Odd Lots
- Wired ran a wonderful photo piece on one of the weirdest aircraft ever to fly: the Soviet Union’s ground-effect ship-killer seaplane Lun. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the pointer.)
- Surezhell, a faint tickle of a memory led me back to even more Lun-y goodness at Dark Roasted Blend. Don’t forget Part 2.
- Which led directly to Awesome Armored Trains. (Steamfrack? Again, the Russians seem to be the masters of this game.)
- Yet another photo gatherum from Spiegel, highlighting zany transportation ideas that didn’t pan out. Or get anywhere near the pan.
- Ars has a nice article on a very new category of aircraft: the solar-powered “atmospheric satellite,” a robot plane that flies in the high atmosphere for indefinite periods without fuel.
- Sakurajima is acting up again. That was one of my favorite volcanoes when I was a kid, right after now-extinct (probably) Paracutin. One thing to note here is how good the comments are. I read Klemetti’s blog as much for his community as for his own (excellent) posts. No politics, no hate, no incessant tu quoque from tribal slaves. You don’t see that very often.
- As with all claims in this category, whether fission or fusion, I’ll believe it when I see it, but damn, I would like to see this.
- The Nook business is in trouble. We’ve seen that coming, but it makes me wonder if the Nook is alone, or if the rest of the color-screen ebook readers are falling into line behind it. (E-ink will remain as a niche for daylight reading.) I read ebooks on my Transformer Prime. Works. It’s a general-purpose tablet with a keyboard dock that makes it an only slightly crippled laptop. The number of specialized gadgets I’m willing to cart around is limited.
- That said, B&N’s print book business is in reasonably good shape, especially its very profitable textbook division. (Thanks to Janet Perlman for the link.)
- Ouch. “There’s no real ebook piracy problem because most people don’t think books are worth stealing.”
- Publishing is an ecosystem, and the parts don’t thrive without the whole. The ecosystem can change, of course, but the changes take time, and not all parts of the system will survive the changes. (Again, thanks to Janet Perlman for the link.)
- Forget underage women. Crossing state lines with rented textbooks can get you into trouble.
- Composers on acid? I’d be curious to hear from experienced musicians whether most of these, um, compositions are playable at all.
- Now this is the sort of drought I can celebrate: We’re looking at a record low tornado count this year.
- On the hurricane side, the accumulated cyclonic energy (ACE) value, which is an aggregate of how much power has been seen in cyclonic storms so far this year, is 48% of normal to August 21. Less than half. The Coriolis Gods are evidently taking a break. Let’s hope it’s a long one.
- The latest Duluth Trading catalog is pushing a product called Ballroom Jeans. Huh? For cowboy proms? Ballroom…wait. Ok. I get it.
- Always read food labels carefully.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aviation · books · ebooks · humor · publishing · science · weather
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I’d love to put a 2 meter repeater on one of those Solar Drones!
BTW: The article states it has an 18mi radius of coverage. That’s a typo.
I could believe a 180mi radius of coverage though…and even that seems to fall short. I mean, imagine an antenna on a 60,000ft tower, the coverage would be awesome. I’d have to do the math but the line-of-sight from that altitude is WAY beyond 18mi đŸ™‚
About ebooks. They seem pretty much just like paper books but you read them on a device. Isn’t the technology ripe for making them much more? Like a low-cost ebook that includes a live subscription to a video blog related to the books content. And even live interaction with the author for a per minute price. For highly technical books like programming this might be a lucrative sideline for an author.
People generally read ebooks on internet enabled devices so why not take full advantage of that. Books that auto-update to correct typos and such. Books that are forever new because the author keeps doing updates. Books with new content provided by the readers themselves perhaps. Maybe someone is already doing these things and I have just not noticed?
Nook vs. E-ink. Over 2 years ago, my daughter bought me a Kindle for Christmas. I would not have bought one; I was looking for a tablet, and not finding one I was happy about at that time. I did not want a specialized device.
That said, I now have about 500 books on my Kindle, use it nearly every day, and always take it with me when I go someplace where I may have to be in a waiting room. I love my Kindle. I can use it standing, sitting, or lying down, with equal ease.
Caveats:
– Kindle is a terrible platform for PDF; it works great with flow.
– The web browser is terrible.
– Many, perhaps most, volumes available for Kindle are badly formatted.
Pro:
– It does a fine job on flowable text.
– Not having to charge it more than once or twice a month turns out to be a huge feature, for me. It’s one reason I always take it along.
I do not enable WiFi unless I need to d/l a book. I rarely use the built-in audio.
I hate reading a book at the computer. Too many distractions. It’s tolerable for a tech manual, although even there, I am more likely to print a few pages on which I can scribble or highlight.
Looking at my wife’s relationship with her phone, I do think that battery life is a major convenience factor. We all (except my wife) became accustomed to charging phones each night. But charging multiple devices each night? No thanks.
And in passing, one reason I reject the iPad is that it should also do phone. Stupid omission.
I just bought a Nook HD+. I used the B&N OS on it for maybe 48 hours then put in a 16Gig microSD card with the Cyanogenmod version of Jelly Bean. That makes it a 9.5 inch HD tablet for well under $200, and it does what I wanted it for and not a lot of things I didn’t need or want. Whether the B&N ecosystem survives or not the tablet is no longer tied to it.
In August 2011 I bought my late wife one of the original Nook Color readers for her to use AS A BOOK READER. I did get her to try CM7 on it and, although I got it to dual boot, she mostly used the CM7 OS and only switched to the Nook mode when there was some DRM content from B&N she just had to have. I wish she could see the new HD+ The screen is MUCH sharper and it is a lot faster.
I bought a Nook Color some time back and liked it a lot. Cyanogenmod worked great on it, and I used it as a tablet until I bought a Transformer Prime. Carol now uses it as an ebook reader, and she loves it. She’s not a computer enthusiast and doesn’t require it to be a general-purpose computer, as a laptop would be.
If B&N folds the Nook business those little slabs will be all over the place, and cheap. They made an awful lot of them, and they’re of pretty good quality. What I’m wondering is if they can make money on ebooks by simply fielding good apps for Android and not making the hardware themselves. The tablet hardware business is still evolving briskly. It may not make sense for a bookseller to be saddled with a particular hardware design, unless, of course, they’re Amazon.