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2011-11-25
2011-11-19
In the past two years I've travelled a lot, on average about a week a month. I usually take about six books with me if I'm away for a week, but I also started reading books on my laptop, just to have more variety. But my laptop is heavy and not comfortable for reading in a hotel bed. Then I realized that it might be a smart thing to buy a dedicated e-reader. I'm a reader, and I've got about ten thousand books, but I'm not a bibliophile, I don't care about first editions, for instance.
But which one? Kindle was out of the question, since I don't want Amazon to be able to track or even delete my reading habits. I also am quite sure that I will carry around a lot of books, so I wanted to have an SD card slot. And if the device is hackable, that's a plus.
I got the Sony PRS T1 reader on the day it was released:
I've got it for a month now, there are about 500 books on the device, I've spend quite a few hours with it and I've learned what this kind of device is good for, and what it isn't suitable for. In short, it's great if you want to read a novel from cover to cover, and it's atrocious if you're actually someone who uses books.
An advantage or disadvantage is that nobody can see what you are reading: no more peeking around you on the plain or train to see what people are reading, no more smiles of understanding between two Terry Pratchett lovers. On the other hand, since nobody sees what you are reading, no longer sharp remarks about being a poser who is just trying to impress if you accidentally happen to be reading Donne. Or sad looks about your lack of taste if you happen to be reading 1634 by Eric Flint.
Technically, my Sony PRS T1 is pretty ok. There are some bugs, especially in the touch screen which is prone to getting confused and will then turn dozens of pages in a quick succession, but nothing too serious.
The screen is good, though a the white is bit too gray, and it's too small. They tell you that your e-reader will have the same size as a paperback, but that's only true if you count the bezel and buttons. There's much less text on the screen than there's on a page of a real book.
I like the fact that this device has real buttons to go to the next and previous page -- I find that easier ot use than the screen gestures. The touch screen keyboard is pretty good, very usable.
The back is rubberized for good grip, and I wish the front was as well, but it's shiny plastic. Not so good. The whole device feels a bit cheap, which is actually a good thing, because it means I don't feel forced to be too careful with it, even though it cost 150 euros. I pop it in my coat pocket or backpack, carry it everywhere.
Battery life is wonderful, and for reading long stretched of text it's great that I can change the fontsize. When I read in bed without my glasses, I can make it small, when I'm using my glasses it needs to be bigger. But the choice of fonts is pretty limited.
It's pretty easy to add new books from Linux, I don't even use Calibre for that, I just copy them to the right location on the device. And project gutenberg is stuffed with the kind of thing I like to read.
The thing is, this e-reader is nearly good enough. It's tantalizing. Already ten years ago I was dreaming of a device close to this one. But an e-reader made for serious users of books.
It should have a bigger screen, at least A5, but color isn't necessary.
it should come out of the box reasonably well-formatted copies of all the classics, from the Odyssee to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, from Jane Austen to Kalidasa, from Mengzi to Layla and Majnun, both in the original language and in an English translation, and a way to show both in parallel.
The text should be searchable, but there should also be some serious smartnesss in that search facility: I want to be able to select a passage and nearly immediately get a list of places from which that passage can be a quote and where that passage is quoted. Wikipedia integration is great, but selecting a name should give me a list of all works where that name occurs. A chapter quote should link to that book, as well as books about those books.
There should be a serendipity feature, where browsing through the list of available books is replaced by "give me something that suits my mood" or "give me fiction about Tipu Sultan".
More and better fonts. I want to have Bodoni for my French books, Bembo for my books in Italian and Caslon for my books in English. I got a copy of Mengzi on my Sony, but there's no Chinese font!
It should be much easier to have a set of books open at the same time -- instead of having just one open and the reset remember their current page. Opening a new book doesn't mean closing the other one!
Text to speech -- especially in the dictionary, especially important for English, which does pose some challenges for a foreign reader.
/books | permanent link |
2011-11-14
Of course, I'd also wanted to blog on the second day of the Calligra sprint, but we were way too busy... In the morning we had the usual plenary meeting. Among other topics, we discussed an extension to the 2.4 release schedule. In view of the current state of the Quality Dashboard, we decided to have at least one more beta release, which probably will move the release into 2012. At the same time, our release manager Cyrille Berger, who couldn't join us, had come to the same conclusion.
Then SKF gave a remote presentation to everyone present on how they use Calligra Words in their application. They are developing a modelling and calculation application and using Calligra Words as the report writing component. The main application creates tables, images and plots which inserted in a document in the embedded Words component. The engineer then addes the explaining text. Those generated items are tagged using RDF, which means that if the input data changes, it become trivial to update just those items while the text the user has created remains intact. We got a remote, life demo of their application, event. It's immensely encouraging for everyone in the community to see Calligra being used in real life!
Then Nokia presented every attendee who didn't have a Harmattan device yet with one; an N9 or N950! This once again showed everyone how far along we have come, since it contains the Documents application with is built on the Calligra core office engine.
Despite giving many people new toys to play with, the commits never stopped coming in, and also from a coding perspective, the weekend was very succesful.
An extremely nice dinner in , which the seven Indians acknowledged present acknowledged tasted very authentic rounded off the day, or would have, had we not congregated in the lobby of the Radisson Seaside hotel for some more hacking. And playing with the new devices.
On Sunday, I spent most of my time in a separate room with Pierre, Pierre, Boemann, Thorsten and Leinir, taking a step back to look at the purpose and problems of a text editing component with a goal of identifying where there are conceptual problems in the current design in Calligra's text component. And then there was a group photo (by Dmitry).
Lunch (the lunches provided by Nokia were awesome!) We also got a presentation by Nokia's Abishek on Sunday showing us how well Calligra does as the core engine for Harmattan Office -- and what could be improved still. It's amazing that in some areas, like showing embedded charts in spreadsheets, we're better than Micrsoft's mobile office on Windows Phone.
Many thanks to Nokia for hosting the sprint in their office building, providing us with lunch and dinner, and to Nokia and KO for sponsoring travel and accomodation!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-11
Pierre Stirnweiss, Dimitrios Tanis and I arrived together this afternoon in the Nokia office in Helsinki. By coincidence, we're actually using the same room that we occupied when we first discussed putting Calligra (back then, still KOffice) inside Nokia phones! Kind of historic ground!
The usual suspects are here, but also many new faces, like Smit Patel and Brijesh Patel, who hack on Words and Dimitrios Tanis who is doing documentation and is now turning into a Kexi hacker!
We've come a long way since then... We have created at least three different applications based on the Calligra engine. It started with FreOffice, a QWidget-based office application for the FreMantle release of Maemo. The code for this application lives right inside the Calligra source repository. Then came Harmattan Office, which will also be released under GPL. Harmattan Office uses QGraphicsView and MeegoTouch. Having Harmattan Office installed by default on the N9 means that Calligra suddenly has hundreds of thousands of users, since the N9 turns out to be an extremely popular device. And then Nokia sponsored Shantanu to create Calligra Active, a Qt Quick-based document viewer based on Calligra that's part of Plasma Active.
But now it's time to go full-tilt for the 2.4 release of the Desktop applications! There's plenty of cool stuff going on, from discussions about the difference between pre-, post- and ambilactarianism, to new comboboxes for the style dockers, to attempts to get Thorsten to commit his line endings. (We're in freeze, but those arrows are smooth...) The room is already full, more people have to arrive, it's noisy, everyone is active -- this is going to be a great weekend!
Thanks go to Nokia and KO GmbH for sponsoring travel, accommodation and dinner!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-07
This was one busy weekend! We had the Krita bug day, of course. But that wasn't the only thing happening: finally the printed comics were delivered! Consquently, Animtim took the train to Deventer and spent the weekend drawing dedications in the pre-ordered comics.
Meanwhile, Irina was busy preparing the list of addresses and printing the address tickers. Then it was time to start stuffing the jiffy bags:
Sort the jiffy bags
And stack them
With a huge stack as result:
Now all that is needed is to get the stamps and send them off, and everyone who pre-ordered a comic-book + dvd pack will get to see the result
If in the coming week or two you do not receive your order, or your order is not correct, please mail me! It's the first time we've done something like this...
And if you haven't ordered your copy, there are still a few left, so don't hesitate, and go to the Krita website and press the order button!
/kde | permanent link |