Ebooks, libraries, authorship

Catching up with my technical reading, I come across this article in New Electronics about Ebooks (www.neon.co.uk, but don't bother going there, I couldn't find the article online; here's a BBC story about it). Despite its focus on the technical challenges in producing a readable electronic book (battery life, resolution, screen size and shape, etc.) its main conclusion seems to be that the principal challenge here is one of ergonomics: making a device which fits how people read.

Well, duh.

I think even this misses the point, though. I suspect, although I have no proof of this, that the way authors write is in part a reaction to the format their work will take. On the surface, this is fairly obvious; work written for a pamphlet or a newspaper will have a different tone and form from that written for book format, and there's a clear, overt design intention there. The question is, is there also a subconscious conformity to the format? I suspect there is. One indication might be the size and spacing of paragraphs, which not only break up the story but also ease the strain on the eye and make a page of writing less intimidating. Obviously the width of the page and the size of the writing will mean that paragraph shape will be different in different formats. Does a writer then write with a visual expectation of what the page will look like? Or are we just listening to the voices in our heads?

So it's interesting to speculate as to what the shape and design of these new ebooks will do to their content, if anything. Any effect will probably be lost amid all the other influences we take in, but I wonder. And it's not as if books will disappear overnight - in this era of TV on demand and easy broadband access to the Net of a Million Lies, the book industry is the biggest it's ever been. Will a new generation of authors, brought up reading from ebooks, produce content better suited to it than us old-fashioned book lovers?

Conversely, of course, this means that anyone designing an ebook has a fearsome challenge. I've read books on a pda, and the experience is less than satisfying. For my money, the design of an ebook is one of the most culturally charged and potentially difficult bits of design you're likely to come across. It's like designing a toilet; both strike deep into our cultural territory, and our sense of where and who we are.

(Incidentally, this is my first cross-post from my Blogger blog, Supernormal. I set it up so that I'd be able to post from my Clie when I'm not at home. Already annoyed with it though - upload of pictures doesn't seem to be possible. Guess I'm shelling out the fifty dollars and setting up my own now).

Ebooks, libraries, authorship

Catching up with my technical reading, I come across this article in New Electronics about Ebooks (www.neon.co.uk, but don't bother going there, I couldn't find the article online; here's a BBC story about it). Despite its focus on the technical challenges in producing a readable electronic book (battery life, resolution, screen size and shape, etc.) its main conclusion seems to be that the principal challenge here is one of ergonomics: making a device which fits how people read.

Well, duh.

I think even this misses the point, though. I suspect, although I have no proof of this, that the way authors write is in part a reaction to the format their work will take. On the surface, this is fairly obvious; work written for a pamphlet or a newspaper will have a different tone and form from that written for book format, and there's a clear, overt design intention there. The question is, is there also a subconscious conformity to the format? I suspect there is. One indication might be the size and spacing of paragraphs, which not only break up the story but also ease the strain on the eye and make a page of writing less intimidating. Obviously the width of the page and the size of the writing will mean that paragraph shape will be different in different formats. Does a writer then write with a visual expectation of what the page will look like? Or are we just listening to the voices in our heads?

So it's interesting to speculate as to what the shape and design of these new ebooks will do to their content, if anything. Any effect will probably be lost amid all the other influences we take in, but I wonder. And it's not as if books will disappear overnight - in this era of TV on demand and easy broadband access to the Net of a Million Lies, the book industry is the biggest it's ever been. Will a new generation of authors, brought up reading from ebooks, produce content better suited to it than us old-fashioned book lovers?

Conversely, of course, this means that anyone designing an ebook has a fearsome challenge. I've read books on a pda, and the experience is less than satisfying. For my money, the design of an ebook is one of the most culturally charged and potentially difficult bits of design you're likely to come across. It's like designing a toilet; both strike deep into our cultural territory, and our sense of where and who we are.

(Incidentally, this is my first cross-post from my Blogger blog, Supernormal. I set it up so that I'd be able to post from my Clie when I'm not at home. Already annoyed with it though - upload of pictures doesn't seem to be possible. Guess I'm shelling out the fifty dollars and setting up my own now).

Automating the design process

Just when you think your job will be the last to go, someone scares you with a bit of software like this...

Turd-polishing, or give-a-damn design?

The world's biggest bath - and its rubber duckies.

One of those phenomenonmeneonemenneona that doesn't yet have a shiny
website but desperately needs one, (there is one here
but it's rubbish),
this Radio 4 programme tells the story of 28,800 little rubber ducks,
turtles, beavers and frogs who were unceremoniously dumped
into the Pacific ocean when their container was swept overboard in
1992. Since then, they've travelled the ocean currents, giving joy to
men with beards (all beachcombers have beards, there's a law) and
enlightenment to oceanographers as they turn up in places they really
shouldn't have been able to drift to. Some, apparently, were frozen
into Arctic ice and ended up on the shores of Scotland (yay! Go
duckies).



This is your main man, dignified by the name Curtis Ebbesmeyer, with a
few of the fearless explorers who dropped out of the race early.
Apparently these plastic venturers are hot property; there's a $100
bounty if you find a genuine one, and they have been known to turn up
on ebay for gazillions of dollars (or some money, anyway, I don't know).

Home Automation update

I've been looking for a home automation system that will (a) be very
low power so I can justify it for just one light and turning the
wirless network on and off, and (b) can be controlled from my mobile
phone.



There are several very basic systems that satisfy (a); only just found
a system which satisfies (b), which is the Pluto home system.


Bad news: it requires an always-on Linux server, so is almost certainly more power hungry than the network;

Good news: if you don't want their hardware, you can get the software
for free, as an open source project! Hmmm... pretty sure I can scare up
a Linux server from somewhere...

For dentworth

Apologies for the execrable video - it was an old camera, it was dark (heavy gamma correction going on here)... but I thought it time to post something! Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce my little floor-sweeping robot, prototype 1.


At the moment it's rather better at rearranging dust than picking it up - I'd say it's about 50% efficient. It works like those street cleaners - basically a dustpan-and-brush on wheels. It's sensor array is a little crude at the moment, consisting of two bigass bump sensors at the front connected to a bigass 'sensing plate'. It has serious problems with obstacles that taper inwards at the bottom, and since I fitted the dustpan to the bottom it seems to be having a few traction issues, so I guess I need to raise it up a little.

If you look very very carefully on the last part of this clip, you can see a grey smudge on the floor which disappears when the robot goes over it. That's a big pile of dust that I carefully swept up and put in harm's way, so the robot could eat it. Or just throw it around. Whatever.

The trickiest criteria (apart from getting a sensor array which was doable with available components and fairly reliable) was making the whole thing low enough to fit under the sofa. Which it does, just.

Later additions: I wanna put some sort of edge following sensors on the side - got some limit switches and drinking straws for making little 'antenna' feelers. Also really need to smooth out the ride - as you can tell from the clip, it makes a horrendous noise at the moment. Can't be good. I need to somehow improve the ground clearance without losing any cleaning (or dirt-collecting) ability.

But it kinda works. Enough that, once you add in the entertainment value, it's worth running it.

Enormous thanks go to Debbie, who went back and forth to Radio Shack, bought it for me on spec, and packed and posted it! Got the book yet, Debs?

Obviously it needs a better name than 'protoype 1'. Suggestions, anyone?

Tourist remover

It's been too long since I looked at core77 - too many cool
things! This is worth sharing, though: a service for removing tourists
from your tourist photos. Apparently you have to provide several shots,
and the service (algorithm? Software sweat shop? Hope it's the former)
provides you with photos free of irritating people. Personally, I like
to have someone in my photos - otherwie they seem a little sterile to
me - but hey.





These
snow globes are more to my taste. Deliciously whimsical, and not a little dark ;) What
did I tell you? Cool stuff!

Alternative Multiply relationships

This is a conversation I've had with various people, but I can't find
where it's been discussed more generally. I did try searching Multiply
for "alternative relationships", but realized pretty quickly the
potential for misunderstanding there...



Anyway.



Instead of being an 'internet buddy', a 'colleague', or a 'father' (just one of many), what would you like to see where it says:



"Elephant_in_the_room205 is..."



...your pet's nemesis.

...your friendly sceptic.

...your secret shame.

...your idiot halfbrother who you keep in the attic.

...Mrs Norris.

...your own secret identity which you forgot about.

...your favourite meal reinterpreted as modern dance.

...your hero.

...a random hanger-on.



Any more suggestions? I'm sure we've done this, but
I can't find it anywhere. I'm also sure I came up with some really good
ones which are now tragically lost.



P.S. if there really is a user 'Elephant_in_the_room205', then I can only say, 'oops'....

Moom's cure for bashful bladder syndrome

This is rather personal, but as it's true and as it may one day provide relief for someone else I think it merits posting.



Bashful bladder syndrome, for those who haven't come across it, is the
name given to that experience many men have when they are desperate to
urinate, but when they finally get to a urinal find it difficult to do
the deed in front of others. Neal Stephenson described as being the
body's way of telling you that you need to "get off campus and go get a
fucking job", which rings strangely true, but doesn't really help.



My own cure is as follows: I stare at the bit of wall in front of me
and imagine that it is a landscape, and I picture myself in that
landscape. The grouting between tiles becomes a glacier valley, strewn
with ice and white pebbles; peeling paint becomes vast petrified waves
arcing up over my head.



The effort of imagining all this stuff means that my brain doesn't have
the capacity to exert its panicky grip on my bladder, which can then
gleefully get on with its own thing.

My wish list for home automation

Being an eco-aware gadget freak is a bit of a trial at times. When it
comes to electricity and power consumption, I have an eco-angel on one
shoulder telling me to cut down, and a gadget devil on the other which
just wants more more more! My bete noire at the moment is my wireless
network. This sits happily under the sofa in an always-on arrangement,
which is wonderfully handy for two reasons: first, it's always on, and
second, it uses up a couple of inaccessible power points (and the
position of the cable modem limits it a bit anyway). Unfortunately,
such profligacy gets my eco-angel wagging reproachful fingers.



The obvious answer (to a gadget freak) is a remote control power point.
These are relatively cheap and come with a remote, so I could turn the
whole caboodle off at the mains without having to crawl around under
the sofa. But it's another remote, which is, well,
just dull.



The thing is, if it were just the network then I could probably live
with it. But I have another little domestic bete noire which I'd like
to be able to fix. The stairwell outside my door is very dark, and
although I have an external light, the switch for it is inside the
flat, which isn't very handy when you're fumbling with your keys in the
pitch black corridor. So, I'd like to be able to turn this light on
from outside. Again, a remote would be handy, but I'm not about to take
a remote with me when I have a bluetooth enabled
mobile phone and a PDA which does bluetooth and wifi!



So. First off, the whole point is to save electricity, so an always-on
PC home automation system is ludicrous. What I want is this:

1. Turn on my outside light at a command from my phone (or PDA);


2. Turn on my wireless network (which can be done just by turning it on at the mains) via a similar signal.


3. To have the ability to turn off mains AC sockets. My life seems
   to run on batteries, which is great except for the chargers that I
   absentmindedly leave plugged in when they're not charging anything!
   Turning these off without bending down would be a boon.

That's it. Doesn't seem like an outrageous list to me. But can I find
anything which will do it? No. Home automation systems seem to assume
that it's okay to lug another remote around with you, which just
irritates me when I have two devices perfectly capable of performing
this function.

District B13

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Action & Adventure

I have to admit, the action movie genre isn't one I'd automatically associate with French cinema, but there are few names to conjure with like that of Luc Besson , famous for (among others) Leon and the Fifth Element, and the scriptwriter of this little knees-up. Banlieue 13 is a low(ish) budget action movie - think Escape from New York, transplanted to Paris in 2010. The plot is pretty flimsy - a neutron bomb somehow finds its way into the hands of a local warlord, and a police ninja has to team up with a local hero to get it back. Cue carnage. What made this film special for me was the superb action sequences, which are heavily influenced by freerunning (I think the French call it Parkour). If you 've never heard of freerunning, it's simply the most amazing and graceful modern sport ever invented, and it was created by (you've guessed it) the French (here's the wikipedia article). The stunts these slim, dancer-like guys pull off (and the actors did all their own stuff, apparently) make the top-heavy heroes of Hollywood and their ludicrously better-than-life special effects look frankly tired.

There's also some nearly-intellectual dialogue which simply wouldn't have made it into a Superman movie - and if there are some glaring holes in the plot, then hey - it's an action film! So what? An excellent night out.

Another boring medical update

For the sake of completeness, more than anything: Had another meeting
with my consultant yesterday (God bless the NHS). His theory is that
I'm still feeling run-down because of the Azathioprine. Apparently,
'flu-like symptoms', as well as being meningitis, depression, flu,
incipient alcoholism, flu, and pretty much anything else you can name,
are also a common side-effect of the Az. Personally, I hadn't made the
connection with 'flu-like' - I'd just figured I felt run down and a bit
woozy, although I guess I was getting the occasional hot flush thing as
well. Anyway, I'm not taking the Az for a few days to see what happens.
Apparently there's an alternative pill which can avoid this problem, so
we'll see what happens.



In the meantime, it sounds like I'll be off work for another week. That should be great but is actually very boring.

League of Gentlemen/2001 crossover?

Where am I going to get a wav file of Papa Lazarou saying "I can't let you do that Dave" ...

(I fear X have dunked the audio on this in their conversion process. Note to self: must learn how to create Flash videos to avoid nasty automated conversion).

Please release me...

It's been nearly a fortnight since my last blog entry, and there's a
good reason for the break (I'd hate to keep my many readers on
tenterhooks for no reason, ha ha). The day after I wrote my last entry,
I phoned my hospital consultant for some advice on my worsening
condition. His response was to get me into hospital at once. Not a
moment too soon, either - I arrived with a raging temperature (39.5
degrees C, which is...let's see...103 Fahrenheit), and by the time I
was bedded down on a ward I was pretty incoherent. Turns out it was
option (b) - a roaring reaction from the colitis to being let off the
leash with neither anti-inflammatories nor immune suppressants (nor
steroids) to calm it down. Not a little scary. I spent five days on an
steroid drip, having methyl prednisolone pumped into me.



All this, I should add, on the eve of the holiday I was supposed to be
taking with my parents on their brand spanking new yacht in southern
France. Mum, bless her heart, flew up from the family seat in Devon and
has been a lifeline - it would have been truly miserable here without
her. She's been cooking and cleaning and generally tidying my flat, and
sleeping on the sofa. Dad was already on the boat, so he's been stuck
in France, bored to tears (no crew = no fun sailing), and we've had
daily text messaging and phone calls. The rest of the family have all
given their best wishes, although it's hard when we're so scattered
about the country.



But anyway.



It's funny, but there seems to be this assumption that as soon as
you're out of hospital, you're fixed and fine and ready to go again.
Well, I'm not. I'm still on humungous doses of steroids, and I will be
for weeks to come. Doctor's orders are to take another week off, and
then ease back into work slowly. And at the moment, I'm definitely
feeling the effects of over-exertion, even now. But I feel like I'm on
the mend, and my poo is wonderfully, satisfyingly solid. You have no
idea how good that feels. I can only hope that it stays that way when
the steroids drop away and the Azathioprine takes up the slack...

Hazel is on Mastermind!

Start:	Jul 17, '06 9:00p
Location:	The telly. BBC2

Stuck in bed again

Well, once again it's official. I'm ill. Stuck in bed for the last two
days, with just about enough energy to make myself soup. All the usual
- dizziness, the usual digestive rebellion, etc. And earlier on today,
I get a phone call from the doctors' surgery saying that they want me
to come in because they've had my blood test results back, and the
latests set have an unusually high ESR.



A high ESR suggests that there's a lot of protein bonded to my red
blood cells, which in turn (don't ask me how) indicates an increase in
inflammation. Which means, as if I hadn't noticed (hah), that my gut is
going ballistic. Again.



Don't know what they'll say on Thursday, when I see the doctor, but
there's basically two possiblities, and I reckon they'll have about as
much of a clue as I do. Either (a) this is a bad (and fairly sudden)
reaction to the Azathioprine (please no - I'd like something to work,
please), or (b) I'm falling between two stools - the Az isn't supposed
to kick in for three months or so, and I'm not taking any other
medication, so hopefully the mice are playing while the cat's away, in
a manner of speaking.



On the plus side, I'm watching the Space Shuttle launch. From about T
minus four hours. Which is kinda interesting - we're now a T minus one
hour, and the astronauts are all safely tucked up in their overblown
space truck. Hope none of them need to poo. IBS would be a hell of a
thing in free fall... my God. that's a scary thought. Lends a whole new
meaning to the phrase 'explosive decompression', hah. Meanwhile, I can
only watch in envy. To me, the space programme is just the sort of
greater cause that I'd like to be able to devote myself to -  so
watching all these guys has something of a religious feel. I'm probably
too old and broken down now - but it was something which has stayed
with me since college - the conviction that it's important in life to
know that your effort has been devoted to something you really believe
in.