Fading Memories

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.

Ideally...

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.

To read Chinese. Not very well, and only traditional characters (the simplified characters of the PRC were far beneath our dignity in Leyden, at least, when I was a student there). But that's two decades ago, and not much of the ancient skill still lingers.

Which is a pity, since I found four Chinese painting manuals for 50 cents each, dating from the seventies. It's all research for Krita! This one is, judging from the contents, especially about drawing women:

Of course, I still have got all my old dictionaries... But Chinese dictionaries are quite a pain to use. One has to know which "radical" -- the identifying part of the charachter -- the character belongs to. Then you have to count the remaining strokes, and that's generally enough to find the character in the dictionary.

For instance, I seem to remember that the first character of the title belongs to the "man" radical -- that's the two strokes to the left. The other three strokes are also a radical, namely the "earth" radical, but it's the "man" radical that's this character's radical. If I remember correctly, because it got less strokes than the other radical.

Look at this handout that still was in my New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary:

So.. We turn to page 39, where the "man" radical starts, and start looking for the characters with three extra strokes. That's on page 42/43. There we find:

We are in luck! The second meaning of the compound "shinu" means "painting portraying beautiful women". Yes, this book is about what I thought it was about!

Of course, when I studied Chinese you needed an extra board in your computer with all Chinese characters baked into ROM in order to be able to type Chinese. Internet was not for students, especially not for those language types.

These days, it should be easy to create a Chinese dictionary application that lets you draw the character using a stylus or your finger or even the mouse and then checks strokes and stroke order and comes up with the right character. However, I haven't found such an application -- most dictionary want you to find the characters using the Pinyin romanization. Which I don't know if I don't know the character...

Not that I am going to do that. I'm trying to optimize painting in Krita right now, and my compile has just finished.

I'm not sure how I arrived at the website of the Times Literary Supplement and found a review of a book based on Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet's memoirs, "Journal D'une Femme de Cinquante Ans". But is fascinating reading, these memoirs of a lady who was a maid-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and who lives through revolutions, wars, exile and everything.

And I was so glad when I found the e-text! It was only released on March 15th... I haven't read a lot of French lately, but the nineteeth century French Lucie Dillon writes is really easy to read, probably because the French I was taught at school was already fifty years out of date back in the eighties.

But now for the sad part: it's only part 1! The fun bits, where she lives in America as an exile, making her own butter, and where she returns to Europe to hob-nob with Napoleon are missing! Please, Mireille Harmelin and Eric Vautier, I want to read on!

My book on Python and Qt programming -- which has always been plagued by availability problems and a publisher who managed to fail to get it into Amazon -- is finally obsolete: Mark Summerfield's Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt has just been published by Prentice Hall. I haven't read it, but I'm quite confident that it'll be an excellent book.

I know I am person with wide-ranging interests, but how the deuce did Amazon infer that just because I like to read the Church Fathers, I'd also be interested in signal processing? And... Am I interested in signal processing? Image manipulation is special case of signal processing, of course, but I tend to leave that sort of detail to Cyrille Berger and Michael Thaler...

Bjarne Stroustrup

Buy this book.

Since October 2003 I have learned to appreciate the C++ programming language. In fact, the better I get acquainted with C++, the more I like it. So, after having read Practical C++ by Ouailline, C++ in a Nutshell by Lischmer, Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo and a few others, and after having touched half a million lines of C++, I thought it time to go to the master for instruction.

Which is why I bought a second hand copy of The Design and Evolution of C++, and later also The C++ Programming Language. Even though it's an old book, dating back to 1994 (stone age, practically, no mention of Java or Python in this book), TDaEoC++ was exactly right for me. I like reading the combination of a historical treatment and a discussion per "feature" or "problem area" much more than a language specification or a tutorial-style book. I feel I've got a much better understanding of why things are the way they are in C++.

Of course, it's also an advantage that Stroustrup is a clear and entertaining author: not too dry, but not trying to be overly funny either. If I wanted to niggle I'd say that Stroustrup is a little too defensive, although that's understandable given the flak that C++ has been getting since its inception.

Dan Margulis

Buy this book.

Larry Marso wrote to the KImageShop mailing list in January 2006 about this book (two chapters are freely available). It deals with the LAB colorspace and the ways LAB makes it easy to completely mess up, I mean, fix, your photographs. Larry wrote us because just then we had added a 16 bit/channel LAB color colorspace to Krita, more because we needed it as an intermediary than because we knew what people would actually do with it.

Now, about a year later, I decided it was time to get the whole text and see whether Krita can Do This, too, already. I haven't started with that yet, for two reasons: first, I was in hospital, second: the demo files that come with the book are not in nice application-independent TIFF (or OpenRaster...), but in PSD, PSD > version 6, to be exact. I have to hope that Cyrille Berger hurries up with his libpsd (which he's developing together with the Scribus people).

Until that's done, I'll just have to content myself with reading the book. There's no doubt that there is a lot of interesting and good information in it. I really want to give Margulis' recipes a try with Krita, and improve Krita where necessary. But at the same time -- oh my gosh! Margulis is a crashing bore. He's self-important, self-congratulatory, wordy -- in short, nearly unreadable. Still, I'll probably wrestle my way through most of it.

Patricia Bray

Buy this book

I had to go to hospital for a small operation (that nonetheless entailed my first night in a hospital), so I had to have some light reading. This book looked like the most likely satisfying on the fantasy and science fiction shelves of the local bookshop. I had never heard of the author, which is a plus for me, and the world building seemed quite nice, even if a little derivative, with strong echoes of late Byzantium and a map that looked a bit like the Black Sea. And despite being the first of a series, it didn't seem the usual hackneyed first part of a polylogy, but a rounded story.

Turns out that it was good choice: there are interesting people in the book, shades of moral good and bad, the world building is as interesting as it seemed at first blush, the intrigue is complex, but not too complex for my nose-stuffed-up-with-sponges-and-bandaged self. Only near the end it seemed as if Patricia Bray got into trouble: she has set up her various plotlines so that there simply isn't good or bad anymore and it becomes difficult to emphathize with any of the protagonists. But that's quite realistic, too, and the depictions of imperial politics, while not quite as convincing as, say, Psellus (who really was in the thick of it), are convincing.

Another strong point: the main protagonist's condition remained a mystery to me for as long as it remained a mystery to himself, despite carefully crafted hints. To me that shows that this is a well-crafted story. I'm looking forward to the second story about Josan -- even though the preview at the back seems to hint that he won't survive the first twenty pages.

In Krita 2.0, we will be using OpenGL much more than we already do in Krita 1.5, so I need to learn. When ordering the two basic books, OpenGL Programming Guide and OpenGL Shading Language. But Amazon then gave me Open Source Game Development Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows as a related choice.

I was a bit surprised: a whole book on coding games for KDE? But, well, it had an introductory chapter on OpenGL, and I thought that might help me ease into the topic.

It turns out this book is a really excellent, well-written concise and clear introduction to coding for KDE. Not just for coding games, but the whole thing. The ideal beginners introduction for people who are interested in coding for KDE. Of course, it doesn't deal with CMake yet, although there is quite decent coverage of Qt4. And the OpenGL chapter is just what I needed, too.

Buy this book, is my advice!

I am reading An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Additional Notes by Hennry Swete. The Grand Rapids seminary (mildly famous in the Netherlands because they revere our Kuyper, while we have almost forgotten about Abraham de Geweldige) have scanned the 1914 edition of this massive book, tagged it using something called "theological xml markup" and prepared a public domain pdf. With all the Greek, Hebrew and everything intact. It's really a great read, and I wish I had a similar book about the Hebrew old testament and another one on the New Testament, with a final volume on the apocrypha.

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