April 2008 – Into the Woods

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

What's down the road from me

Home in the morning light

As I mentioned in a previous post, if you go about .4 mile up the road from me, you come to the paved public road. If you go down the road from me, you go across a tractor bridge and onto a little tractor road into the woods. Let’s walk down the road.

Baby clover in the morning dew. Where I exposed the soil for site preparation, I’ve worked hard to get ground cover growing, mainly fescue grass, rye, and red and white clover. This stuff is off to a good start. I’ll have more photos when it’s grown enough to be more photogenic.

Looking downstream in my woods

My little valley, where the branch comes through

Looking upstream in my woods

What pine trees do in the spring

When you’re in the woods, don’t forget to look down.

The woods are full of this in the spring, but I can’t for the life of me think what it’s called. Bonnie, what is this? Response: redbud

From this point on, we’re on neighbors’ land. The tractor bridge, and the lowest point on our little walk.

From the tractor bridge, looking downstream

Starting up the next ridge

Continuing up the next ridge

… and on up the next ridge

On the next ridge, looking across a little valley. Do you espy anything familiar on the far hill?

In case you couldn’t find it, here’s the location of my little trailer seen from the opposite ridge.

Drought watch: La Niña is weakening

NOAA

You’ll recall that the drought in the southeastern United States since late last summer was caused, according to climate scientists, by La Niña. La Niña is a large patch of abnormally cold water in the equatorial Pacific which alters how rainfall moves up from the south toward the southeastern United States. NOAA says that these equatorial ocean currents are warming up, which means that La Niña is weakening. NOAA says, though, that La Niña will persist for another three months.

This latest update from NOAA on La Niña does not specifically mention the southeastern United States, but it does say that below average rainfall will continue in the southwest, from Texas to Nevada.

With luck, the good spring rains we’ve been having here in northwestern North Carolina will continue.

Finally, a cell phone a nerd can love

Once upon a time, cell phones were great telephones. Back in the mid-1990s, when I worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the Examiner had a fantastic collection of analog cell phones that are now considered obsolete. Money was no object to the Examiner — reporters and photographers in the field had to be able to communicate with the mother ship no matter what the cost. My favorite phones were the old analog bag phones. These phones put out a three-watt signal and supported audio quality that was as good as a regular telephone.

Then the digital revolution completely changed cell phones. Digital is supposed to make everything better, right? In the case of cell phones, that is most decidedly not true. The old analog phones have now been almost completely phased out, and most cellular companies won’t let you use them anymore. The digital phones did bring prices down, by allowing the cell phone companies to push more calls through the same towers and radio bandwidth, but the toll on voice quality was tremendous.

Why cell phone calls make us tired

This is because the sound of the human voice on cell phones is now digitally “compressed” to the thinnest possible data stream. This is a “lossy” compression. As much voice information is thrown away as the cell phone companies think they can get away with. Cell phone signals are way more compressed than what you get in, say, MP3 music compression. One of the reasons talking on a cell phone requires so much concentration (making cell phones even more distracting for drivers) is that, whether you realize it or not, your brain must work very hard during a cell phone call to try to fill in the missing information as best it can to parse the words. This is why many of us find cell phone calls very tiring. Another digital artifact that makes cell phone calls annoying is that there is delay. Your voice no longer travels at the speed of light as it did during analog days. Instead your voice travels at the speed of the cell phone companies’ equipment — computers, basically, and we know how fast computers sometimes are. That delay distorts conversational cues. It’s easy for both people to start talking at once, and it takes a fraction of a second to realize that you’re both talking at once. Thus cell phone calls are filled with little verbal dosados.

Motorola rules!

Motorola still makes a bag phone, and yes it’s digital. Only Motorola engineers (how I admire them!) could make such a nerdy telephone. It weighs 10 pounds. Cell phone companies don’t want devices firing three watts into their systems anymore, but you can add a three-watt amplifier to this phone if you need it. Otherwise its transmitter is rated at .6 watt, or 600 milliwatts.

Just how much power any digital cell phone puts out at any given time is a complicated matter. Not only that, but there are many good reasons for keeping the power down. It extends battery life, it reduces interference on congested cellular bands, and it reduces RF exposure from that tiny internal antenna that’s just inches from your eyes. But transmitter output power isn’t all that matters. Receiver sensitivity also is a big factor. Before a cell phone can be a good phone, it must first be a good radio transmitter and receiver. Those Motorola engineers excel at that. The antenna on the Motorola M800 bag phone has a sticker near the antenna warning you, in both English and French, to keep 20 centimeters (8 inches) away from the antenna. And, as every ham radio operator knows, the quality of the antenna is at least as important as the quality of the receiver and transmitter. Most cell phones have extremely sorry antennas. Using a coaxial cable, you can attach any kind of antenna you want to this phone, for example a directional Yagi antenna like the one I use for my EVDO Internet setup.

In any case, those people who’ve been annoyed that I’ve been hard to reach while I’ve been working on my communications systems out here in the sticks may be happy to know that I now have powerful cell phone with outstanding audio quality. But if you’d like to chat, please call on weekends, because, even though I splurged on a heavy-duty phone, I’m not spending a bundle on the Alltel service plan I signed up for.

Michael Pollan on having a garden

New York Times

It’s always a good Sunday if Michael Pollan has a piece in the New York Times Magazine:

You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.

Gardening with raised beds

My first raised bed. This one will soon have tomatoes in it.

I plan to garden using raised beds. If you do some Googling or ask someone who uses them, you’ll find they have a number of advantages. A couple of advantages that aren’t often mentioned: They make life easier for inexperienced gardeners like me. And they make it easier to work using only hand tools.

I don’t want to start collecting a bunch of powered machinery. It costs a lot of money, they have to be stored somewhere, they require maintenance, they make noise, and they use fuel. I want to try to do as much as I can using simple hand tools.

I’ll build a couple more of these raised beds during the next week or so. They’re not that much trouble to make, and they’re not that expensive. About $40 in posts, and about $70 for the commercial topsoil and composted cow manure to put in them.

What's up the road from me

I live on a private, unpaved, gravel road that provides access to six parcels of land. All the neighbors have more land than I do (I have five acres). I’m about .4 mile down this road. After the road passes my place, it leads to a neighbor’s cabin, then turns into a tractor track that follows a little stream for a while and then winds up the next ridge. I’ll have photos of down the road later; it’s much more complicated and picturesque in a very different way than up the road. But for now, here’s what lies up the road. (Up means toward the public paved road, and down means into the woods.)

Up the road about 150 yards, past the neighbors horse pasture

The neighbor’s horse pasture

About 500 yards up the road from me

The neighbor’s horse pasture

Where the road dips down to my place

The driveway leading to the neighbors horse barn

Moved to Stokes!

Where I live now…

Where I used to live. You decide if it’s a step up or a step down…

The trailer towed nicely yesterday, but it was a pain in the neck maneuvering it over the soft ground and backing it into its space between the trees. Jake, the RV maintenance man, did the towing for me and most of the work of leveling the trailer.

All the hookups are working — water, electric, and septic. More later about how I’m connecting to the Internet.

It sure is quiet here.

More what's blooming

This is in Bob and Sue’s yard (my brother and sister-in-law).

Red azaleas

White azaleas

Tulips

What's blooming in Mama's yard

Spring in Yadkin County, where my Mama’s house is, is running about a week ahead of spring in Stokes County. Stokes has a slightly higher elevation and is closer to the mountains.

Lilacs