I think I've finally gotten my PVR stabalized. I'm going to have to go and get some more memory, but as it stands things are working.

I've had a PVR based on MythTV now for about 3 years. Before that I tried a couple of other platforms, and was a DirecTiVo user. If you are not sure if a pvr would work for you, I would really recommend getting a TiVo and trying it for a year. I watch what I'm interested in, at my convenience, not simply because some programming exec thinks that I should be watching the new show at some arbitrary 'prime time'. Considering I work in the evening, the Exec's idea of a good schedule certainly isn't mine.

There are other aspects of using a pvr, some of which the execs are not pleased with. However that's not my interest.

I decided some time ago that it was time to start the migration to Digital TV. The big problem I ran into was the need for a faster computer than I had. I was able to get away with adding a front end that I was able to use. However that left me running two systems when I really only needed the one. Finally over the Christmas/New Years holidays I replaced the motherboard in my main box, added hard drive space, and ended up putting in a new processor, and memory. I'm using a USB based NIC at the moment, as the NIC on the new motherboard isn't being recognized yet. That should change in the near future, but I have a spare PCIe1 slot that I can use.

For some reason since I replaced the motherboard, I was having stability issues. Also the system would boot up with some rather strange modes. After beating my head against the problem for the better part of a week, doing hard disk diagnostics, etc. Finally I had the system do a memory test. No immediate problems, but about 45% of the way through the est, errors started showing up. I reseated the memory, same problem. I popped out one memory stick and still ran into issues. Switched the memory, and the testing ran clean. Tried the other stick in the other slot, and still ran into problems. So, I've got a bad 1 gig memory stick. Fortunately the memory requirements of what I do are not so high as to force me to use 2 gig, but I'll probably replace this memory as well. (I think I can add the good stick into either my server, or my primary desktop.)

But for now, that can wait. Now I need to improve reception elsewhere...

As some of the people I will be forwarding this link to are not Christian, I'm not going to wish all of you a Merry Christmas. The 8 days of Hanukkah have already passed, and Kwanzaa will be happening as well immediately after Christmas. And I'm pretty sure that with the pagans and other faiths that are represented in my friends and extended family, we can all find something to celebrate in the season. And for those of you who have not found something to feel a part of, there's Festivus.

I do live with the Gregorian calendar and consider Christmas to be one of the most important days of the year, (after my son and daughter's birthdays) so please realize that at least in part, this is my way of spreading my wishes of wellness to all of you.

The year started with some mixed activities. There were a few ham radio contests that I was able to participate in, and had a great time with them. I don't know that I'll ever be a great contester, but I have fun and do what I can to contribute.

Many of you know that I have started shaving my head, and I was wearing a mustache at the time. My son's girlfriend's family noted that I looked a lot like Jamey Hynemaen from the Myth Busters, and I had even been approached once earlier with some confusion about the issue. I was mostly thinking, 'OK, this could be interesting later on, but it's getting kind of cold,' so for the first few months of the year, I started letting my hair grow out again. I think it's interesting the number of people who were surprised at the amount of gray hair I had. It is still a salt n pepper mix, but is getting grayer with every year. I think part of the shock is that some people forget that I'm well into my 40's now. I'm hoping for a long run yet, but I'm aware that time is passing.

Lots of health related stuff that is at least in part related to that aging stuff, I won't get too involved in it here though. Feel free to ask me about it, and I'll probably share more than you wanted to know.

Someone I consider a friend missed a lot of the beginning of the year. Considering the amount of work he went through to recover from that, and all that he has done as president of the Twin Cities FM Club, I'm really happy that he is doing as well as he is. I hope I never have to go through what he did, and consider the trouble I have had to be trivial in comparison.

I completely skipped Minicon this year. In part because I didn't schedule any vacation for Easter weekend, and worked that Saturday. Additionally I decided that Anime Detour looked interesting this year, and probably would have gone on my own. However I ended up going as the male chaperon to my son's high school club. It was an interesting experience, and I recommend it for anyone who is interested in making sure young adults and older teens have a good time. Yes, some rules got broken, but no-one was seriously hurt. I didn't have to lay down the law with anyone but my son, and nothing compared to what we went through a couple of months later.

Let's see, from there we had near daily calls from the school regarding Michael missing this period or that. High School finals preparation (or not) Field Day ramp up and contest, Mike was working at one of the local theaters, and occasionally was showing up a little bit late. Too occasionally it turns out. And in all of this, preparation for Convergence 2007. I think I may have even gotten enough sleep this year. Even with being woken up at 2 am after going to bed at 1 am, by staff wondering if my son was in the room, because his girlfriend was looking for him. In general a pretty good time. Well...

Mid July, Michael got on a bus to California to attend a step sister's wedding, then to be best man at his buddy's wedding a couple weeks later in OR. One thing lead to another, and he decided to stay there. I haven't heard from him since a couple of weeks after he decided to stay, other than a Thanksgiving greeting, so I can't say how he is doing. I think he is working, and hopefully studying to get his GED, but he hasn't spent a lot of time talking to me about it.

At CONvergence, I met up with a couple of people at the Volunteer desk, and we are in the process of putting together an added service for CONvergence going forwards. In short we are looking to add sign language interpretation to various events to assist for the hearing impaired. I have a lot of hopes for where this will go.

Well, that's most of what's been happening on the personal front. Well, OK I neglected to explain more about the Jamie Heyneman look-alike bit. First of all, I'm not really into costume creation/play/design. So while I've thought of creating a costume to be a technomage in years past, and possibly as J.J.H. from Spiderman to run the Volunteer desk, nothing ever really came of it. However with the fact that several unrelated people had expressed to me the observation that I looked something like 'that guy from MythBusters...' I decided it might be interesting to take advantage of that at CONvergence this year. So I let my mustache turn into a goatee. I found a pair of wire rim reading glasses that I was able to pop the lenses out of, (perhaps I shouldn't have, occasionally they would have worked just as well with them in) and picked out a few pieces of clothing that I either had around the house, or that I would otherwise be able to make use of later. A white shirt, a black Barrette, black long sleeve t-shirt, and so on. Basically off the shelf stuff. And the only people who had any idea what was going on were my son and his girlfriend. (OK possibly her family as well, don't know.)

The important part of all of this is that it was really a very subtle costume. My voice is just about right. Recall that Jamie is from the mid-west so while our accents are not identical, they are just close enough. I didn't have to go out of my way to change a whole lot, and I didn't need any makeup. Well OK, I did tint my goatee, but I don't think I needed to. Most of the people who I've known for years would come up to me, in my costume and were almost entirely oblivious to the costume. I know of four different people who it had to be pointed out to that I was even in costume, and who's jaws dropping at the realization was almost audible.

Complete strangers on the other hand, that was a different matter. One of three things happened. For some of them, I probably just looked like another guy at the convention. Dressed a little oddly, but nothing exceptional. Next up were the people who were aware of the show Mythbusters. For them, 'You know, you look just like that guy from that TV show?'. Finally the fans of the show who didn't already know me were occasionally going, 'Is that, no, it can't be, but...' I even had one person engage me in a conversation, fully believing that I was Jamie Heineman, and wondering if the show was doing something at the convention.

To all of you, Thank you, it was one of the highlights of my year. I'm a big fan of the show, and have nothing but respect for both Jamie and Adam. I honestly don't think I am a double for Jamie. I think that if the two of us were in the same room, even if I were in costume, and he was not, that there would be little confusion. But it was fun, and I can be wrong.

So the new year is about to begin. We've lost some people, and I've made a few new friends. I'm publishing this on one of my own blog sites, which I hope to be updating regularly going forwards, and adding podcast type recordings to the same site as time progresses. I will be pointing to this blog from Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and in e-mails to family members and friends. I'm not sure if comments will be enabled on the blog, but feel free to respond where ever you found out about this at.

Top of the season to all of you, and may next year provide you with a better situation than this year has.

-Rusty

Well, the kindel was released a little over a month ago. And while I don't expect to be getting one, and am not going to be critical of the specific product, I do have some observations regarding the general topic.

Content over form factor. When it comes down to it, e-books are primarily a different publishing format for books. In the past you could print to pulp paper, low acid, 'organic' bible paper, etc. If you wanted to, you could print to granite. Kind of expensive, and not generally considered portable, but...

You could also publish in Braille, Audio, newspapers, magazines, other periodicals, etc. You could also publish in ephemeral forms, perhaps by having your writing flashed on a screen, or spoken aloud once in a theater.

Each of these forms of publications has it's merits, and problems. And when you get down to it, e-publishing is little different from the rest.

I've read a variety of material including usenet news articles, up to and including multi-chapter stories that could be considered books, fan-fiction zines, web page stories and poetry, as well as books from Project Gutenberg and the Baen Free Library. Most of that has been on a computer monitor at a desk, but more and more lately it has included various PDAs (palm Vx, Sharp Zaurus SL-5500) and now a couple of related e-books (Sony readers PRS-500 and PRS-505)

Along the way I've encountered issues with each of the various source material, and presentation devices. The ugliest so far that I have seen is the PDF file format. Now I'm not saying that it doesn't have it's advantages. As a content creator, you have ultimate control over how the material is presented. You can dictate fonts, pagination, and so on. Which is fine, if you want to limit your audience to those people who are going to read that material in exactly the way you present it. In all honesty, the only place that I think this is the right direction is for presentations. Last I checked, books and stories didn't tend to be presentations first, though sometimes that's involved.

Obviously I have some strong opinions on the matter, and perhaps you would appreciate it if I would explain at least one of them to you. Depending upon the medium that you are reading from, different font sizes make more sense. The difference in size between 10 point text, and 12 point text does not seem to be all that large, until you consider a couple of paragraphs rendered in a couple of different ways. On Paper, 10 point text, on 8.5x11" paper (US Standard Letter) is quite readable. However if you are reading from a computer screen, most people will bump the font size up to 12 point to get slightly better readability on that media. If you take a simple 2,000 word document and format it in 10 point Times New Roman, it turns into just over 2 pages. Bump it up to 12 point, and it formats to 3 pages. Simple extrapolation suggests that a 20,000 word document would switch from being around 21 or 22 pages to being 29 or 30 pages. And while that may not seem particularly important, it makes a lot of difference to people who have to carry tomes of 200,000 words and more. (Think text books and reference material.)

But we're talking about electronic documents here, not paper! That's right. But remember that most of the documents that are being prepared at those numbers of words are initially being prepared to be printed. The author is using a screen where an 8.5" wide page is being stretched out to being 10 inches wide, or more. She's comfortable with the layout. Dumps the document to a PDF, which among other things, locks down the font size. You don't get to change that on the device you are displaying the document with. Think you might be more comfortable with 12 point text? OK, bump up the page size from 100% to 120%. Notice what happens? In most cases you now have to scroll from side to side to read each line of text.

Now if you're reading on a Kimble, or a Sony Reader, you'll find that the closest you're going to get to that standard page size is to turn the page 90 degrees left or right. I'm not sure how the Kimble handles that, but the Reader is OK at that, with some limitations. You can also use the 'magnification' tool to essentially get rid of the margins to give more readable text for those who like a larger font. Pretty much forget it though for smaller PDA type screens.

If you're lucky, the publisher of the PDF will have formatted the document for either trade paperback, or better yet 'paperback'. The screen on the Sony devices is 3.5" x 4.75" of e-paper. Any form factor larger than a paperback has to be 'shrunk' to fit the display. That means that 12 point text will look like 8, or even 6 point. Obviously even worse for 10 point material. However if you are creating the PDF yourself, formating the document to one of the smaller page sizes, and shrinking the margins as well, you'll find a reasonable output on most devices.

Yes, it means more pages, but you are not printing them to paper in any case. Right?

Better is to start with something other than a PDF. The Sony readers understand RTF files, as do many software packages for PDA and Cell phones. They will happily format the document on the fly for you as a result. You can still format text for chapter headings, insert page breaks, etc, and the result is a document that pretty much anyone can read. Yes, there isn't a lot of copyright protection in the format. I have to be honest though. There hasn't been one form of copyright protection out there that protected the material in question from someone who was seriously interested in stealing the material. You still have to go after the thief, and in most cases all you've done is aggravate you're legitimate customers who discover that the copy they are reading doesn't work on this device, or on that platform. I haven't even bothered to install the software that came with my reader's because aside from using it to delete the demonstration material on the reader's, I can't think of any reason I would want to use it. And when it comes down to it, I can at least show off what the demonstration material contains until I get enough of my own material there, by which time I generally don't even notice the original stuff in the first place.

Where do we need to go though? Well, there are three 'models' to consider for e-books and e-book readers that are pretty well defined already. There's the periodical material. Newspapers, magazines, and Blogs. These are all something I would consider mostly throw away material. At best you may clip a story or graphic to hang onto, but the advantage of e-display's should be that you can set up a scrap book for this stuff, and going to that later should provide you with a way to look at it in the context of what was with it in the first place.

The next model is the subscription book model. You go to a library of material, you can check it out, perhaps copy a page for reference later on and at the end of some period of time you return the original material. Any copying may be as simple as copy and paste (loosing formatting?) or as in a library you get an image of how it originally appeared, either of which you could annotate.

The third model is that of the personal library. I am currently at the point with my 'in print' books that if I never bought another book again, and never read another word online again, I would very likely be left with dozens of books that I never even seriously crack when I die. For those books that I will never get to read, the author has been payed for the books. (None of which are missing front covers.)

Now there are people who collect books to re-sell them later on. I tend to doubt that they will try doing so with e-books. "Yeah, I got this original e-book copy of 'Down and Out...' by Cory Doctrow. What will you give me for it?" "Um, everyone has a copy of that already. Tell you what I won't beat you up for trying to sell it."

One of the major reasons that people build up personal libraries though, is to use what's in their library for research about either topics, or writing forms, etc. There are two reasons you want those books in your collection. The first is so that you can go back and reference them when you are preparing new material. The second reason is that since they are your own copies, and you can annotate and amend the material. You can note right in the margins how this seems to be opposite of some other source. You can strike out stuff you can demonstrate is wrong.

That's were current technology in e-books is lacking for now. There currently is no useful way to annotate or write in the margins of e-books.

Oh, you can edit the original text, or place an overlay on specific pages of a pdf, and we are finally getting to the point of being able to flag pages as your own individual sense of what to remember, be it's going to be a long time before you can circle a word and print in tight printing down the margin, 'see how so and so approached this issue for an example of why the author may be wrong.'

Of course at that time we'll have the power behind the pages to allow interactive searches, and so on. Whether we can make use of it or not, that's a different matter.

The Text book as source of funding for the school bookstore is rapidly fading to black.Too many students are learning that they can buy the book on Amazon and have it before the first day of class, and while the bookstore may have been willing to charge $500-$1000 for the set, it's all available on Amazon for tens of dollars. And as more of it is available in e-book format, you'll be able to carry that Psych 101 text into the 400 level classes and compare what we thought we learned from them to what we have learned since.

The Sony readers will take SD cards up to at least 2 gig, I think it's 4 gig capable. A wallet for a dozen of these will be smaller than a wallet with ID cards in it these days. And who knows what the future will bring.

Are there places for improvements with the various e-readers out there? Yes. Isn't that always the case?

Starting up a new blog. I'll have more to say along the way, but this is really just to get things started.