us–with the promise of a happy ending, even if the nature of that happy ending is obscure to us right here and right now.
- Early reports of Amazon giving in to demands from major publishers that they be able to set prices for their ebooks were evidently premature, but I’ve seen more reliable reports that the deal is now done, and that ebook prices will rise. This is not a bad thing: Publishers should compete on price, not retailers. And if Macmillan wants to charge $15 for an ebook, that provides some wiggle room for upstart and smaller publishers to get a place in the channel charging $10, or $8, or $5.
- Many photos have just gone up for EntConnect 2010.
- Ubuntu 10.10’s code name will be Maverick Meerkat. And hearing that reminded me that Lucid Lynx is just around the cornah. (The small photo of some meerkats devouring a Halloween pumpkin is worth the click!)
- I’ve been having some very odd problems creating good audio CDs with InfraRecorder Portable, and now recommend that you don’t use it. Some of the tracks just don’t “take,” but when I burn the very same MP3s to a blank disc from the same spindle using Gnome app Brasero, the disc is perfect.
- It’s far from complete but it’s a damned good start: A listing of electronics surplus houses by state. Sadly, they don’t list Apache Reclamation & Electronics, which suggests that Phoenix’s Mother of All Junkpiles has passed into history.
- From the Words-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Mumblecore, a film genre characterized by improvised scripts, inexperienced actors, and lousy video equipment. (Sounds like my home movies.)
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: ebooks · electronics · linux · publishing · religion · software · words
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Lucid Lynx is coming out next month? Oh, man, and I just finished installing Karmic Koala here! (Replacing my old, creaky Debian-unstable installation, which died along with the disk drive holding its root filesystem. Fortunately, I had already moved my important personal files to another, much newer spindle.) I picked Ubuntu this time around because that’s what I use at work, on (believe it or not) a reformatted iMac. (Albeit a new one, with a 21″ widescreen display and dual-core CPU.)