Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

• Here's a nice, high-school physics level lab demonstration of an aluminum air battery, made from aluminum foil, aquarium charcoal, salt water, and a paper towel. A few of these in series will run a simple solid-state radio. It would be fun to figure out how to expand the concept into something a little more durable, with thicker aluminum plates, in some kind of container that will confine the messy materials and yet admit oxygen to sustain the reaction.
• Damned if the photo of this beambot doesn't remind me of the Ed Emshwiller F&SF cover for "Callahan and the Wheelies," a 1960 story by Stephen Barr that I blatantly imitated in my own high-school fiction.
• When I first got into computing in the midlate 1970s I had a number of CPU green cards, but was always a little puzzled that none of them were...green. (The COSMAC green card was blue, and the 8080 green card was white.) In truth, I didn't know at the time why everybody called them "green cards," and if you still don't know, here's a site where you can see the real deal. (Thanks to Richard Haley for the link.)
• And from Richard's own hand comes a list of instruction mnemonics that you won't find on most green cards, of whatever color. My favorite is EMW, Emulate Maytag Washer, which the crotchety frontloading 3330 disk packs back at Xerox building 214 were very good at doing, except that they were in the spin cycle all the damned time.
• Google Books has mounted most (if not quite all) of a fascinating book called Hi There, Boys and Girls! which is a history of local children's TV programming in the US. The book is organized by TV markets around the country, and the Google Books version is intriguing for how much material is actually available for free. The Chicago material is available, and excellent, if not as detailed as Jack Mulqueen's full-book treatment in The Golden Age of Chicago Children's Television, which has a much more limited Google Books preview.
• We are getting close to the release of Michael Arrington's Crunchpad Internet tablet, but little or nothing has been said about the only thing I really want it for: a large-display ebook reader. It needs an SDHC slot (which I think it has) and some decent ebook software (anybody's guess) but given those two things, it could remake the ebook biz. July is flying. Wherezit at, Mike?

• The United States has overtaken Germany as the world's lead producer of wind energy, measured in total kilowatts. Way to go--keeping in mind that Germany still beats us all hollow with kilowatts per capita. I'm a big believer in NWS, in that order, and part of the reason N comes before W is that over the past few years, when Carol and I have passed giant wind turbines along I-80 on our way to and from Chicago, they were only turning about a third of the time. Wind energy is great, but it does not stand alone.
• Small children should be allowed to get dirty as a way of building their immune systems. I was digging in the back yard since before I can remember, and never had much trouble with allergies. There may be a downside to our dirt- and germ-averse culture that has nothing to do with the risk of antibiotic-resistant pathogens. (With Gretchen's approval, I think I'm going to buy our nieces a couple of garden trowels next Christmas...)
• Few people today remember that Apple Computer was once a Pascal shop, and had a promo poster in the late 70s incorporating a classic "railroad" diagram of Pascal language syntax. Yes, the 70s really did look like that. (At least it wasn't all done in Harvest Gold.) Thanks to Paul Santa-Maria for the link. Paul created his own version of the poster in black and white, which I hope he makes available at some point. The Waite Group sold (or gave away; not sure if it was a boom promo) a similar card in the same era, but it's long since vanished from my collection.
• Has anyone here ever read any of the Very Short Introduction books from Oxford University Press? Are they useful? I just ordered several, and I'm curious as to the quality of the series. I'll report here once the books show up and I've had a chance to read them. There are many subjects I'm interested in sufficiently to read 150 pages on, but not 600 pages.
• A German publisher wrote an article claiming that cheaper ebooks will put them out of business. (The article is in German; take what you can from the English summary or if you know the language, click through to the original.) The gist is that there are special costs associated with e-publishing that more than balance the special costs associated with print publishing. My take: If true, it's only until we get up to speed. (I also think it may be true that many publishers don't really understand all the forces that bear on how they make their money. Many things lead up to the cash-register's beep, not all of them obvious.
• I'm a lot less sanguine about the OLPC than I used to be, but the recent unveiling of future designs intrigues me: The next-gen OLPC will have two displays, and can be held and read portrait-style, like a book. When a keyboard is needed, rotate the device 90, and one of the two displays becomes a keyboard. Very cool, and something like that should be sold worldwide by every electronics retailer. (Their peculiar distribution mechanism will eventually be the end of them.)

I read about Michael Arrington's concept for a low-cost Web tablet back last summer, and was intrigued. Web is useful, but the resolution on this gadget (1024 X 768) would make it ideal for reading PDF ebooks, particularly textbooks and scientific/technical nonfiction with lots of illustrations. Not every type of book can be read on a cellphone, and the sorts of ebooks that require larger displays are getting precious little respect in the gadget world.

But I learned today that the Crunchpad (as the TechCrunch crowd is now informally calling it) has reached the prototype stage. They sound like they're aimed in the right direction, but remarkably, I see no discussion at all of the device's usefulness as an ebook reader. (I added a comment to the entry to this effect.) It looks like it can work in portrait mode, and has an accelerometer to sense when it's been "spun." Ebook reader utilities are not cycle-hogs, and would add little to the burden on the CPU or SSD storage.

I'm a little queasy about on-screen touch keyboards; I would use the USB port for a "real" keyboard when one is needed. I would also add an externally-accessible SDHC card slot for loading content without waiting for the inevitably slow Wi-Fi link. But beyond that, if the thing can render PDF and CHM ebooks well, I'd buy one like a shot, and pay $300 for it without regret. This is one to keep an eye on.

• Foxit Software (which sells a line of very good PDF-related software, including the Foxit Reader, which I use daily) has announced an e-ink based ebook reader, the eSlick. The device isn't being shipped yet, but there have been some early reactions in Wired and other places. I'm interested because Foxit is unlikely to claim (as most ebook enthusiasts do) that PDF is the spawn of the devil. Worth watching.
• The Loopy Idea of the Month comes from two Ohio academics who have recently patented the notion of collapsing hurricanes by flying around them in supersonic aircraft and (somehow) using the sonic boom shockwaves to scramble the storm. Apart from the fact that supersonic aircraft use fuel at a prodigous rate, I still don't quite follow the physics of how this is supposed to collapse the storm. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
• Jim Strickland passed a long a detailed how-to for extracting metallic titanium from white pigment. The process is straightforward, if (as it must be) highly energetic. I think the stickier question is working the titanium after it's been isolated. Titanium is difficult to melt and very difficult to machine. I have a piece in my curio cabinet, and I'm very glad I don't have to make anything from it.
• Many people sent me the latest version of the old joke that "If Programming Languages Were Religions..." most of them lamenting that my favorite language—and my favorite religion—were not included. So it goes. I'm guessing that Pascal, like Catholicism, is patient: There will be only one programming language in use in the hereafter, and it will not be C++. You'll have to go somewhere else for that.
• The Wall Street Journal tells me that the RIAA is abandoning its mass-lawsuit strategy of copyright enforcement. It hasn't worked at reducing music piracy, and its sole effect was making the music industry bigshots look positively evil. One can only wonder why it took so long to figure this out, and whether the damage can ever really be undone.
• Here's a wry peek at what we may see come out of the Big 3 bailout. Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link. Have you driven a Pelosi lately?
• Also from Pete comes word that Werner Von Braun wrote SF. This actually looks pretty good—gotta love that cover!

• Carol and I just finished the bulk of our Christmas cards. The cards we bought this year had little sparkles glued (badly) to them, and as we processed the 70-odd cards going out, the cards began shedding, and sparkles are now showing up...everywhere. I'm looking down at my shirt cuffs right now, and they're blazing like a disco ball. Next year: No sparkles!
• Illinois' illustrious governor will soon (we hope) be matriculating to the Governors' Wing at the Joliet Correctional Center, and I am displeased to announce that he went to my high school. In fact, he was a freshman when I was a senior, and his sneaky little face is in the Lane Tech 1970 yearbook. Pete Albrecht was also a freshman that year, and narrowly missed out on the cooties inherent in having a future felon governor in your homeroom. Pete tells the story at greater length (with scans from the yearbook) over at InfoBunker. (Scroll down to the December 9, 2008 entry.)
• David Beers passed along a link to what might be the absolute worst idea of 2008: Google Code's research project aimed at allowing x86 native code to run in a browser. Hoo-boy. My question: If the Cloud is so great, why risk being pwned at native-code speeds? (And isn't this what Java is for?)
• Google Books has very recently posted back issues for a number of venerable magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, CIO, Ebony, Jet, New York, Vegetarian Times, American Cowboy, and who knows what else. (I don't see a master list of magazines.) The PM collection runs from 1905 to 2000, and isn't just a scattering of issues, but damned near all of them. So what was PM's cover story the month you were born? (Mine? "Mermaid Theater." Wow.)
• Alas, you can look at the Google Books magazine back issues, but you can't save them to disk or print them out. Or can you? (I haven't tried this yet.)
• The wonderfully named Nevada Lightning Laboratory has managed to transmit 800 watts of power across five meters' distance, besting the previous record of 60 watts across two meters, set by MIT. The technique is not new, and was patented by our boy Nikola Tesla 100 years ago. Very cool, but are my wire-frame glasses going to melt when I step into the field with my Tesla-powered laptop?
• This Friday's full Moon happens only four hours from Lunar perigee, and is the biggest of the year, 14% greater in angular diameter (not especially noticeable) and 30% brighter (way noticeable!) than the apogee Moon we saw earlier this year. That's bright, it's high, and if you've got snow all over the place, midnight will be knee-deep in moonshine. (Not that kind.)
• 200,000 inflatable breasts got lost on their way from China (where there is evidently an inflatable breast factory) to Australia (where they were to be polybagged with a men's magazine) and have only recently been found in Melbourne. Just thought you'd like to know.

My SF collection Souls in Silicon (which I described in my August 19, 2008 entry) is now available from Lulu as a single downloadable ZIP containing all the major ebook file formats. These formats include:

• .DOC: MS Word 2000
• .RTF: Rich text; loads in nearly all word processors
• .LIT: Microsoft Reader
• .LRF: Sony Reader
• .PRC: MobiPocket
• .PDF: Fixed-page Adobe Reader print image
• .HTML: Web browser

I consider these to be the most important ebook formats now in use outside of the more or less separate Kindle universe. All files are DRM-free.

When the book was first released, I configured the Lulu catalog item so that it would sell the PDF print image as a download. This was a mistake, because fixed-page PDF files are not very good ebooks if you're using anything smaller than a laptop or a tablet, and the download PDF option implied that PDF was all that you could get.

So I disabled the "download PDF" option from the Lulu sales page for the printed book, and created a new Lulu product consisting of the ebook edition ZIP file. The price is $3.99 for the ZIP, just as it was for the PDF print image. If anyone reading this bought the print image and would like the ZIP with all the other ebook file formats, just shoot me an email and I'll send it to you. (The ZIP contains the PDF print image as well as the reflowable file formats.)

Big thanks go to John Ridley for putting me on to the Calibre ebook toolset, which converts very cleanly from a Microsoft Reader .LIT file to the Sony Reader .LRF file. Odd tools like that are popping up constantly in the ebook world, and it's hard to stay ahead of it all.

If you mention Souls in Silicon somewhere, even if you only saw the print edition, please indicate that it's available in an ebook edition as well. Thanks!

I'm hard at work on my second collection, which I will (probably) call Cold Hands and Other Stories. Much depends on whether or not I decide to include my short novel Firejammer, which is a YA item and may be better off on its own or with something else like it. With Firejammer the collection would be a little long; without Firejammer, it would be a little short. (25,000 words makes a difference!) I'll keep you posted.

The programming tracks at Denvention 3 didn't get me terribly fired up to see them, and that was evidently a common reaction. Instead, I spent a lot of time with friends camped out on couches talking tech. Intense discussion went on about ebook readers and what they ought to be, along with much flashing of Kindles and Sonys and iPhones—which, I might suggest, would make reasonable reflow readers if a Certain Somebody of Inconsistent Insight wasn't so convinced that nobody reads anymore. (And if Apple didn't reserve the right to reach down to your iPhone and nuke any application it doesn't like...) So it may be time to outline what several years of thinking (and a certain amount of messing with various reader thingies that I have owned, borrowed, or simply beaten on) have converged to, in my own vision of an Ideal Ebook Reader.

The shouting war between those who want to read fixed pages and those who want to read reflowable text is pointless, and after awhile, silly. There is more than one possible view of a document, and as with suits and dresses, some documents look better in certain views than in others. A novel or nonfiction volume lacking illustrations can be read reflowably on a small screen. Anything with useful page structure or significant illustrations requires a genuine page view. Page views require large displays. There's no getting around that. On the other hand, the conventional wisdom that you must have either a full-page view or a pocket-sized device is also dead wrong.

Envision this: A rectangular block roughly the size and shape of an iPhone. It's really a storage module, with an SSD of a decent size. (I'd suggest at least 32 GB for starters.) The storage module has some minimal intelligence, and a battery. On one end, there's a high-bandwidth serial connector. USB 2 isn't quite broad enough. ESATA would work, or whatever comes after USB 2. Now, note well that the storage module is not only a storage module. It has an display and touch controls, and a renderer for reflowable ebook text, as well as a viewer for images and videos. It may also be a cell phone; certainly, there's room for the jelly beans in something that size.

Now envision a second, larger device, which is basically a tablet, or a convertible clamshell. It isn't necessarily a competitor to a full-featured laptop or Tablet PC, but something more resembling a 10" or 11" netbook, with enough processor muscle to handle Web browsing, email, and light text/spreadsheet manipulation. It has a slot for a removable drive…and the storage module I described above plugs into the slot. The tablet uses the smaller module for its data storage, but the data storage device itself can operate independently, as a pocket ebook reader or even a cell phone. No sync problems: There's only one SSD for both devices. But when you don't need the tablet reader, you pop out the pocket reader and stick in your pocket. If you have an idle moment, thumb it on and read another chapter from The Molten Flesh. Or call ahead to reserve a table at Chez Geeque.

What we basically have here is a GSM-equipped pocket reader that "wears" a larger tablet reader for the sake of its display and battery, and possibly its keyboard. The two devices (tablet and pocket reader) don't necessarily have to be made by the same firm. The two physical form factors and interface mechanisms should ideally be an independent hardware/software standard, so that people could choose one device or another from several vendors, mixing and matching tablets and pocket readers to fit their own preferences. Not everybody may want a pocket reader, so a "dumb" storage block without a display would be possible, and cheaper. Putting GSM on the pocket reader would allow the pocket reader to be a cellphone, and the docked assembly to work like a Kindle.

I don't know how likely this is, and I know it's not going to happen next week. I just need to make it clear that this is what I want, and what I think might serve the needs of the greatest number of ebook people in the greatest number of ways. I do know that getting into the either-or mindset is a trap, for ebook readers or anything else. We are engineers. We solve problems. And sometimes one solution lies inside another.

• Someone's invented a glass jar with a screw-on lid on both ends. Makes sense: By the time you reach the bottom of the peanut butter, most of the oil is gone and what's left is as hard as a rock. Or, alternate lids and gradually work your way toward the middle. If you keep alternating which end is up, the oil won't be as likely to collect on either end and the peanut butter may stay softer until it's all gone.
• Bruce Baker directs us to a Webring of homebrew CPUs. No VLSI. No LSI. Maybe TTL chips. Or discrete transistors. Or relays. I wire-wrapped a COSMAC machine with 2K of RAM back in 1977, and I thought it was a job. Wow.
• As an individual with a "special relationship" to calculus (and a special fondness for filk) I damned near bust a gut watching this. The Slashdot commenters (who are interesting all by themselves) need to get a life, or at very least a sense of humor. Most of them weren't even alive when Disco was first-run, and so I suspect the comedy shoots right by them.
• Epson has been demonstrating a proof-of-concept model of an A4-sized e-ink display with a mind-boggling resolution of 3104 X 4128 pixels, in monochrome. 385 DPI is more than enough for monochrome graphics (though gray-level depth is not stated) and within a few years, a full-sized letter/A4 ebook reader will not only be possible but inevitable.
• From Jan Westerlink comes a pointer to a wonderful gallery of home-made kites, including one I especially like, especially in light of yesterday's entry: A 4-cell tetrahedral made by rubber-banding 24 bamboo shish-kebob skewers together. Scroll down to pictures 24 and 25. Beautifully done, if a little prickly: If that thing dives toward you, duck!

• I remember reading somewhere years ago that having a photo of a box on your Web store improves your sell-through of downloadable software, even if the product is never sold in a box and even if the box doesn't even exist. Anyway, here is a product that helps you create imaginary product boxes.
• Here's another very similar product. We evidently have a small industry here that I had never heard of before this morning.
• And yet another: This time, it generates a 3-D rotating video of an imaginary box!
• After a little further research, I'm guessing that the "online affiliate marketing" industry is driving the imaginary box subindustry. On the other hand, the online affiliate marketing industry is itself imaginary, and basically a scam that labors mightily to stay just half a hair on the legal side of the razor. It's what the 419 scams would be if Nigeria had something like the FTC.
• From Pete Albrecht comes a link to a video showing how well a 21-foot (!!) X-wing model rocket flies. (Flies? So-so. Dies? Spectacularly!)
• Don Lancaster has a detailed article (PDF format) about why rooftop PV solar power isn't as big a win as everybody says it is. Definitely worth reading, and pay especial attention to the description of exergy, a concept I had heard of but not understood until now. As with TTL and CMOS logic, Don finally made it click for me.
• Is Flash memory "write endurance" (i.e., the number of times you can change the state of a Flesh emmory cell) a serious issue or not? I always thought it was, but Eric Brombaugh (one of my EE friends who knows a thing or two about such matters) sent me a link to an article that changed my mind. If you're interested in Solid State Drives (SSDs) the parent page is worth a look as well.

I don't buy a lot of music anymore, and in thinking back, I suspect that I stopped buying when I stopped listening to the radio. (I stopped listening to the radio because the stations play the same sixteen stupid songs every twenty minutes...forever. But that's a separate rant.) The tough part in selling anything is discovery—basically, getting the prospective customers to know that you exist—and it becomes a lot tougher when you slide from machine screws to wine, and incomparably tougher yet when you move from wine into the realm of art. Absent radio, I discover new music a lot less often. Here's a recent discovery tale that did lead to a purchase, and if I were the artist I'd be maybe a little annoyed:

Carol and I don't watch a lot of TV, but we turn on the Weather Channel before we go to bed to catch Local on the 8s, and then again in the morning over breakfast. The Weather Channel plays "smooth jazz" during its canned local forecasts. My affection for smooth jazz is sparse, albeit less sparse than my affection for what I call club jazz. No sax please; we're contrarians—I think I dislike sax music because almost everybody else worships it. A few mornings ago, I looked up over my Cheerios to watch Local on the 8s, and realized that there were no saxophones playing. Better still, it was not the usual mournful, shapeless noodling, but a purposeful, upbeat (nay, near-manic) piano piece. Two minutes later, the forecast over and the music cut short by yet another Mucinex mucus man commercial, I ran out of the kitchen to the machine here, muttering, "I gotta have that!"

Alas, the Weather Channel does not announce the artists on its forecast music, so I hammered out a quick email to them, after spending several minutes digging through their site looking for a contact link: Please, folks, what was the title/artist of the bouncy piano piece playing during today's 6:58 AM Local on the 8s?

I only half expected an answer, and was working on memorizing the piece so that I could whistle it to whomever I might know in smooth jazz fandom. But yay wow, by late afternoon, I got a nice note from a Weather Channel junior staffer who confessed that she didn't know precisely, but the February AM playlist was attached. And so it was: The email carried an Excel spreadsheet containing the titles and artists for 15 songs, one of which was by implication the bouncy piano piece. I just didn't know which one.

I had done this kind of detective work a time or two before. I first looked up the artists, separating the pianists from the sax maniacs. It came down to either Leo Tizer or Bradley Joseph. I went over to Amazon, looked up the artists, and started playing the samples for the album tracks named in the playlist spreadsheet. On the third try, I got it: Brandley Joseph's "Rose-Colored Glasses" (and Bradley himself) had been discovered. Ninety seconds later, I had purchased the track through One Click for 89c, and had a DRM-free MP3 in my music directory. Ninety seconds after that, I had his CD album (Hear the Masses) on its way. The friction was all in the discovery.

Amazon supposedly sells two million music tracks as unencumbered MP3s. I shop for music so rarely that I didn't even know this. I did know that Amazon has been selling PDF-formatted short stories (and other short textual works, including nonfiction) for a couple of years now, for 49c a pop. Alas, by the time I decided to apply to the program, they had closed it to new submissions, but the delivery mechanism is the same as for MP3s: If you have One Click enabled, you get the item in a few seconds.

I think Amazon Shorts may have been doomed because Big Name Writers would not sell unencumbered PDFs, and Small Name (or No Name) writers do not sell enough of anything to justify the effort it takes Amazon to vet them and post them. Or perhaps Amazon is simply migrating the program to Kindle. We'll find out eventually. The point to be taken away here is that we have digital delivery down cold. Discovery is fluky and always will be, especially for things like fiction, which (with vanishingly rare exceptions) you do not hear on the radio. Amazon can make the gumballs drop into your hands. We're still not sure how they'll make you want the gumballs, but tougher problems have been solved.

In the meantime, Bradley Joseph has another fan, and might have more if the Weather Channel would just put his name in the corner of the screen while they're playing his music over their forecasts. I hope he got some cash for the license, because not everybody is going to dig as hard as I did!

I lost the wall wart charger for my Sony Reader a couple of months ago, and a new one should be here in a few days. I don't love the Reader, as its USB transfer software unapologetically refuses to run on Windows 2000, but a guy in my business should have one, just as he should have a Kindle. In the meantime, I've been thinking a lot about wall warts, chargers, and one area of electronics that could really use a standard or two. The high road is something like the WildCharger featured recently on Crave, which is basically a pad that induces a trickle of electricity into whatever you place on it. Wotthell, that technology should be available built into computer desks, but it's not up to me.

I am very sick of wall warts. I have a bin of them downstairs, probably thirty in all, and I doubt that any two source the same voltage. The barrel connectors are of wildly different diameters, and some of them put the positive conductor on the outside. A few, furthermore, are not even barrels but weird connectors of no conceivable justification.

Damn, I want a standard.

Consider this as a possibility: A code for wall warts that could be printed on both the wart and the electrical device it's shipped with. The code would be human-readable and contain the essential parameters:

DC5-20-100-6P

The code begins with AC or DC. (There are AC wall warts, lord knows why.) The next number is the whole number voltage, separated from the fractional voltage by a dash. A second dash sets off the current sourcing capacity in milliamps. The code ends with the diameter of the barrel connector in millimeters, followed by either an N or a P, depending on the polarity of the inner conductor. For example, the code shown above would be for a DC wart sourcing 5.2V at 100 ma, with an 6mm barrel connector having positive on the inside.

There's no reason these things can't be like jelly-bean logic, and there's no reason why anyone should have to dig too hard or pay too big for a replacement wart. The IEEE should be doing something like this, but isn't.

My new Sony Reader charger will show up the day after tomorrow via DHL. And the day after that, I'm sure I'll find the original. At least then I'll have a spare.

I've lived such an overstuffed life for so many years that I'd almost forgotten a psychology that was a very big part of my youth: Sniffing around for "just something to read." I'm a very deliberate reader these days because I don't have a lot of completely uncommitted time. I have a reading buffer of 50-100 books on hand here, all of which were chosen because they touch on one of my interests or another. (My library as a whole contains somewhere around 2500 books, down from 3000 before we left Arizona.) I never have to cast about at random for just something to read.

For many people, reading is an even bigger part of their lives, believe it or not. (Maybe fewer than we'd like, but they're out there.) These people are driving the ebook industry right now, and I've noticed a phenomenon few others have commented on: the explosion of interest in out-of-copyright books by people who might not have been slobbering Dickens or Jane Austen fans in the past. At numerous sites online, people are uploading ebook versions of many classic texts. I follow Mobileread, which now has about 3,800 free ebooks online for download, the bulk of them pre-1923 works, some well-known (they have Dickens' complete works now) and some pretty obscure, like the Scottish Psalter of 1650. Mobileread is interesting because people are creating versions in the popular small-screen ebook reader formats like Ebookwise, MobiPocket and BBeB rather than raw text—nor formats used primarily on PCs, like PDF and MS Reader.

I continue to boggle at people reading Thackeray on their cellphones, but boggle or no boggle, it's being done. The classics are coming back. I can't entirely explain it, but I have some hunches:

• Many of these ebook editions are beautifully done. The Dickens canon is the work of one man named Harry in the UK, and they include some of the nice old 19th Century woodcut illustrations plus color covers where those were available. (Oliver Twist, yes. Martin Chuzzlewit, no.) They are not shot full of OCR errors and gaps like some of the stuff I've downloaded from other places, including the venerable Project Gutenberg.
• They are free and they are easy to get. There are no hurdles to jump, nothing to sign up for, no money to lay out, and no DRM to drop sand in the gears of the experience.
• There are no ethical issues involved in obtaining them or passing them on. I still think people are basically honest, and they do consider the rights of copyright holders.
• They're classics because they have withstood the test of time. They're good.

The classics have always been available in bookstores, of course, at prices comparable to those of newly published books. But if you're shopping for something to read on the train going in to work because it's a dead hour coming and going, it's hard to beat free, especially if free is easy and involves no pokes from the conscience.

What we're seeing here might as well be called open-source literature. It's being done by volunteer labor, including people who are drawing new artwork and contributing it without copyright claims. It's significant because people writing new ebooks have to take into account that the total available number of reader-hours in the audience is finite, and the friction involved in obtaining and reading the classics is now approaching zero. Like Linux, it will take a while yet for the well-formatted library of classic ebooks to mature, but like Linux, they will eventually become a competitive force to reckon with.

And wow, dare we hope that the premodern will put a fat boot up the ass of the postmodern? A lot of those "dead white males" must be grinning about now.

US copyright terms are more complex than they should be—everybody seems to agree on that but Big Media. Here's a nice short summary that I have presented before. What's interesting is what happens in a sort of weird window between 1923 and 1963. Books published in that window bearing a legal copyright notice may or may not still be within copyright. The key is whether the copyright was explicitly renewed by the rightsholder. No renewal, and the book passed into the public domain after its initial 28 years of copyright, which would be no later than 1991.

Most books from that period that we even moderately successful financially have been renewed, but I've found a fair number of reasonably interesting books that were not. Most of the books I used in my researches into the fourth dimension in high school were either pre-1923 or never renewed: Coxeter's Regular Polytopes, Manning's Geometry of the Fourth Dimension and The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained, Somerville's An Introduction to the Geometry of N Dimensions. All are now in the public domain, and all are available from (surprise!) Dover Books in print editions, but I would certainly like to see them become nicely reset PDFs and not simply holographs. (My copy of Coxeter fell apart back in 1970.)

A lot of old electronics and amateur radio books were never renewed. All the Frank C. Jones amateur radio books that I have (great tube-era construction stuff!) have expired, and they were beautifully done. The late Don Stoner's New Sideband Handbook from 1958 is now out of copyright, as is Radio for the Millions. A lot of these old titles are now available from Lindsay Books.

As I've mentioned in other places, a lot of classic SF has expired, including most of E. E. Doc Smith's work, and much of H. Beam Piper. All of the Skylark books except for Skylark Duquesne (published shortly before the author's death in 1965 and thus outside the window) have expired, as have all of the Lensman books except for Gray Lensman and Children of the Lens. None of the Ace Double short novels I've checked have shown up for renewal, including Chandler's The Rim Gods and Lin Carter's Destination Saturn. Both of those could stand republishing; most of the other Ace Double entries I have are best forgotten. (It may be that the components of Ace Doubles were treated differently from a copyright standpoint; this would be useful to know. I'm looking into it.)

Nothing written solely by the Jesuit Herbert Thurston has been renewed, and his book Ghosts and Poltergeists is actually good sleepytime reading. (I'm still trying to obtain The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, which of all his books has the best rep. The bookstores I order it from keep selling it to somebody else before I get there.) The New Dictionary of Thoughts is a decent book of quotations, well-organized by subject, and now expired. Max Freedom Long's pre-1964 books on Hawaiian religion and magic were not renewed, nor were Carl & Jerry author John T. Frye's two books on radio repair. Ditto Glenn's Theodicy and Broderick's Concise Catholic Dictionary, along with Jessie Pegis' A Practical Catholic Dictionary. The slightly peculiar Benziger Brothers' My Everyday Missal from 1948 (with print I can't imagine anyone could read in a badly lit church) does not appear in the renewal records. Ditto My Sunday Missal from Fr. Joseph Stedman (1942) and St. Joseph Sunday Missal from Catholic Book Publishing (1962). In fact, most of the odd little prayer books I've gathered over the years either have no copyright notice or were never renewed.

And that's just the stuff from my own library. When I come across a book published in the Weird Window, I often check the renewal records to see if it's expired. There's a nice lookup page here, though the lawyers always caution that it's possible for there to be errors. I suppose. Nonetheless, there's a lot of room for the release of these titles as ebooks, or their reissue in print via POD. The public domain does not begin in 1922 and go back from there.

This oral surgery business has set me back on a number of projects (no, scratch that; all of them!) but things get a little better every day and I'm hard at work again on several fronts. The fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry is getting close to finished. I'm now doing the topic index, which is an interesting concept. I regularly get messages from guys who ask me, "Hey, Jeff, what was the Carl and Jerry story where they set up a talking skull for a haunted house?" That's all they remember: The talking skull. So there will be an index entry like the following:

Skull
November 1959: V11 #5 Book 3 p.81 "The Ghost Talks"
On Halloween, Selsyn motors and a glowing skull haunt a house for Norma's sorority.

The topic index will have entries like Iceboat, Dogs, Kidnapers, Bootleggers, Capacity-operated relays, RC models, Telemetry, Tesla coil, Norma, Mr. Gruber, Theremin, Ultrasonics, and so on. I already have a complete chronological index on the Web here, but I wanted to make the search possible by topic, and if all you remember is that the boys were fooling with a police speed radar unit, you can look up Radar and see both stories (there were two) in which police speed radar figures significantly. After the index is done, I have two "new" Carl and Jerry stories to typeset and then it should be finished. I'm hoping to have it available by February 10.

With Carl and Jerry in the can, my next major push will be to get two anthologies of my own SF out there on Lulu and as ebooks. The two volumes will be:

• Souls in Silicon, including all my SF featuring any sort of artificial intelligence, plus a significant excerpt from The Cunning Blood; and
• Firejammer!, which will contain all the rest of my published SF plus the title novella, which has never seen print and, given its 27,000-word length, is unlikely to in traditional markets.

Unlike my earlier Lulu publications, these two will get ISBNs and be available on Amazon. I also intend to make them available on the Kindle. Most of the material has already been typeset, and a lot of the remaining effort will go into things like finding art for the covers. I'm hoping to get these both out by midyear; Souls in Silicon may happen sooner.

In loose moments I've been recasting the 1993 print edition of Borland Pascal from Square One for FreePascal, and will release an initial volume as a free ebook sometime in late summer. As FreePascal was designed to be compatible with Borland Pascal 7, this should work. The ebook will be free, but I will offer an inexpensive printed edition with a color cover on Lulu. The first volume will cover the basic concepts of programming, installation of FreePascal on several platforms, the use of the console window IDE, and the core Pascal language. Much of the book is now obsolete, and it doesn't really cover OOP beyond the basic idea, so if additional volumes happen they'll take a fair bit of work and won't be out until 2009. I'm also considering adapting my portions of The Delphi 2 Programming Explorer for Lazarus, but that won't likely be this year either.

Toward the end of the year I may release a third Old Catholic history title, which will be a compendium of several shorter items from journals published between 1875 and 1900.

Note well that this is a publishing plan file; I still intend to do a fair bit of writing and will continue to shop my material to traditional markets. I hope to finish Old Catholics and make some headway on The Molten Flesh—and if I can't get traction there, I will go back to Ten Gentle Opportunities. Shorter items may pop up at any time; writing is a messy business. But you knew that. I hope.

• Bob Halloran wrote to remind me that dual-booting Windows and Linux on a single hard drive is easy—but you have to install Windows first. When you install Linux it will see the Windows partition and configure grub so that grub will allow you to choose either OS when the hard drive's MBR gets control. If you install Linux and then Windows, Windows will overwrite the MBR with its own stuff, and grub will be gone. I'm going to try this with a couple of Linux installs alongside Windows (I want both Ubuntu and Kubuntu on that drive, at minimum) and will report back here in detail as to how it goes.
• From Engadget comes a report of a prototype ebook reader (including handwriting recognition) shown without any explanation at the recent CES. This looks damned good to me, and is worth watching, at least in part because it's not tiny. I do not want a tiny ebook reader. I want something that shows an 8 1/2" X 11" page full-size. The dimensions on this gizmo are unclear, but it's sure as hell bigger than a cell phone. I'll trade a keyboard for a stylus, but I want the display to be at least letter-sized. (And I want a photovoltaic panel on the back to charge it when I'm not using it!)
• There's nothing whatsoever preventing a piece of software from rendering a PDF ebook as reflowable text, and we're starting to get hints that Adobe may provide that ability, at least for the Sony Reader. This will allow people with big displays to read an ebook as pages, and people going crosseyed on small displays to read an ebook five words at a time. It should be the reader's choice, and I'm annoyed that that ability was not there from the beginning of PDF time.
• Finally, I'm going in for serious gum surgery tomorrow morning, and I do not plan to be fully present intellectually for a couple of days. Do not look for a Contra entry before Thursday, but if you see one, it means I'm in better shape than I expected to be.

• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a collection of free fonts with a German flavor.
• Pertinent to the above, Pete sent a link to a nice free font viewer from AMPSoft.
• Alas, font rendering is one of the areas where Ubuntu (and Linux generally) is way behind Windows.
• An almost unbelievable piece of spyware is being installed by Sears, Roebuck on the machines of people who join "My SHC Community." Good God: The software installs a proxy that causes all of your Web activity—whether associated with My SHC or not—to be intercepted. Disclosure of the spyware is buried in the small print way down in the thick of a 54-page "privacy policy."
• Here's yet another reason not to use Vista: It's all about protecting Microsoft and the Big Media outfits that Microsoft is trying to impress. What they did to this guy is criminal, but predictable. DRM technologies like this are the reason I do not buy downloads of music or video.
• I inadvertently validated a lot of people's objections to ebooks recently: I lost the wall-wart charger for my Sony Reader. I simply don't know where it is, and the Reader is dead as a doornail for lack of juice. I'm sure it's here in the house somewhere, but until I find it, well, paper is looking mighty good.
• Pertinent to the above: I recently purchased a 109-year-old copy of a theology journal containing an article on the Old Catholic movement. The journal is as readable as it was in 1898—and the several ebooks stored on my Sony Reader might as well be on Mars. We have to work on this. DRM and deprecated media formats aren't our only problems. Could an ebook reader be made with solar panels on the back side so you could charge it by flipping it over and laying it on a sunny windowsill for an hour?
• Also in the ebook field is a report from Crave pointing to Igor Skochinsky's blog entries reverse-engineering the Kindle. There's some interesting stuff in there that hasn't been turned on yet, further cementing my conviction (now having actually seen Jim Strickland's unit) that as ugly as it is, the Kindle is the most innovative thing the ebook world has yet seen. That doesn't make it perfect, but I'm less dismissive than I was.
• Every now and I then I spot something that makes me say, "Damn, that's clever." The Make Blog highlighted earrings that can become earplugs when ambient noise gets too high. Carol and I don't go to many live concerts for precisely that reason: Everything's too loud and gives her headaches. Yes, the plug portion should be designed so that it looks less like a shuttlecock, but the inventor gets credit for thinking outside the box.
• My Kodak EasyShare V530 digital camera (which died at warranty expiration plus three weeks) may be replaced by this model. 12 megapixels! Are we getting to the point of diminishing returns on camera resolution? (I actually like it for other features, like taking the picture when you press the button and not three seconds later.)

A little-noted but absolutely crucial divide in the ebook world hinges on the question of whether book pages—numbered sequential blocks of text with a fixed format—are necessary, or even useful. I've been mulling this ever since I first loaded a Web page in late 1993 and watched it reflow text as I dragged the lower-right corner of the browser window around. Reflowing text stuck in my craw, in part because I was a magazine editor at that time, and magazine pages have very definite layouts.

I've flip-flopped on the issue many times over the years, but I've recently come back to my original position: The page is essential. Ebooks need page structure so that we have a universal, human-readable notation for identifying a location in a large document. This location must apply identically to all editions of the same work, whether print or electronic. If the equation is on page 201 of a print book, it should be on page 201 of the ebook. This requires that the ebook have a page 201, and in a lot of modern ebook reader software, page numbers are dependent on font size, meaning that they're basically meaningless.

The argument that text needs to be displayable on many different shapes and sizes of displays always seemed like a non-sequitur to me. Laying out a book into pages does not preclude reflowing the text in a window. I know enough about PDF internals to say with some confidence that a properly designed PDF viewer could render a PDF as reflowable text with page boundaries shown by a dotted line. All the information is there in the PDF; it's up to the viewer how the text is presented to the user.

So all the seething arguments about page-oriented versus reflowable file formats is kind of ridiculous. It's not about the file format. It's about the viewer. I see no reason why the industry could not standardize on PDF documents and create special-purpose viewers for devices with small or otherwise nonstandard displays. Certainly, as a publisher I'd prefer to create just one single file format for a published work, supporting both print and electronic editions, and let the viewer software adapt to the limitations of the underlying hardware.

Right now, ebooks are mostly fiction and purely textual nonfiction because our low-power portable displays aren't good enough to render complicated page images well. That's a temporary limitation. I think that within five to eight years we'll see letter-size tablets with full-color, 1200 DPI electrophoretic displays that can render a page image pretty much as well as paper. This will allow ebook editions of comics, kids' books, art books, and figure-intensive technical books without any compromise, and if you want to go crosseyed reading something like that on your cellphone, well, it's up to your software. Page images are the baseline. Subset the format however you prefer, and we'll all get what we want.

• Many have asked which book I have from Dr. J. Allen Hynek's personal library (see yesterday's entry) and with only a little trepidation I'll admit that it's A. R. G. Owen's Can We Explain the Poltergeist? Hynek was interested in a lot of odd things, clearly—just like me, heh.
• People have also asked me, given that I have a cow skull and a horse vertebra on my office bookshelves, what else do I have there? Alas, nothing quite as exotic as that—except for a radio-controlled rat. If you want a list I'll give you one, but you may be disappointed. (The bones have a story that I may tell, however.)
• And alas, I have evidently misunderstood the "Ten Things..." meme (see my entry for December 7, 2007) as three of them are about other people—Irwin Scollar and my parents. They have to be about me. So I've been asked for three more. Gotta think some but if I can find three more I'll post them here somewhere.
• You can download a VMWare Appliance that—mostly—emulates the OLPC XO. I had it running within a minute of getting it downloaded, but as with any custom hardware that differs significantly from a standard PC, some of its features work differently or not at all.
• The OLPC XO has apparently scared Microsoft enough to prompt them to offer Windows XP for $3—assuming the machine's hardware is jiggered to run it—and Negroponte is predictably having none of it. Bravo. We need an adult version of Sugar for the XO, not a crippled version of Windows. (We also need other things. Future entry.)
• There are a number of other "sub-sub notebooks" that the press has been positioning as competitors of the XO, including the Classmate from Intel and the EEE PC from Asus, but none of them has a convertible display. In other words, they are clamshells only. That's not the same species of machine. In my view, to be an acceptable ebook reader, a clamshell has to pivot into a tablet.
• It is possible to have less than 5% of the brain tissue of a "normal" human being and still have an IQ greater than 100. The article is a quick summary, and while still controversial, John Lorber's research is not nutcase stuff and suggests that we know even less about the brain than we claim to. (The question thus re-emerges from its box, as hard as Carl Sagan's ghost tries to sit on the box and keep it closed: Are we computers or terminals?)
• I f you don't mind a little occasional raunch in your Web comics, this one also contains a lot of geek culture and a certain amount of math humor. It also proves Michael Abrash's point that comics are about writing, not drawing—lending further creedence to my own contention that everything is about writing. Some of the comics work better than others, but yeek! This strip hits me where I live. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for pointing it out.)
• This remarkable underground complex was dug in secret. Where the hell did they put all that dirt and broken rock?
• There is a word for "cutting large figures of horses into hillsides with spades." The word is "leucippotomy." Damn, there's a word for everything.
• By the way, an interesting way to kill some time with Google Earth is to search for Britain's hillside chalk figures by eye, beginning with the town they're near. (See the above point.) Those things are indeed big.

When I first heard about One Laptop Per Child I was dismissive—what third-world kids really need are things like clean water and freedom from bloodthirsty governments—but I've since changed my mind for several reasons. The best way to reform autocratic societies is to educate their women, and the earlier you start, the better. That's a whole separate topic, and not one I feel like getting into right now or possibly ever.

No, the real magic of OLPC is the way its contributors have gone back and re-thought much of what we assume about personal computing, and in particular about portable computing. Latop computing is in a bad place right now. My 2001-era Thinkpad X21 runs at 750 MHz. My 2006-era Thinkpad X41 runs at 1.5 GHz—and seems to be only half as fast. Ponderous file access, constantly stuttering mouse pointer, poky screen refresh, well, what else should I say? (And those were problems right out of the box!) My brother-in-law's hunky new Vista laptop is twice as heavy, just as poky, and felt like it would set my pants on fire.

It's time to throw it all out and challenge a few basic assumptions, the first of which is that a portable machine must be capable of doing anything a desktop can do. Nuts to that. The essence of portability is size, weight, and battery life. Engineers should take that as a given, and see what can be done with it. Don't start by assuming Office 2007 or some massively animated video game as normative and then shooting as high with the hardware as you can. That makes both the hardware and the software look bad.

Laptops should not run Windows or OS/X. They should run an OS that is tuned to do the most necessary things in an energy-efficient way. This is the smartphone philosophy of design, used because there is no choice—a smartphone can't sit there and continuously slurp 25W from a battery the size of a CF card. Data compatibility matters much more than software compatibility; that is, a portable should be able to render and manipulate Office files but not necessarily run Office itself. Much of our software is designed by people I call "feature creeps" who (in fairness to them) are driven as much by imperatives from corporate finance (and the tyrrany of the "pip chart") as they are by any passion for creating new things. They assume that next year's PC hardware will make up for this year's cycle hogs, and for a long time that was true. It hasn't been true for two or three years now, and that's why our laptops seem so slow.

The brilliance of the OLPC XO device is that its engineers literally went back to a blank slate and started over. Gone is the bulky, heavy, fragile hard drive, replaced by a tiny SDHC solid-state drive, plus an SDHC slot for a second card. SDHC cards hit 16GB this past fall, and I still use a Thinkpad X21 laptop that has only a single 20 GB hard drive—of which 6 GB are still free. (I laid out a whole book on that machine!) The XO's AMD Geode CPU runs at 433 MHz, which is actually fast enough to do a lot of things if your OS isn't eating most of your cycles. (My 2001-era Thinkpad X21 only runs at 750 MHz.) Its power-management intelligence is radical. The Geode processor can turn huge chunks of itself dead off when not needed, and so in monochrome ebook mode (no backlight) the XO draws just half a watt. (In full functional computer mode the XO draws about two watts, with about half of that going to the backlit display.) The display spins around and allows the device to work in either laptop mode or tablet mode. (Alas, the first-gen XO does not have a touchscreen or stylus input. I can only hope that future generations will.) The OS is a custom fork of Fedora Linux optimized for both low-power operation and kid-friendliness. It's not standard Linux, and that's a good thing. Ubuntu is more efficient than Windows, but it's not efficient enough to run on something constrained to 2 watts or less power consumption.

The XO went into mass production in November, and Third World governments have begun ordering hundreds of thousands of them for use in rural schools. Getting the cost down from $200 to $100 has been a problem, but if they would just open the market up to First World consumers, they'd be making them by the tens of millions and the cost would plummet. Go figure. (Americans can currently by them only by buying two, and sending one to a Third-World child.) Supposedly the design is open-source, so if some other manufacturer wants to make a version for the West, I'm guessing it's at least possible, if not necessarily as cheap as the true OLPC device.

What I'm hoping is that the design will prove out that a laptop doesn't have to run Vista to be useful. I'm especially fascinated by the XO as an ebook reader. Even this early in its price curve it's half the cost of a Kindle, and does a lot more. (You can program it in Python!) So I'm watching it closely. I may even order one under GOGO. If I do, I'll report here.

Sometime back, I realized, while soaking myself in the vigorous online discussion raised by Amazon's Kindle, that there is more than one kind of reading. "Reading" is not as simple and monolithic as just sitting down with a book. In my view, there are three different kinds of reading:

• Meditative reading is reading to change your state of mind. "Reading for pleasure" is most of this, but there are other kinds. People read to inspire themselves, to laugh, or just to think of something other than what's going on around them. I read dullish history books at the end of the day to make myself sleepy. There is also the use of the written word as a kind of spiritual mantra; in Christianity this is called lectio divina, in which the act of reading itself, independently of what is read, is treated as a kind of prayer.
• Autodidactive reading is reading to teach yourself something. It requires deep attention, and for best results, the taking of notes or outlines. This may involve reading entire books sequentially, but in many cases it involves reading portions of several or many books with some kind of topical relation. The overall goal is understanding, skill-building, or decision support. Most tech people read intensely to solve problems. It can certainly be fun, but it can also be torment.
• Developmental reading is reading within the process of creating texts for reading or presentation. It's what people in publishing do, and I do it a lot. It includes developmental editing, copy editing, proofreading, and indexing. It also includes the sort of reading that supports writing, as of research papers, documentation, or course materials.

Most people who now read ebooks regularly are meditative readers, and most of that is reading for pleasure. We're starting to see ebook use in autodidactive reading, but there's remarkable resistance to the concept, even (or perhaps especially) in the tech industry. Economic pressures eliminated printed manuals from software products, and most tech people mourn that a little, perhaps because tech vendors, for whatever reason, used to spend more effort on printed manuals than they now do on online help. Also, the kind of extreme focus that autodidactive reading often requires clashes with computer displays. This is why I generally proof printed copies rather than on-screen files, especially for book-length works.

What kind of reading we do bears heavily on what kind of ebook reader we'd like to have, or whether we'd just as soon stick with paper. If we're just reading to make the time go by, novels on a PDA or cellphone display can work well. This is "one-dimensional" reading; think of it as slurping text through a straw. Learning from books is a lot more two-dimensional; for example, where there are figures or photos in the text, or footnotes to read and perhaps follow. Learning is often three-dimensional, by which I mean reading that involves quick changes of focus from one book to another, with occasional dashes to the Web. I sometimes sit in my chair with four or five books lying face down on my nearby desk, the chair arms, or the floor, like bugs. (When done on a bed, this creates something called "the scholar's mistress," vividly portrayed by Fritz Leiber in Our Lady of Darkness.)

There will come a day when the tech is good enough so that all three kinds of reading can be done exclusively on electronic devices. But I'm also pretty sure that a single device will not serve all kinds of reading. This may explain a lot of the puzzlement and indignant howling over readers, screens, and file formats. I like my Sony Reader; it do make the time go by. But I have yet to turn to it for autodidactive reading, even when the files are available. Developmental reading is really computing, pure and simple, because it involves so much data entry. The screen still makes my head hurt, but I understand that I have no choice. (Yet.)

As displays get better and user interfaces mature and standardize, things will improve. In the meantime, we need to understand that not all readers serve all kinds of reading, and we need to think a lot harder about what we are actually trying to do (and how we go about doing it) each time we crack a book.