May 2009 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

kerpoof
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 May '09

22 May '09

wanna see what the e-books of tomorrow will look like? see what the kids of today are playing with: > http://www.kerpoof.com they won't even realize this is a kick-ass authoring tool. they'll just know they are having fun... -bowerbird ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc…)

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remember eucalyptus?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 May '09

22 May '09

remember i told you about eucalyptus, an iphone e-book viewer-program that loads in e-texts from project gutenberg? it's been rejected by an apple reviewer, because the app was able to download the kama sutra, which is a naughty book. yeah, yeah, this isn't the first time that apple's review process has been an ass, and it'll get straightened out eventually, but the p.g. connection is pretty funny... -bowerbird ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc…)

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brewster kahle weighs in on the google book "settlement"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 May '09

19 May '09

brewster kahle weighs in on the google book "settlement": > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR200905180… he is opposed to google's boondoggle... -bowerbird ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc…)

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Re: About the Samsung i730 (Verizon, 3G, CDMA) Re: Well, it has kindled a lot of discussion, hm?
by Kevin Pulliam 15 May '09

15 May '09

Just to be clear, the phone in question 'already' has Wifi built in. (This is one of the few touch screen, PDA, Wifi, Bluetooth, Cellular internet, and qwerty keyboard phones that Verizon ever released. Sorry no Camera.. but to some of us, that's actually a feature too). The trick is to avoid the hefty dataplans to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership to a fraction of what it costs to buy a modern PDA/phone which don't have a way to turn off the Cellular Internet. The procedure: I slightly exaggerated for effect (it's not quite a 5 second procedure), but it's really quite easy and most folks can follow these one time instructions in under a minute or so. ------------- Step 1: In File Explorer (on the phone), browse to MyDevice/Windows/Startup Step 2: 'Cut' (using the right hand 'Menu' Then 'Edit' then 'Cut' choices) the file named "CDMACSP" from the directory. Step 2a: Go up one level and 'paste' (using the right hand Menu then Edit, then Paste) the file to the windows directory. (This step is optional if you want an easy way to put the program back in the startup folder, or to temporarilly re-enable the cellphone internet). Step 3: Now, on the phone menu, go to 'Settings'. Then choose 'Connections' tab, then choose 'Connections' icon, lastly choose 'Manage existing connections'. Step 4: Edit each of the two shown connections and change the phone number to #### (or anything really) instead of #777 and #7772. -------------- That's it, you are done. The phone is now incapable of connecting to the cellular internet system. NOTE: Verizon does require you to 'select' a data-plan when you activate this phone. Simply select the (outragous) per Kb charge of 'pay as you go' or something similar (but remember, you've already disabled internet. - there will be no 'as you go') You now have a $75 ebook reader / cell phone with no data plan, that is WiFi enabled, a full function PDA, and a windows mobile device. This phone will also work just fine with the cell phone radio turned completely off. If you just want a cheap portable ereader/wifi device, you don't even need to signup for anything with verizon. Verizon also offers a 'Data-block' option that you can ask for via customer service, but I don't trust them to always/continue to offer that, or to get a tech on the phone that knows how to enable it on their system. This way, all the control is on your end of the data pipe. For those technically interested, the program we removed from startup 'fixes' the phone numbers at startup if you ever mess them up. If you are ever stuck somewhere and MUST get internet, and there is no 802.11b wifi available. you can go back to the windows directory, run the CDMACSP program, and then connect to the internet through the cellular network. Change the numbers back to something useless when you are done. I learned this trick (and many others) for this phone here http://pdaphonehome.com/forums/samsung-i730-i830-i830w/ I recommend this website for any discussion of 'how do I do what I WANT to do' with just about any brand of phone or PDA. There are updates and software packages to allow playback of DivX, WMP, and Tivo recorded TV shows. You can even load your unencrypted itunes or amazon music purchases. The only true limitation is that it cannot read an SD Card larger than 4GB, and it also doesn't have a 'slick' iphone/ipod like interface. At the moment I have 4 hours of TV from my tivo, 8 hours of Divx video files, 4-5 albums of music, and 460 ebooks loaded; The card is 75% full. Amazon and Apple do have one thing figured out. The ability to grab a book on the fly is 'priceless'. There is nothing so futuristic, yet here today (here for several years actually), than browsing to a website (feedbooks.com, fictionwise.com, webscription.net) and downloading a new book straight to your reader (no cables, cards, or laptops required) while sitting in an airport because you want to read the next book in a series, or another by the same author. Cheers Kevin On 5/14/09, Michael S. Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org> wrote: > > About the Samsung i730 (Verizon, 3G, CDMA). . . . > > How do you rename that file to make it wifi??? > > > Thanks!!! > > > > Michael > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d >

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Re: detumescing optimism
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 May '09

14 May '09

jon said: > BB, how about detumescing my optimism? ok, if you think i'm not optimistic, you're crazy. i am extremely optimistic, which is why i haven't given up on e-books even after lo these 30 years. the thing that i am _not_ is _unrealistic_... no sir, i look reality squarely in the eye, even stare it down. but you, jon, you do not. and that is your problem... > What I am thinking of is some kinds of heads-up displays > that can be worn like glasses, seeing the "screen" through > some sort of lens system. I should think them to be perfect > for reading etc, and afaik they are mainly LCD based, and > accordingly power-conservative. have you ever seen such a heads-up display in real life? > I know it exists oh really. _how_ do you know it exists? have you ever seen one out in the wild? > I know it exists, but much as epaper did for a couple of decades, > it seems to be languishing, or at least limited to special purposes. e-ink didn't "languish". researchers who were very well paid were working very hard on it, for long hours, for a long time. but sometimes the technology doesn't come along as fast as you'd like it to. sometimes you run into problems that were... unforeseen. sometimes the paths you pursue are false starts. the problem with e-ink was very simple: it was too easy to grok. we know what paper is; we know what it can do, and it can do a lot. so it was very easy for us to picture exactly what e-ink (or e-paper, or whatever you want to call it) was. it is something that is exactly like paper, except that it's digital and can be constantly refreshed. and because paper is so very simple, yet so remarkably versatile, as well as being quite easy to understand, given our familiarity, it was quite easy for the e-ink marketers to get us quite riled up. consequently, they started feeding us the hype _far_ too early... and -- to exacerbate the pain -- we bought into it _instantly_... then when the engineers couldn't deliver, immediately, we got impatient, and incorrectly viewed development as "languishing". except technology makes its own timetable; we don't "decide" it. plus then idiots like rothman kept pushing the unrealistic hype, simply because the false promises kept people reading his blog. they wanted to believe, just like you, so they flocked to his blog. he told them what they wanted to believe, and they believed him. he even started embellishing the ridiculousness, with promises that this new wonder e-ink was going to be unbelievably cheap. what a pile of steaming crap _that_ was! anyone with one ounce of sense who read the news about the money being pumped into the e-ink coffers _knew_ -- without any doubt at all -- that this technology would _not_ come cheap. the e-ink companies were financed, and refinanced, then refinanced again, every time at a higher price to a new round of suckers on the basis of bigger and better hype. with that many investors that (still) need to be paid, e-ink ain't gonna become inexpensive for another decade or so... but rothman was busying peddling his lies, to build up his blog. $50 is what he said the things would cost. fifty fucking bucks! he even came to believe that price himself. what a dumb sucker. plus, when the first e-ink came out, the contrast was just _awful_. even rothman himself had to concede that it was plain unusable. and, and it was expensive as all get-out. and it had an ugly flash on every pageturn, _and_ those pageturns were unworkably slow. notice that, in all the hype that had come before, never was it even _mentioned_ that contrast might be a problem, or that there would even _be_ a flash on page-turns, or that pageturns would be glacial. not one word. there's an old saying that the only product that has no flaws is the one that hasn't been released yet. this was that, in spades. we had envisioned e-ink/e-paper that was perfect in every way. unfortunately, there were _lots_ of problems with the real thing. of course, flash forward to 2009, and reality has set in, and hard. we're looking at $300 machines -- $450 if you want a nice size, and that's only the bigger companies with the bigger budgets... (when you look at a little guy like iliad, it's more like $600-$800.) there's still the flash, but it's not quite so bad. and the pageturns, well, they're still not very fast, but people have gotten used to that. because, really, what can you do about it, except whine like a baby. we're still at -- what -- 16 shades of gray? that's pretty pathetic, but color looks to be about 2-5 years away. (for the last 14 years, _everything_ with e-ink has _always_ been about 2-5 years away, as that is a time-period which you can always keep pushing back, but also short-term enough to scare off any competing products.) 14 years ago, jon noring was claiming that cheap hi-res screens would be available "in 5 years". about 10 years ago, he was still claiming that they were "5 years off". when i finally pointed out, 6 years back, that he was _still_ predicting they were "5 years out", just as he had been doing for the _previous_8_years, he stopped... ironically, about the time he finally stopped spouting the nonsense that's when hi-res screens started appearing. just as i had predicted, -- not that this "prediction" was anything more than common sense -- they first appeared in expensive early-adopter toys, things like g.p.s., and also in commercial settings, such as cash-registers at mcdonalds. because that's how it happens in the world of commercial products. the first iteration of _everything_ is going to be priced far too high. ostensibly this is "to recover the research-and-development costs", but that's just a rationalization. the fact is they charge a premium because they know that they can extract one from early adopters... they charge a lot because they can. they always have. always will... then, over the course of the next 5 years or so, they drop the price. they do this like clockwork. you can depend on it. so it's _easy_ to see what technology is going to be available, cheap, in 5 years. it's the technology that is available _now_, but only at a premium. ergo, that's the answer to your question about heads-up displays... are they available now? do you see them on _any_ products now? if not, then the technology isn't there yet. sure, just like e-paper, it's easy to _grok_ heads-up. we have no trouble _visualizing_ it... but just because _we_ can "visualize" it doesn't mean the engineers can _build_ it, let alone build it at the kind of price we'd like to pay, let alone build it at the price we want without performance flaws... you want to know where the heads-up displays are right now? they're in jet fighter-planes. the military is paying _huge_ dollars for 'em. so if you're a company that's making heads-up displays, you're going to keep selling them for huge dollars to the military. it's only when the military starts ordering the stuff in _buik_lots_ that the manufacturers will drop the price, and start trotting out the technology to other lower-margin users. but again, they'll be the early adopters, from whom the companies can get a premium. if you're wanting it to be _affordable_, to the masses, wait 5 years... (in case you're curious where the hi-res screens pulled down their huge money at their outset, it was in medical imaging equipment. why sell hi-res color screens to the public for pennies when you can instead sell 'em to hospitals who will pay exorbitant prices?) > Or am I too optimistic? What am I missing? you're being unrealistic. that's what you're missing. realism. reality doesn't care one whit about your optimistic "hopes". (then again, it also doesn't care if you do pessimist "doubt".) *** > it is all very well to be satisfied with tiny screens, but > it does bad things to one's capacity for effortless, > comfortable, non-injurious, reading for hours and hours. i was going to comment on this earlier, when someone made a point about a 300-page book turning into a 600-page book when the screen is only half as big. now, on the one hand, who cares how many "pages" there are? the machine itself doesn't get any "heavier" with more pages, and pageturning is simple enough, so why should that matter? well, it ends up that the one place where it _does_ matter is in whether you can "disappear" into the book, and not even notice the machine. the more often you turn pages, the harder that is. it's not really a _deal-breaker_, but it does impact _comfort_... (this is "comfort" over and above the "eye strain" factor. i don't get eye-strain, but that doesn't mean that nobody else suffers. i _do_ have the problem that most old people have, which is that my eyes need bigger letters, so that's yet another "comfort" factor.) but the fact remains that some people do fine with small screens. > BB made some good points as usual, gee, jon, that's the nicest thing you've ever said about me... > but some rather unconvincing ones also as usual. that's more like it... ;+) but i'm sure if you're not convinced, you just weren't reading closely... > Eg: " but don't focus on _books_ per se, because the number > of book-readers in the population is very small. (and it's getting > even smaller every day.) book-readers won't drive this revolution." that's absolutely true, jon... if you think that is "unconvincing", then there's not very much i can do to get you to see the light... > See, BB, I do indeed focus on book reading, > not because I am selling, but because I read. well, that would be fine if you were producing the products. but you're not... the sellers are... so _their_ interest is what brings products to market, or leaves them in the back room. > Only if I change my market do I change my focus. > I don't much care about the other things the gadgets > can do because I don't do them much. but it's not _about_ you or your focus, jon. it's about making money, and if you're not a part of a critical mass that can make them money, then they aren't going to produce the products that serve your focus. so, when i said "don't focus on book-reading", what i meant is that book-readers don't have enough purchasing power to produce the kind of product that they need, so they're going to have to suffer with the "leftover" use of some other product that _does_ fill a mass need... > Does anyone know why such heads ups are not common yet? here we go again... > Note that they need not be dedicated machines, any more than PCs are. this doesn't really make sense... the p.c. is the prototype of a non-dedicated machine. > You say: " i always said this idea was ridiculous, because a > reader has to have a screen and a chip and an operating system, > and those are the most expensive parts of any computer, > so if you're going to pay for those for a dedicated reader, > you might as well get a full-fledged computer instead..." that's right. > But you see BB, we do not all have your thews and sinews > and built-in power sockets. We cannot sit and read in the train > or in bed or on a hilltop and read a comfortably sized screen > or image weighing a couple of kilos for hours on end. i don't really know what all of this means. you _might_ be saying that a full-fledged computer would be _heavier_ than a dedicated book-reading machine, but that is not true. at least it doesn't _have_ to be true. you might also be saying that a full-fledged computer would need more electricity than a dedicated book-reading machine, but again, that's not true, or at least it doesn't _have_ to be true. i know that it's really hard for people to _grasp_ these facts, so i will try to explain it to you so that it becomes obvious... let's take the kindle as our example, ok? the kindle has a chip and an operating system and a screen. in that sense, it _is_ a full-fledged computer. or _could_ be. except that it has been neutered. the operating system has been hacked so that it will present a very limited appearance. all of the regular o.s. possibilities have been sandboxed out. some enterprising crackers have reversed this hacking and uncovered the linux underpinnings. but the fact remains that you can't just install linux programs and run them effortlessly. yet if amazon simply decided to let you do that, you _could_. but -- obviously -- amazon doesn't want to let you do that. indeed, amazon had to _pay_ techies to _do_the_neutering_... that's right, the kindle costs _more_ because amazon _paid_ to make it _less_useful_ to the customer. think about _that_... so, for the very same weight, and with the very same screen, and the very same cost (or _less_), amazon could've handed customers a full computer instead of a "dedicated" machine. indeed, with wireless bundled into the price, the kindle could be an _awesome_ computer, at least in some ways, although the chip in the thing would be a little pokey for some apps... and sure, the battery juice would go faster if you were doing word-processing or web-browsing, not just book-reading, but that's one of those laws of nature that we cannot repeal. but do you understand what i'm saying now? the only reason we can now build a $350 e-book machine is because we can now build a $350 _computer_. voila... (because an e-book reader-machine _is_ a computer!) if we could build some kind of an e-book reader-machine that was _not_ a computer -- an e-book machine which didn't have a chip or an operating system -- then maybe we could make one that was _cheaper_ than a computer. but we can't, not given the model of e-books we're using. (you might be familiar with jon jermey, who has argued for a long time that -- by converting our books into _images_ -- we could build a much simpler _image-viewing_machine_ that would indeed be cheaper than a "real" computer, but nobody has really followed up that good idea in a big way. closest thing was "juicebox", which woulda done the job... however, with google serving up 10 million scan-sets now, it might be productive to seriously consider jon's suggestion. no, you can't search images, but google does search for you.) > So far epaper has it all its own way. I take your point about > its price ans a specialised device, but why should it be > specialised? It looks to me like a perfectly usable screen > for many purposes. Maybe more than LCD...? well, no, you haven't "taken my point" about the price of e-ink. it's expensive. and it's not going to get any cheaper very soon. l.c.d. is much less expensive, which is why it's in more products. and e-ink looks to me like it could end up as a stinky stinker, because mary lou and her pixel qi screen can do _both_ day _and_ night viewing, and -- because it's made in l.c.d. fabs -- it's gonna be significantly cheaper than e-ink from the get-go. but again, it hasn't been released yet -- at least not any wider than the o.l.p.c. distributions -- so we don't yet know its flaws. that's the lesson: don't believe anything until you actually see it. -bowerbird p.s. if mary lou does get her pixel qi screens out to the world, i would seriously nominate her to receive the nobel peace prize. she shortcircuited the whole american corporation greed thing, in both the _development_ of these cheap-and-green screens, and in their _roll-out_. since that corporate greed is the _main_ fire that fuels anti-american sentiment on our planet, thereby leading to global unrest, the fact that mary lou derailed greed might be the biggest reason we have a peaceful future, if we do. ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc…)

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Re: !@!@! "Kindle Library"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 May '09

14 May '09

walter said: > I don't get this. I was talking about the iLiad, > which works fine without DRM and Feedbook, > which allows DRM unencumbered downloads of > their public domain and creative commons books. yes, walter, we know the iliad doesn't have d.r.m. that's good. except it means that the iliad doesn't read d.r.m. books. so, no, of course you're not gonna lose any d.r.m. books, because you don't have any of 'em to lose in the first place. and if you lost public domain or creative commons books, you'd just go and re-fetch them, which is exactly what a kindle owner would do if they lost their public domain or creative commons books, which yes, they can read just fine. the d.r.m. books that the kindle-owners have, the ones that don't do you any good, are the ones they worry about losing. i'd recommend backing them up. if amazon does belly-up, you can crack the back-up, future hackers will tell you how. (let's pretend that current hackers haven't figured it out yet.) -bowerbird ************** Recession-proof vacation ideas. Find free things to do in the U.S. (http://travel.aol.com/travel-ideas/domestic/national-tourism-week?ncid=emlc…)

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Re: Well, it has kindled a lot of discussion, hm?
by Joshua Hutchinson 14 May '09

14 May '09

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!@!@!Kindle
by Michael S. Hart 13 May '09

13 May '09

Has anyone checked out the http://KindleLibrary.org. There are hundreds of thousand of eBooks for kindle owners there. We are interested in getting some feedback on the site.

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[PW] Cornell's new permission policy (fwd)
by Michael S. Hart 13 May '09

13 May '09

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 16:47:31 -0500 Reply-To: list(a)project-wombat.org To: list-open(a)project-wombat.org Cornell's library has announced a new policy that it will no longer require permission for patrons to use copies of public domain materials that it provides. Since some of us talk about copyright and property rights to published materials every now and then, I thought the announcement might be of some interest. The news release is available at http://news.library.cornell.edu/com/news/PressReleases/Cornell-University -Library-Removes-All-Restrictions-on-Use-of-Public-Domain-Reproductions.c fm I hope other libraries, archives, and museums will come to the same conclusion. Happy trails, David David Haynes San Antonio

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Please test phone-format eBooks
by Greg Newby 13 May '09

13 May '09

Thanks to Janina Sieslack & others at http://www.qioo.de/ , I have a new eBook format option. If you are interested and have a modern Java-capable mobile phone, please give this a try and send feedback. This is my first attempt at adding a new converter (we hope to have more, and Marcello has added several new ones lately). So, you need to use a longish temporary URL. For any given eBook nunber (as long as there is text), try a URL of this form: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/gbn?fk_books=1008 substituting your favorite eBook # for 1008. You might be prompted to type the eBook number if you're viewing an eBook not yet converted to the .jar format. I'd like to go ahead and edit this change into the main catalog page, but would appreciate hearing of success stories (or problems) from a few people first. Thanks in advance! Yes, the URL should work OK from a cell phone. I don't know of a way to get it to display on a regular computer. -- Greg

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