Friday, May 25, 2012

New B&O TV

New Bang And Olufsen TV, at non-premium price.
Looks pretty nice, and I like that it does not dominate the room like most modern TVs. With many of them you feel like you've invited the Borg inside.



By the way, it's Olufsen with an E because it is from my ol' homeland Denmark. Olufson would be Swedish. (Both mean Son of Oluf.)

"No Name, No Slogan"

The trend of no names or numbers for Kindles or iPads is irritating if you want to search for it. How do you search for (accessories for) the small Kindle ($79)? Nobody knows what to call it. I think it’s arrogant of those companies, they just assume their product is so dominating that no differentiation is necessary.

For example I was looking on Amazon for a nice soft-leather cover for my small Kindle (the current cheap one). I had heard about Cole Haan as having some nice ones. And I found several variations of them, but they seemed to be all for Kindle 2 or 3. And I had no way to limit the search to the small Kindle, because it has no name beyond "Kindle".

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Get a tablet and then cover


Funny. Just hours ago I was looking (again) into Oberon leather covers. They are really quite unique. And I really like them. The problem is that there's not one of them which I really really like, as it were. I guess my favorite one is is the one with the classic drawing Roof Of Heaven, but that's as much about philosophy and some experiences I've had as it it is about the art. 
Also, I don't know, it seems a bit artificial that their covers bend in a big curve. For some reason I feel I would prefer if some actual bends had been put into the leather, so you got something more like a book cover. Perhaps it's because the spine looks forced, not like it's meant to be there. 
----
I'm not sure if this iPad Case is too effeminate for me, but it seems to be very nicely made. Whaddaya say, can a man use this and remain a man's man? (By which I don't mean, you know...) I think perhaps the navy one is better, you can't go wrong with dark blue. 






I also like this one, although I'd have preferred the the inside red color to be much darker.





Monday, May 21, 2012

Send to Kindle, formats and Emily Starr books LM Montgomery

I think the Send To Kindle app is very cool. But still... I have two ebooks which I only found on the Net by long and hard search, which were some obscure format which I had to convert myself with Calibre, first into HTML and then into ePub so I could read it on my iPad.

But I now decided I wanted to read them on my Kindle. So I fired up Send To Kindle.
What do you know, while it will send and convert Word documents, PDFs, txt and RTF, it can't do anything with either HTML or ePub! The first one is pretty much the format all e-text is based on, and the other one is the defacto standard in ebooks.

So I had to open the HTML file in Nisus Writer Pro and save it as RTF, then pull that file into Send To Kindle, which sent it to Amazon's server, which converted it to the proprietary Kindle format! OMFG. This overall lack of standards and compatibility is ridiculous. And with all these conversions, it's a miracle any semblance of the books remains, but it seems they are quite readable, correct paragraphs and no odd line breaks or such.  Yea.



By the way, the e-books are "Emily Climbs" and "Emily's Quest", by Lucy Maud Montgomery (L. M. Montgomery). Probably others have had their troubles finding them also, so I've posted them now (they are out of copyright so far as I know). You can find them here in RTF format, here in HTML format, and here in ePub format (the last one include the first book, "Emily of New Moon"). Oh, and I'm not sure if this works, but this should be all three books in Kindle format.
"Emily of New Moon" is the first book, "Emily Climbs" is the second. If you are a fan of Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables" books, you'll probably like these too.

[Note: I believe these books are out of copyright. If I'm mistaken, notify me and I'll take them down. My Gmail address is eolake.]



... Hmm, it seems that Amazon only syncs how far you have come in a book over various devices with books you've bought from them, not with books you've loaded yourself. Is that sound business sense or a little stingy?