Category Archives: Technology

Kindle eBook – many editions of the same thing? – consumer confusion

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I can’t recall a new technology that offered so many choices for apparently the same thing. And no clear reasons as to why I should get a particular one.

I’m talking about eBooks. In this case how a search for a single out-of-copyright book turned up a multitude of confusing choices.

The book is The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells.

As I have an Amazon Kindle I first went to their Kindle eBook web site. And so the fun began. Here are just some of the eBook versions there:

  • For $2.57 there is what seems to be an illustrated eBook, although it’s hard to tell as the reviews appear to be talking about the hardcopy (paper) version. So I’m still not sure.
  • Next was a $1.27 edition from a different publisher.
  • Following that there’s a $0.99 version from yet another publisher. 
  • There were others, but I stopped looking. From memory there was a free one, but it wasn’t available for Australian customers.

With me so far?  All three above are for that one title in a single eBook. Besides some possible illustrations, I can’t find out what is different between them.    So what follows really added to the confusion I felt there at Amazon:

  • For $1.00 a single eBook that had 30+ Adventure novels, including my target Moon one as well as other Wells pieces, such as War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

This last one clearly stated it has “an active table of contents”, which is good news.  TOCs are not indispensible, but some free/cheap eBooks are just one big, fat plain text file, with no hint of TOC.   Begs the question if the first 3 do, but a quick check showed it wasn’t obvious.

Having done some research I had earlier discovered ManyBooks.net which offers “the best ebooks at the best price: free!”  I am sure these are all out-of-copyright ones (!).  So anyway, The First Men in the Moon was there.  The download dropdown options had Kindle as a format, so I took that and down it came to the PC. I then used the new – for me at least – ability to then email the eBook file from the PC to my Kindle email account…and when I turned the Kindle on, the eBook magically appeared.

It has no table of contents.  But hey, the Kindle lets me add my own notes and I can Go To them if I want.

So there you go. I’m guessing the non-free ones do have a TOC. Maybe they have been professionally edited too. But it’s not clear as to what added-value they bring as most of them don’t spell it out.  And spelling out such things is called marketing.

The Cathedral – Cathedral Ranges

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About 2 hours NE of Melbourne are the rugged Cathedral Ranges. They are between Marysville and Alexandra.  And boy do they offer some great, challenging walks.

I remember being told, as a kid, that some people actually walked up to the very top. I was gob smacked, but believed it when told that they “had to start early in the morning”.  Now that I’ve done it 3 times, I acknowledge it certainly isn’t easy. But not so sure about the early morning start.

It’d suggest it’s a 90 minute minimum ascent. Note ascent, coz it’s almost up hill all the way. It’s my Work-Reward type of walk;  puff, puff, puff (work) then wow! as the stunning views of your rewards kick in. 

 

More photos available including sweet captions. As usual, best viewed as slide show.

Truth be told this was my 2nd time on this route and I found it slightly more difficult. I’d think part of that was a slight complacency, which you just can’t afford to be on rocky, steep, uneven tracks. Twice I did the old semi-slip-slide. And twice I thought I had pulled a muscle; once in the arm and once in the back. A sit down and rest quickly got rid of the throbbing pain, but not before the heart was ticking that little bit faster.

It may have been the recent rain loosened the surface just that bit more too. 

32 digits and the joy of logarithmic remembering

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I only recently learned about GUID’s, that is Globally Unique Identifiers, usually meaning the Microsoft one. It’s a ‘number’, but made up of the digits (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F).  The computer dudes refer to this as Hex or Base16. We humans normally use Decimal or Base 10.

Anyway GUID’s are 32 Hex numbers long.  It wouldn’t take that long to write one out.  In fact, like this:  21EC2020-3AEA-1069-A2DD-08002B30309D.  Their main purpose is to provide a unique number for things like serial numbers. For example each Ipod has one. I’m not sure if it’s a GUID but it’s similar. You can also see them inside your Windows Registry.

So how many unique ones are there?

The answer is 16 raised to the 32nd power. That is 1632. Or roughly 1038. That is a 1 followed by 38 zeros.

Now, on this pale blue dot of ours – planet Earth – there are about 6 billion people.  Something like 109

So how many GUID’s per person?  If you remember your maths it’s quite easy: 1038 divided by 109.  That is: 10(38 – 9) or 1029. So we can each have a 1 followed by 29 zeros worth of GUIDs . Well beyond a billion billon billon each. Probably enough.

But that’s not enough maths for today. Oh no. We still have our own galaxy to think about.  The milky way has about 100 billion stars.  That is 1011 stars. If each of those stars supported a population like ours, there would be 10(11 + 9) or 1020 beings.

So with our humble 32 hex GUIDs, we could give each being 10(38 – 20) or 1018 GUIDs each. Hey, isn’t that a billion billion each? Nice.

No car? Then here’s some day trips on a train

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Over the last few years I’ve re-discovered trains.  By that I mean longer trips, not just the 20 minute hop into Melbourne.  Here are some of the ones I did. But first:

  • You can get timetable information from V/Line
  • Most of the larger country stations have town maps or even tourist information stands in them.

 

Geelong

Only about 45 minutes away. I went from Newport station. Things to do:

 

Ballarat

About 1 hour and 20 minutes from Footscray station, so catch a suburban train first.  Check the timetables for exact details as it may be easier to go into Southern Cross (not sure if all trains stop at Footscray).

  • Beautiful goldrush-era buildings. Circa 1860s
  • One of the best art galleries around
  • Shopping etc
  • The world-class Sovereign Hill  (an outdoor museum presenting the story of Australia’s fabulous goldrush history)  Whilst it is too far to walk to, it is a must-see.  I have just read about “A new V/Line train initiative – the Goldrush Special now delivers visitors directly to Sovereign Hill’s front door. As part of the Goldrush Special a courtesy return service coach meets the train at Ballarat station and brings visitors directly to Sovereign Hill.”  I’d be calling them up.

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XBMC- Quick start and keys

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A media centre lets you manage and play back your media files on your PC (Mac, Linux..) system.  XBMC is XBox Media Centre, and despite the name, really has nothing to do with the X-Box any more.  They describe it as “‘an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media”

I have it on my laptop and main PC.  It’s fantastic.  I have my avi, flv, mkv, mp4 etc movies in C:\Movies and use XBMC to watch them back. My quick steps:

  1. Grab it and install it from their download page
  2. It will get any extra s/w off the Internet if it has to, during the install
  3. Run it and then make 2 quick changes
    • Add at least one Folder as a source for your Videos. (select Videos –> Add Source then browse for your C:\Movies or whatever folder they are in.)
    • Unlike some other players it can remember where it is up to for multiple movies, making it easy to Resume playing where you left off last time. This is off by default, so (System –> Video –> Playback, then change Resume From Where Last Stopped to yes)   Update: with newer versions of XBMC (10.x) this is now (System –> Video –> File lists, then change Default select action to Resume)
  4. Off you go to watch your videos.  If it doesn’t start in Fullscreen mode then jump to that (see below).  Play with the image size/ratio until you get the one you like.

The default keys (at least under Windows) are

 

Function

Key

Notes

Play

Space or P

  

Little jump fwd / back

Right and Left cursor keys

  

Bigger fwd/back

up and down cursor keys

  

Stop

X

  

Time remaining etc

I  (as in Info)

O (letter as in Other) for more technical info

Picture size/ratio

Z (quite useful)

  

Moving mouse may show top menu, which has extra icons/options for Video and Audio etc + manual controls. 

   

To get rid of above menu

Esc  

Esc also general Menu back out

Exit XMBC

S 

As in Shutdown. Note silly use of Shutdown in the popup, it means the program not Windows. Use this.

Fullscreen toggle

Alt-Enter

  

Volume up/down 

+/-

  

First PC versus current 2010 smartphone

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This topic came up yesterday and I was intrigued by what some quick research showed.

My first PC was an IBM JX, circa 1985.  My new smartphone is a HTC Desire.  And now to the numbers:

Item PC JX HTC Desire smartphone
CPU speed 4.7 MHz 1000 MHz
ROM 96 KB 500,000 KB
RAM 0.5 MB 576 MB
“Disk” storage 1 MB 16,000 MB
Screen resolution 640 x 200 800 x 480
Screen colours 16 16. Well… 16 million.
Price (approx AUD) $2500 $650

Then there’s Ethernet, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, 3D graphics acceleration, ‘mouse’, touch screen, multi-tasking…okay I can stop there.

Notes:

  • “Disk” storage:  Non-volatile data storage (survives with power off) My JX used diskettes. No hard drive (!)  Maxed out at 2 x 360 Kb (3”) + 1 x 360 Kb (5”) drives. So about 1 MB total. Desire supports user-changeable microSD cards. I have 16 GB.
  • JX had a special 720 x 512 graphics mode, but only in 2 colours (!).
  • JX screen was physically bigger, of course.

This wasn’t my first computer, I deliberately said “first PC”.   I can’t quite recall, but I think the first one I used regularly was a Commodore 64, but I don’t think it was mine; maybe one of the brothers’ (?)   A bit later, I know I then paid for a Commodore Amiga.   Pre-dating both of these, I’m sure someone had a Sinclair ZX-81 that I used to briefly tinker with, maybe a neighbour.

Backing up my PC’s main data

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Not much to say really. Except regularly backing up your key data is important.  I have an external USB2 hard disk (appears as my Q: drive) and use Microsoft’s free SyncToy 2.1

I run it in contribute mode with my synching folders (folder-pairs) something like this

Left Right
C:\My Documents    Q:\backups\My Documents
C:\Music Q:\backups\Music

SyncToy (ST) was initially designed to keep the two folder-pairs (labelled Left and Right) in synch. So if you added a file to the Left folder then ran ST, it would copy that new file to the Right folder…of that pair.  Or vice versa. Including changes/deletes.

Contribute mode in ST is newer and different, basically not really syncing, just copying from Left to Right and not deleting. It’s my quick and simple back up.   Mainly My Documents, Music,  business data (MYOB) and some text files/notes.

How I find my files (including on external disks and DVDs) & Blu-ray movies etc

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Now where are those files?  I’m looking for the movie Big Buck Bunny.avi  as well as the unpublished masterpiece  My Life Story by Me.doc

They are either on the main hard drive … or maybe on one of my archive DVDs or – hang on – are they on that 500 GB external USB hard disk?    Then there’s the files on that old laptop that I access via the network. Mmmm.

The solution is to use a Windows file catalogue program and then do a search.  I’m only going to give quick overviews so you can go off and have fun trying them out for yourselves.

Key point: I’m really only interested in file and folder names, not their contents nor their tags (like mp3 or jpg files have). It takes much longer to catalogue inside a file and there are programs that will do this.

I have covered my tips for Archiving and indexing your digital photos elsewhere on SiC.

Files stored on hard drives, including external USB/firewire and networked hard drives

I use the free Locate32 to catalogue these drives.   I can then search for the file named Big Buck Bunny with the extension avi.   Or all avi’s.   It can do more complicated searches (size and date etc).  My basic Logitech keyboard has a Search key and I assign that to start up Locate32.  I also have Windows update some of  Locate32′s catalogues every few hours; the main ones.

FYI: on the main hard drive I catalogue My Documents, my Music folders and Downloads

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Archiving and indexing your digital photos

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It’s now mid 2010. A quick search shows I have been taking photographs with digital cameras since 2005.  I was actually a late starter, but still have lots and lots of JPG and NEF image files. 

There comes a time when you have to move them off your hard drive to free up space. This is called archiving.  For my purposes this is different from backing up, which means taking a copy onto an external media, but leaving the original on the hard drive. Archiving means deleting them off the hard disk, once they are safely on your external media (like a DVD).

It’s a 4 step process:

  1. Copy them to the external media, usually a DVD
  2. Index them, including creating thumbnail (small) images of them, enabling you to still ‘browse’ them without having to hunt down your archive DVDs
  3. Create a 2nd copy of your archive DVDs (for taking off-site, see later)
  4. Delete the original files from your hard drive

I archive by year. In fact the photos on my hard drive are arranged by year too; I have top-level folders 2010, 2009, 2008. 

1. Copying them

Just use your standard DVD creation software. You are creating a Data DVD (not a Movie one!).  I use the free ImgBurn software.  Important point: give each DVD a sensible, unique Volume Label.  For my 2009 archiving it took three DVDs. So I gave them Volume Labels of DS.photos.2009.1   DS.photos.2009.2 and DS.photos.2009.3

After the files have been burnt, write the Volume Label on the DVD itself.

Verify the burning worked, by browsing a number of folders on your new archive DVD.

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