I've been meaning to write a review of Weasel Reader for a while now so I just did. The original work in progress is at Weasel Reader review.
While there are many formats for eBooks and a few dedicated pieces of hardware on the market I've found that after trying out everything I could find I've settled on just a few choice technologies that I have gotten the most actual reading out of. In fact just one aspect of one piece of software in particular pretty much wraps it up for me: Autoscroll Mode: Screen Wrap as found in Weasel Reader. Every other text reader autoscroll I have come across forces the eyes to contantly move, often very unsmooth, much unlike a book with its clear sharp letters that stay firmly in place. I believe this common misfeature leads to far greater eye strain and a lower overall acceptance of eBooks because of it. The only possibly superior scroll mode I would like to see added would be a flash mode where words or phrases are flashed sequentially onto the same spot allowing you to read without moving your eyes at all, then you just have to remember to blink on the periods!
Weasel Reader will run on most any PalmOS device which gives you not only a wide range of PDA hardware to choose from but also desktop emulators should you really fall in love with the Weasel! Having a good selection allows you to choose a device that fits well in your hand, has an easy to read high contrast screen, and enough capacity to store a selection of books. I'm currently using a Handspring Visor Prism and keep a few dozen books on hand to read at night after the wife goes to bed with the lights out or in the queue at the grocers or any other place those nasty slowdowns in our fast paced moderns lives creep up.
All that said Weasel Reader can be a bit overwhelming to configure so I offer the following as suggestions to get the most out of this great piece of software:
* Options, Preferences: ** Check Skip Project Gutenberg license ** Show zTXT size in index ** Always remember position. ** Use Scroll/Bookmark Buttons
* Options, Display Preferences: ** Line Spacing -2
Once the above are set open up a book and you will see a status bar that has a return to menu arrow, percentage of the book complete, the time, battery indicator, and access to the bookmarks menu. Frankly, I don't care about any of that and as long as "Always remember position" is checked as listed above that is the only bookmark I need. Thankfully a simple tap anywhere on the left hand letter side of the silkscreen hides this menu leaving our screen chock full of text and only a slim progress bar at the bottom to give us an idea how far we are along in our read.
Now for the fun bit: Press the Address Book button and a dotted line begins decending the screen, a virtual page flip in progess pacing your reading. Too fast you say? Tap the down arrow a few times. Want it faster? Just tap up until you are zipping along. I find myself automatically adjusting the speed as I read and punching the Address Book button when I take a break to rest my eyes. Once out of the auto scroll mode the up and down buttons move up and down a page at a time but I find myself tapping the top or bottom half of the screen with my fingernail quite naturally.
Overall Weasel Reader is an excellent piece of software I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from. Enjoy!
Posts like this really concern me, you seem to have some facts and a good grasp of problems let you don't fully realize the problems.
In regards to Round-Up: "and binds in soil (so no runoff)" so what about the soil? Great that it doesn't end up in the water but it still goes somewhere.
You make a distinction between dependence on synthetic chemicals and constitutive expression of natural pesticides. How many people do you think understand the difference? More importantly, do you want to be on the side of people convincing the unknowning masses that this entire category of manipulation is safe just because a few types of it is safe? Do you really believe that the profiteering corporations are going to draw the line of safe/unsafe where you would when it is your body and not their profits?
This however is the statment I have the most problem with:
"Also, genetic engineering is inevitable."
Bullshit. It sounds like you are working off the false presumption that somehow the crops are going to feed the world. They are not, the companies are not enterested in fair distribution of food, they are interested in more profits. There is plenty of food to feed everyone right now, there has been for years. The problem is not lack of food or resources it is politics.
"We won't be able to sustain current farming practices at a sufficient volume to feed the world's growing population. Water sources are drying up and soil is being ruined rapidly."
We could already feed the worlds population. The worlds population is slightly stabilizing (thankfully). Water sources are drying up specifically because of the fucked up practices of the worldwide food cartel and a complacent populace that couldn't be bothered to give a fuck more. Farmers are not being encouraged to grow in a sustainible matter and so are fucking the future at every turn just so they can have theirs.
"Genetically modified plants to overcome this will be necessary."
Genetically modified plants will not help this one bit. Not at all. What they will help is some executives get rich and some farmers get poor and some people (let's not forget the people) get some likely to be overlooked health concequences or maybe a famine or plague or two to be chalked up as somebody elses problem.
"And finally, genetic modification is not a completely new thing."
Yeah, so because we've done it for 10,000 years that means its a good thing to keep doing? Have some vision and faith in humanities ability to change.
"We can't stop modifying plants now" Why not? all you mention to back this up is that we need regulation from government agencies that you in turn deride as being incompetent. Here is where I agree with your post though, the problem is political and could be largely helped by forming a government agency with some backbone. However more important is to get knowledge into the hands of people and to not condone these types of actions by companies who only interest is to get their moeny and get out and the future be damned.
Bah, that's all I have to say, fuck money grubbing corporations and the ignorant sheep who fill there pockets with uneducated dollars. - jason
While I hardly think that the 70 dollars that Network Solutions charges for domains is a reasonable price (except for the unarguable fact that people pay it, same reason SUVs are 30 grand), Network Solutions does run the root DNS servers, as well as those for.com,.net, and.org. Keep in mind that without these servers no domain name resolution would be possible under the current system and someone has to do it. This is not a service that I am really interested in seeing cost undercut, I would rather a bit more robust than needed system actually.
And for those that may argue that people pay 70 dollars for the domains because they have no choice that is hardly true, you can use subdomains (witness ae.breakset.com, candra.breakset.com, etc) as well as bastardize the country TLDs and get yourself a.nu domain for 40 bucks or whatever the price is these days.
Well I don't remember Beyond 2000 _promising_ us anything (I do miss that show though) but there have been many products over the years that brought Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) to the consumer marketplace (I'm not even going to get into scientific/educational HMDs here).
All of them have been plagued by motion sickness, dizyness, and eyestrain, not to mention, especially in the consumer marketplace, unrealistic expectations (chalk it up to hollywood and a populace ignorant of technology).
I figure my eyes have gotten bad enough I'm hoping for the full on cyber replacements but that's an even more off topic post.
Anyway, for the momment being my favorites are the Sony Glasstron's mentioned in the post above. Keep in mind there are two models, the Glasstron PLM-S700, which is capable of 800x600 resolution meant for computers, and the Glasstron PLM-A55, which does 800x225 and is meant for portable DVD playback personal widescreen style.
PLM-A55: Silly bastards have them under camcorder accessories...
An excellent source I found for these and other HMDs is Mindflux though keep in mind prices there are in Austrailian Dollars.
And BTW, I remember a DOS program called Acidwarp that if you used a certain command line switch would dump out several pages of text intructions on how to build exactly this type of device for projecting it's visuals onto a wall.
There is nothing new in the world, only new implementations of old ideas, and newbies discovering the same old shit.
Just my offtopic 2 cents. There seems to be a lot of bantering back and forth about which format is better, tape, solid state (RIO), cd, cdr(w). People seem to latch on to their favorite and defend it relegiously without much real "reason".
So here are my "reasons" for liking or disliking various media and some thoughts on all of them:
Tape is good quality, fairly cheap and probably most important a lot of people have tape decks. I have a nice deck and I like the potential of blank tapes. They can be anything, they can be rerecorded (though at a loss, the same loss as occurs over generations of copies of analog tape and related to the simple degradation over time of the signal).
The time to make a good mixtape is about the same as making a good mix cd though you can just shovel junk onto a cdr a bit quicker if you have a good setup.
As far as more music, tape definately wins on a cost per minute basis and is roughly on par with recordable CDs. Solid state is far higher than either right now but I think that it is going to come down much quicker in the next few years, there isn't much more of a bottom in tape or cdr media. So while it is a "whatever works best for you" situation right now, I don't think there is any argument that solid state is the future as it will quickly outstrip capacity of both tape and cd and has a couple of other important benifits, one of which I feel is largely overlooked:
Battery Life. Both tape and CD have to spin discs or pull wheels where a solid state device should only have to power the amp and not much else. A well designed solid state portable is going to far outstrip play time of either tape or CD and this includes CDR/MP3 format players. The thing people seem to forget in that pipe dream very fast is there isn't a single portable CD player (that I have seen anyway) that would even play through the 13 hours of 128kbit mp3s on a CDR once. I fully believe in a few years that a solid state portable will be capable of this many times over and in a much smaller form factor.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been meaning to write a review of Weasel Reader for a while now so I just did. The original work in progress is at Weasel Reader review.
While there are many formats for eBooks and a few dedicated pieces of hardware on the market I've found that after trying out everything I could find I've settled on just a few choice technologies that I have gotten the most actual reading out of. In fact just one aspect of one piece of software in particular pretty much wraps it up for me: Autoscroll Mode: Screen Wrap as found in Weasel Reader. Every other text reader autoscroll I have come across forces the eyes to contantly move, often very unsmooth, much unlike a book with its clear sharp letters that stay firmly in place. I believe this common misfeature leads to far greater eye strain and a lower overall acceptance of eBooks because of it. The only possibly superior scroll mode I would like to see added would be a flash mode where words or phrases are flashed sequentially onto the same spot allowing you to read without moving your eyes at all, then you just have to remember to blink on the periods!
Weasel Reader will run on most any PalmOS device which gives you not only a wide range of PDA hardware to choose from but also desktop emulators should you really fall in love with the Weasel! Having a good selection allows you to choose a device that fits well in your hand, has an easy to read high contrast screen, and enough capacity to store a selection of books. I'm currently using a Handspring Visor Prism and keep a few dozen books on hand to read at night after the wife goes to bed with the lights out or in the queue at the grocers or any other place those nasty slowdowns in our fast paced moderns lives creep up.
All that said Weasel Reader can be a bit overwhelming to configure so I offer the following as suggestions to get the most out of this great piece of software:
* Options, Preferences:
** Check Skip Project Gutenberg license
** Show zTXT size in index
** Always remember position.
** Use Scroll/Bookmark Buttons
* Options, Display Preferences:
** Line Spacing -2
* Options, Scroll Preferences:
** Autoscroll Mode Screen Wrap
Once the above are set open up a book and you will see a status bar that has a return to menu arrow, percentage of the book complete, the time, battery indicator, and access to the bookmarks menu. Frankly, I don't care about any of that and as long as "Always remember position" is checked as listed above that is the only bookmark I need. Thankfully a simple tap anywhere on the left hand letter side of the silkscreen hides this menu leaving our screen chock full of text and only a slim progress bar at the bottom to give us an idea how far we are along in our read.
Now for the fun bit: Press the Address Book button and a dotted line begins decending the screen, a virtual page flip in progess pacing your reading. Too fast you say? Tap the down arrow a few times. Want it faster? Just tap up until you are zipping along. I find myself automatically adjusting the speed as I read and punching the Address Book button when I take a break to rest my eyes. Once out of the auto scroll mode the up and down buttons move up and down a page at a time but I find myself tapping the top or bottom half of the screen with my fingernail quite naturally.
Overall Weasel Reader is an excellent piece of software I've gotten many hours of enjoyment from. Enjoy!
word.
This is the only place I've found online that has DC-DC Power Supplies, AT and ATX in various wattages, prices vary from around 100-200 USD.
Keypower DC to DC Power Supply
I plan on using these things for my off grid (solar and wind) powered computers and any car boxes I build. Have fun!
Posts like this really concern me, you seem to have some facts and a good grasp of problems let you don't fully realize the problems.
In regards to Round-Up: "and binds in soil (so no runoff)" so what about the soil? Great that it doesn't end up in the water but it still goes somewhere.
You make a distinction between dependence on synthetic chemicals and constitutive expression of natural pesticides. How many people do you think understand the difference? More importantly, do you want to be on the side of people convincing the unknowning masses that this entire category of manipulation is safe just because a few types of it is safe? Do you really believe that the profiteering corporations are going to draw the line of safe/unsafe where you would when it is your body and not their profits?
This however is the statment I have the most problem with:
"Also, genetic engineering is inevitable."
Bullshit. It sounds like you are working off the false presumption that somehow the crops are going to feed the world. They are not, the companies are not enterested in fair distribution of food, they are interested in more profits. There is plenty of food to feed everyone right now, there has been for years. The problem is not lack of food or resources it is politics.
"We won't be able to sustain current farming practices at a sufficient volume to feed the world's growing population. Water sources are drying up and soil is being ruined rapidly."
We could already feed the worlds population. The worlds population is slightly stabilizing (thankfully). Water sources are drying up specifically because of the fucked up practices of the worldwide food cartel and a complacent populace that couldn't be bothered to give a fuck more. Farmers are not being encouraged to grow in a sustainible matter and so are fucking the future at every turn just so they can have theirs.
"Genetically modified plants to overcome this will be necessary."
Genetically modified plants will not help this one bit. Not at all. What they will help is some executives get rich and some farmers get poor and some people (let's not forget the people) get some likely to be overlooked health concequences or maybe a famine or plague or two to be chalked up as somebody elses problem.
"And finally, genetic modification is not a completely new thing."
Yeah, so because we've done it for 10,000 years that means its a good thing to keep doing? Have some vision and faith in humanities ability to change.
"We can't stop modifying plants now" Why not? all you mention to back this up is that we need regulation from government agencies that you in turn deride as being incompetent. Here is where I agree with your post though, the problem is political and could be largely helped by forming a government agency with some backbone. However more important is to get knowledge into the hands of people and to not condone these types of actions by companies who only interest is to get their moeny and get out and the future be damned.
Bah, that's all I have to say, fuck money grubbing corporations and the ignorant sheep who fill there pockets with uneducated dollars. - jason
While I hardly think that the 70 dollars that Network Solutions charges for domains is a reasonable price (except for the unarguable fact that people pay it, same reason SUVs are 30 grand), Network Solutions does run the root DNS servers, as well as those for .com, .net, and .org. Keep in mind that without these servers no domain name resolution would be possible under the current system and someone has to do it. This is not a service that I am really interested in seeing cost undercut, I would rather a bit more robust than needed system actually.
.nu domain for 40 bucks or whatever the price is these days.
And for those that may argue that people pay 70 dollars for the domains because they have no choice that is hardly true, you can use subdomains (witness ae.breakset.com, candra.breakset.com, etc) as well as bastardize the country TLDs and get yourself a
Well I don't remember Beyond 2000 _promising_ us anything (I do miss that show though) but there have been many products over the years that brought Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) to the consumer marketplace (I'm not even going to get into scientific/educational HMDs here).
All of them have been plagued by motion sickness, dizyness, and eyestrain, not to mention, especially in the consumer marketplace, unrealistic expectations (chalk it up to hollywood and a populace ignorant of technology).
I figure my eyes have gotten bad enough I'm hoping for the full on cyber replacements but that's an even more off topic post.
Anyway, for the momment being my favorites are the Sony Glasstron's mentioned in the post above. Keep in mind there are two models, the Glasstron PLM-S700, which is capable of 800x600 resolution meant for computers, and the Glasstron PLM-A55, which does 800x225 and is meant for portable DVD playback personal widescreen style.
Sony's Pages are:
PLM-S700 PC Glasstron
PLM-A55: Silly bastards have them under camcorder accessories...
An excellent source I found for these and other HMDs is Mindflux though keep in mind prices there are in Austrailian Dollars.
And BTW, I remember a DOS program called Acidwarp that if you used a certain command line switch would dump out several pages of text intructions on how to build exactly this type of device for projecting it's visuals onto a wall.
There is nothing new in the world, only new implementations of old ideas, and newbies discovering the same old shit.
Just my offtopic 2 cents. There seems to be a lot of bantering back and forth about which format is better, tape, solid state (RIO), cd, cdr(w). People seem to latch on to their favorite and defend it relegiously without much real "reason".
So here are my "reasons" for liking or disliking various media and some thoughts on all of them:
Tape is good quality, fairly cheap and probably most important a lot of people have tape decks. I have a nice deck and I like the potential of blank tapes. They can be anything, they can be rerecorded (though at a loss, the same loss as occurs over generations of copies of analog tape and related to the simple degradation over time of the signal).
The time to make a good mixtape is about the same as making a good mix cd though you can just shovel junk onto a cdr a bit quicker if you have a good setup.
As far as more music, tape definately wins on a cost per minute basis and is roughly on par with recordable CDs. Solid state is far higher than either right now but I think that it is going to come down much quicker in the next few years, there isn't much more of a bottom in tape or cdr media. So while it is a "whatever works best for you" situation right now, I don't think there is any argument that solid state is the future as it will quickly outstrip capacity of both tape and cd and has a couple of other important benifits, one of which I feel is largely overlooked:
Battery Life. Both tape and CD have to spin discs or pull wheels where a solid state device should only have to power the amp and not much else. A well designed solid state portable is going to far outstrip play time of either tape or CD and this includes CDR/MP3 format players. The thing people seem to forget in that pipe dream very fast is there isn't a single portable CD player (that I have seen anyway) that would even play through the 13 hours of 128kbit mp3s on a CDR once. I fully believe in a few years that a solid state portable will be capable of this many times over and in a much smaller form factor.
Anyway, just some thoughts - jason