[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]On Saturday I went to Stephen’s to erg, and on Wednesday I went to Doug’s to erg. I’m trying to emphasize the things that Dan and I worked on last Thursday, but it appears that I did a better job of it on Saturday and on Wednesday. Both times I paddled for half an hour non-stop, then started doing 9 minutes normal, 1 minute fast, and about a 30 second rest while I got a drink of water, and then went really hard for the last two minutes. But on Wednesday, my stroke rate was higher, my heart rate was higher, and from the video I don’t think I was rotating as well. Also, I tend to do a stroke-stroke-pause instead of a stroke-pause-stroke-pause, so I don’t know if I am, but I think I’m not pulling as hard on one side as the other. It’s too bad the erg doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting the same power on both sides – on the boat you’d know because you’d be going in circles.
Update: It turns out that the way I’ve been creating the smart playlist, with “Genre = Podcast”, which worked for years now, suddenly stopped working. Changing it to “Media Kind is Podcast” and making it sync under the Podcast tab worked.
Thanks to the latest iPod and iTunes updates from Apple, the iPod, the very device that “Podcasts” are named after, has become useless for listing to podcasts the way I want to listen to them.
The way I like to listen to podcasts is in the car, while driving, a time when I probably shouldn’t be poking around the screen of my iPod instead of watching the road. But Apple, in its infinite wisdom, made podcasts different from music or audiobooks in that you can’t (by default) click “Play” on them and listen to them one after the other. Instead, you have to pick one, hit play, and when it’s done, find another one, hit play, and lather, rinse and repeat. Until a few days ago, I had a very nice work-around: I made a Smart Playlist that contained “Genre = Podcast + Playcount = 0″. It worked great.
But now there is a new update for the iPod and iTunes, and they’ve broken it. The playlist still shows, and I can still play it in iTunes and it plays all the way through and the ones you listen to remove themselves from the playlist. Beautiful. But even though that playlist is still checked to sync to the iPod, the playlist doesn’t show up anywhere on the iPod. So how the fuck am I supposed to listen to an hour and forty five minutes of podcasts, some of which are only 3 or 4 minutes long, without spending time poking around on my screen instead of watching where I’m driving?
Maybe it’s time to find a podcast app for my Palm Pre.
On Sunday I went over to Stephen’s to erg. Last time I was there the battery on the computer died and Stephen warned me not to rely on it, so I brought my gps to act as a timer and heart rate monitor. I also brought my video camera to bore everybody on YouTube again, but unfortunately the battery died after just a minute or two.
Without the erg computer, I was relying on other cues to know how well I was doing – I listened to the sound of the turbine and tried to notice what muscles were tiring. What I wanted to hear from the turbine was a ‘VOOgah’ sound that meant I was getting some pause and glide. If I wasn’t paying attention I would get a much steadier ‘vrrrmmvrrrmmm’ sound that meant I wasn’t pausing. (later on I tried the computer for a while and discovered that when that happened, my stroke rate went up from the mid 60s to the low 70s, but with no increase in speed.). I also tried to remember to get good twist and rotation – the more I concentrate on it now the sooner it will become natural.
I paddled steady for 15 mins, took a sip of water, paddled another steady 15 mins, then I tried the erg computer. With the computer to help me see if my stroke rate was increasing, I paddled for nine minutes steady, increased my speed for one minute without increasing my stroke rate, grabbed a quick sip of water and repeated two more times. The last set I finished off with two minutes of high speed (still at 65 strokes per minute) and some slow cool down. Over an hour of paddling all told.
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]This is why I don’t mind paying Dan for some coaching, even when I don’t have a lot of spare cash. I can watch videos of myself alone until I’m blue in the face, but it takes a coach to point out the things I was missing. In this video I’m getting a *lot* more torso rotation that I do when I erg alone. And if there’s one thing that last year taught me, it’s that doing good technique on the erg translates to having good technique be natural on the water. If there’s one thing I heard over and over again from my teammates in 2009, it was how good my technique was and how naturally it seemed to come to me. Stephen referred to me as “a technique savant”. But it wasn’t natural, it was a result of hours spent at Dan’s house erging and listening to his advice, as well as listening to the advice of other experienced paddlers.
Today I was doing 800 metre (half mile) intervals, working on technique while maintaining a fast pace. I did 6 intervals, all around 4:11-4:13. This video is from the last one, where I was my tiredest.
My colo box, which I bought used on 10 January 2007, hung last night and needed to be rebooted. That’s the second time in 3 months, after nearly two years of flawless service. I wonder if it’s time to replace the hardware?
And once I open the discussion about whether to replace the hardware, I open another discussion in my mind: is it time to go back to Linode or some other VPS provider? I left Linode years ago because they didn’t have enough RAM and hard disk for what I needed, but over the years what they provide for the same amount of money has been growing and growing. I currently pay $100 a month for my colo space – I subdivided the box into three Xen domUs, and of the two guys who rent the other domUs, one of them pays me pretty regularly and the other guy sometimes remembers to pay but usually forgets. I don’t think either of them are making very extensive use. So essentially I’m paying $70 a month for 1Gb of RAM and 100Gb of HD for apps, and 370Gb for a music collection. Well, the music collection isn’t all the important, and for $60 a month at Linode I could get 1Gb of RAM and 50Gb of hard disk. Evidently adding another 50Gb of disk would add another $25/month to that, which isn’t optimal. Anyway, I’ve got to consider my options here before spending another $500 on a used colo box.
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]I did a long work-out at Stephen’s today. I think my technique is coming along nicely, except I drop my head down and to the side too much when I get tired. Jim says I look like I’m leaning back, but I think that’s because my gut gets in the way. The front-view video is from about 40 or 50 minutes into the work-out, and the side view is from the first ten minutes. One thing I worked on was trying to get more rotation – when I thought about it and worked on it, my stroke rate dropped from around 72-74 down to about 64-66, but my speed stayed the same. I didn’t see much change in my pulse, but my heart rate monitor was cutting in and out all the time. I guess I should find out from Dan whether he thinks the longer slower stroke will lead to good results in the water as well.
I went over to Stephen’s house to erg tonight. The past two Wednesdays I’ve gone to Doug’s, but he was busy tonight. Stephen’s house is a bit of a haul, but gas is cheaper than buying my own erg. Plus it’s fun to hang out with different paddlers and talk about stuff.
We did 5 minute intervals, alternating. Stephen hasn’t calibrated his erg, so I think the speed it was showing was a bit fast. I would do a set with the resistance set to about 5-7, then he’d do a set at about the speed with the resistance set to 7-9. My heart rate was in the middle 150s. After we both did 6 sets, Stephen had had enough, because he’d done a hard workout yesterday, so I did a steady 15 minute piece at about the same speed. The last couple of minutes of my piece, I sped up and raised my heart rate into the 160s.
It was a great work-out. Plus I got to inflict my CD of “Kilted Generation” on Stephen.
The Facebook “Suggestions” box, which normally shows me people who know somebody I know or groups that a Facebook “friend” or two has joined, is currently suggesting “We can find 1,000,000 people who DO believe in Evolution before June”. There are only two problems with that:
1) Evolution is a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not, it just is. The only people who are swayed by arguments about whether something is true or not by how many other people “believe” in it or not are idiots. The world didn’t suddenly start orbiting around the sun because a majority of people “believed” Galileo and Copernicus, it was always that way. And it didn’t stop doing so when Galileo renounced his theory under torture. And anthrogenic global climate change isn’t going to go away if you stick your fingers in your ears and go “LA LA LA I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU”. (I’d say that idiots who can be swayed by majority belief arguments aren’t worth arguing with, but unfortunately they hold a lot of political power in this country.)
1a) As a scientific fact, I don’t think “evolution” deserves that magisterial capital letter.
2) The fan group, rather than presenting facts or arguments about evolution, is actually more about making fun of people who believe in one or more Gods, especially Christians. So maybe they should state that as their purpose, instead of making it about evolution, a scientific fact that many theists, even Christians, understand is true.
This morning, Doug, Mike and I agreed to meet at BayCreek for a paddle. I’d scouted it out on Thursday when it was about 42 degrees out, and it was remarkably free of ice. But as I got in the car to go, I noticed that the temperature this morning was only 25 degrees. Not quite as pleasant. I won’t be paddling without pogies today.
I arrived at the parking lot to see that Mike was already there, but he’d gotten his car stuck in the snow. I helped push him out, which is not exactly the sort of warm up I wanted. Doug arrived almost as soon as we’d gotten Mike out, and we didn’t waste any time getting ready. As I’ve done so many times before, I realized that I’d left my GPS on the table where I was getting ready. Oh well.
The creek had a bit more ice around the edges, and the water was cold and dense. The shallowness of the water and the swiftness of the flow meant that we didn’t make very good speed, and we had to constantly hunt from side to side to find water deep enough to paddle in, even if it meant being in the main brunt of the current. Often we ended up in single file because it the only deep water was too narrow for side by side paddling.
After 15 or 20 minutes, I was finally warmed up enough to take off my paddling jacket. There was a very narrow fast bit just downstream from where the weir used to be, and Doug and Mike waited for me just above that. As we warmed up, we started really enjoying it. I have to say, in spite of the ice forming on my jacket, in my beard, and on the top of the boat, I was warmer paddling this morning than I am sitting in my office right now.
In spite of the cold, we saw geese, ducks, swans and one kingfisher. We also saw lots of people walking their dogs in Ellison dog park. A few of the people looked at us like we were crazy. They were probably right.
By the time we were ready to turn around, I was dragging behind the other two guys a bit. After we turned around, I enjoyed the feeling of actually making some headway so much that I went out hard and lead them through a line that went from deep fast part to deep fast part. I think I managed to keep the lead for about half a mile before first Mike and then Doug pulled past me.
After we “finished”, we decided to paddle out into the bay to look around. We could see some motorcycles running around a pylon course on part of the ice, and the ubiquitous ice fishermen, and there were were out nearly half a mile from shore. We hit ice a few dozen feet short of where the time trial turn-around was, so I said “to hell with it” and paddled out into the ice. My Looksha does an ok job of breaking thin ice, but when I went to turn I got about 90 degrees around before I hit thicker ice that I couldn’t break through easily and turn at the same time. That’s when it hit me how silly this little stunt was. I had to paddle backwards a bit, breaking ice with my paddle for every stroke, and then once I got into thinner ice, turn for home and paddle back, still breaking ice. Not the smartest thing I ever did, but not dangerous. At the worst, I would have had to paddle backwards around the curve that I’d already cut in the ice, and I didn’t have to do that.
It was a great day out, and I’m hoping there will be more thaw days.
NYMCRA has announced their points calendar for this year. It’s only seven races this year, instead of the ten last year. Assuming that these races are going to be on the same weekend as last year, here’s what my race calendar looks like so far:
Not a points race, even though it was last year. It was my first real long distance race, and it’s very well suited to me, being a river without massive waves or long shallow stretches.
Up near Ogdensburg, NY. 9 miles with a portage. I know nothing about it, but the Google satellite view shows Madrid is on a river with a lot of shallows.
This was my first 10 miler last year, and in spite of the thunderstorms and my bad pacing, I’m looking forward to it again. It will be a perfect race for the Thunderbolt.
12 mile race in Rotterdam, NY. I don’t know anything about it, but the web page says it starts on the upriver side of a lock, so it’s probably an up and back race.
1 August
Owasco Lake Challenge
Y
I missed this one last year because Vicki and I went to Pulaski with the Huggers Ski Club. I heard it was a good one.
I need to start thinking before I write. Or at least verify my assertions.
The other day I posted about the n900 and droid root exploit. Well, as Brentonpointed out you can get dev versions of droids that have root without needing to resort to bit twiddling boot loaders. I foolishly assumed that since someone did it, that it was necessary to do. sigh
Then I assumed the drivers for wifi and cell radio were closed binary drivers. Felipe Contreras quickly corrected me on that assertion.
In a previous post I jumped too far ahead of myself and was promptly thwapped by rtaycher.
My mindless ramblings make me look like a fool. However, the upside is that I learn a lot of new info by being corrected in my false reasoning. Which I love. The downside is that by being incorrect all the time, people may stop listening. I suppose as with most things in life, I just need to find the balance to create that elusive moderation.
I received a n900 last week and it is several levels of awesome.
I do not really consider myself a gadget geek. My wife might disagree with that assertion due to all the devices littered around the house. However, my previous cell phone was almost ten years old. Thats right, I bought my last phone at the turn of the century. I would say that fact alone removes me from the gadget geek school.
That ancient phone and the n810 were a really nice combination. I could access the net via DUN over bluetooth (http, ssh, etc..) and make phone calls. I wanted to merge the two devices and I knew the n900 would do that. That ability alone made the n900 worth waiting almost a year for. (That was when I started getting sick of having two devices.)
While the n900 is a spectacular device it definitely is not the shiniest. Google and Apple have that covered. With that in mind I keep getting asked why spend more for less? Why not just get a droid or iphone with access to all the apps, multi-touch, etc.. etc..
You will never see that on the n900. Not because the devs at nokia are security geniuses, nor because the maemo community lacks hackers. That post will never be needed for the simple reason that there is a rootsh in the apps repository. Yes, that is right. My phone comes with immediate and easy access to root.
I am definitely NOT a linux geek, nor an adept hacker. I will probably never use rootsh, but other people will and I can benefit from their efforts. As I discovered with the n810 there will eventually be a need to get access to root. And when some hacker creates /sbin/butterfly they will do it without having to bit twiddle the boot loader.
The n900 is a great compromise between the draconian iphone and the loose freerunner. It has its binary drivers and inaccessible hardware (you probably can’t hack the wifi or cell radio easily.), but offers an open debian based linux distro.
One last point that probably needs yet another post, while the droid is open-ish when compared to the iphone, it is still just another way for google to get ads in front of you. While this is not inherently bad, I am not comfortable paying someone so they can market to me.
"Searching for the internet’s tea person" by Justin Kirby
For many years I have been making really great coffee. Everyone who drinks it is amazed at how good the coffee is. While I would love to claim that I am some kind of coffee prodigy, I simply follow Tom at Sweet Marias. The guy is pure passion. All his product recommendations and bean selections have been amazing.
Sweet Marias has a personality too. It is not some slick rounded corner corporate site trimmed down to a bland stub by lawyers. It finds that hard to reach middle above the myspace eyesore. Tom appears to be on this constant search and is tirelessly hunting for good coffee. It is not just the beans, he finds the best tools too. Pure awesome.
I hereby dub Tom of Sweet Marias the internet’s coffee person.
Now I have decided that I like tea. I am starting to like tea enough to invest in making good tea. However, I have run into a road block: I am unable to find the Sweet Marias of tea. I have found Adagio’s and other misc places, but I am not getting the same passion from them. They all look and read too polished to be run by people who really care. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure Adagio and friends are really great people, I am just not seeing the same single minded awesomeness I see at Sweet Marias (If I don’t get any real response from this post I am probably going with Adagio).
Perhaps I am making too brash an assumption that the coffee and tea culture would be similar enough to have Tom’s doppelgänger.
I am putting this out there to see if anyone is aware of where I can go to get access to a singularly and freakishly awesome tea guru?
I noticed something the other day. It was surprising at first, then the more I thought about it the more I realized it made sense.
You have classic works like Don Quixote that have created iconic cultural terms; "I felt like I was tilting at windmills." There is big-endian vs little-endian created by Gulliver’s travels and popularized by computer culture. There are many more but since this a random musing I can’t think of them.
The surprising thing is that you have a massive thousand page work and what we have left from it is "Tilting at windmills.". I am not aware of any other popular phrase derived from the knight. I am reading Gulliver’s Travels and all that is culturally familiar is the little vs big satire.
Both of these memes occur rather quickly in the works. You don’t have to read all that much in order to stumble onto them. Is this common? Do so few people read the entire work?
Don Quixote has the cave of Montecino(sp?) and Gulliver’s Travels has the floating island kingdom of inept academic fools (which is hilarious.), to name just two off the top of my head.
The real question is: Are there any iconic cultural memes that occur towards the end of the works?
I am afraid we only enrich our culture with the first 25% of great ideas.
"There are reasons markets are under served" by Justin Kirby
Things I knew before I started, but ignored: There is usually a reason that markets are under served.
Here is some background before I get to the real story.
I am somewhat involved in boy scouts, my son is a Webelo II and I volunteer for that I can. Last summer I volunteered to coordinate summer camp. This boils down to collecting forms, having parents fill them out, copying the info to different forms, handing forms in to the main office, hoping and praying that they don’t lose track of it,
keeping copies and then transcribing yet more data. All of this is done via paper and pen. I have never spilled so much ink in my life. Keeping track of so much paper and who has done what was a nightmare of epic proportions for someone like me. Other people’s money was involved in a mixture of checks and cash all with different amounts
due and constantly changing based on a mind boggling laundry list of variables. If ever there was a process ripe for automation, this was it.
I thought I found an itch I wanted to scratch.
The ephemeral goal was to provide a basecamp on steroids for scouts to organize themselves. I wanted something less complicated than BigTent, but a bit more custom tailored to scouting than a generic group org system would be.
I am quite satisfied at my current job. I wanted to solve a problem, not alter my life. I quickly realized that I needed to do two things; find a designer/usability guru and figure out if this was going to be a viable project. In other words, will this eventually pay for itself?
I got my friend Brenton Klik to sign on and together we did some research. I try to use conservative numbers, but when they become too bleak I shift to conventional wisdom as found in Hacker News. This is what we found:
There are about 20,000 cub scout packs and troops in the US and that number is shrinking. Right at the beginning there is a limited customer base. If we assume a maximum 10% market penetration over the course of a few years we end up with 2,000 customers.
I didn’t really want to do this myself so I wanted to hire someone, this means a decent developer and tech support person. With a part time support position and full time developer the initial yearly cost would be $80k. I
In order to eventually enter the black within a few years, I would have to charge $10/mo per pack, not per user. I didn’t really see the model working on a per user basis. Nor did I want the uncertainty of ad revenue. Basecamp charges $25/mo for the minimal package, so $10/mo seemed reasonable.
Brenton and I met with a representative from the scouts to figure out whether this was a viable idea. You can read his post for details on that experience.
In my opinion the biggest hurdle is that the scouts is a volunteer run and volunteer funded organization. I wasn’t out to make a living on this project, but I certainly didn’t want to lose any money either. There were significantly cheaper solutions out there. None of them do much of anything particularly well, but they do it cheap enough and
tolerably well enough. Which is what matters.
As Brenton said, for the price of a coffee we found out that the project wasn’t worth it. There are reasons why blue oceans are blue.
I am struggling with a decision I never imagined I would have to make. Most of those who know me would be surprised at what I am considering. The question that is weighing on my mind is whether I should buy an iMac.
(All the following is NOT derived with scientific rigor. It is merely the ramblings of a floss purist questioning his ideals via personal anecdotes.)
A long time ago I realized that I am not a typical computer user. I use Firefox to surf the web and emacs for everything else. These preferences, which tend towards a positive feedback loop , have brought me to a small isolated area of the Venn diagram.
However, I do have a wife and son and they fall into the larger section of that imaginary Venn diagram. They browse the web, use email (predominantly through the web), IM (again web based), manage photos via f-spot, watch videos through mplayer, play some time wasting games,etc.
Of course my son does a bit more with various tools like scratch.
The core problem and reason for this post is that he wants to do more, but can’t. Editing videos on linux is near impossible. Cinelerra is about as useful to an impatient ten year old as mowing the lawn with a pair of scissors. Kdenlive looks promising, but crashes constantly with segfaults and other weird errors. After hours or days of stubborn persistence his natural response it to give up. I don’t blame him.
The core philosophy of floss is freedom. Freedom is a hollow concept without pragmatic consequences. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, thus for popular systems at least stability is approachable. Of course there are caveats and other problems with this which I will punt. With FLOSS one also has the ability to make an application do what they want (the freedom part). If a package comes close, but not quite, then you have the ability (whether you do it yourself or higher it out) to get the feature you need. This saves you writing a system from scratch.
Non-free systems in the floss view are bad because you can become entrapped in that system. In order for Digital Restrictions Management to ‘work’ it has to be infused throughout the system from the hardware level up to user level apps including network services. Enforcing whimsical industry group policies through fallible systems is always a poor judgement call.
Expanding closed systems through undocumented, broken api’s is an exercise in frustration. While there are exceptions they are exactly that, rare exceptions.
One can easily observe some real world consequences that are surprising for a floss purist. Floss tends to be a copycat of the closedgiants. One can easily argue that the closed giants also copy each other.
Another observation that contradicts the philosophy of floss is that the media apps tend to crash. Sure, mplayer and co. will play most codecs perfectly fine. Creating or manipulating media is a different experience entirely.
A naive observer would be forgiven wondering what benefit there is to all this freedom when innovation is not the de facto emergent property.
Bringing all these tangents together I am back where I started: Do I buy an iMac so my son can create media with relative ease or do I hold onto ideals and contribute to an immature ecosystem? In other words do I side with short-sited pragmatism or hold out for potential long term rewards?
"why eBook readers are great next year." by Justin Kirby
I recently succumbed to gadget lust and bought an ebook reader, BeBook to be precise. I read a lot of books and luckily they tend to be public domain works from long dead authors. My tastes allow me to take advantage of the reader while not compromising my DRM == Evil stance.
The overall experience of reading on the BeBook is quite good. Needing light to view a display on an electronic device is still surprising. The screen is a bit smaller than I expected (though I am not sure what I was expecting exactly.) which means more page turns to read a book. Turning a page does take a few moments, however, it is easy enough to anticipate and click the button while you are close enough to the end. You can then finish reading while the reader does whatever it does to render then next ‘page’.
I often end up reading in bed. It is a habit I got into while I was single and luckily I have an understanding wife so I am able to continue doing this. It is so much easier using a reader while laying down than a book. Unfortunately, the buttons emit a clunky click when pressed. I initially thought this was the death knell for reading the BeBook in bed. Luckily, the wife has yet to complain.
For reasons I have yet to figure out, the default zoom level of some pdfs can be illegible. Zooming involves pressing the number key with the magnifying glass on it. NOT the buttons with the + and -, which are for volume. That took me longer to realize than I care to admit. The zoom button cycles through the various modes in one direction. This means that if you go one step too far you have several more page refreshes to go through to get back to where you want it. This can feel like it takes a while due to the slight delay in display refresh. I don’t really plan on using this to play audio, so it would be really nice to remap the volume buttons to zoom.
There really isn’t much to say about the software. It just works. Which is both surprising and good. As far as I can tell the UI is just a file browser, if there are more ways to browse your library, I don’t know about it. Since the file view has worked well enough for me I haven’t bothered to look.
I read mostly pdfs and epub books. Rendering epub is definitely superior to that of pdfs. If I had to guess, I would say this is because epub is an open standard, pdf is extremely complex while epub has a single purpose, and it appears there is more epub content. I have not tried any other formats since they tend to have DRM and I don’t want to throw away money or support such a horrid concept.
OpenInkpot needs mention. It is a linux distro for the Hanlin v3 (BeBook) and other ereaders. It is an interesting idea and deserves some attention. I want to use it some more before I decide whether to switch. The few times I have booted it, Inkpot seems to be very similar in how the BeBook functions. At least I haven’t noticed any marked difference yet. I am definitely going to play with it again and would recommend taking a few minutes yourself.
Content. The single reason to buy these things is to put books on them. If you can’t do that, they are quite pointless. Sure, you can put feeds into ebook format and consume them that way, but then links are dead and I have found it to be rather constraining. However, I do use zinepal.com and for what it is, it works very well. (more on that in another post.)
If you don’t care whether your soul is sucked into the maw of giant corporate blobs, then DRM is for you. There are two big buy offers on your soul; Amazon and Sony. You can give them lots of money for the privilege of temporarily accessing big name authors and other pop-culture trends. Then they will take it away at a whim. Who wouldn’t want that?
Even if you did decide your soul was worth their baubles you would still have to run a vbox/vmware image of windows. Most of their spyware is not cross platform.
Your other choice is to travel into the world of Public Domain, Tech Tomes, and Unknowns. Lucky for me, this happens to be where I enjoy traveling. Reading authors that were around before the Brimstone Puking Demon was envisioned is extremely entertaining and rewarding. O’Reilly has decided that their customers are not amoral savages so there is a wealth of cool, but expensive, content. There is also a bunch of places offering self-published authors and a few publishers that have functioning brain cells, http://www.baen.com
There is enough content out there allowing you to avoid DRM altogether. It just requires a bit of work to find. I am still looking for good sources of books. I love that O’Reilly doesn’t have DRM. However, building a library of their material would be extremely expensive at $30+ a pop.
Is the BeBook worth it? Yes. It allows me to easily read classic lit, all the tech tomes I could want and find great unknown authors. Using it for only a week and I am hooked.
First, I would like to apologize to everyone who put so much effort into qunu.
Current Status:
The server has been taken offline. There are no backups which are current, the latest is one month old.
Why:
The server that was just taken offline was to be a temporary home lasting one, maybe two months. We were then going to find a more permanent setup. As with most things that have a deadline it received no attention until it was necessary.
Apparently there was some confusion as to the date which the account was to be canceled. It was scheduled to be taken offline on December 21, 2007. However, the server was taken offline nine days before the scheduled time (e.g. today)
A few weeks earlier, Mickaël at process-one had generously offered to take qunu off our hands. So we had finally found the home we had been looking for. I had even started the process of getting all the data off the server. Unfortunately, the transition is not going as smoothly as I had hoped.
Once again, qunu will suffer through a period of downtime before it is finally resurrected again. Maybe qunu should be renamed Phoenix or Lazarus
At some point when all the kinks are worked out, probably next month, qunu will be started at its new home. Don’t hold your breath, but don’t give up hope either.
Just ran into this emacs key binding. Someday I need to just read the manual and mark all the stuff I wish I knew already for later study. But since I will probably never do that here is yet another cool thing in emacs which I didn’t know about:
C-x h runs the command mark-whole-buffer
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el’.
It is bound to C-x h,
Put point at beginning and mark at end of buffer.
You probably should not use this function in Lisp programs;
it is usually a mistake for a Lisp function to use any subroutine
that uses or sets the mark.
Not only can you edit videos in emacs now, but you can also create music. My initial response was WTF!? However, after watching the demo videos, I can see the practical uses.
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