Odd Lots
- Feeling a little better, but still lousy. Thanks for all your kind words and wishes.
- We may not lose the Nook after all. Or we may. At this point, I’ll refrain from taking sides.
- Calibre 1.0 has been released. Quite apart from its role as an ebook manager, there’s absolutely nothing like it for doing ebook format conversions. If you don’t have it yet (it’s free) you’re nuts.
- I’m boning up on my grade-school French, and this Lazarus component directory (as close as I’ve seen to Torry’s for Lazarus) is the reason. (Thanks to Bill Meyer for the link.)
- Samsung is starting mass production of their 3D V-NAND flash memory devices. It’s unclear when we’ll see SSDs containing the technology (much less SD cards) except to guess that it may be sooner than we think. (Maybe it’s time to write my funny pirate novel, which depends on cheap terabyte SD cards.)
- New Zealand has outlawed software patents. Watch for innovation to explode from The Other Down Under.
- I’ve often wondered why phage therapy has not been much in the news, given the rise of multiply antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Maybe it’s because all the phage action is in Georgia. The other Georgia.
- You may have to send away to Tbilisi for real bacteriophages, but you can get stuffed ones from Amazon.
- Oh–unless you hadn’t heard, I’m a phage phan. The leaded glass design in my front door is a stylized bacteriophage. As is the design in the ironwork on our front porch. Friends who have been here either know this already or should look the next time they visit.
- Bill Meyer sent a link to a brilliant little prototyping enclosure that folds up into a cube for testing or deployment, or folds flat for tweaking. Very cool that it’s from Bud, whom I connect mostly with aluminum chassis.
- It can’t just be the Un-Pentium. (ARM has that franchise, I guess.) It’s gotta be the Un-Un-Pentium. And it’s evidently coming to a periodic table near you.
- Shameful thing to admit by a man who’s been in publishing for thirty years and was an altar boy in the Tridentine era to boot, but I always thought the canonical “lorem ipsum” greeking text was nonsense Latin. It’s not.
- Having flown a lot of Hi-Flier kites with flying wings printed on them as a kid, I was always a fan of the unlikely aircraft. Here’s a very good multipart history of the flying wing, which is not as modern a concept as most of us like to think.
- H. P. Lovecraft’s back-of-the-envelope notes for his novella “At the Mountains of Madness.” Really.
- From the Word-I-Didn’t-Know-Until-Yesterday Department: Twerk . If you don’t know what it is, well, that may be a plus.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: aviation · ebooks · hardware · health · history · pascal · programming · software
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You’re welcome. 😉
On Calibre:
Yes, it is a great tool, but also can be annoying for the frequent need to re-install. Nice that it’s feature-rich, and nice that it’s well maintained, but really, a less frenetic update cycle would be ok.
One reason I say that is that I have recently encountered a major installer issue on Windows 7. I am unable to install Calibre 1.0. Why? Because after I click the Install button, nothing more happens. Ever. And this is not simply a problem with Calibre–I have encountered it with other programs. Discussion online suggests that the installer is so deeply entwined with the OS that many simply resort to reformatting and reinstalling Windows. Really?
MS has a “Fixit” tool. It may be a part of the fix, but it doesn’t do it all. Another suggestion is to unregister and re-register the installer service. Then, of course, there is the issue of entries in the registry. This is a problem in need of a real solution. Time, I think, for Mark Rossinovich to jump in!
Lazarus components:
The directory is a help, but also contains dead links.
As an aside, and with respect to freeware for both Delphi and Lazarus, I have lately been bitten by Git. Many people are moving to this tool, it seems, and for reasons I do not fully understand, it gives me fits. TortoiseGit does not remove the arcana of Git in the way that TortoiseSvn does for Subversion. In two cases, the ultimate solution for me was to go to the repository on GitHup, and request a zip download, which is apparently built on demand.
Git needs some really clear explication, not just of the commands, but of the underlying concepts, which are apparently the justification for its strangeness.
Bud enclosure for prototypes:
I would add that not only is it clever, but relatively inexpensive, in these times of rapid inflation. I have not bought one, but probably will. Bud chassis products have never been my favorites (I prefer the Hammond products, in most cases), but perhaps they have done better with plastic. One thing I did not see mentioned was whether the plastic used has been formulated with anti-static properties….
On RaspberryPi (implied by the Bud product):
In my limited fiddling with RaspberryPi (Model B) to date, I have observed that at least with Raspbian, unexpected power loss is often toxic to the file system, and the OS generally seems unable to recover. As I was looking at it, in the near term, as the foundation of a sprinkler control system, this is not wonderful. It suggests either the use of a UPS (simple but silly for such a purpose) or a battery to shield RPi from spontaneous loss of power. A word to the wise.
On the Nook, as a Kindle user, I don’t really care about Nook, but as my Kindle nears its third birthday, I have been looking. I note that the Asus Nexus 7 has a very attractive price, and size and weight almost identical to my Kindle keyboard model. Still more than twice the $100 mark, but it’s a full Android device with a 1080p screen. Haven’t seen on in the flesh, but will look at it. Mainly, I hope that we are about to see a promising collection if inexpensive small tablets. Please, let the competition be fierce!
On Calibre updates:
The developer himself has said that you don’t need to update continually. If you are happy with what you have, turn off notification and check the web site every six months or so.
Jeff,
Get well soon!
Regarding lorem ipsum:
I’d be very skeptical of claims that “lorem ipsum” was standard dummy text before the 1960s, much less since the 1500s. I’ve been professionally involved with typography and typesetting since the ’80s, and unprofessionally since the early ’60s. (I’ve recently reverted to setting hand type, at the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts.) I’ve always been reading up on the history of the craft, and also diligently studied contemporary specimen books (and those from the earlier 20th century) while I worked in type shops and ad agencies from the ’80s until about five years ago. I’ve looked at reproduced pages from a lot of type specimen books from earlier times. I’ve also been a fairly studious amateur Latinist for about thirty years, with a particular interest in Latin printing terminology and recent Latinity generally.
I’ve never seen any lorem ipsum that predated Letraset. I doubt I’ve seen any deliberately “dummied” text from earlier than that time, either. As far as I know, the only Latin text that was ever commonly used for type specimens was the opening of Cicero’s First Catilinarian: “Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?”, etc. This was widely enough used that a desire to fancy it up may have been a factor in the often swashy designs for the capital letter ‘Q’. More often, though, the text was whatever tickled the fancy of the typesetter.
For what it’s worth, Wikipedia, on the page for “lorem ipsum”, agrees with me: “It is not known exactly when the text acquired its current standard form; it may have been as late as the 1960s.”
For shorter texts, “a quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is of course a standard in English, but I prefer Fred Goudy’s even shorter, but less respectable “pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”.
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Ken
Phages – speaking of… on Fox News today:
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/10/17/bacteria-eating-viruses-found-to-effectively-destroy-c-diff-superbug/?intcmp=obnetwork