I’ve been playing with the new international version of the Kindle intermittently over the last few hours. This is the model with the smaller 6″ diagonal sized display.
A very first impression is that it’s actually a white iPhone that’s been under a steamroller!
But the device has a delightful form factor. The screen is crystal clear and is easier to on the eyes than traditional LCD displays. The strange visual effects as the next page prepares itself came as a surprise and I presume is something you get used to and eventually don’t even notice. The monochrome screen renders images in a way reminiscent of an antique daguerrotype, or that could be becasue I’m looking at a screensaver image of Jules Verne right now! I’ve yet to see how it performs in bright sunlight.
My first disappointment – inevitable I know – was to discover that apparently there is no web access available in Australia. I certainly hope that this changes soon. There’s something frustrating about being denied access to a feature available to others.
I wasn’t expecting Amazon to be giving books away, but I am surprised at the costs of titles. While the basic cost is US$9.99 there are higher priced volumes.
There is the option to load the device with your own files. You can do this directly with the Kindle connected to a PC or Mac as long as the documents are in the appropriate formats (.azw, .azw1, txt, unprotected .mobi or .prc). Project Gutenberg is a good source of .txt and .mobi files. There are other ways to get other formats – say a .pdf or .doc file – on the device using email. This is something I’ve yet to try.
The data charges for us international users are also pretty high – US$0.99 per megabyte – using the Whispernet service, compared to 15 cents within the US.
That said the device offers opportunities to try out magazine and newspaper subscriptions for a fortnight and you can always download sample chapters of books you’re considering adding to your library.
Posted in Books, Reading
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I just stumbled on to this nifty timeline of art from Portugal and Spain while searching for online examples of the work of Francisco de Zurbarán.
I first heard of him via Cees Nooteboom’s brilliant travel around Spain ‘Roads to Santiago: A Modern-Day Pilgrimage Through Spain‘. Exploring Zurbarán and his work seems to be as much of a lifelong quest for Nooteboom as Spain itself. Zurbarán is well known for his luxuriously rendered draped fabric in his paintings. My mother always used to stress how difficult it was to render draped fabric convincingly.
Francisco de Zurbaran, 'The martyrdom of St Serapion' (1628)
I’m sure she’d have been delighted if she could have discovered so much art so readily online – that I now take for granted. I dare say though that the hunt whether in a bookshop, gallery or online still is part of the delight of discovery and contributes its own kind of serendipity.
But back to the timeline! It neatly places the artists into their broader context which in turn reveals the profound interconnectedness of places we can tend to see with 21st century eyes as separate places. For example, at the start of this timeline period, “Philip III rules Spain, Naples, Sicily, the Southern Netherlands, and (as Philip II) Portugal.”
Last Saturday I spent an enjoyable morning learning about safer cycling and traffic confidence. The local City of Sydney Council has been offering free cycling confidence courses for the last few months and recently anounced they’ve extended the program until the end of the year.
It was the best weather imaginable to spend a day cycling around. Sunny but not hot. And the trainers, Patrick and Dion were very good – excellent communicators and thorough at letting you know what was right and wrong with your cycling technique during the drills.
The venue is the CARES (Community Road Education Scheme) facility in Sydney Park close to where I live at the St Peters end of Newtown. It’s next to a miniature traffic setup where children on scooters and bikes learn about traffic lights.
The day starts at 8:30 with intros and basic theory about traffic and your rights as a cyclist which leads to the core knowledge – that you can and should occupy an assertive position in the road – so you can be seen and also see what’s going on around you better.
After this conversation, a bit of time was spent mainly re-assuring the instructors that all of us were okay to let loose on the weekend roads of Alexandria, Redfern and Surry Hills. About half an hour was taken up with practising emergency stops, swerves, looking backwards and not wobbling, hand signals and turns. Then we set off for the real world via some very attractive parts of the inner west of Sydney.
Putting the theory into practice began quickly with ever more complex drills being performed by each of us until the instructors were confident we understood what we should be doing. What was expected to be a medium busy road turned out to be far more exciting, but we were probably protected a bit by sheer force of numbers. It was great fun being part of a string of almost a dozen riders working our way across a roundabout. Momentary flashes of the peleton flew through my mind.
And it wasn’t all about being assertive. The trainers encouraged us to communicate with car drivers. We were promised ten points if we got a driver to wave back, and a 100 if we got a smile!
The end destination was Redfern Park which we reached by riding down the very attractive Turner Lane. After a rest there, a muesli bar or two and a drink of water, we headed back to Sydney Park for the final wrap-up.
Read in the Portuguese wikipedia about the changing name of the Portuguese national day celebrated today. Its origins go back to the Republic in 1910 and through the Novo Estado period. The name of the day until the Carnation Revolution was ‘Dia de Camões, de Portugal e da Raça’. This was in memory of those who died fighting in Portugal’s colonial wars, one factor that led to the revolution. Now the day that used to celebrate war and colonial power has become the ‘Dia de Portugal, de Camões e das Comunidades Portuguesas’.
Luís Vaz de Camões is considered to be Portugal’s greatest poet. His most well know work is the grand epic of Portugal’s glorious discoveries, Os Lusíadas. While details of his birth are unclear he died in Lisbon on 10 June 1580.
Luís de Camões by François Gérard
Over a couple of days this past week I’ve read a brilliant biography of a Norwegian scientist I’d never heard of before. Lucy Jago’s The Northern Lights was published in 2001. She starts the book at a dramatic and dangerous moment during an icy expedition in 1899 to investigate what causes the northern lights, the aurora borealis and from then on it’s a hard book to put down.
Kristian Birkeland (1867-1917) was the first scientist to emphasise the importance of electro-magnetic effects in cosmic physics. The story reveals much about the level of understanding of radiophysics at the turn of the twentieth century and the difficulties of doing this big science in a tiny yet-to-become-independent country, Norway.
The book also illuminates some powerful blinkered vision on the part of Britain’s Royal Society and a surprisingly long-lasting reluctance to acknowledge the contributions of Birkeland to our understanding of the relationship of the Sun to our electro-magnetic environment. So much of this is common knowledge to radio hams and short wave listeners today – especially as they wait for the next sunspot maximum – that it’s surprising to learn how recently confirmed this knowledge is.
As a scientist he matched his understanding of the physics with an entrepreneurial instinct of how best to engage with industry to source the necessary funds for his research, but was ultimately undone by less than honourable partners and investors. He died not knowing of the complex international machinations that prevented him receiving an early Noble Prize. His total dedication to his work took a terrible toll on his health and his marriage.
Kristian Birkeland and his terrella experiment. (WikiCommons)
The dangers and cost of mounting lengthy expeditions to research the northern lights inspired him to devise a way to create the phenomena he wanted to study in the laboratory. He built ingenious experiments where he was able to recreate aurora and other electro-magnetic phenomena of the universe in part of a lecture theatre using his ‘terrella’ within the vacuum of a small glass enclosure.
He reminds me of another hidden figure from contemporary radio history who died alone in a distant hotel room only a year earlier, Father Archibald Shaw (1872-1916) aka the Wireless Priest. Shaw supplied wireless equipment for Mawson’s 1911-14 Australasian Antarctic expedition.
For a preview of the book and reviews visit this page.
Earlier this week I stumbled on the Guardian piece on developing iPhone apps published back in February.
I think the most interesting part of the iPhone experience is the iTunes store. As a long term iTunes user I’d have to say I’ve resisted spending heaps on music. But since buying the iPhone I’m surprised at how comfortable I am spending money on apps! I think it’s fantastic how the apps store has evolved so quickly to be a space where people are happy to spend small and not so small sums on apps they think might be useful or amusing. It’s like inventing ebay or amazon and not really having to worry about warehousing or distribution (beyond what must be massive bandwidth). I’m also intrigued about how successfully corporations like Apple, not traditionally considered content producers adapt to the new role. Family friendly is hard to balance with innovative ways to engage with all that your audiences wishes.
On the app developing front, I’d be lying if I pretended I didn’t share the fantasy of being the guy (mentioned in the Guardian piece) who authored an app in a matter of weeks and was pulling in $21,000 a day a its peak of popularity. What a marketplace!
So now I’m starting out reading the first chapters of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X for Dummies ISBN 978-0-470-43289-1 which I bought at Dymocks this afternoon. LOL.
I love the aura of computer programming manuals. They take you to a space where all is ordered and achievable. They don’t hide the challenges, but after a couple of pages you imagine you’re twenty years younger and thirty IQ points brighter just from jumping onto the narrative train. As the delightful delirium sets in you even imagine you will actually have some of the time you’ll need make it all happen!
While the manual may cost $25 or $30 this costs pales into nano insignificance compared to the amount of time and attention you need to be able to dedicate to the task. At a humble rate of $50 an hour the book suddenly takes on a different resource dimension as the real investment becomes clearer.
But like I say it’s a space I like to visit and plan to spend more time there, if I can.
I’ve also discovered the series of video podcasts Stanford have been publishing since the beginning of April on iPhone Application Programming. (the link opens iTunes).
Reading an article in the Weekly Guardian on how the Energy-hungry Internet is threatened by its own success. The growth of demand and traffic is matched apparently by more energy hungry servers etc leading to a sense of an impending perfect storm as energy costs rise. Sounds like bloat may be the dark flipside to the exponential growth and doubling of computing power and halving of equipment costs.
It would be interesting to develop some indicative figures that reflect carbon cost of a static page, a simple and a complex google search and maybe posting and editing a blog post like this – and compare them to other activities like a walk in the park, a ride in a lift or a drive down the freeway.
While tidying up my mac I stumbled across a video I must have saved but not got around to really watching first time around. When I did earlier today, it was one of those unforgettable experiences. The video displays a set of skills and an attitude to technology I wish I could emulate.
F2FO is the French ham responsible for the extensive documentation and the video at the foot of the page.
Here’s the page. F2FO builds from scratch a batch of triode radio valves and the video traces every step in loving detail. It’s a jaw dropping story. I can’t wait to tackle the extensive documentation on the site. It’s in French but conveniently set up for an automated online translation.
The video is 17 minutes or so. It must have taken Claude a considerable amount of time to prepare the components and assemble that batch of home-made triode valves.
These are the technological survival skills I would love to possess.
At the very least I’d like to know more about his amazing workshop and those tools he uses.
I was inspired to search for comparable documentary videos depicting the factory scale production techniques. There were clips shot in 1930 at the Osram factory and later at the Phillips-Mullard factory tracing the steps building an EF80 pentode. Both sets of video were made available to YouTube by the Philips Museum. They make you appreciate the F2FO approach even more!
The highlight and surprise of the trip home was a stop at Cook Park on Summer Street in Orange. As soon as I come out of the loos – the reason for my visit – I saw a neat and old fashioned conservatory full of brightly coloured blooms lighting up the warm autumn late afternoon.
Begonias in flower in the Blowes Conservatory at Cook Park, Orange
The Blowes Conservatory, Cook Park, Orange
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this short visit to the Zoo. Staying overnight on the grounds of a zoo did not appeal at all.
