Thu, 07 Jan 2010
Some Light Reading...
I'm taking the family on a long-overdue vacation up to Vermont next week. In anticipation of doing lots of reading, I picked up two of R.A. Salvatore's Forgotten Realms trilogies, 'The Dark Elf' [0] and 'Icewind Dale' [1]. If the reviews on Amazon and bn.com are any indication, they should be quite entertaining.
- [0] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Forgotten-Realms/R-A-Salvatore/e/9780786915880
- [1] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Forgotten-Realms/R-A-Salvatore/e/9780786918119
posted at: 21:12 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags: Books Fantasy ForgottenRealms
Sun, 03 Jan 2010
Kickin' it Old School
Going through my desk drawers recently I came across my 10-year old Palm IIIe [0]. I threw some batteries in it, and lo and behold it still worked fine. Luckily, Palm connectivity under Linux was stable ten years ago [1] - five minutes and a USB-to-serial converter later, I was installing plucker [2] and some of Cory Doctorow's novels [3]. Here is what it looks like:
Despite the small screen (160x160), it's actually nicer to read ebooks on this than any backlit-LCD screen of today (although the Palm IIIe does have a cool illuminated-green-text "backlight", I don't use it as it tends to eat batteries rather quickly).
The Palm IIIe interface is very fast and will hold 4-5 full-length novels in plucker format. This isn't a lot by today's standards, but it only takes a few minutes to swap them out for new ones. I can download any book from project Gutenberg in plucker format for free, and can convert other books from HTML format right from the web with plucker-build (until commercial ebooks come without DRM, I won't be buying any, nor will I lock myself into one platform as with the Kindle).
- [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_IIIe
- [1] http://www.jpilot.org
- [2] http://www.plkr.org
- [3] http://craphound.com/?cat=5
posted at: 01:13 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags: Palm Ebooks Ereader Plucker
