Eddie's Fancy

I’ve been drooling over the Sony eInk devices since the original Librie was released in Japan. Finally last year the PRS500 was released in America but was retailing for $350, way above my toy budget.

Then a month ago I noticed a deal where if you registered for a Sony Chase Visa you can purchase the reader for $50 plus $50 credit and their eBook store. Score!

I’ve been playing with some free software to convert html files to the native Sony format and have read one full book.

The form-factor is great, small and light yet the display is large enough to read. The eInk display is very crisp, but has a bit of bleed over from the previous screen. The refresh time is slow, but usable. I imagine future generations of this technology will improve on that. Since the display only requires power during transitions, the battery life is on the order of weeks. Also there are plenty of conversion tools so I can grab free books from Project Gutenberg and read them on the device with a bit of tweaking. Reading was pretty pleasant once I got used to the controls, after a few chapters I was ignoring the reader and focusing on the story.

There are a few downsides; it’s a bit underpowered, it only supports SD cards up to 2GB and doesn’t allow you to tag or categorize books on the SD card. Also the desktop software to manage the device and buy eBooks works but is awful. Yet another set of widgets that look nothing like native windows’ controls. A touch screen and wireless access would really enhance the device.

It was definitely worth $50 and I’ll be using it in between real books or while out and about. I still don’t know if I’d spend $350 for it, not unless I had big pile of cash I was just waiting to spend.

One more volume in the Cerebus saga, four more to go. This one covers Cerebus’ encounter with Jaka’s ex-husband Rick and more discussions about Men and Women by Dave Sim. Not much happens until the very end, and while interesting I didn’t care for it as much as some of the other Cerebus volumes. Hopefully events at the end will get the story moving along.

My laptop is somewhere around seven years old. I can browse the web and compile simple programs but not much more without straining it to its limits. But right now I’m too cheap to buy a new one.

As such, I was disappointed to see the Fedora Core 7 upgrade script die with a fault. Not too surprising really, most upgrades don’t come out too well, Linux or Windows. I had backed up all my data files so I rebooted into a full install. I only have 192MB of RAM so the graphical install wouldn’t load, so I tried the text install, which died a horrible painful python exception just after partitioning and formatting my hard drive.

Lovely.

So, on to Ubuntu. Which wouldn’t boot from a CD. Great. Burn to a DVD and it boots but the graphical installer won’t load. So, download the alternative image, burn to DVD and now I’m up an running again. Although, I with their wireless network config manager had an entry for channel.

So far I like Ubuntu, which is not surprising since I’ve used Debian for years. Apt-get is definitely much faster than yum.

I think next time I’m buying a Mac.

Sunday morning I awoke at 4am to the sound of rain. Unfortunately it was coming from out living room. A pipe in the second story attic started leaking directly over an interior wall. The water ran down between the wall, through the floor and pooled on the sheetrock ceiling of the living room before coming through.

One of the more surreal moments of my life was punching a hole in the ceiling with a screwdriver and watching the water run out.

I turned the water off and went back to bed. Later I started pulling down wet drywall and punching holes in the walls upstairs. We’re getting an estimate on pipe work and new water heater, which we’re due for.

It could have been much worse, the water fell on the rug above the hardwood floor which had a rubber pad beneath. Friends have been telling me horror stories all week about incidents, so I feel better.

Life can be interesting.