Early learning

Hurrah for ebooks!! (updated twice)

People who don't yet take advantage of ebooks really should get wise.
For example, take this, Complete Anne of Green Gables. This is a great collection, and the price, $31, is certainly reasonable. And I have to admit that the books together is an attractive bundle to own physically.
(Mark Twain, by the way, was a big fan of Anne of Green Gables.)
(Many people only know it from films/TV, but I think the books are far superior. You have the time to really get to know the characters, and they are wonderfully written, and wonderfully funny, an understated, intelligent kind of humor.)

But they do take up space. Long-time readers know how it adds up. And now compare it to this item (seems unfortunately to only be available on Amazon UK at the moment): The Complete works of L.M. Montgomery.

Update: it turns out it is indeed available in the US. (Thanks to Len.)

It is illustrated, and it has everything, including the books above, the Emily books, the Storygirl books, all the shortstories, articles, and her autobiography! (The last was actually what I was looking for. I want to know how much of Emily's struggles and joys as a young writer, she had in common with her author.)

... And, it is zero grams and no space, being digital, and costs less than two Pounds Sterling! (Three dollars.)
(You may be able to find much of it for free, but I had to work through quite some hoops just to find the three Emily books and convert them to Kindle format, so I'm delighted to pay two Pounds for this collection, trust me.)

Montgomery's books are sometimes seen as books for young girls, but as she found out herself, they really transcend their genre. Full of wisdom and humour and warmth, and very entertaining, I love them despite me being a 49-year-old male.

Sometimes, especially in the Emily books, I am very impressed just by *how good* she is, both in terms of plot and in terms of language.

---

I will happily pay a good price for a small item I really like. But I'm also sometimes delighted with simply a good deal. And it rarely comes better than this, look at how much you get for the three bucks (see list at the end of the post.)

---

Delphi Classics in UK has many other interesting Collected-Works collections at similar crazy prices. And it is said that they are beautifully produced and formatted, something you can't often say about free ebooks.

---
Update:

ganesha games said...
Anne of Green Gables was also made into a delightful anime adaptation. I don't know how faithful it is to the book but it was popular in the late 80's in Italy.

Thanks. Maybe I'll take a look at it. Despite:
I got the famous Canadian film from the eighties. And it really was very good, and "Anne" actor was sweet and perfect. But... like with Little Women, I felt that an adaption of such a book cannot *really* succeed, because the main attraction is that over the many hours you read the book, you grow *so* attached to the characters, and in a film, that just can't be done. (Perhaps in a TV show?)

Also, in those books, the other very strong side is the *tone* of the book, very loving, and the *thoughts* of the author, loving and reflective and philosophical, and often speaking directly to the audience. It might be done with a voice-over, not sure, but for some reason that is very rarely done. Maybe they fear it takes the audience out of the story? (I think a voice-over, done really right, can be great.)

Also, movie/TV adaptations almost inevitably popularize and flatten a book. They have to take out something for time, and of course they take out the things that some of the audience may not understand, or which it takes time to think about, something which you have when you read a book, but not when watching a movie.

An example of this is the James Bond movies. I don't consider the James Bond books great literature, but they do have *some* pathos and depth, which you certainly can't say about the movies, most of which are simple popcorn shoot-em-ups with big budgets.

---

CONTENTS of The Complete works of L.M. Montgomery:

Anne of Green Gables Series

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

ANNE OF AVONLEA

ANNE OF THE ISLAND

ANNE OF WINDY POPLARS

ANNE’S HOUSE OF DREAMS

ANNE OF INGLESIDE

RAINBOW VALLEY

RILLA OF INGLESIDE

Emily Trilogy

EMILY OF NEW MOON

EMILY CLIMBS

EMILY’S QUEST

Pat of Silver Bush Series

PAT OF SILVER BUSH

MISTRESS PAT

The Story Girl Series

THE STORY GIRL

THE GOLDEN ROAD

Other Novels

KILMENY OF THE ORCHARD

THE BLUE CASTLE

MAGIC FOR MARIGOLD

A TANGLED WEB

JANE OF LANTERN HILL

The Short Story Collections

CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA

FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA

UNCOLLECTED SHORT STORIES

The Short Stories

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Poetry

THE WATCHMAN AND OTHER POEMS

UNCOLLECTED POEMS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Non-Fiction

COURAGEOUS WOMEN

The Autobiography

THE ALPINE PATH: THE STORY OF MY CAREER

Contextual Pieces

MISS MARIETTA’S JERSEY

L.M. MONTGOMERY by Marjorie MacMurchy

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES REVIEW (I)

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES REVIEW (II)

OUR WOMEN

LETTERS FROM THE LITERATI

“ANNE OF GREEN GABLES” READY

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES FILM REVIEW, 1920

iPhone/Mini stand (updated)

Frameshift stand for iPad Mini and phones. Not cheap, but I have to admit it looks really nice.

And... on the top picture, doesn't it look like some sort of big piece of workout equipment or summin?    :-)

The site is not very helpful with info, like what does it weigh, and how do you change the angle? (Surely not with tools, as it looks like?)

Update:

Richard Ford of IGP said...
We updated the descriptions of the FrameShift Mini and FrameShift based on your comments.

... They added info about the weight (70 grams only for the Mini), and how to change the angle: "...using only your hands, no tools required. The friction hinge ensures it will stay at the angle you set until you change it and won't come loose over time." Thanks, Richard.

(This is what I love about small companies, they can be responsive. Big companies, I guess, can't allow to delegate enough responsibility to let people speak for the company, and the execs don't have the time.)


I'm tempted to get one, but then I really like my Griffin xPo.

They also have a full-iPad stand, which looks more like something from a science fiction movie, despite its simple function of just propping up an iPad.     :-)

Platforma iPad bag

iPad one

I was just looking at my "old" iPad One, and I was struck by two things: 

1: How much I still like it, and how much it recalls to me the feeling of how immensely important a step it was in computing. I think very few people yet realize just how big tablets is, I think it's almost on par with the World Wide Web. 

2: How outdated it is. The screen is not even close to iPad 2's screen, despite having the same resolution. It is too slow for some of the new apps. It doesn't have a camera. It can't use the newest iOS (6), it can't use Siri or dictation, etc. (To be fair, iPad 2 can't use Siri either.)

3: So I looked it up on eBay UK, and was shocked at the high prices it is still fetching! Around £200/$300! That is not much less than a brand-new iPad 2 or iPad Mini! 

I am not sure what this means. Perhaps there is waiting to get a new iPad, though I have not heard of this. Or this is just another vote about how important the platform is, dripping down even to version one. I dunno. 

Apple defends smallness

An easy way to make ebooks?

Will we get an easy way to make ebooks? (I put this on my mail blog because it has a bigger readership and I think this cause deserves that.)

Apple Shows Signs a Major Interface Overhaul Is Coming

Apple Shows Signs a Major Interface Overhaul Is Coming, article.
The latest sign that changes are afoot is a job listing seeking senior software engineers for Apple’s iLife suite. The posting calls for “an enthusiastic Cocoa engineer to help us re-imagine how user interfaces should be built and work.” That doesn’t sound like a simple facelift. That sounds like the ground-up revamping of a core software suite — iLife, included in every new Mac, includes iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand.

I can't tell you how pleasing that is. I only hope they are doing something similar with the Mac's Graphical User Interface and the rest of the basics. Because I've been getting increasingly worried, with no essential improvements in the last two big OSX updates (Lion and Mountain Lion), only increasing deference and reference to the iPhone interface, which is really the last thing an professional user needs. And there has also been more and more bugs in recent releases, both iOS and OSX. So I'm worried that the Mac platform may be degrading into an amateur platform. For people who use the web and email and facebook (the lower case is intentional, due to lack of respect  :-), and perhaps create a family newsletter when the waves go high.

Our voices are gathering (updated)

The Note rocks. If
only it ran iOS...

[Update: more experts are weighing in, supporting this.]

Barclays Expects 5” iPhablet Late 2013, Early 2014, article

Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes told his clients on Monday to expect Apple to release a 5-inch iPhone—or iPhablet—in either the last quarter of 2013 or the first quarter of 2014. He said that the form factor is popular enough that Apple will not be able to ignore it.
[...] "Apple has stood firm that its iPhone is ideal for one-handed use, which is true in our opinion. However, one handed use is arguably less important as phone calls become less and less crucial - the larger form factor has caught on for navigation, texting, videos, books and web access."

Indeed. I am surprised it is taking Apple this long to realize this, I've said for over four years that the iPod Touch and the iPhone are simply too small to be very useful for anything but phone calls and the simplest of apps. (There are very few web sites which I'm able to read or use on an iPhone.) And the Samsung Galaxy Note, now well over a year old, made it abundantly clear to anybody who has tried it (has Apple?) that two more inches makes a world of difference (it's double the area).

Jobs of course said that 7-inch tablets are not useful, "unless you include a file to make your fingertips slimmer". Jobs had opinions, many of them, and very, very strong ones. And he never changed them, until suddenly he had, and then the new belief was his own, and he had always had it. And some of his beliefs, inevitably, were not well founded. I think this is a good example. If the iPhone is useful, and the 10-inch iPad is useful, by what kind of logic would sizes in between those two not be useful? Sorry, it makes no sense at all.

The near-8-inch iPad Mini, the 10-inch iPad, the 3.5(4)-inch iPhone regular, and a 5 or 5.5-inch iPhone Deluxe would together make for a strong line which covers about everything. (Until the day we really need large tablets, but I think that's a minority market for now.)

Catching the Catcher...

Catcher In The Rye is not available as ebook. Jeeeeeez, come ooooooooooooon!

I hear that Salinger is "protective" of his work. Well, he better wise up, we are quite a few now who, if we can't get a book as ebook, we just skip it. So he loses a reader and a sale.

A different tablet use: as camera viewfinder

The new Canon 6D, beyond super-duper-low-light capabilities (usable 25,000 ISO!!), has a built-in wifi hub. Kewl. If you install the "EOS Remote" app on an Android or iOS device, you can view pictures sitting on the camera, or shoot the camera remotely, seeing what the camera is seeing at the moment. Very nice, and free, once you paid for the camera itself.

Two small downsides: the app is not yet optimised for tablet, only for phones, so the interface is rather simplistic. And the camera of course has to use Live View and so will focus from the sensor itself, and SLR lenses (unlike, say, Micro Four Thirds lenses) are not optimised for this, so focusing takes longer, like a couple of seconds instead of less than 1/10th sec as usual.

But lookit this nice picture in picture effect, photographing the iPad while it's getting the camera's feed.

(By the way, an oddity: EOS Remote was able to email me this image. But how? The iPad was not connected to my Internet-connected wifi network, only to the Canon 6D, and how in the world does the 6D connect to the Internet? I surely had not connected it to anything.)

Griffin Xpo stand

I just got the Griffin Xpo tablet/phone stand. It's awesome. I don't understand why it's getting so little exposure, it's a portable stand with the aesthetics and capabilities of a full-sized stand. Folded, it's pocket-sized (barely longer than a pair of sunglasses) and weighs less than two ounces (51 grams). And it works with virtually any phone or tablet, even in a slim case.

It costs less than $20! (it's solid aluminium), and it comes with a cute little leather case (so it doesn't scratch other things, I guess).
If you push the legs almost together, it will even hold a phone in vertical orientation.

I have a feeling this product may not be available for long (they don't even sell it in the UK), so get one or two today.

I admire design and engineering like this. So small, so light, so simple, yet so effective, strong, and nice looking.
And it's harder than one might think... I've been buying iPad stands for near three years now, and it's only now I've found one which combines all these points. I have some small ones, but they are not aesthetic or strong. I have some beautiful ones, but they are not compact or light.

"Apple Absolutely Has To Make An iPhone With A Bigger Screen"

Apple Absolutely Has To Make An iPhone With A Bigger Screen, article, BusinessInsider

That bigger screen is awesome.
Apple's stock has cratered 35% from its peak of five months ago. This fall is the result of a lot of factors, but the biggest one is this: After five years of having the best smartphone on the planet, Apple has arguably fallen behind the competition. And the biggest and most obvious reason Apple has fallen behind the competition is its stubborn insistence on sticking with a small iPhone screen.

Yeap. Well, I don't care about Apple's stock price, it matters only to investors, not even to Apple (and I doubt the screen size is *that* strong a factor there), but I do care about usability.
I've said it before, and I say it again with tears in my eyes: Once you've tried a five-inch screen for reading and video (and I guess gaming, but I wouldn't know), then the current iPhone starts to look like a five-foot basketball player.

I said this first back in 2011 (I even predicted it before I acquired the excellent 5.3-inch Galaxy Note):

I think the future of the phone is in the 5-inch size. Apple may be slow to go there, since they didn't invent it, and they can be a bit stubborn about such things. But I think it's like with desktop monitors, why does Apple no longer make a 15-inch or even a 17-inch iMac? Because everything else being equal, bigger is better. Once you could make screens cheap enough, they grew.
-
The Note is an excellent ereader. The iPhone is usable as such, but only just.

New 128GB iPad

Apple Aims New 128 GB iPad at Professional Users, article.
Apple has announced a 128 GB version of the fourth-generation iPad. The new model will cost $799 for the Wi-Fi model and $929 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model

I had hoped for a 128GB model for my iTunes video content, but I had hoped it wouldn't cost more, or at least significantly more. I think Apple should follow Amazon's more reasonable storage upgrade pricing. A hunnert bucks between each model is a bit stiff. 

... That said, if iPad 5 (whenever it comes) looks interesting, I'll probably "bite the green apple" as us Danes say, and get the 128GB model anyway. After all I paid for .mac membership for a decade, each year hoping they would introduce something useful for me.

New term: a "green Apple": an Apple product which tastes bitter for some reason but which you have to have anyway.

(At least Apple is not so bad as the newest Microsoft scandal: the 128GB Surface model has 45 gigabyte missing to pre-installed software/crapware bloat! Ouch.)

---

TidBITS is also running a mini-campaign to hold Apple responsible for their often-lackadaisical support, especially for professional users.
But my real question is if Apple is going to give professional iPad users the kind of respect they deserve in terms of software updates, documentation, release notes, and tech support. Yes, people everywhere have started using the iPad for business purposes, but as we ran into recently (“Pages 4.3 vs. BBEdit 10.5: How Apple Doesn’t Respect Its Users,” 26 January 2013), just because you can get your work done on an iPad now, Charlie Brown, doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t going to pull the football away from you in the future.

I can get behind that. If Apple seriously believes (and they say they do) that tablets will replace most PCs, and that tablets can be used for serious professional use, then they have to take professional users seriously in all areas, and they generally are not, not even in desktop computing, just see how the last two versions of Mac OSX have added features which makes it look more and more like an iPhone interface, but have added virtually no new features to attract the professional crowd which have been their core supporters since the eighties.

They also have not made serious upgrades to the Mac Pro (the tower model) for years. They promise a brand new model this year, and I'm nervously watching to see if they do it really for pro users, or the best feature will be that this new "pro model" will fit in a bread box and come in five colors, and be glued together like the new 24-inch iPad to make it nigh impossible to change or upgrade.

Books to recommend

For people like me who are not necessarily techies but admire beautiful and efficient technology, iPod Evolution may be an interesting book. I have pre-ordered it.

Earlier I liked Steven Levy's book The Perfect Thing, (seems to not be out in ebook format, but it does exist as audiobook) also the story of the iPod, but with Levy's particular style, which is highly respectful (a rarity amongst journalistic writers) and entertaining. I also recommend his past books Hackers and Insanely Great. ("Hackers" is not about cyber-criminals, but about exceptional computer pioneers.)

Update: looking for more Levy to enjoy, I found this collection of historic Wired articles on Steve Jobs. And another called Wired: Icons.