Kindle 3 in NZ

A few thoughts on the Kindle 3

• The eInk screen is amazing to read from, after reading 4 book on the device and reading until 2am in the morning there is no eyestrain unlike when I use an active display such as my netbook or cellphones.
• Books load quickly after the first time, when they appear to be indexed.
• The kindle store works well and with your credit card details linked to your account can be bought with only a couple of clicks.
• The purchased books arrive very quickly over both wifi and 3G.
• Also books purchased directly from there website arrive next time you connect the kindle to a network.
• The battery life is impressive on the first charge I've read 5 or so books before getting a battery warning, should last 8 or 9 books by the time it's had a couple more charges.
• Battery life is a function of page turns, so appears to decrease as you increase text size and spacing. But leaving it in suspend for a week has little or no effect.
• It's highly impressive to switch the device off and have the kindle render a graphic on the display and leave there while it's 'off'.
• The text is very clean and easy to read.
• The device is quite small about the size of a midsized paper back and incredible light!
• The size and weight make it alot easier to hold than an iPad for reading.
• The refresh rate when turning pages is quite acceptable, if you hit page advance when you reach the bottom of the page it should have refreshed by the time your eye reach the top.
• You can change the font, spacing and orientation of the text.
• The 3G makes is easy to buy a book and start reading it pretty much anywhere.
• The downside is it makes it a little too easy to buy a book that catches your eye, and with the purchase only requiring a click or two could easily get out of control.
• There are a lot of free ebooks in the correct formate available from third parties such as baen, including some complete series, which helps make the device even more valuable

• The webbrowser is rather basic though usable, a 5 way pad is not the best way to browse the web.
• The music player is completely basic, no gui just plays stuff in order in the background, the built in speakers are of reasonable quality.
• The book reader as usual is the standard robotic voice, and won't make audio books obsolete any time soon.
• The books seem to have US$2 surcharge on them to cover the cost of sending them Internationally via 3G, this applies both when buying via 3G or Wifi, which as far as data charges go is a complete rip off!
• Book prices are in US$ so while the books are still cheaper than a normal priced paperback they're not incredibly so (NZ$17 for the most expensive I've bought)
• While the book range is decent I've run into a number of books that are not to be sold in NZ

Overall I'm very happy with the device I just wish the book prices were in NZ dollars and didn't have the US$2 surcharge!

Quote

And so from nothing our universe begins.
In a single blinding pulse, a moment of glory much too swift and expansive for any form of words, the singularity assumes heavenly dimensions, space beyond conception.

-- Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

Having decided to read a more non-fiction I've started off deciding to finish the above book. It's an awesome book and I'm greatly looking forward to finishing it this time, now that I've got a hardcopy in hand.

I've also decided for now to read/finish off a couple of other non-fiction works, Collapse by Jared Diamond, and The Origin of the Species by Darwin (often referred to as one of the most beautifully written scientific works).

Still I'm looking for other decent scientific or semi-scientific non-fiction so if you have any suggestions please make them!

The Eye of the World.

Need I say more?

Cards and Books

I seem to be acquiring cards that I need to stick in my wallet at a rather fast rate:
Dymocks, Real Groovy, Christchurch Library (Quiet don't mention I don't, live there any more), Hamilton Library, ACC, DCI, BusIT!, One card, LIC Security(Though this one needs to be on my belt not wallet) as well as the usual Drivers, Eftpos, Credit etc
All in all it's far to many bits of somewhat useful plastic and Cardboard.

Other bad news :-P is that regular pay + bookstores is a bad mix if one wants to save as much money as possible, Gaming stores don't help either but at least there It's things I want that aren't out yet rather than a couple of hundred books I want that are either instore or can be delivered in a week.

Still some good books, "Toll the Hounds" (Steven Erikson) and "Red Seas Under Red Skies" (Scott Lynch) soon to be joined by "The Lies of Locke Lamora" (Scott Lynch), "Inda", "Fox" and "King's Shield" (Sherwood Smith).

Free Ebooks, Wallpapers

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Freebies Bonanza

Tor (a big American SF publisher) are allowing free download of a number of there ebooks until the 27th July. They've also stuck up wallpaper versions of a cover art from a variety of of books and older SF mags.
It's well worth a look for some good wall paper and some good reading material.

Snow Crash

If you've not read it you should, It's a cyberpunk novel by Neal Stephenson. It plays around with a lot of interesting ideas related to linguistics, informational and biological viruses, Sumerian mythology, the rise of civilization and Christianity or Religion. While it's a work of fiction the ideas utilised and the real world implications of some of the ideas are a fascinating alternate view of Civilisation and Religion.

Any way Snow Crash is well worth reading and I'd highly recommend it to those who find such ideas interesting!

To quote:

Metaplanetary by Tony Daniel:

I repeat for all prospective despots, kings, saviors, democratic freedom fighters, and the like: Frequent rummage sales . You never know but you might pick up the secret of universal domination at one, and at a sweet price.

Sound and Fury, Signifying ...?

An interesting little article by the SF Author Richard K Morgan, on the angst and some of the other issues in SF & Fantasy. It was written as a guest editorial for an SF anthology, but was never used as consider somewhat too negative. Any way he's decided to stick it up on his website and it's an interesting read and those of you interested in SF & Fantasy or writing little bits may find it worth reading.


Sound and Fury, Signifying ...?

...
Here's a quote:

"[T]hey're really a bunch of self-righteous condescending arrogant little pricks who are more than happy to ignore history and scientific facts when it suites [sic] them ... a bunch of goddammed fucking militant, humorless, and annoying asshats for whom beatings are way too good."
...
Trawl back through the short history of SF and you can see the exact same bitching and lekking oneupmanship set loose time and time again. New Wave writers lambast and laugh at their predecessors from the so-called Golden Age. Individual authors ally or square up to each other with ludicrous intensity. Lots of furious lit. crit. goes flying this way and that. Splat! Pow! Blood on the dancefloor. Oh, but the times, they are a-changing -- here comes the hard-SF revival to "take back" the genre, to barricade themselves in the genre cabin with their technophilic faith and new frontier spirit and hold off the weirdos for a while. Then cyberpunk kicks down the door all over again, proclaims itself dangerous and subversive (but over here, in this corner, some New Wave purists scoff).
...

Looking for somehing to Read?

If your looking for some decent fiction/SF then might be worth having a look at this list of Current SF authors, fav books for 2007 and what they're looking forward too in 2008!


Fantasy Book Critic: Fantasy Book Critic’s 2007 Review/2008 Preview: A Writer’s Perspective

Rainbows End - full text online

The full text for Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge has been put up online for those interested in such things. The book is a nominee for the 2007 Hugo awards. Vernor Vinge is a rather well known SF writer who usually has some interesting ideas to play with so if you have time it's well worth the read.

Blindsight

Just finished reading "Blindsight" a book released for free under the creative commons licence. It's a very interesting, hard science fiction novel. Which explores a number of interesting ideas, related too intelligence, consiousness and they way our minds work. If your interested in that sort of thing or just good Science fiction I highly recomend you read the Book. The link is to the online copy and also links to PDF and zipped HTML versions.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

The ideas with regards to sentience and Intelligence and if both are required, for a advanced or high tech species are very interesting.
So read the book and let me know what you think!

A few examples of some of the things mentioned or discussed in the book can be found here.

Half Blood Prince

Well seeing Era has made a post on the subject and that this post has been sitting in my drafts for a week now I might as well post it with the book due Saturday.

I can't be bothered making as many predictions as Era but based on my rereading of the Half-blood prince last week I suspect we may find out something along these lines.

Snape is Good, and following DD's orders. Various things in Half-blood suggest this.
He makes the unbreakable oath in HB, to help Mal, knowing that DD would expect him too or possibly as he's already discussed this with DD.
The reason being that DD suspects he's going to be killed soon, and that Mal has been ordered to do it and would prefer Snape to do it rather than force Mal to do something truly evil.


Any way I'm looking forward to Saturday!

Best Scfi of the 00's

blog.pmarca.com: Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far

Top 10 science fiction novelists of the '00s -- so far

This ones right on the money, if your looking for a few new authors. I highly recommend most of these having read a bit by most of them (Charles Stross, Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, John Scalzi, Neal Asher). These guys are all part of my list of reasons why leaving uni and get a job are good. Though I'm definitely going to need a bigger bookcase as well! Unfortunately the public library only tends to have a few of the various books by them they're so new, still a good place to start!

For those of you who don't mind reading ebooks Charles Stross has one of his more recent works available for free download from here. http://www.accelerando.org/book/

"Sleep well and Wake" & Desktop Search

Looks like your right Christina, Jared's "Sleep well and wake" does appear likely to have originated from the Wheel of Time series.

A prime quote from the books being:

“Sleep well and wake, Rand al’Thor.” Only an Aiel would wish you a good night by hoping you did not die in your sleep.

The wonders of desktop search!
Note if your running Windows XP, I highly recommend you download and install Google Desktop Search to handle searching your documents. I found it to be one of the most useful tools on my laptop when doing my Masters papers, being able to type in a fragment of something you remember reading in a paper and having Google Desktop find the appropriate research paper with in seconds is unbelievable useful.
If your running Linux then install Beagle Desktop Search and if MacOS X 10.4(?) upwards then you don't need to install any thing Spotlight will do it for you.