Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?

Who jumped first from the newspaper sinking ship?, article.
Even after the Hearst Corp ditched its San Francisco Examiner for a $660 million deal to buy the San Francisco Chronicle in late 1999, more happy talk ensued. If anybody cited Warren Buffett’s 1991 warning that newspapers had lost their special “franchise” value and that he wouldn’t be buying any more of them soon, I missed it.

I'm no investor, I don't have the nerves for it, or the interest, really. But if I were, my motto would be "nobody ever got broke listening to Warren Buffet".
Investors are puzzling creatures. On the one hand, in the nineties you had all those people who thought that anything starting up with a fresh new dot-com was a goldmine*. And that gave us the dot-bomb. On the other hand, many people only smell the sharks when the ship is already three-quarters sunk, if then. Some things don't take a genius to predict. I remember saying to a friend in maybe 1996: "newspapers are going out. More and more, people will get their news on the web".

I guess it depends on your personal life. Me for instance, I never read newsletters in my adult life (as a kid I read those our family got), and I took to the web like a duck to water as soon as I could, mid-nineties. Other people are still to this day very comfortable with their daily, crinkly paper-paper, and only uses the web in areas where they're more or less forced. So the world looks very different from there.


*I remember a young, aggressive webtrepreneur telling me around the millennium that mentioning that he had a dot-com got him girls like he was a rock star.

Thanks, Apple

I've noticed that I'm actually thankful for my iPad. It's the best reading experience I've ever had.

Admittedly you have to find the right brightness level first. To me that's about the iPad being the brightest thing in the room, but not much brighter, that contrast is what tires the eyes.  And due to the weight it really needs something to hold it (luckily good floor stands like the Flote are starting to appear).

But then: I can fine-tune the font and text size to perfection (well okay, the Kindle app would do well with finer steps between sizes). I have a nice, big (about perfect size for reading), high resolution screen (especially iPad 3). And with the stand I can read in bed with my arms under the covers. And I don't have to tune a lamp and the book's position to get it lit well. (Something about my eyes prefers pretty strong light when I read, perhaps it is the astigmatism, perhaps smaller pupils help. And this may be why I prefer a lit screen to the grey Kindle screen. (Maybe a front-lit e-ink screen may help.)) I can change back and forth between any ebook in my collection in seconds, plus articles in various apps and forms, and films/TV and other forms of entertainment.

Rumor: Microsoft to Introduce iPad Competitor

Microsoft to Introduce its Own iPad Competitor, article.

You gotta give it to Microsoft, they are like Doctor Doom: No matter how many times they are beaten, they come up swinging again!

To the kind of people who say that this proves the villainousness of MS, that the Good Guys always get into a breakdown after being beaten a couple of times, to those I say: nahhh, come off it. Microsoft just makes money, and they're very good at it. And they invented Microsoft Bob and the Talking Paper Clip!

Apple I Computer Sells for $374,500, Jobs Memo for $27,500

Apple I Computer Sells for $374,500, Jobs Memo for $27,500, article.
In the same auction, a Steve Jobs memo from his days at Atari sold for $27,500.

Dangit! I knew I should have held on to all the memos from my old bosses, just in case one of them ever reinvents the computer- or communications-business three-four times.

Dictation (updated)

Update:
Working with this, I'm noticing how much I really am slurring. Humans can normally understand me, because we have complex mental mechanism anticipating what somebody is likely to say, etc.
It helps to speak slowly and deliberately, and to anticipate and compose each sentence before I say it.
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I'm getting a little more optimistic about dication. As the well worn reader will be aware, I've been sad that it works poorly for me, a couple of mistakes in each sentence, thus negating the advantage. This has been for several different applications and on several different machines, even Windows ones. Apparently due to my Danish accent. (It's no fair, it works so well for Mads Mikkelsen.)

But I find now that I (to the contrary of what we're told), speak more deliberately and with slight pauses between words, especially if they are unusual, I can cut it down to about one mistake every other sentence, which is beginning to be useful, especially on the iPad or iPhone, where I dislike typing.

And I get a feeling I can learn to predict where the software may have difficulties (basically anything slightly unusual or worse), and make the pauses and clarity of enunciation more pronounced (no pun intended).

I can see me now, writing my next adult novel in a café, speaking loudly and clearly: "Candy Lace laid back in the hay, spreading her long, supple legs. 'Come here you big stud,' she said..."

OH, and and speaking the punctuation helps too.

 

Leather books

Physical books are starting to get a nostalgic, aesthetic-object status in my mind.
I have just bought a bunch of old, beautiful leather books to put in my nice cherry-wood book cases.
I'll have to be a little brutal to manage getting space for them, not sure how I'll mange. But I've wanted this for a long time.
Some of these books (by amazing coincidence they are mostly Danish) are even books I'd like to read. Like Classic early editions of HC Andersen.
(Though I'll probably still read them as ebooks, it's simply much better in almost every way.)

The beauty of such things were of course the inspiration for the background and header-background of this blog, which I most made myself. (Sorry, I'm just pretty proud of it.)

Tactile screen article.

Article about an upcoming tactile screen. It seems the screen can change to extrude buttons.
But it's very frustrating, it's not stated how it works. How can you make an article about important new technologies without stating how it works? It's not even clear if the screen actually changes form, or if it just feels that way to the fingers.

The noise of Social Media

In the mid-nineties, I was a member of a writers' group. And I wrote a humorous poem using a lot of computer/Internet terms. Then I edited it, removing a lot of terms that I realized most people wouldn't understand. ... And then, when reading it to the group, *nobody* understood it anyway! They didn't understand any of the terms which I thought were in common use.

So maybe you can understand why it's a bit of a shock to me now to realize that I'm becoming alienated to the new computing/Internet world. Because it's all now about "web 2.0" or Social Media, and they just don't do anything for me.

While watching the Apple keynote this week, everything seemed damn impressive. And okay, the Retina MacBook is awesome, if I didn't work from home I'd get it for sure. But otherwise, after sobering up (figuratively!), it occurs to me that basically everything new in iOS 6 or OS X Mountain Lion is social-media driven or Cloud driven. 

And while I am for communication in general (in the broadest sense it is vital), the reality of the twitter/Facebook world just seems so hollow to me. Nothing in it interest me. If somebody has something interesting to say, it is much more likely to arrive in an article or an email than in social media space. I always wrote concisely, but very few of my thoughts which feel important to me can fit in 140 characters, sorry! And if you've put some thought and feeling into something, how likely are you to post it on somebody's facebook "wall"? 

In the end I realised that I am just not likely to really use any of the new features in iOS 6 or Mountain Lion.

To me, the Social Media space feels like a party. Dozens of people all talking at once, trying to be heard over the noise. The only time I remember having a great conversation at a party was once me and two other people had sequestered ourselves in a quiet corner for an hour. That was really good, but it only happened because we isolated ourselves from the teeming masses and the noise for a while. 

New MacBook Pro (updated)

Apple has just made a minor speed bump to the Mac Pro models (towers). No ThunderStorm (or whazname) or USB3. Which is sad, and doesn't help fears that they may abandon the line.

But on the bright side the new MacBook Pro is damn impressive. (Article.) Much thinner. More power. Good battery life. Solid state drives. And: Retina Display! 3000 more pixels than an HD TV... on a 15-inch laptop! I love the iPad 3 Retina display, and it's sure to rock on a laptop.

Well, it has only half a TB of storage (due to solid state drive prices), which is not huge for many people these days, so people working with photos, sound, or video may have to bring external drives to the game. But that's about the only downside I see immediately. (Well, they're more expensive also, so they are keeping the old models for now.)

I've been wondering for almost a decade when Apple would finally make OS X resolution-independent, so they could make really high-rez screen without making the interface elements so small they'd be useless. It appears that the new OS, Mountain Lion, and July 2012 is when. Took long enough, but looks promising.

If Apple does not do something kewl with the Mac Pro line, I may actually consider one of these as main machine, with an external display. (Also the Mac Pros are incredibly expensive, they have not at all fallen like laptops have.) Hmmm... I'm guessing all apps I use have to be updated for the display though, I'll have to look into that, it could mean some inconvenience. Apple says they'll pixel-double when apps are not updated though, that may work well enough. Works fine on the iPad anyway, I am not noticing if apps are updated or not.

Oh, cool detail: they have varied the angles of the blades in the fans, so the noise is not collected on a single wavelength, which should make it appear more quiet. (That it *needs* fans is sad maybe, but I guess testimony to how much more power it has than the AirBook, which is not slow.) I must say though, I hope this is *not* like the cooling system which they were so proud of in the Mac Pro G5 in the mid-noughties, which they said would be relatively quiet, but turned out to be so fluffin' noisy.

Update:
It seems the Mac Pro will survive, Tim Cook says new models/designs come in 2013.
I wonder if they will make it much smaller? It is a wonderful design, but huge and heavy, and since it came out, Apple has more and more been on a kick with miniaturising things, even those which didn't need it, like the iPod Nano and the Apple TV.

Another success story

I'm sure the bulk of self-publishers are not great and don't go far. But there are just so many amazing stories that I can't ignore them.

Theresa wrote romance novels for 19 years. She wrote every day. She reached the finals of writing contests, and she was represented by two separate agents over this period. But she never made a sale. She resisted self-publishing, because she wanted, as she told me, “to do it the hard way, the right way.”
In 2011, she heard talk of self-publishing on Amazon and figured she had nothing to lose. Her first two books published via Kindle Direct Publishing were medieval time travels, Return of the Rose and A Knight in Central Park. She expected to sell 10 books. Instead, she was selling hundreds within a month, and after a favorable mention in the Pixel of Ink blog, the hundreds turned into thousands.

If you are already successful, I guess a Publisher can make sense. Even though they have basically stopped doing any publicity for books, and expect the author to do all that anyway. But sometimes they still give a nice advance, some of them. Even if they only in the end pay the author around 5% because of their big, obsolete overhead.

But for a new author, I don't see it. Even if you make it through the slush pile, it still takes at the very least a year to get the book out, for no good reason. A good friend of mine had a book accepted by a publisher, and then was strung along and along and along... the editor got sick for a while... and in the end it all became a big nothing, and she had wasted three years.

Jobs: no iPod for Windows users

According to this article, Steve Jobs fought nail and claw against anybody using iPods on their Windows machine. Imagine how much smaller Apple would have been now if wiser heads on the board had not talked sense into him?

Kindle update, contrast again

People have long been talking about hacks or fonts for the Kindle which supposedly improve the contrast. I could never see how that would work, it seems to me you would need to change the hardware to make the contrast better.

The newest software update to the Basic Kindle promises again better contrast. With a small skeptical hope I installed it, but I photographed the Kindle first, for easier comparison.
Below the comparison photos. Even with Photoshop's measuring tools, I can't find any difference. (Oh, by the way, the same tools show clearly that the background is middle grey, not light grey as the manufacturers claim.)

Before update: 

After: 

I'm sorry to carp on about this issue, but it hurts my heart, because I could really love the Kindle if not for this single problem, that the screen is too dark. (That I seem to be in a small minority about it doesn't make it easier, but at least Mark Twain said it's the better place to be.    :-)

If/when Amazon makes a front-lit Kindle, like the Glow Nook, I'll buy it. It'll be my sixth e-ink Kindle*, all bought in the hope that This Time It Would Really Work For Me.
But I'm not bitter (not a lot). I think Amazon has really forwarded e-reading in a big way, when nobody else seemed to be able to.

By the way, these are the contrast/lightness readings (the tine circle on the left, first for the background and then for the text):

As you can see, the contrast is about one third of the theoretically possible.
I took care to photograph without glare in the screen, for maximum contrast.

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*I have Kindle 1, Kindle 2 Int, Kindle 3, Kindle Dx, and Kindle 4 Basic. (And the Kindle Fire, which is good, but doesn't do anything my iPad or Android tablets don't do.)

When Sailing Solo Around the World, Bring an Extra Kindle

When Sailing Solo Around the World, Bring an Extra Kindle, article.

He's sailing solo around the world, and he didn't bring a backup for his Kindle??

OK, admittedly I can be an overly careful person, the type who checks all my pockets twice before going out. But really, I wouldn't go anywhere, much less alone to the middle of the ocean without bringing a backup for what's probably the only entertainment device I have. Especially what with the basic Kindle being smaller than a pulp paperback, and hardly more expensive (okay, the last thing is exaggerated, but $79 for an ereader is durn cheap).     :-)

Making ebook from web stories, example

I'm a big fan of the animated show Daria, and I happened to find some fanfiction related to it. I've never read any kind of fanfiction before, but I decided to give it a shot, and I started reading Falling Into College by Richard Lobinske. He has written so many short stories, continuing each other, that all together it effectively forms about five novels!

Now, I don't think reading long stories in a web browser is great. Just for one reason, you have to keep the same window open for a long time, days or weeks. And it's not saved in a document, or ebook. And you lose your place if the page reloads (which it does on the iPad every time you change tab). So I wanted to save the stories in a file, like an ebook.

[Update: Stephen told me about a tool which makes this process simpler: FLAG. Thanks.] [If you know the email addy Amazon gave your kindle or app, you can even email it directly to it. You need to pre-approve the sender address (found here) on your Kindle admin page on Amazon.]

This was not trivial to save, because it was split up in a page per chapter/story. But fortunately Instapaper is so ingeniously made that it detects that and saves all the pages into one document which you can then read in the Instapaper app on your favorite device.

But Instapaper is made for articles, not ebooks. For example, it has no search function. And with long documents you may lose your place if you shift the iPad from horizontal to vertical position or vice versa, because Instapaper paginates it differently, at least if you come into the app by accident in the position other than the one you left it. But I quite liked Richard's stories, so I wanted to transfer it to a proper ebook document.

I have Send To Kindle for Mac, and it has a browser button in Safari. But sadly this simple does not work on my machine, dunno why.  (I could use Print from any app and select the "Send To Kindle" printer. But this sends it as a PDF file, so you can't change text size or fonts in the Kindle(app)*. Probably the button does the same when it works.)
So what I did was copy the text (Command-A) of the whole book/article (160,000 words!) on instapaper.com (in Text view), and paste it into a word processor document and save it as .RTF (Rich Text Format, a basic and universally useful word processing format). This preserved the formatting.

Then I opened the Send To Kindle app and dragged the document into it, clicked, and boom, two minutes later I had a perfect ebook sitting in the Kindle app on my iPad (and my small Kindle too, just for kicks).

Some of his stories were not connected by "next page" links, so there it was a little more work; I had to open a word processor document and open each story in the browser, then select all the text (Command-A), and then drag it into the document, each one under the former one. Then save that document as .RTF. Then Send to Kindle. (If I had wanted to use a different ebook reader, BlueFire or MegaReader or whatnot, I could just use Dropbox, or connect by USB and drag the document into that app's space in iTunes.)


*If you want to do this, it is worth knowing that you can adjust the text size (a bit crudely) in the resulting PDF file by adjusting the text size in the browser window before "printing"! This is also useful knowledge for when actually printing web pages to paper.

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By the way, I think writing fanfiction may be very good practice for a new writer. Sure, it doesn't pay, but most writing doesn't, and at least this way you're prepared for it! And you'll write for an audience who are already interested in the characters, and I guess it's likely to foster more feedback than most writing.

Pubslush

This sounds like it could be *really* great, both for authors and for world literacy.



Pubslush.

(Unfortunately there are some harsh criticisms of Pubslush, I hope there's not a lot to them.)