Uncategorized – Page 15

Borrowed another ebook

This one’s even worse than the
first one from a usability standpoint.

The problem is that this one’s a PDF file, but instead of
reading it with one of the many excellent PDF readers in the
world (including Adobe’s), I still have to read it with Adobe
Digital Editions.

Adobe Digital Editions, instead of having menus across the top
with helpful items like “rotate screen”, and “go to full screen for
the text”, has buttons scattered around the part of the screen
that isn’t text. With the epub format, two of the buttons
enlarged and reduced the font size, but the PDF’s don’t reflow,
so all you can do is change the size of the text window. The
largest size I managed to get on my 14 inch laptop is readable,
but if I had an “enlarge font” button, I would still push it.
Especially if I were trying to read in bed, which I haven’t
bothered to do with this one.

On reading the epub book last week, I found myself wishing I
had a netbook, but with this one, I doubt that I would be able
to get a readable size of text, so this book would probably be
even less readable with a netbook.

It isn’t clear what the rationale for having some books in epub
format and some in PDF, but they seem to be about half and half,
so if there are only 108 books and half of them are unreadable,
that gives me even less incentive to buy another gadget.

I should mention that my eyes are a lot better than those of
most people my age. When I was younger I was unusually good at
reading fine print. Until I turned 40, I could read the
condensed Oxford English Dictionary without the magnifying
glass. Now I still don’t carry reading glasses
around with me, although in my home, I usually do have a pair
within reach. So if I can’t get a good font, there are a
lot of people in the world who can’t read the book even by squinting.

I think this is our tax dollars at work. It’s sad that people
whose job is to serve the public have so little concept of
how to implement technology to do that.

Cyser making

I don’t seem to have blogged about making cyser since 2006, but
I do still do it every year.

Last year I experimented and made three beverages from the
cider I bought at the ciderfest
and fermented them all on the wild yeasts from the Carlson Orchards
apples. It was reasonably successful, although none of them is
really ready to drink yet. (A year is a pretty short time for a
cyser, and should be OK for a cider, but it really tastes like the
slightly sulfurous quality in the one-ingredient cider is that
kind that goes away with age.)

So this year I’m making 3 gallons of the one-ingredient cider
(simplest recipe in the world — put the cider in a carboy and put
on a fermentation lock and forget about it for a few months, then
bottle) and 5 gallons of the cyser (almost as simple except that
you add between two and three pounds of honey for each gallon of
cider).

I still had about 8 pounds of the 20 pounds of honey I bought last year
from an apiary in Lowell in a Wort
Processors group buy. The hard part about making cyser if you
don’t buy the honey and the cider at the same time is that the
honey has crystalized, so you have to heat it gently to convince
it to turn back into a liquid so you can pour it intoyour
carboy.

Last year I skipped that step, and used a brewing bucket
instead of a carboy, and missed watching the liquid clear as the
yeas flocculates out. So this year I swore I was going to do it
right, so I spent half an hour or so this morning watching honey crystals
reliquify, and pushing the ones that hadn’t through the funnel
with a skewer.

I also have 10 pounds of honey that I bought yesterday from Mike Graney, which
would have been easier to use but I thought I should use the older
stuff first. I’ll add some of Mike’s honey when the krausen
(a thick layer of bubbles from actively fermenting yeast, which
usually disappears after a day or two) has gone down, but right
now I’m closer to the top of the carboy than I like to be.

How I like the surround sound

I promised to stop talking about the setup, so I won’t tell you
about the set of cables I just ordered from monoprice.com. Except to
mention that the solution to not having enough TOSLink sockets
is to get a TOSLink
switch. And that I’m still insecure on round 4 of ordering
cables whether I have enough of the right kind.

But I have had a chance to listen to a fair number of different
programs in surround sound, so I’ll tell you about what I’m
getting for the several hundred dollars I spent.

For just music recorded in stereo, it doesn’t really get you
much. The music still comes out of the stereo speakers, which
are still in the same place and the same quality.

For programs like movies and TV shows, it really does
make a difference, though, because the dialog is coming out of
the center channel, and the background music is coming out of
the other speakers, so it really does come through as
background, and doesn’t make the dialog hard to understand.

The FM radio is by default pushed through all the speakers, and
that’s a bit of a disadvantage for the way I use the radio,
because I have the volume down in the living room because of 5
speakers instead of two, but then when I go into the kitchen it
isn’t loud enough to hear.

And the sports programs really are a bit more exciting when you
feel surrounded by the crowd noise. I thought that was a bit
hokey when I first heard it, but now I miss it if I hit a
program like that which isn’t in surround.

I still haven’t listened to a real music DVD that’s been mixed
for surround sound. I moved the Werner Herzog Lohengrin up on
my Netflix queue, so I’ll let you know how that worked out.
There’s also a blu-ray Lohengrin, but I want to see what Herzog
does with it. I’ll tell you some time about the live production I saw
once — it’s an opera that needs a stage director.

The Magicians

The premise of this
book by Lev Grossman is that it’s surprising that the young heroes and
heroines of other fantasies never seem to have read about each
other. So in this book, some of the teenagers recruited to a
Hogwarts-like school for magicians on the banks of the Hudson
River are in fact big fans of a Narnia-like series of books about
a world named Fillory.

I wouldn’t say to run out and buy the book even if you find that
premise intriguing, but I was glad that I could borrow it from my public
library. And I finished it even though reading in bed on that
laptop at the wrong orientation was not doing my neck any good.

The major problem is that the characters aren’t interesting
enough to sustain 400 pages. But all the points about the Narnia
and Harry Potter series are valid, and interesting to
contemplate. Why does Narnia always reform the initially
recalcitrant earthling? If the children lifted to another world
have experienced evil in this one, mightn’t they bring it
there?

If you aren’t a Narnia fan, I would say there’s no point at all
in reading this book. You’ll miss some jokes if you aren’t a
Harry Potter fan, but that’s less critical.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0670020559&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Ciderfest

Pretty busy today, since I spent all of yesterday getting ready
for and going to the Boston Wort
Processors Ciderfest.

Normally I bottle the cyser from the previous year before the
Ciderfest, but this year I was lazy and didn’t. It isn’t usually
really ready to drink after only a year, anyway. So I have to
bottle that, and then put the cider I bought into carboys for this
year’s strange
fermented fluids.

I ended up roasting vegetables and putting them on a large
platter. I put some herbs and spices in the oil I brushed on them
before roasting. I had said I was bringing potato salad, but then
a lot of other people were saying they were bringing finger food,
and I thought that was a good idea, since most people don’t spend
all afternoon with a plate and fork in their hands, but they do
spend the afternoon with a drink in their hands, so being able to
eat finger food is important. But most people seem to have eaten
them with forks anyway.

Over half of what I brought were potatoes, but there were
slices of turnip, kohlrabi, fennel, daikon radish, and green
pepper, too.

The weather was perfect, and the setting in a field on the edge
of a pond was idyllic. One of the interesting tasting experiences
was that someone else had done what I did with last year’s cider,
and just dumped it in a carboy with a fermentation lock and let
the wild yeasts do their thing. The two beverages tasted
significantly different. Someone suggested the fermentation
temperatures may have been different. Or of course the local wild
yeasts may be different in Jamaica Plain than in Cambridge,
although you would expect the ones from the apple orchard to
overwhelm the interlopers from the apartment.

Roman Polanski

I know every other blogger weighed in on this a few weeks ago,
but I had Wanted
and Desired, the documentary about the original trial, in my
Netflix watch now queue, and I wanted to see it before I
pontificated. I got around to watching it last night.

I was pretty sure the current difficulties Polanski is in
aren’t an example of the creeping police state mentality that
the cases of Gates
and my
neighbor seem to be, since this involves someone who has
actually been convicted of something. But I couldn’t tell from
the news reports what the actual story about plea bargains and
time served was.

If you’re interested, you should watch the documentary. But
the short version is that he was indited on a series of
charges, and the one he was willing to plead to was “unlawful
intercourse”. This is less serious than rape, but can still
lead to a 20 year sentence in state prison.

The sentencing problem the judge faced was that there were
enough issues with the conduct of the trial that he didn’t want to give a sentence that would
be appealed. But he thought Polanski should serve some time in
jail. The only sentence that couldn’t be appealed was the 90 day
“evaluation”, which in Polanski’s case took only 42 days.

The judge was outraged that he had achieved only 42 days in
jail and was trying to bargain for more time in jail when
Polanski decided he didn’t trust these bargains and left.

The documentary focuses on the views of the two principal
lawyers in the case, the prosecutor, who looks a lot like Robert
Redford, and the defense attorney, who looks something like Sam
Waterstone. Of course, what you really want is the point of
view of the victim and of Roman Polanski, both of whom are
interviewed, but understandably don’t want to talk about the
more painful aspects of the issue.

My gut opinion is that this is not the way to protect 13 year
old girls from being exploited by older men. This isn’t an
example of random police power, but certainly does indicate that
the intersection of the courts with the media and the political
system can lead to undesirable results for both victims and
criminals.

So if Polanski manages to not come back, I won’t be outraged by
any miscarriage of justice. If he does end up coming back, I hope
any additional sentence can be mostly time served in the Swiss
jail, which I would guess is a lot more civilized than the
California State Prison. (I’m not the only person who thinks
that — the reason the 90 day evaluation got done in 42 days was
that the prison officials were concerned that they wouldn’t be
able to protect him.)

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001HB1K46&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Played at an English Country Dance

The Harvard
Square English Country Dance has open band several times a
year, where anyone who’d like to play for dancing can join in.

I’ve been three times in the last year. The first time was a
bit intimidating — the band leader clearly thought she was
offering constructive criticism when she said I was playing on the
back of the beat, but I couldn’t even hear what she was talking
about, let alone figure out what to do about it. But the playing
was fun when I wasn’t feeling criticised, and the tune list worked
well on recorder. I brought both serpent and recorder, but ended
up playing mostly recorder, since even I can hear some rhythm
problems when I’m playing serpent.

The second time I was just invited to sit in when it wasn’t an
official open band. The good part about that was that I danced
for the first half of the evening, and then just sat in on the
second half. I was surprised that they wanted the serpent to play
the tunes, which I hadn’t practiced. They were happier with the
serpent than the first leader had been, but still made cryptic
comments about how my recorder playing could stand to sacrifice artistry
for rhythm. (This was during the
dance — during the rehearsal I’d specifically asked if they
wanted me to change anything and had been told it was fine.) The
playlist was mostly pretty good for C recorder, but there was one
piece that just plain didn’t work for C recorder. The recorder
player in the band played it pretty well on his alto recorder, so
I was embarrassed that I hadn’t brought mine. This is part of why
I spent the summer playing dance music on the G alto.

Last night I had practiced the tunes on both serpent and
recorder, and carefully marked on the tune list which ones would
work on G recorder. But I noticed that it was really not as
recorder-friendly a tune list as the previous two. It turned out
that this band was really excited about having the serpent play
drones. There was a good bass player, so the oom-pah rhythm bass
was covered, and several of the tunes did work over a drone, which
is a lot more fun on serpent than it is on most instruments. It
was a pretty big band with lots of other melody instruments, so I
ended up not playing much recorder, although nobody complained
about it when I did play. But the G alto as country dance
instrument is still fairly untested. The serpent did feel a lot
better about it than about the two previous experiences. The bass
player took one dance off to dance, and complimented me when he
came back to play.

Borrowing ebooks from the library

The Minuteman Library
Network, to which my local public library, the Cambridge Public
Library belongs, has just started loaning out electronic
media, including ebooks.

They have a really good record on computerizing the loan of
dead tree books. Their whole catalog is online, and everyone
who has a library card at any member library can request a book
and get the next available copy shipped to a convenient library branch. You get email when the book arrives, and another
email when it’s due.

Their first try on loaning ebooks isn’t (for me) anything like
as successful, but I’m hoping they just started with something
they could get working fast (it says “Powered by Overdrive”) and will improve it as users point
out problems.

One obvious problem is that there are only about a hundred
ebooks. They do include some newer books, including the two I
requested: Julie
and Julia, which I have requested, and The
Magicians, which I’d put on my Fictionwise wish list,
but didn’t think I really wanted to pay a hard cover price for
it, so I’ve now checked it out of the library as an ebook.

Another problem is that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way
to check back in a book you’re finished with before the due date,
which would seem to be an obvious courtesy to the people behind
you in line.

The checkout itself went smoothly, although it was a little
irritating to have to enter my card number and PIN again, since
the Digital Media Catalog is a separate site, with the same
login and password as the Minuteman Library Network, but it
needs a separate login.

But when I checked out the book, I got a little xml file with
information about the title and the author and the publisher and
the duration of the loan. So the next problem was to get the
software that reads this XML and gets the actual book.

I turned out not to be able to do this on my Linux computer.
So I waited until yesterday, when I needed to log into Windows
to reprogram the remote control anyway.

Downloading Adobe Digital Editions on a windows box wasn’t any
harder than downloading any other Windows software. (That is,
lots more work than “apt-get install program-name”, but not
really difficult.)

Figuring out where to enter the filename of my little xml file
was a lot harder. The “open file” menu item only wanted you to
enter pdf or pdb files, and this was a .acsm file. So I finally
opened up Explorer and moved the little icon from the Explorer
window to the digitaleditions window. I suppose lots of people
would have tried that first, but it really seems like a barbaric
way to have to enter a filename when you already know the
filename.

The program seems pretty bare to me. Most of its window is
blank, so even if you maximize the digitaleditions window,
you’re still using less than half the screen for the actual
reading area. And there’s no way to rotate the window so that
you’re using the screen format in the orientation where it’s
aspect ration is similar to that of the printed page. It’s easy to increase or decrease the font size,
and the page up and page down buttons do what you expect, and
things are readable, but of course, even my laptop isn’t really
an ideal size for reading books on.

I was delighted to find that digitaleditions seems to work
perfectly under wine in Linux, so except for the software download, there
isn’t any reason you have to boot Windows to read the books.
(Unfortunately “works perfectly” means you have to use the same
clumsy method to enter the filename as you do under Windows.)

The program is advertised to work on Sony readers and some
ipods, so it may well work better for owners of those devices.
And if they continue to add more titles, it might make sense to
buy a device that works with the software they’re insisting that
you use. (Obviously not for the hundred or so titles they have
now, several of which are public domain anyway.)

Besides being too big and heavy for reading in bed, my current
laptop no longer runs from the battery, so I have to plug it in
anywhere I want to use it, even for a few minutes. Obviously if
one needed a portable computer to read in bed on there are lots
better choices than this.

So if the digital media loan program succeeds and is providing current books for
free in the format of my choice, I may consider buying a better
device for using it on. It would be even better if the loan
program would give you more choice of both software and
hardware, though.

“The Nation” by Terry Pratchett

It was interesting reading this
book right after finishing The
Baroque Cycle, because it felt in a way like a sequel
from a young adult point of view. It takes place a couple of
generations after the founding of the Royal Society, which is an
important part of the plot resolution.

It’s not a Discworld book,
and it lacks the non-stop hilarity of some of the better Discworld
books, but it’s an unusually good young adult novel, with both
male and female point of view characters.

Terry Pratchett says he wrote it because there had to
be a fourth verse to Eternal
Father, Strong to Save. It’s sung by the captain of a
ship which is lifted by a tsunami and deposited on an island:

Oh Thou who built’st the mountains high,
To be the pillars of the sky
Who gave the mighty forests birth
And made a Garden of the Earth
We pray to Thee to stretch Thy hand
To those in peril on the land.

You can hear Terry Pratchett himself sing this in on the
Barnes and Noble site.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0061433039&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Last post about setting up the new home theater

Not that I mightn’t complain about the new home theater, but I
now consider it set up, so future posts will be about interface
inadequacy or something.

I decided to stop plugging things in and out until the new DVI
cables arrived, and set up the disk player with a regular stereo
connection, and used the TOSLink cable to link the cable box to
the receiver.

This morning all the HDMI cables arrived, and it turns out that
even with all the equipment in front of me and turned around so I
could see the back, I had ordered the wrong cables.

Cable TV

I could have sworn I saw an HDMI socket on the back of the
cable box, but it isn’t there now. So I have connected the cable
box with the composite video cables and the TOSLink audio to the
receiver. This is on AV1, which is the input that’s selected when
you push the “TV” button on the receiver.

Broadcast TV

I don’t currently watch this much, but if I were to downgrade
my cable, or if there were a really good audio program on one of
the broadcast channels that’s not in HD on the cable box, I would
like the option of watching via broadcast. Right now that audio
isn’t hooked up, so I can only listen through the TV speakers; if
I get another TOSLink cable I’ll be able to hook that to the
receiver and listen to it from whatever other input has the
digital audio connection.

DVD

The new Blu-Ray DVD player with the network connection was a
pain in the neck when I didn’t have the two HDMI cables, but “just
works” when you’ve connected it via HDMI to the receiver. I don’t
have a Blu-Ray disk to test, but the surround sound was working
fine with the DVD I played.

Computer

This I haven’t tested, but it’s hooked up to the receiver via a
DVI-HDMI cable and a regular stereo audio cable. I don’t know how
much I’ll be using this for, since the DVD player will play
netflix watch now and youtube (untested). The firewire cable I
ordered turns out to be the wrong kind, so I can’t test what
channels the cable box is putting out on firewire.

Not really done yet

So I still have to buy some more cables, and set up the fancy
remote control to know about the new equipment, and tell netflix
to send me blu-ray disks and run the program that sets up the
receiver based on putting a microphone in your listening
location. But it’s definitely ready to start giving demos.