Technology – Page 17 – Into the Woods

Finally, at last, I have an identity. I know what I am. I am a steampunk. I discovered this through one of the New York Times’ blogs.

How do you know if you’re a steampunk? If you do your laundry (as I have been doing) with buckets and a washboard and hang it up to dry, but you also have an iMac and are tempted to get an iPhone. If you want a house (as I do) with a gothic design, but you also want it to be as green as possible. If you want a real keyboard for your iMac, something like you might have found on an IBM terminal in 1972. If you understand that analog technology can never be made obsolete by digital technology, no matter how many smarty-pants young techies think otherwise (leave a comment and bring it on, if you dare, smarty-pants young techies).

As documentation of my steampunk credentials, below is a photo of today’s laundry and my iMac.

Actually I’m going to go ahead and respond to the smarty-pants young techies who think that analog technology has been made obsolete by digital technology. Your Wifi router, and your cell phone, use digital forms of signal modulation, but the underlying transmitters and receivers are analog, since radio waves are, and will forever be, analog. Your audio system may use digital sampling and recording methods. But your amplifier is, and will remain, an analog device, because sound waves are, and will forever be, analog. Your eardrum is an analog device. Physics and engineering will forever need differential equations to calculate, say, orbits and trajectories. All those equations are analog. The universe is analog. Any digital system that wants to interface with nature must do so in an analog way.

Rain today = tomatoes tomorrow

The reddest part of this squall missed me, but it left an eighth of an inch of rain yesterday.

Today we have real rainy-day rain, and it may go on for hours.

What I last lived in thunderstorm country (17 years ago), Internet radar didn’t exist. Now you can easily see when rain is approaching, and how much.

After they’ve had time to slurp up some of this rain, I’ll have some photos to show what the rain did for my baby tomatoes, peppers, peas, and beans.

Finding country roads, with technology

The backroad to Germanton

I’ve always loved the backroads, and I thought I knew the backroads around here. But nothing knows the backroads like a GPS device.

I’ve had a hiker’s GPS unit for years, but it’s not smart enough to plot over-the-road routes and tell you where to turn. I’ve played with those things occasionally in rental cars, but they’re too complicated to learn how to use in a rent car. But last week I broke down and got me** a remaindered Garmin iQue M5 on eBay.

It got me*** to Madison easily. I had not previously been to Madison from here because I didn’t know how to get there. I also let the GPS device plot a new route to Mama’s house in Yadkin County. It found a backroads way that I would never have thought to try, and it cut two to four miles off the distance. If you accidentally or intentionally stray off the route, the device will warn you, recalculate a new route, and talk you back toward your destination. Often I’ve avoided trying backroads because I had no map, had no idea where the roads went, and I didn’t want to risk getting too lost. But an in-car GPS device frees you up to explore with confidence.

Within the next few weeks, I’m planning a road trip into the mountains along the Tennessee/Virginia line. I’m going to explore me** some backroads.

** Californians: Google “reflexive dative,” or see this or this. Don’t y’all miss my little seminars on Appalachian English?

*** This is not a reflexive dative but is rather a simple indirect object. 🙂

eBooks: Their day has come

Today’s New York Times on my Sony Reader

There were several failed attempts to introduce electronic books before Sony finally got some traction with the Sony Reader in 2006. When Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, they sold like hotcakes, and Amazon couldn’t keep up with the demand. Only recently did Amazon announce on their web site that they finally have enough Kindles in stock to ship them immediately after purchase.

If you’re buying a eReader today, the Kindle is the way to go. It loads itself wirelessly over the cellular data network, and Amazon pays all the costs of that wireless sync’ing. The Sony Reader, on the other hand, must be connected to a computer to load new books or content.

I have a Sony Reader, but I don’t have a Kindle. The San Francisco Chronicle did have a Kindle, though, and I got to play with it a bit before I left San Francisco. The hardware could use some redesign, but its theory of operation is brilliant.

The Sony Reader at first was dependent upon Sony’s Windows-only application and Sony’s on-line store. Sony’s Windows application is embarrassingly clunky, and the store’s offerings are seriously limited — mostly mass-market stuff.

But a free open-source application has liberated the Sony Reader and given it new life. The application is Libprs500, and it runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Many sources of eBooks for the Sony Reader, both free and commercial, have sprung up on the Internet, and the Libprs500 application lets you load all that content on the Sony Reader without having to use Sony’s clunky application at all. Because I like science fiction and fantasy, I particularly like the Baen Free Library, which also has books for sale.

Libprs500 running on my Macintosh

One of the nicest features of Libprs500 is its ability to pull down RSS feeds from news sources and automatically format them for the Sony Reader. This makes it practical to read today’s newspapers on the Sony Reader rather than in front of the computer. The list of available feeds is shockingly intelligent (as one might expect with an intelligent open source application). For some of the sources, a password an subscription are required. The New York Times requires a password, even though it’s free.

The Libprs500 list of news sources

The Stokes County Public Library is poor and has a very limited selection of books. The nearest bookstore is in Winston-Salem, and it’s pathetic (I guess I must not be in San Francisco anymore). I don’t have room to store books anyway. So I’ve dusted off my Sony Reader. When Amazon redesigns the Kindle hardware to correct the mistakes they made in the first version, I wonder if I’ll be able to resist buying one.

The real promise of eBooks is in the very early stages. eBooks drastically lower the cost of self-publishing. I hope book publishers are soon as threatened by technology as record companies are now.

With both the Kindle and the Sony Reader, with any of the available software, you can make your own books with text from any source. Go to Project Gutenberg, of course, for the classics, which are now in the public domain.

I made my own copy of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” using the French text from Project Gutenberg

Category: Technology

Oh, are you a steampunk too?

Rain today = tomatoes tomorrow

Finding country roads, with technology

eBooks: Their day has come