Archive for the ‘Geekiness’ Category

« Older Entries

Musings on the New Kindle

Friday, July 30th, 2010

So, there’s a new Kindle out, and there’s an interview with Jeff Bezos on USA Today:

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular “e-pub” standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

I call Shenanigans on this line of argument. Kindle supports PDF and plain text files, for heaven’s sake! Plain text files don’t have Whispersync either, but it’s still nice to have support for other formats.

It’s not as if adding ePub support would be hard, either.

Want to see how hard it is to support ePub? Follow along.

  1. Go download the ePub version of this book. It’s a good one, trust me.

    Download the file

  2. rename the file from .epub to .zip

    Rename it to .zip

  3. Open the zip
    It's just HTML!

See, ePub is just a zip file full of XHTML.

So what’s the deal, can the Kindle not render HTML?

Nope. The new Kindle comes with a webkit browser, so I’m pretty sure it can handle HTML rendering.

There’s really no excuse for the Kindle not to support ePub.

I still have an old-ass first generation Kindle, that won’t even read PDFs, let alone ePubs. I read a lot of PDFs for work, and the old Kindle isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Although Amazon added PDF support for Kindle a few months ago, they neglected to issue the update for Kindle 1, to my great consternation.

I suppose I could stomp out in a huff and buy a nook, but I already have something like 60 books in the Kindle format.

So, despite my sense of indignation at the lack of ePub support and general grumpiness at being overlooked for the PDF upgrade. I went ahead pre-ordered one of the shiny new Kindles.

Vendor lock-in is a bitch.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Books, Geekiness, Rants | 3 Comments »

Poplar Forest in OSM

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I have noisy coworkers, and so I listen to podcasts while I’m at work to help keep my sanity. Today, I was listening to old episodes of the the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

The episode I was listening to talked about Poplar Forest, which was Jefferson’s second home / retreat. Today it’s sort of a museum, and I noticed that it wasn’t yet added to OSM. The Yahoo images weren’t very good, but I could see the building, and I knew from the podcast that it was an octagon with a long rectangle sticking out the side.

So, I drew a crude octagon, then told JOSM to arrange the nodes in a circle. I think it came out pretty nicely.

Poplar Forest in Openstreetmap

Some time ago, I added a node for Monticello to the map, so now you can plan your Jeffersonian vacation with OSM.

Monticello in OSM

I think Mr. Jefferson would like Openstreetmap. After all, he commissioned Louis and Clark expedition to map the American West.

Clark's Map

I’m pretty sure he would have been in favor of share-alike licensing, too.

He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

No doubt if Alexander Hamilton were alive today, he’d own stock in Navteq, plan his travels on Bing, and call us all “intellectual voluptuaries.”

Alexander Hamilton loves Microsoft

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in Geekiness, Maps | No Comments »

Roadster in the Park

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

I had a silly idea to see what would happen if I jammed my tripod in the Carradice bag and tried to shoot some video.

You end up seeing more of my butt than you probably want to, but here is the result, anyway.

I’m trying to learn how to use PiTiVi to edit together a video, but my laptop is almost 5 years old, and it’s taking forever.

Posted in Cycling, Geekiness | No Comments »

If it were Harrisburg

Monday, June 28th, 2010

This is how big the BP oil disaster is. There’s a website where you can move the oil spill over a map of your city to give you a better sense of scale.

If the BP clusterfuck happened in Harrisburg

I own a car. This is my fault.

Posted in Cycling, Geekiness, Maps, vegetarianism | 3 Comments »

Michael Arrington on OpenStreetMap

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

The other day, one of my coworkers forwarded me a link to an article on TechCrunch about OpenStreetmap.

For a moment, I was exited to see OSM getting some press. My excitement faded rapidly, when I saw the article made a rather glaring factual error. It claimed that OSM is a product of Cloudmade.

Sloppy journalism is nothing new, and nothing to get overly excited about. In the comments, a few people tried to correct the mistake, pointing out that OSM is a project in it’s own right, and Cloudmade is a company that uses the OSM data.

Mr. Arrington replied to these comments that he “fully understand[s] the relationship between Cloudmade and openstreetmap.” Clearly he does not.

To say that Cloudmade is in charge of OSM is an error of the same magnitude as saying that Canonical is in charge of Debian. It’s totally ridiculous, and anyone who spends 10 minutes poking around the web could have figured this out.

Arrington then goes on to insult the entire readership of TechCrunch:

“for the vast majority of our readers [the relationship] just isn’t relevant.”

Evidently the difference between the actual facts and made-up malarkey is not relevant to the TechCrunch readership. Maybe TechCrunch is the high-tech equivalent of the Onion, I don’t know.

Not content to insult his own readers, he goes on to slag off the entire open source universe.

If even 1% of our readers gave a damn I’d write a post explaining how projects like these are able to stay on track, and why there is always just one for profit company guiding it.

Evidently he thinks that open projects alway have a for-profit company behind them. I’ve been an active contributer to OSM for over three years now, and I’ve never once been “guided” by Cloudmade in any way whatsoever. Does anyone know what for-profit concern is “guiding” Wikipedia or Mozilla? I sure don’t.

After several more comments tried to correct Arrington’s mistake, he decided that the OSM community is “nasty” and closed down the comments.

Well, sorry TechCrunch. We’re open source people. When we see a mistake, we file a bug. We tried to help you fix your buggy article. It’s what we do. You didn’t listen, and so your article is still broken, and you look like a fool.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Geekiness, Maps | 7 Comments »

« Older Entries