A Colour Nook!!

The wonderful AG, the Keeper of the Books, allowed me to get a new eReader a couple of weeks ago to replace the Pocket PC (picture, right, from Wikipedia) I've had since about 2001. Don't get me wrong, now: the HP Jornada 568 has lasted a very long time for any piece of electronics, was relatively easy to program, has a nice clear screen for reading (a little small, I'll admit), and, recently, has been frequently the object of great curiosity from many people, asking if that was a prototype for a new Apple machine. To be honest, a piece of electronics that lasts 10 years of fairly continuous use definitely gets my respect.

Anyhow, it's coming to the end of its life, with the batteries starting to lose their ability to hold a decent charge and the beast as a whole becoming prone to testy reboots, so I finally decided that a new reader was needed. The problem was, as many have found, one of choice. Many people never moved to an eReader until Amazon introduced the Kindle, so their choice was easy, as they had no history of books to bring forward. I, on the other hand, have around 200 books in a variety of formats - .LIT, .EPB, .PDF, .CHM, .ePub, etc. - that I would really rather not buy all over again.

So, I looked around and found that the Nook Color is really a kind of mini-tablet, running Android 2.2. You could get an emulation on a PC in 2010, so I started playing with it there back then. I also started looking for ways of converting my eBooks (very few of which are Secure, or locked, luckily). I found a program called calibre, billing itself as an eBook manager program, that runs on Linux and Windows, and which will convert a number of formats into ePub, which is the Nook's "native" or preferred format.


Anyhow, I got my new toy a couple of weeks ago, and a few extras that I, for one, really consider necessary. These include a cover, of course, but one that can, as you can see, be used as a stand to hold the Nook at a convenient reading angle.

The next extra, equally important in the short term, but essential for the long term, is a supply of film screen covers to protect the capacitative screen from damage.

Finally, as I have used the small HP for some ten years and am totally accustomed to using a stylus to work the on-screen keyboard, a stylus. The one you see to the left is a rooCase, and comes in the form of a foam tip to an otherwise rather attractive ball-point.

So, it was a few days of play to explore the Nook, get used to expanding and shrinking the screen (annoying, that - web sites used to be written to self-adjust in the days of the old HP!). Anyway, it's certainly got some nice features. One thing I could do with is a set of smaller keys (as I'm not using my fat fingertips) with some extras, rather than having to continually hit an alt key to switch to another keyboard full of numbers and symbols. The text presentation is, on the whole, very good and at least the equal of that in the Microsoft Reader software on the Jornada, and the idea of swiping ones fingers on the screen to turn pages very quickly becomes natural. Then, after getting well stuck in to The Art of SQL, it was time to convert books from other formats. I can only say that calibre worked without any fuss or problems. It uses all the cpu power it can get its fingers on, and definitely isn't the fastest program on the planet, but the output (ePub in my case) is just as good as the originals that I fed it.  

Do I have any grouses about the Nook Color? Well, one or two. I'd like to be able to see the list of books that I have to select from in the equivalent of Windows Explorer's Detail view, instead of icons with only a quarter of the title in view. Of course, that may be possible - just a feature that I haven't found yet.
The other thing that surprised me to start with was the sheer weight of the thing! 654 grammes (with the cover that I bought), 1.44 pounds. Compared to the HP, which only weighed a few ounces, the Nook is a huge monster, and definitely takes getting used to - when reading in bed, for example.

Overall opinion: very favourable. I'd definitely recommend it to people with existing eBooks: ePub and PDF are readable immediately. I'm very happy, and can see the end of paper book purchases in this house looming closer.

TTFN

Work vs The World

Right now, unfortunately, Work seems to be winning. In work we're getting requests from clients that appear, on the face of it, to be very reasonable ... but always waay late! Still, the work is fun (for me, at least) so I don't mind staying late or going in on weekends. Too much.


So I've been using my spare time - such as it is - to rip and burn old cassettes. Where I live (NJ) it's been seriously wet and thundery these last few weeks, so there've been times when I've sat in a chair listening to the rain outside, splashing from the roof, dripping onto and off of the leaves, running down the squirrels' backs, and onto the dogs' noses - making them bark - and had sound from the other side of the room of an Amazonian rain forest. Essentially no difference between the two ! I've been getting four or five done per weekend - it'll be some time in 2012 before I finish at this rate! And then there'll be the LPs!

[Geek Stuff]

Ive been wandering around a little of the web, looking for learning opportunities. There are just a few books that you can get hold of on Fictionwise, which is a shame, as I would like to use my old hp PDA more often. However, I have found some goodies.

• If you're a SQL Server DBA, or wanting to get into it, Brent Ozar has some good stuff here.
• Jen Kyrnin runs a series on about.com that's all about Web Design. It doesn't often get nose-deep into code, but seems pretty good for practical design matters.
• Mike Murach's publishing have a C# 2008 book out, and I'll be getting in to it soon. Getting it directly from them seems the cheapest way.
• Talend is a company I ran across that offers open-source ETL software - interesting.

A few weeks ago I wrote a lot about my little Asus netbook. Well, my step-daughter now has one too, except that she chose an Acer One, in Dark Blue, so I'm hoping that she'll agree to help me write a review of that. She's also lusting after knowledge of the Internet, the Web, and all things to do with web sites, etc., and just generally showing off just how bright she is. I suppose I'll be writing everything I tell her down and publishing it here. Finally, I met someone today with a new Dell netbook, so maybe I can get some info for you about that one too.
A few weeks ago I brought my son back into the future by giving him a small hp Jornada 565 PDA. Now, of course, starts the serious hunt for connectivity. Right now I'm looking at this page for some ideas. Once upon a time I used a LinkSys 802.11b card with beta drivers, but the cards are long-gone, worse luck. His other machines are an Acer desktop with lots of power but condemned to running Vista, which kinda hobbles it, and a small hp desktop running Ubuntu 9, which does a great job on 128 MB of RAM, and is in great need of a couple of new gigabytes of silicon to help it !
[/Geek Stuff]
Lastly, a public service announcement. There's going to be a craft fair on September 18th on Tuckerton Road, on the border between Marlton and Medford, here in NJ. More info will be forthcoming, but the AG and I shall be working it.

TTFN

A 64-bit Future ?

Last year our friends at Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows XP in order that those of use with Itanium PCs (not many, I suspect !) and those of us with 64-bit AMD chips (most of AMD's current customers.

This version of Windows XP was based upon Windows Server 2003 SP1 as that was the latest version of Microsoft Windows during the operating system's development, but takes Windows XP as its name. It is designed to use the expanded 64-bit memory address space provided by the AMD64 architecture; Intel refers to its implementation of the technology as EM64T. So much for the technical details, how has it fared ?

I installed it about a year ago on a new AMD Athlon-64 3200+ machine with no problems and I've lived with it ever since. Yes, I have a copy of VMWare's software hosting a virtual Windows 2000 sitting on it awaiting problems, but I've had very few. I use quite a few programs and do a bit of development on it too, so I should be a good test for it, I thought as I started out.

My heart started to sink when I tried to install Corel's Ventura Publisher 8, and it failed with the (now familiar) message that the executable was fine, but not for this cpu. Bad message, that, as I'd seen exactly that cpu running 32-bit Windows XP run the same program flawlessly just two weeks before. Still, after asking around on the Ventura UseNet, I realised that it was the install program and not VP that was the problem, and that was soon fixed. Not so the next problem, which was with VP's fonts - they wouldn't scale properly. I really needed the facilities that VP had offered me, so I bought a copy of Serif Software's PagePlus, installed it, and got on with my work. No blame really on Corel - I was using software designed for Windows 9x and NT on a radically different OS.

Then I decided to burn some CDs of music that I had ripped from LP. Blaze Audio's software works fine on XP/64, by the way, and is great for recording a whole side of a disc and then chopping it back up into tracks. Normally I used to use Nero 6 Ultra Edition with Windows 2000 and XP/32, but it has proven rather unstable with XP/64. In fact, it's the only program that has managed to totally bomb the system back beyond a BSOD to the point where the only thing to do is to power it down and up again with the hardware power switch ! If I have just rebooted anyway (not a frequent occurrence) then using Nero 6 seems ok; using it after playing with things for weeks isn't such a good idea. I'll be trying out Nero 7 soon.

Finally, with this litany of problems, Apple's iTunes 6 has proven a little fallible. Once (but only once!) it managed to crash itself in a very weird way. It stopped producing music and it's screen image froze. I killed the iTunes processes supporting it, but that area of the screen was locked by the program so that other programs could leave "droppings" on it, but I just couldn't get rid of it. A reboot was required :( iTunes has also had problems seeing my CD/DVD burners, claiming that they are just readers (one is a BenQ internal and the other an HP external, on either FireWire or USB).

Now for the good bits. Reliability has been a great improvement. I skipped the entire Windows 9x series, on the principle that I was already suffering several hundred known bugs in Windows 3.1 and didn't need a few hundred new and unknown ones! I went straight to Windows NT and found that I could expect a BSOD or a required reboot about once a fortnight. Much better than twice daily! Windows 2000 extended that to about monthly, although none of my machines ever actually go that far as I'm always installing and upgrading. Windows XP/32 hasn't improved much over Windows 2000 for me, for just those reasons. However, my copy of XP/64 has been rebooted involuntarily three times because of Nero in 14 months and about 6 more times while I have added software. Personally, I think that this is getting very good; Vista has a very high bar to exceed.

One thing in passing: when I started out with it only one company (www.avast.com) made a complete range of anti-virus software that included 64-bit versions, so that's what I'm using, and I'll recommend it. It's easy to use and, to all appearances, very effective. I've deliberately imported infected files onto my system and it has found them all. Note, though, that I'm not in the testing business - I'm just a consumer.

Some more mixed news is that while Microsoft has included a lot of hardware drivers and some companies, like Brother and Konica-Minolta, have gone to some trouble to produce 64-bit drivers, others have studiously ignored this market. The most conspicuous of these is HP. In the 90s HP moved towards using a common PDL for all its printers, with one version for inkjets and another for laserjets. This meant that, so far as the user was concerned, if you didn't have the right driver for your new HP you could always get by with something like a LaserJet Series II driver. You wouldn't be able to get it to do anything more than the old Series II, but at least you could use it.

These days, however, HP driver sets weigh in at about 50MB and are very OS-specific. They also seem to be abandoning old printers, so that the release of a new version of Windows will mean sales of a lot of new printers, as there'll be a lot of orphaned HPs around. Personally I consider the other brands to be of equal quality to HP,so I've left the HP fold already.

There are always nice surprises, though. Like getting my Wacom Serial/keyboard Graphire Mk 1 to work. I just plugged it in to try it with the virtual Windows 2000 and it kind of worked. Later, after a reboot, I was moving it before unplugging it and realised that the mouse was moving too! I call that a gift :) Audiotrak's Maya EX is a USB audio I/O device. For output it powers my Monsoon speakers but on input I can plug my Thorens turntable into it and record vinyl. This was a 32-bit beast too - it has 32-bit drivers - but works without any drivers at all with XP/64.

How cool is that !