The heck with it. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Archive for the ‘Kindleing’ Category
TMQ watch: December 24, 2013.
Friday, December 27th, 2013TMQ Watch: December 10, 2013.
Tuesday, December 10th, 2013As noted last week, this is TMQ’s bye week.
Meanwhile, we have obtained a copy of The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America
It probably will not happen today, but we do plan to have a review of King of Sports up between now and the next TMQ.
Pictures of MatchBook men.
Tuesday, October 29th, 2013Interesting.
Why is this interesting? Well, I checked my Amazon account to see what titles were available to me. Right now, there are six: three of them were purchased as gifts for other people.
So, I can get the Kindle ebook edition, at a reduced price, of a physical book I bought for another person. Let me repeat that: for a considerably reduced price, I can get the electronic edition of a book I don’t even own. I’m not sure if this is by Amazon design, or a flaw in their process. I would have expected Amazon to do some checking, such as: did this go to the primary shipping address on the account, or a different address? Was this a purchase off of someone other person’s wishlist?
But hey! I can get Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 99 cents!
Add the professional narration of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a reduced price of $12.99 after you buy this Kindle book.
Yeah. $12.99 seems a little steep. How much for the amateur narration?
Noted.
Thursday, August 15th, 2013The 5th edition of Learning Python
Since I am not an idiot, I bought the ebook; doing so is easier both on my wallet and on my back. I started reading it and working through the examples last night.
Quoth Chapter 1, under “Who uses Python today?”:
The IronPort email server product uses more than 1 million lines of Python code to do its job.
I can only smile and say “No. Comment.”
And a few bullet points later:
The NSA uses Python for cryptography and intelligence analysis.
So remember, folks: the NSA is spying on you, but they’re doing it with open source software. Doesn’t that make you feel better?
(Yes, yes, I’m sure the NSA also uses Perl and Java and Visual Basic and FORTH and even internally developed languages that are still classified. I just found it funny, is all.)
Stupid question, probably.
Sunday, May 19th, 2013But why does the National PTA have an “official e-reader”? And what other “official” products does the National PTA have? “Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy: Official beer of the National PTA”? “Leica: Official camera of the National PTA”?
I know, I know, but does anyone have a better answer than “M-O-N-E-Y”?
After action report: Las Vegas, NV 2012.
Tuesday, July 31st, 2012I don’t have much new to report as far as equipment, but I do have a couple of notes on existing stuff. DEFCON for the past few years has run a “secure” network using MSCHAPv2 authentication.
- This worked fine on the Kindle Fire. I was able to log in and browse whenever the network was working. However, there seems to be some sort of bug in the Kindle Fire: after a certain amount of time, the wifi setting on the Fire would either stop responding completely (on/off switch wouldn’t do anything) or would immediately crash (with an error message) as soon as I tried to open the setting.
- The default Network Manager on Ubuntu 12.04 would not connect to the “secure” network at all, but just constantly brought up the authentication prompt. Google turned up more than a few reports of Ubuntu issues with Network Manager and MS-CHAPv2 authenticated networks, so it seems this is a known issue. I worked around this by downloading and installing wicd, which was able to connect. However, wicd does not appear to save network settings, so every time I wanted to connect to the network, I had to re-enter the configuration.
(In general, I’m seeing more and more problems with project e and Ubuntu 12.04. I suspect some of these may be issues caused by doing several upgrade installs in succession, so I may try doing a backup of /home, reformatting project e, and doing a scratch install and restore of 12.04.)
Food: I had excellent meals at Lotus of Siam (the sea bass drunken noodles) and at Piero’s Italian Cuisine, which is a very old-school Italian restaurant near the convention center.
That was some swell osso bucco. And I don’t think I paid much more for it than I paid for osso bucco at Ciola’s when they were still open.
I also broke with one of my rules and went back to Shabu Shabu Paradise again. In my defense:
- I really like these people and want them to be enormously successful.
- I haven’t been there since my last trip with Andrew and Mike the Musicologist.
- I kind of have a tiny little crush on the waitress. Who, by the way, recognized me from my previous visits, even though I was clean-shaven last time. (I think she’s married to the chef, so nothing’s going to come of that.)
I also had a good meal at Mint Indian Bistro, and very good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and The Egg and I on Sahara. (The rule doesn’t apply to breakfast, as it is very very hard to find good breakfast places that aren’t casino buffets, Denny’s, or IHOPs in Vegas. If anybody does have a recommendation for a good breakfast place in Las Vegas, please feel free to drop it into the comments.)
I’ve been driving past Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas for years now, considering giving them a try and then not going after all. This time, thanks to Tam inspiring a German food craving in me, I thought I’d give it a shot. The verdict: meh. It wasn’t a horrible meal. The service was pleasant and efficient. But it seemed like I paid a fair amount of money for pretty average food. Walburg is better and cheaper and really not that bad a drive if I go there from work. (You’d be hard-pressed to spend $50+ at Walburg without either being too full to move or too drunk to drive.)
I drove past Flavor Flav’s House of Flavor several times (it is very close to my preferred ATM in Las Vegas, which, in turn, is far enough away from DEFCON that I’m not any more paranoid than usual about using that ATM), and I regret not getting a photo.
I did get some photos (but they didn’t come out well) of “Lynyrd Skynyrd BBQ & Beer“. BBQ and beer? I can haz both?
(By the way, I was never offered a full can of soda on any of my Southwest flights. But I did get a full can of drinking water between PHX and AUS.)
Thanks to: Everyone at DEFCON 20 (staff, goons, presenters, and attendees), the folks at Shabu Shabu Paradise, Lotus of Siam, the Egg and I, Blueberry Hill, and Mint Indian Bistro, the Mob Museum, Amber Unicorn Books, Greyhound’s Books, Borepatch for linky-love, and anyone else I missed.
Kindle notes.
Sunday, July 8th, 2012Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app
Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.
This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns
One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy
My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.
Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963
Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…
…and the Kindle edition
(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)
After action report: Boise, ID.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2012This is going to be more like a collection of random notes towards an AA report than an actual report. I do plan on a longer more thoughtful blog post later; probably this weekend, if everything works out the way I want it to. (I’m waiting for something to come in, and I need to go out to my mother’s place to take some pictures.)
- You can do blog posts from the Kindle Fire. I wouldn’t recommend it, and there are some issues with the WordPress interface on the Kindle, but in a pinch it can be done. And it is better than trying to post from a smart phone.
- On the other hand, I was at dinner one night with some friends. One of them was talking about a new gun he’d bought, but wasn’t sure what variant it was. He (and several other people at the table) were very impressed when I whipped out the Kindle Fire open to the appropriate section of the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson 3rd Edition
. At least one person said, “That’s it. I’ve got to get one.” Yeah, I like having the Kindle Fire.
- Speaking of books, I started and finished The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
on the way up. Tam has written about this book previously, and anything I could add except “go read it” would be superfluous.
- Supposedly, according to the TSA, you no longer have to take out your laptop if it is under 12″. At least, that’s what I was told by a TSA agent in Austin (too late to do me any good) and the first TSA agent I spoke with in Boise. The second TSA agent in Boise apparently either didn’t get the memo, or the other two were wrong. Good old government ineptitude.
- I feel obligated to link to this Oatmeal comic.
- I had a lot of good food in Boise. Other than Bar Gernika and the Moxie Java on Chinden, I had a fantastic breakfast (as in, one of the best breakfasts I’ve ever had) at a small place called Goldy’s in downtown Boise, and a very nice meal off the prix fixe menu at Chandlers Steakhouse.
- Speaking of Chandlers, some folks have been talking about martinis, so I thought I’d post this:
Chandlers calls this “The ’33 Plymouth”; it is, of course, made with Plymouth gin and Nolly Prat vermouth. They do warn you that it takes 10 minutes to make one; I consider it worth the wait. - There was a restaurant near the hotel that I (sadly) did not make it to, but was notable for the carved wooden sign out front stating “Famous Prawns”. I am sufficiently geeky that whenever I saw that sign, all I could think of was “No prawns at this altitude!”
- I find that what gets under my skin about travel these days is mostly the minor annoyances. The $3 bottled water in the room. (A buck or $1.50, maybe. That’s gas station price. And what do you suppose the gas station’s markup on bottled water is?) The lack of notepaper and envelopes. (Remember when hotels used to supply those? I know, everyone emails now, but an envelope is still useful to hold receipts and other bits of important loose paper.) Annoying WiFi networks. Etc.
- Minor annoyances aside, I did like the staff and the facility at the Riverside Boise. (And at least the WiFi was free.) The cookie and milk/coffee break provided by the hotel on Friday was a particularly nice touch.
- Anyone ever read Lawrence Block’s short story about Keller the hitman, “Answers to Soldier”? I understand how Keller felt about Roseburg; I feel much the same way about Boise. It reminds me a lot of Austin twenty years ago. (And, much like Keller, I have fantasies about moving almost every place I travel to. And then I end up going back to Austin…)
- I was reliably informed that on Thursday (the first full day I was there, when we spent much of the afternoon tramping around the Old Idaho Penitentiary) the high was 92 degrees. Balmy by Austin standards, but the humidity was 6%. That would explain why I was drinking water like it was going out of style the whole time I was there…
- As small town as Boise feels, it is big enough to have at least three gun stores. (There may be more, but the show host recommended three specifically.) I was able to visit two: the folks at Boise Gun Company were really nice, and have a huge selection. Cliff’s Guns, Safes, and Reloading seems to be a great place for reloading supplies; they didn’t have quite the new or used selection of Boise Gun Company, but did have a couple of interesting used guns. (On the other hand, $2,000 for a Model 16-4 strikes me as high. But I didn’t try to talk them down, what with being an out-of-state resident and all.) And the staff at Cliffs was perfectly pleasant to me, thankyouverymuch.
- Sadly, I didn’t have a chance to search for used bookstores in Boise. I did look for bookstores in Ketchum and along the route between Boise and Ketchum, but didn’t see any. Oddly enough, I also didn’t see any gun stores along the route. (They probably would have been closed on Sunday, but I was specifically looking for both gun stores and book stores, just to satisfy my curiosity.)
- Speaking of Ketchum and the general area around it, can you say “yuppie heaven”? I suspect if you planted magnets on old Ernie’s body and placed him inside a coil of copper wire, you could provide enough power to light all of downtown Ketchum at night.
- On the other hand, the stretch of 51/20 between I-84 and 75 is an amazing drive. This is basically 82 miles of…well, nothing, except high desert country, farms and ranches, mountains, and lots of curvy mountain road. I have a track of the route I took, and may post it later so folks can get a feel for what the country looks like.
- I haven’t been a big KIA fan, but the rental company gave me a KIA Forte, and it turned out to be a pretty swell car. It handled well on the road, got close to 30 MPG, and felt pretty stable at 85 MPH. Plus, it had two 12V sockets, an aux input, and a USB plug up front. I haven’t checked the Consumer Reports repair records, but the Forte might be worth looking at if you’re in the market for a 4-door sedan.
- Boise seems to have nearly as many thrift stores as Austin, Mom. I didn’t see any Goodwill stores, though; the majority of thrift stores seemed to be affiliated with the “Idaho Youth Ranch“.
Noted.
Thursday, May 17th, 2012I can get Wired for a buck an issue if I use the blow-in cards that come with the print edition. (I can also frequently get Wired for a buck an issue if I purchase it at Half-Price Books.)
If I go to their website to subscribe, the combined print/tablet issue costs $1.67 an issue. The tablet or print issues by themselves cost $1.25 an issue.
If I get the Wired app
(Current print subscribers apparently get the content for free. Which means that it makes more sense to go to Wired‘s web site and subscribe than it does to do an in-app purchase: $15 vs. $19.99. It makes even more sense to subscribe using the cards, but then I have to deal with the print editions.)
Look, Conde Nasties, I’d be happy to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Wired. But I want at least as good a deal as you give on those blow-in cards. One dollar an issue or bust!
It was perfectly innocent. Really. I swear.
Monday, May 14th, 2012I went over to Amazon because I wanted to see if S.W.A.T Magazine was available in a Kindle edition.
The answer is “No”, but I discovered something else.
S.W.A.T. themed romances. There appear to be two authors in this genre: Denise A. Agnew
- Within His Embrace
.
- Within His Sight
: “Women respond to a man’s testosterone without any thought…”
- In Her Defense
- and Under His Protection
: “SWAT sniper Trey MacGilvary likes his women wild and hot… “
and J.C. Wilder
- Tactical Pleasure
- Tactical Maneuver
- Kissing Cowboy: Men of S.W.A.T.
- Loving Ranger: A Men of S.W.A.T. Story
(I can’t tell for sure, but the latter two appear to be longer works in the “Men of S.W.A.T.” series. The first two are 70 and 79 pages long, the last two 100 and 96. The Agnew books appear to be closer to full on novels, coming in at about 250 pages. Except for Within His Sight, which clocks in at 81 pages.)
En Fuego.
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012Some folks may have noticed that I haven’t written much about my experiences with the Kindle I purchased a while back.
Well…the screen went south on that one and it is unusable.
I’d held off on replacing it because I have the Kindle reader on my phone, so there wasn’t a compelling argument for me to have a stand-alone Kindle.
At least until Amazon had their sale last week offering refurbed Kindle Fires for $139.
Mine arrived yesterday. I’m still messing around with it trying to get things set up the way I want then, but expect some thoughts on the Fire in the nearish future.
(I actually do still agree with John Siracusa’s summary of the Kindle Fire: “a magical, colorful window through which you can give money to Amazon“. But my plans for the device mostly do not involve giving a lot of money to Amazon; rather, I’ve been loading it up with O’Reilly ebooks and public domain/free content.)
Edited to add: Interestingly enough, the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson 3rd Editionprobably works much better on the Fire than it does on the regular Kindles. I’m willing to give Amazon $15.39 for that; Supica and Nahas are essential, but also an awful lot to lug around.
Noted without comment.
Friday, April 8th, 2011101 Nook Color Tips, Tricks, and Hacks: The Unofficial Guide to Getting the Most Out of the Newest Nook eReader By William Percy
Link goes to the Kindle edition.
And while I’m on the legal beat…
Tuesday, January 11th, 2011Alex Tabarrok, one of the Marginal Revolution bloggers, has an interesting article in the latest Wilson Quarterly about the economics of bounty hunting.
Edited to add: Just for grins, I thought I’d throw in a couple of links to Paladin Press books on bounty hunting, such as “Rex Venator”‘s Modern Bounty Hunting: A Real-Life Guide for the Bail Fugitive Recovery Agent
Do Androids dream of electric apps?
Thursday, September 9th, 2010As noted previously, I finally resolved the phone issue. (And AT&T can still die in a fire.)
The number one question I’ve been getting (replacing “Where did you get that shirt?” at the top of the charts) is: “How do you like your new phone?”
Answer: I like it just fine, but…below are some preliminary thoughts on Android (at least, as implemented on the EVO 4G; I do realize that some of these may be issues with the built-in apps, rather than the Android OS itself):
- It is disappointing to me that the alarm built into the EVO’s clock app can’t be set to play arbitrary sound files as alarms. (I fall into Ihnatko’s 2% who haven’t seen the movie yet, but I love the story behind “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien“.)
- Ditto that I can’t set an arbitrary sound file for text message notifications.
- It is also disappointing to me that there’s no basic Notepad type app provided with the EVO. I’m sure there’s probably 300+ on the Android marketplace, but I needed to make a shopping list this morning and didn’t have time to sort through all of them. Any tips?
- Integration between the built-in music player and the built-in navigation app is also a disappointment; the navigation app will pause the player to make route announcements, but you have to manually start the player up again, rather than it automatically resuming play.
- On the plus side, the sound is great; I can listen to podcasts in the car without having to hook into my (currently non-functional) stereo system.
- The on-screen keyboard is vastly better than using the keypad (even with T9) was on the T616, and somewhat better than the on-screen keyboard on the N800. However, I still have a lot of trouble hitting the correct key with my large-ish fingers.
- One of the drawbacks of purchasing an Android phone is synchronization with the MacBook. If I had purchased an iPhone, everything would be simple (or at least, simpler). But, no, I had to be different and resist peer pressure… At some point, I suspect I will end up ordering this. (Right now – and I do realize this is a phone controlled setting – the MacBook sees the phone as a USB disk drive with photos on it, and automatically opens iPhoto. I can browse the Android file system and copy files to or from it without problems.)
- Speaking of iPhoto, I’ve done almost nothing with the built-in camera yet. I need to work on that.
- The EVO’s calendar app has a noticeable lag; it takes a couple of seconds to switch to the current date when I bring it up.
- If there’s a way to sync the EVO’s calendar app with Google Calender, I haven’t found it, and there doesn’t seem to be a separate Google Calender app (like there is for Maps, Voice, Earth, etc.). Do I need to grab some other calender app off the Android Market? (Edited to add 9/10: Okay, I think I’ve figured this one out. You can sync the EVO app with Google Calender, it just isn’t quite as straightforward as I was looking for.)
- The EVO also seems to lag behind in changing screen orientation when I rotate the phone.
- I managed to get the Android SDK and the ADT plugin installed without problems on the MacBook, but the ADT plugin won’t install into Eclipse on Project e. It looks like there are some dependencies that Eclipse can’t resolve, but I can’t figure out what those are. I may have to blow away and reinstall Eclipse (which isn’t a major issue; I don’t have a bunch invested in Eclipse on Project e).
- I either need to dig out my old Java textbook, or see if I can find an updated edition cheap online.
- Speaking of textbooks, and having nothing to do with Android in particular, I just paid $180+ for a damn textbook
. This makes me mildly cranky.
- My old T616 in the case fit neatly into the magazine phone pocket of my 5.11 tactical pants. The EVO? Doesn’t fit. Dear 5.11 folks: maybe we could think about redesigning that pocket to fit smartphones? (I wear 5.11 tactical pants (or, as some people call them, “a Kaiser blade Internet pants“), not because I’m a mall ninja, but because they are the most comfortable and toughest pants I’ve found. Plus they make it really easy to carry all my stuff.)
- Battery life is…well, middling. I haven’t really tried optimizing power consumption, though, except for turning off WiFi and Bluetooth. (Hurrah for the EVO’s control panel that allows easy access to those settings.)
- There’s a few applications I’m looking for and would welcome advice on finding in the Android market. The first one is a good WiFi scanning utility; ideally, it would have the ability to log access points with GPS coordinates, note if the points are A, B, G, or N, note if they’re open or closed (and if they’re WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.), and write all this data to a XML or KML file. It looks like there are several apps in the market that meet these criteria, but I’m not sure which ones are good.
The second app I’m looking for is a good vehicle management application. At a minimum, I’d like to be able to enter an odometer reading and number of gallons, and get a miles-per-gallon figure for that tank, as well as an average MPG for all tanks to date. It’d be spiffy if I could also enter a price per gallon, as well as other expenses (insurance, repairs, maintenance) and get a cost-per-mile figure as well. - I love the GPS Status app.
- I’ve played a little with the Amazon Kindle app; so far, I’m more impressed with it than I am with the refurbished Kindle I purchased earlier this year.
- The EVO’s screen is impressive. Much better than the N800’s. I haven’t done a side-by-side with an iPhone 4 yet, but I’m willing to bet it gives the iPhone a run for its money.
- The EVO’s video player can decode H.264 video! (I haven’t done anything with the camcorder app, so I don’t know what format it encodes video in.)
- Waiting for a sale on those 32GB microSD cards…
- Edited to add: There’s also no general file browser app on the EVO.
Again, I generally like the phone; most of these are just minor quibbles that I can probably solve one way or another.
After action report: Las Vegas, NV.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010I covered a lot of stuff in my previous travel report, so this will mostly just be updates.
- Project e worked spectacularly well at DEFCON. This is the first chance I’ve had to really push the battery life, and I was able to get an good 12+ hours out of the battery without running it totally dry. (This was with the machine set to “powersave” and putting it into “standby” or “hibernate” when I was in the dealer’s room, or driving around with Mike the Musicologist and Andrew. Continuous usage with the wireless would have been more like 6+ hours, I think, which is still pretty impressive.)
- My one regret is that I forgot my Alfa external WiFi adapter. I would have enjoyed playing with that at the convention.
- The 5.11 bailout bag also worked out well for lugging around Project e and various other equipment. Again, I was able to carry a pretty good load, including the laptop, charger, books, a couple of bottles of water, the small camera, and miscellaneous other necessities.
- MtM has the Nikon with him and has been taking a lot of photos. As you saw below, I did use the Nikon to take some Gehry photos. When I have more time, I’m going to put up an expanded and annotated Flickr photo set; I did some side-by-side experiments with aperture priority vs. automatic exposure.
- Food in Las Vegas was, without exception, pretty darn good. The worst meal I had (at the Four Kegs) was still better than average (and I didn’t order the stromboli, which is the house specialty). We also had a very good (if loud) tapas meal at Firefly* on Paradise, the usual wonderful meal at Lotus of Siam, the previously mentioned dinner at Shabu-Shabu Paradise, and a Moroccan meal at Marrakech. (I had not previously had Moroccan food, so I can’t comment on how authentic it was. I certainly enjoyed my meal, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt.)
Vegas does have something of a shortage of good breakfast places outside of the casinos (and even inside of the casinos, if you’re not looking for a buffet). We had several good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and one excellent breakfast at The Egg and I on Sahara. I know that MtM and Andrew went to a good Italian place in New York, New York while I was at the convention, and I’ll let them comment on that. - Between Tucson and Las Vegas, the refurbished Kindle I ordered arrived, and it went on this trip. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the Kindle later on, but my first impression is “Meh”. I did manage to read John Clark’s Ignition! in PDF format and a Project Gutenberg MOBI format copy of Heart of Darkness without too much trouble, but my experiences with other PDF files and eBooks have been inconsistent.
- On the other hand, I finished, and highly recommend, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 4th Edition
and am almost finished with Cisco Routers for the Desperate 2nd Edition
(also recommended). No Starch Press rocks. And the coupon code “DEFCON18” will get you a 30% discount. And they’re running a half-price sale on all e-books.
- My Southwest experience this time was much more pleasant. No misplaced bags, and no flight delays. One thing that was particularly unusual was going through the security line in Las Vegas; I had, literally, no wait. Just walked straight up to the TSA agent and got in line for the metal detector. It took longer to take my shoes off and the laptop out than it did to get through the rest of security.
My thanks to, in no particular order, the DEFCON 18 staff and presenters, No Starch Press, UNIX Surplus, SEREPick, Lotus of Siam, Shabu-Shabu Paradise, Sarah at the iBar in the Rio, and the unknown belly dancer at Marrakech.
Special thanks to my high-speed, low-drag travel companions in the primary, Mike the Musicologist and Andrew “Porous concrete? What were they thinking?” Wimsatt.