dreamshovel

Metaplace is gone. Along with the site, thousands of user-created worlds representing untold amounts of time and creativity have collapsed into canned screenshots and video clips. Call it business imperative, another walled-garden tragedy, whatever, in the end (that would be NOW) it makes no difference. Things existed before and now they don’t.

For my own SlideMountain world (a work that I’m most proud of) I decided that the proper send off would be via a blaze of scripted destruction. Performance art, in a 2.5D metaverse.

After a maddening series of lag and connectivity issues, I kicked off the process today around 8pm or so.

The harbingers of doom arrived early

It seemed only fitting that I use the Multim0d script sequencer that I released a few months ago (and I have to say it worked pretty well :-)). The various effects plugins were written in an insane rush, between holiday obligations, etc, and could only be tested up to a point. Oddly it was not easy to guess exactly how long it would take to erode things from fully-running world down to bare tiles. Turned out to take almost an hour.

Yeah, you really “had to be there, XD”, but here’s how it went: First random clusters of objects were suffused with a blue-ish glow and then slowly pulled across the world into cluster of 4 moai surrounding a sparking lava core. Once there they were slowly deleted. Gradually, the clusters increased in size and the sliding speed was increased until all world objects had been destroyed. Then the moai vanished.
For the last stage the terrain began to “melt” in a multistage fading and leveling process, randomly distributed across the world grid. This was the one part which worried me a bit and sure enough the “erosion” process code caused a stack bust when tackling the 100×100 grid and a crowd of onlookers. I quickly flipped to a fall-back that spiralled through quadrants and everything completed nicely.

And that was that, weeks of work nuked in less than an hour.

It was a sad but strangely satisfying end to something I’d worked hard to complete and which was a source of amusement for many people. But to me at least, better than letting things evaporate at the flick of a switch in a server room.

And to all the avs who popped in to watch the “Meta Meta Immolation” let me just say thank you for your attention, camaraderie and support. Indeed, Best Wishes to all the MP community!

Metaplace is dead: the metaverse is just getting started. Onward.

The collection started when I pulled a thin, translucent sliver from the battery compartment of a holiday toy. It had been placed there in order to insulate a battery terminal from the battery during shipment and thus help assure that the toy was ready, literally, out of the box. Now it had become a forlorn bit of exotic garbage, placed at the corner of my desk to be admired.

It was soon joined by: a narrow strip of tape holding a set of underwear in a bundle, a jagged tear from a jasmine tea packet, a small, fragile and ripped anti-static bag, a twist cap from a water bottle, some remnants of shrink-wrap, a blade guard from a safety razor and a millimeter long fragment of red tinsel garland.

Only the water bottle lid is marked with a plastic identification code (#2, high density polyethylene) indicating recyleability. All the rest, every dinky bit, is without any obvious further use, destined for the garbage sack and dim points beyond.

Perhaps they will migrate far away, down the hill across the valley and out into the Great Pacific Trash Vortex, a mass of plastic crap twice the area of Texas. Perhaps they will drift evil and help choke a pelican or a turtle.

At best they will just be passive parasites, adding noise to food identification signals and taking up space until something comes along that can digest them. Will it be something that is friendly to the human-sustaining ecosystem? Maybe a microbe that sinks some carbon and excretes some water and oxygen along the way. Can we wait? Do we have to?

It seems that the potential of crap to commodity (”C to C” ?) processing should be a multi-billion dollar business, even with the current fledgling state of bio-engineering. Waste farmers armed with tweaked-out microorganisms, wielding digestion for the greater good.

Or perhaps the little bits of plastic crap are here to stay, a secondary life form condensed by an enzymatic action of human industry. A quiet organism whose replication and adaptative core is completely external to its form, residing instead in human memes. These controlling and facilitating memes are in turn parasitic aspects of human adaptation which must be culled in any long-term human future. A subtly toxic grey goo, independent of nanotech.

But likely it’s just a lot of garbage, produced by ignorant meat-sticks in their haste to earn a cheap buck. And the first generations of waste farmers will taste a new and hyper-lucrative arbitrage game thus far undampened by serious competition. Perhaps too, waste farming/mining will be the coming-out event for bio-engineering, as the science quickly begets the tech that begins to suck up all those discarded commodities.

For the moment however my little pile of resin orts requires a trivial immediate personal cost to discard, against an equally trivial near future return. The reversal of that time-valuation calculus will truly represent an economic revolution.

For a long time I had a Metaplace invitation in a lonely corner my mailbox. I’m exactly not sure why I neglected it for so long but around last June, I finally logged in for a look around and quickly began spending a lot of time in Metaplace.

So several months later and I have gained a measure of fluency with the Lua-based toolchain and the art and gameplay idioms, met a variety of amazing and creative people, produced a number of effect and tool plugins via the MP commerce marketplace and have made a couple of well-regarded worlds.
Yesterday morning I finished a new, large and richly-scripted snow sport world that I’d been working on for a few weeks. It immediately filled up with enthusiastic and complementary players, and rocketed up the ratings charts. Good Times.

So when I popped over to the MP forums to post the official release announcement and saw the sad sad news that Metaplace.com was closing up shop Jan 1 2010, I may have stopped breathing for a moment. All worlds, all content to be lost to the winds.

And of course a big gut-wrenching loss is to the staff who lost their jobs in the middle of the holiday season.

Now, businesses come and go and the loss of a web platform is not unprecedented, to say the least. Various web sites and services have been lost in the past. But while basic web such as text, images and video are common media forms which may be copied to a variety of archival platforms, when a proprietary platform like MP goes down, the “content” may well go with it. Sure we can do screen and video captures, but the live part of the environments, the actual magic of metaverses, just evaporates.

And while it’s easy to smug sagely about the eeeeevils of proprietary platforms and walled garden architectures, the loss of all that creativity is deeply painful. It is not, after all, as if the ‘free’ time was spent watching TV or some other passive dissipation.

True archiving would preserve the platform as well. I know an audio engineer whose priceless archival recordings of live jazz are accompanied by the tape recorder(s) and monitors used to make them. Perhaps this trends to the obsessive audiophile stereotype, but for metaverse preservation it’s a fair bet that preserving the physical server platform is essential.

Perhaps in the future the Internet Archive will expand into the metaverse preservation domain, after all it would seem to be a logical evolution for them. But for now it’s a matter of well, loss mostly. Someone with deep pockets could simply buy the MP rackfuls and employ some curatorial staff to keep them running, but I doubt that will happen.

So, it ends: the venue, the domainful of art and assets and the friend/buddy cohort. And we’ve got just a few days, right in the midst of a major holiday/vacation season, to make our screencaps and videos, assure our scripts are saved locally, revisit our favorite places and exchange contact information.

And to recall some highlights that will probably fall outside of the rough archiving processes:

• The first screening of the excellent (best yet, IMO) virtual world documentary “Another Perfect World”.
• The groundbreaking “Rockin the Metaverse” series of live music performances., featuring (among several others) Grace McDunnough, Doubledown Tandino and Raph Koster himself.
• Various industry ‘celebrity’ speakers holding forth generously at The Stage world.

There are also a couple of things whose loss will only reinforce their importance:

• A soon-to-be-dissipated vibrant and creative community. Some of the more hard-core are likely already present in other metaverses, so they may well just change channels, so to speak. But the easy-access web-based MP platform was really good at bringing in fresh metaverse users who will find few acceptable substitutes at the moment. Their “outsider” perspectives are extremely valuable.
• The open User Created Game platform domain for which the loss of MP leaves a large and damaging void. Although in any such open system there is a lot of crap, there were also more than sufficient gems to compensate. So also tally up a loss to gameplay innovation.

As for my own modest contributions I’m most proud of the Multim0d “script sequencer” tool and API that allowed non-programmers to assemble in-world effects and manipulations into complex composites (e.g., disco floors, swarms of angry penguins, simulating snowboard-style avatar movement and all manner of tile animations.)
I also made a popular set of animated fire, the web-embed Isoasis and Regionware places and of course my comically ill-timed “SlideMountain” world, released literally hours before the closing announcement.

But the real talent of Metaplace can seen in these amazing, entertaining and insprirational works:

Happy, Dark City and Wonka (by Xuemei, probably my favorite MP creator)
Kyoto, Steampunk (Dalian)
Space1599 (TheBeeKeepers)
Thousand Rooms, Atlantis (J9scarborough)
GeoQuest, ZooEscape (John)
Fishing, Metapark (Legend)

And well, a great many more. Metaplace is still for the moment a living thing, full of creative expressions. Check them all out while you can

Usually, navigating the Metaverse means wielding a resource-sucking app that is the very definition of Fat Client. You see this with Second Life, OpenSim and other 3D-rendered virtual world platforms. The upcoming CryEngine based Blue Mars system, while visually spectacular, will likely require even beefier hardware support. Such is the cost of rich 3D rendering.

But high performance costs restrict adoption.

Not too very long ago embedding video in web pages was a big deal. A lot of client hardware wasn’t up to the task and in any event adequate deployment platforms were not widespread. The quasi-ubiquitous deployment of the Flash runtime has resulted in FLV video becoming the de-facto (though unfortunately proprietary) web video platform. Right place, adequate functionality, right time…
So, how about embedding a metaverse “player” in a web page?
There are various groups working on browser-based OpenGL and other 3D rendering, with some working toward eventual Second Life or OpenSim clients that run in-browser. Other efforts leverage Flash, such as Vivaty, Metaplace and the recently departed Google Lively.

Another technique is to run the heavyweight client app within the server farm, capture the user-screen, encode as video and relay to user. Basically app-to-video. You can then play the video in a lightweight browser plugin using Flash. User commands can be proxied to the “client head” at the server farm. This technique is performance-bounded by the video codec operations, but does allow for zero-deploy goodness.
Of course command latency can be a real concern, depending on the twitch factor of the game. But then latency and lag always cause problems.

Demos of this kind of thing have popped up now and again (including some by teams including myself). One notable effort demoed Second Life “running” on an iPod Touch/iPhone.

A more general solution has been recently shown by GaiKai. If they can deliver what they show in that exciting video it will be a Very Good Thing indeed.

Yeah, it seems almost a return to the days of remote Big Iron and local dumb terminal. But not exactly.

Since I’ve been spending some time there lately I’ll focus on Metaplace.
Metaplace is a Flash-based 2.5D browser based metaverse. By going with the simpler isometric environment Metaplace avoids beating their collective heads up against cutting edge browser performance barriers, while still establishing presence and refining system dynamics. Metaplace worlds are easily web-embeddable as shown below. From the embedded link you navigate and interact normally within the world. Unfortunately at the moment there is no provision for “guest accounts” so you can only see the actual embedded world if you are a Metaplace member.

As expected, Metaplace has relatively low requirements. Basically a box that can run a browser with the Flash plug-in appropriately fast to handle YouTube videos should be at least minimally sufficient.
This very low barrier to entry is a tremendous advantage. Another advantage of web-embedded metaverse engines is the seamless integration with the web. Links triggered from within a Metaplace world can just pop open tabs/windows on your browser, allowing you to easily move between contexts.

Overall I think the Metaplace team has done an excellent job, but see for yourself. I’ll leave the link up as a kind of companion metaverse for this blog, feel free to drop in anytime.
UPDATE: Jan 01, 2010: Embedded link removed since Metaplace is no more

After a couple of years of using this latest generation of ebook reader I find there is one core use case that remains under-served.

Never mind the fancy business models.

Never mind the rent-seeking.

Much of the time what I want is to simply dump articles, clippings and pages to the Reader for later, offline reading. I don’t want to fumble around with loading SD cards, custom applications, server uploads or postscript tweaking. Basically I just want to treat the reader like a printer.

Sure, there are various workarounds for this but none have the simplicity of just printing. And the support infrastructure already exists as the “print page” paradigm for web pages is well-established.

Naturally any implementation should handle necessary format conversions to assure the best possible rendering for the given device. Hardly exotic behavior for a printer driver.

Look, I like the “iPod of books” tag and the sync paradigm has its advantages but most of the time what I want is a paper replacement. An official printer driver should be included with every Sony Reader and Kindle.

I’ve never read Stephen King’s “The Stand”, nor seen the movie. But I know it involves an end-of-the-world flu pandemic. With the Swine Flu hype escalating and references to “Captain Trips” percolating out of every social media stream, I figured I’d get the book before someone hits me with spoilers and anyway what better choice for bedtime reading in the midst of an actual influenza outbreak, right?
Proper pandemic protocol dictates that I order-in, thus avoiding tedious and harrowing interactions with possibly (oh noes!) INFECTED hosts. Obviously, this is a job for my trusty Sony eReader…

Popping over to the Sony ebook store I immediately find they have “The Complete & Uncut Edition”. Excellent! I hate how King’s novels always get cut down to a whispy scant 800 pages or so.
And the price is…US $35. Wow! That’s a lot for an ebook version of a novel published in 1978 by a super-popular author. Isn’t it? Since I find the Sony store prone to overpricing their books I’ll just look elsewhere.

OK, top of the search results: same edition ebook available from Random House. Hmm, US $50! No thanks.
A few dodgy torrent sources pop up, but I like books and authors and have this silly idea that artists should be compensated for their works. So no leeching. (hold that thought.)

Just for kicks, I check the Amazon store, as if I had a Kindle, but find only “Title is not available”. So much for that. It is however, fairly encouraging that other King ebooks recommended on that page are about $8 bucks each. And amusingly, a new DVD copy of the 1994 movie for sells for just $26. But to be fair it’s not the new “uncut” edition. Anyway King’s work is usually better in book form.

Other vendors offer the novel in a range of formats and prices, from $15 - $43, but none of the formats will work on my PRS-500 eReader. Hoorah for standards.
I could just grab the mobipocket version and do some conversion voodoo, but I’d like to avoid possible conversion artifacts and legal PITAs.

So for my $350 ebook reader I can either buy an unsupported version for about $15 bucks and perfom a possibly low-quality / quasi-legal format conversion or shell out $35 for a bona-fide Sony-compatible version of “The Stand’. And to think they say these things will never take off!

EPILOGUE:
OK, nevermind the ebook and H1N1 virus, how about regular, olde-school paper?

Amazon lists a range of hardbacks, used-new-first editions, $15-$500 + shipping, but since I have to go out anyway I decided to just swing by the local big-box bookseller. Unsurprisingly, they have it. The nice stack of fat paperbacks is prominently displayed right next to a speciality section of disease-disaster thrillers. Well that’s some responsive marketing, you sick puppies!

But the real disaster is the $8.99 paperback itself. Very poor quality, uneven printing, flimsy pages (all 1000+ of them). Worse even than the regular paperback edition of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (which literally fell apart in my hands as I was reading it).

A Prime Argument in any iteration of the somewhat silly “ebook vs paper book” debate involves the tactile and other sensory aspects of holding a physical book in the hands, riffling the pages, the the look, the feel, smell, etc. And also the keepsake element of a tangible object. This argument is largely neutered by shoddy printing and cheap bindings. Yeah, I know, it’s a mass-market paperback so what do I want? Well, how about something that allows me to experience the author’s art without eyestrain? How about something that doesn’t look like it will fall apart well before the 1000+ pages can be turned? I have a copy of the similarly massive “Swan Song” by Robert R. McCammon that I must have bought 15+ years ago. Its clearly printed pages are still intact and readable thus demonstrating that at least a nominal level of paperback quality IS possible.
After a few minutes of trying to convince myself to just buy the damn cheap paperback I walk out of the store empty-handed.

So in the end I’m left with the public library, that dependable bastion of the written word. And indeed I should have gone there first, since they had a nice hardcover copy of “The Stand” just sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting for me. I was mildly surprised that some other twisted soul hadn’t beaten me to it ;^)

POSTSCRIPT:
While I’m of the firm opinion that ebooks should be priced less than their paper-based versions, I might have paid about $15 or so had a compatible ebook version been available. It’s also clear that I’ve been spoiled by the crisp e-ink display of the Sony Reader (also on Kindle) as evidenced by my somewhat snobbish dismissal of the cheaply-done paperback. And whomever may benefit from hefty ebook pricing and cheap paperback printing the only certain thing is that, just as in the case of ‘piracy’, Stephen King lost a sale.

Libraries Rule!

Wafery thinness

On a rainy afternoon in 1995, during one of my regular runs from Shadyside, up and over to Squirrel Hill (in Pittsburgh) I stopped to scribble down a few things I felt were characteristics of that time. You know, subjective, pretentious drivel. Later that evening I typed it up and put it on a personal web page now long gone.

So for whatever reason I was thinking about that stuff recently and spent some time digging around the web. Unsurprisingly no luck, and no Wayback luv either although I’m sure there is a paper copy boxed away somewhere.

Anyway, it seems like it’s time for another ’snapshot’, this time scribbled out on a somewhat higher ‘hill’ in the Sierras and posted on a somewhat more memorious Internet. So, here’s the 2009 version:

The 1995 version rambled on for a couple of pages, but I live a more terse life these days so I’ll stop now ;-()

Sometime in late 1982 maybe early 1983, I ran across True Names at the university library. It was a fairly quick read but when I finished I felt oddly out of sync with my surroundings, as if hours or even days had passed while I was reading. Such was the engrossing nature of the work. I must have sat there for another hour or so musing furiously about what I’d just read. And I was consumed for days, by the big ideas in that little book.

I recently re-read the novella and found it to be every bit as astonishing today, 25+ years on.
In terms of technology certainly things have advanced quite a bit since the 1980s, and all too often such rapid change dooms speculative fiction to quaintness. Occasionally however an author will really grok a technology progression and ride it right into tomorrow. Such is the case with Vernor Vinge, and True Names is notable for its descriptions of the emergence and leverage of mindspace, that particularly disruptive technology just now in its MMORG-3D infancy.

Once startling ideas become over time, commonplace. Today we are well along the path of integrating the “cyberspace” of the internet into our cultural fabric. And in these days when the “Singularity” concept is creeping ever into the mainstream (at least as half-baked trendy cliché), some of the mind-expanding aspects of True Names may not seem all that shocking. For example, in order to comprehend and manage data-streams beyond the handling bandwidth of basic humans, the protagonists learn to leverage extra-human sensory and processing tools, delegating lower level “awareness” to external computational processes much like the autonomic nervous system handles our breathing and other ‘background’ bodily processes without higher-level tending. It is at this point the flesh and blood protagonists transcend human awareness, in small steps at first, accelerating onward at an increasing rate. It is the cusp beyond which science, to the static observer, appears as magic. It is the seed of the Singularity.

Now this ground has been well-covered by a variety of authors in recent years, with notable efforts by John Barnes in Mother of Storms and Charles Stross in Accelerando. And probably even well before, in glancing blow, by Teilhard de Chardin. Indeed you could argue that this is an aspect of tool use that has been with us from the first fur jacket.

However at the time, as a punk kid knowing little about exotic phenomenology the “bootstrapping awareness” concept hit me like a lightning bolt. Even now it is, I think, one of the more powerful concepts illustrated by True Names. Barring self-extinction, Humans will continue to use, integrate and finally subsume a complex armamentarium of tools, ever increasing in power and ever decreasing in viable lifetime. Mindspace will inevitably exceed the mind.

In addition to their lush, adventurous prose Gibson and Stephenson gave us ‘cyberspace’ and ‘metaverse’, respectively, establishing themselves as visionaries of the modern internet-laced world. But prior to both, with his 1981 novella True Names Vernor Vinge provided a startling vision of extra-human mindspace, a vision that we are only now beginning to experience in the most primitive forms.

The fact that this classic and influential work was out of print for so long and remains somewhat obscure, when the shelves of your local big-box bookstore are larded with all manner of tedious crap is, well, a True Shame.

Sad news tonight. Yma Sumac, icon of exotica music and tiki culture has died at the age of 86. Her incredible multi-octave singing voice is something you really just have to hear in order to appreciate. Truly an amazing talent.

I first encountered her work in the 1954 film Secret of the Incas, itself a gem of obscurity (The lead character is basically Indiana Jones, down to fedora and leather jacket, and a couple of scenes presage ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’).  Sumac had a small role, but it was her ethereal singing that cast the lasting impression. Some songs from that film are included on her first album “Voice of the Xtabay” . She later had a show in 50s-era Vegas, a long period of reclusion and then a kind of resurgence. 86 short years.

Happy Journeys Yma Sumac, your voice will live forever.

Updated: May 8 2008
Update 2: May 16 2008

Around early March the northwestern Reno neighborhoods of Mogul and Somersett began getting a lot of seismic activity, sometimes dozens of small M1-M2 quakes in a single day. There have also been a number of M3s and a few M4s, including a late-night M4.7 that shook up a lot of people. Because most of these quakes have been very shallow they are very noticeable, even M1 and M2 “micro-quakes” that usually  escape notice. And the M4s are way more violent and frightening than any M4 quake should be.

At the moment the rate of the quakes seems to have dropped off quite a bit and are no longer a kind of all-day background shimmer, but the sudden and often booming shakes continue. Just last night (about 4am) for instance a sudden loud M2.6 sounded like the ceiling cracking open.

The USGS web site has a lot of interesting data feeds so I thought I’d generate a bit of chart porn for the 2008 Reno Quake Swarm.

Continue reading ‘The Reno Quake Swarm of 2008’ »

Well Kindle has finally hit the streets and the Sony vs Amazon smackdown has begun in earnest.

First-off, whatever the ultimate fate of the Kindle, Amazon has certainly got the PR game in hand. Kindle is all over the popular press right now, including a lengthy Newsweek cover piece by Steven Levy. The Sony Reader may have a year’s head start but I wonder how much of that sales advantage will evaporate in the coming weeks.
In one sense Amazon is at a slight disadvantage due to the fact that Sony, being first to market with the Reader, has already tapped some portion of the ereader appliance early adopter market. Are such leading edge buyers ready to cough up another $400 for this latest hotness? And then there is the absurdity of DRM content lockdowns and format incompatibilities that continues with Kindle. For my Reader, for instance, I have purchased a couple of dozen DRM-locked BBeB format books that I can’t resell and can’t legally convert for use on another device, such as Kindle. Of course I knew this going in so I’m not whining, just saying “Behold device lock-in, in your face !”.

But the main area in which Amazon looks to win is selection. I have wasted a lot of time searching around the relatively sparse Sony Connect site for books to buy. Think about that. A customer who is ready to buy, but nothing to sell him. I don’t know the business internals of Sony Connect, but it sure seems that they rolled their own store instead of partnering with an established bookseller with a comprehensive stock. The Reader, like Kindle, is the quintessential long-tail gadget, but without a deep backlist it’s little more than a novelty. A couple of months ago Sony announced a partnership with Borders that would deepen and/or replace the offerings of the current Connect store. But nothing yet and, well it may be too late to help thwart the Kindle release and overwhelming PR blitz. Anyway, isn’t Borders an Amazon partner?

Much has been written about the Web-connectivity features of Kindle, and I agree that OTA book purchases represent a second significant advantage to Amazon. But IMHO, Web browsing not a particularly good use of the current generation of e-ink based devices. Due to the slow refresh rates and relatively low pixel resolution of e-ink screens graphics must be converted, animations culled and text reformatted. Why else would Amazon try to charge you monthly fees for otherwise free content? The EVDO-connected Kindle may be good for basic emailing and reading RSS or other Web text, but many of us can already do that on our mobile phones. And if I felt the need to purchase a portable, non-laptop web device I’d have to go with the $299 iPod Touch, trading EVDO for WiFi and because the iPod display is faster and renders much more detail than the e-Ink displays of Kindle or the Reader.
So while the net connection for Kindle may allow all kinds of communications activities, it really need only exist in order to facilitate impulse purchasing from the large Amazon catalog. Other uses are marketing gravy.

But despite its debatable email utility, WAP-reminiscent formatting woes or Web format conversion vigs, the Kindle appears to offer superior ereader utility to that of the Reader. If Sony wants to stay in the game, at the very least they had better respond to the access and selection advantages of Kindle. Perhaps they can address the access challenge with a USB-based WiFi accessory, something small and self-powered. As for the selection and backlist, well that’s Amazon’s turf and strength. Maybe the Borders partnership can help. Perhaps Sony can compete by eliminating DRM-restrictions although I doubt publishers are yet ready for such a move. Whatever Sony does it had better be quick and smart because Amazon just grabbed their lunchbox.

In October 2006 Sony began shipping its ebook reader (henceforth referred to as the ‘Reader’) and I couldn’t wait to get one. For me a usable electronic book is almost a mythical entity living in a world of the future that we’ve somehow missed, along  with the flying car.
Over the years I’ve used a variety of phones, PDAs, micro-laptops and one or two short-lived “electronic book” devices but none have provided a particularly satisfying ebook experience. Enter, the Reader.

The Screen
Once unwrapped and powered on you immediately see “The Screen”, the lauded E-Ink display technology making its large-scale consumer debut in the Reader.

This new display technology renders text that is crisp and flat and really beautiful. The background is slightly more dull light-gray than white, but the contrast is quite acceptable. And right away you encounter the difference between the e-ink screen and a backlit LCD. The E-ink screen, like a regular paper book, gets easier to read in brighter light. So unlike for instance, a regular backlit PDA, the Reader allows one to lounge around the patio reading, in the sun. More importantly, the display is very easy on the eyes, and I have personally experienced none of the eyestrain I had come to expect from reading text on a backlit phone or PDA display. Whatever happens to the Reader, the E-Ink display has set a new standard for portable display quality.

There is one display quirk in the form of a very noticeable flicker during page turns. It appears to invert black to white as the new page is rendered on the screen. It takes about a second for this repaint operation to complete, and the impression is of a “flicker”. Fortunately you habituate to this after about 15 minutes or so.

Continue reading ‘A Year with the Reader’ »

The recent bigfoot-on-Mars silliness reminded me of this Mars Pathfinder pic, circa the 1997 Usenet. Truly a meme that never gets old.

Come to think of it, we’re nearing the tenth anniversary of that landing, wow! And just around the corner in 2009, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Almost 40 years and we haven’t been back.

That’s just sick.

So I am finally getting around to this archive. Some content has previously appeared here and there around the web in various venues and under one or more pseudonyms. And between the IMs, the txts, the ‘casts, the tweets, the communities, the voips and the emails, I’ll add some new stuff as well.