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January, 2015:

Practical and Impractical Swag

Jan 30th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Borland Thermos and Mug - 500 Wide.jpg

Carol and I were digging out the far dark corners of our walk-in pantry, and an interesting artifact came to hand: A plastic thermos bottle with the following inscription:

It keeps hot food hot, and cold food cold. How does it know? Is it the most “artificially intelligent” object in the galaxy?

At the bottom of the front face was Borland International’s logo. The jug was a teaser for Turbo Prolog, and I think I received it while I was still at PC Tech Journal in the fall of 1986. I had to quote the text here, because as you can see from the photo, a good part of the inscription has been worn away. Why? Because I used it. I used it a lot.

That is not generally the case for swag.

Once I became a computer journalist in 1985, I was offered a lot of swag, and took more of it than I had any need for, mostly to be polite. These were, after all, advertisers and potential advertisers. Carol and I have gotten (and still get) swag from various persons and organizations, and it’s interesting to look around the house and see what we still have, fifteen years after I ceased to have advertisers:

  • In the summer of 1976, Carol attended an open house at a local real estate office in Rochester Minnesota, where she was at grad school. They gave her a yellow plastic noodle strainer reading “Joe Maas Gallery of Homes” and a phone number. Almost 39 years later, we still use it to strain noodles and dumplings and anything else that needs to stay in the pot while dumping the water. Joe Maas’s name is long gone to friction and detergent, but I still remember it. For swag, I’d say mission accomplished.
  • Seven or eight years ago, we received a plastic flyswatter in the shape of a house from the realtor in Chicago who helped us buy our condo. It’s a little smaller than most flyswatters, meaning that it has less mass and is more maneauverable, as a good many flies have found to their sorrow. I’m not sure I’d want my company name slobbered up with bug guts, but I use it most days in the summer and will never forget Rohn Realty.
  • In 1985, Quadram gave me a nice leather reporter’s notebook with their logo on the front. I used to use it a lot for pen-and-ink jotting, until technology made pen-and-ink mostly obsolete. Technology did the same number on Quadram, so I guess it doesn’t matter that I misplaced it some years ago. (I think I know where it is, but I don’t want to dig that deep in a pile that big.)
  • Premia gave me a nice little pen knife / nail file / micro-scissors in 1992 or so with the CodeWright logo on one side. It’s still in my desk drawer and I still use it.
  • Screwdrivers. I still have and use a pocket screwdriver from PK Ware, as well as the one that came in the box with Windows for Workgroups.
  • Thumb drives. These didn’t exist back when still I went to trade shows, but Eric Bowersox gave me a couple of teensy little items that came loaded with just about every piece of documentation AMD was giving away about its processors and motherboards. Double brilliant.
  • Canvas bags. Too numerous to mention. All that came to hand just now long outlived their vendors. A particularly good specimen from the 1991 OOPSLA is still my designated hamfest trick-or-treat bag.

Not everything makes good swag. Here are some cautionary pointers:

  • Pens. Live fast and die quick; that’s the pen motto. All are long gone, although a spring-loaded Levitra gimmick pen given to me by a doctor friend remains in my Personal Museum of Very Odd Things.
  • Coffee mugs. Part of the problem is that everybody gives out coffee mugs, and your swag mug gets lost among all the others, and is eventually given to the local thrift store. The other part of the problem is that coffee mugs aren’t always microwaveable, and if you can’t nuke the brew, that mug is on the short path to oblivion. I gave away the nice OS/2 Warp mug I once had because it was plastic. And early on, swag cups often had foil trim, which catches fire in the microwave. The Borland mug shown above is a very nice item, but man, you should have seen the fireworks when I turned the microwaves loose on it in the early 90s.
  • Clothes. Ok, folks, look at me: Am I an XXL? Then why are all these trade-show T-shirts size XXL? Because you can’t stock six sizes at your booth? Well, look at whose canvas bag I’m toting. It isn’t yours, hint hint.

Not all those XXL T-shirts are gone. We still have a couple, and Carol uses them for nightgowns and swimsuit coverups. A famous example has those cute little whatevertheyares from the cover of O’Reilly’s book Sed and Awk. When we were in St. John’s in 1998, a vacationing geek chatted up Carol, hoping that she was that rarest of beings: a beautiful woman who uses sed and awk. (Carol referred him to me. His disappointment was palpable.)

I’m sure there are others in drawers and cabinets around the house. The wonder isn’t that we still have them (we’re legendary packrats) but that such cheap and usually plastic geegaws can actually serve real needs for longer than ten minutes. Borland’s AI thermos will doubtless see ice-water service again this summer, now that it’s no longer in the bottom of a box. Houses have flies, and thus realtors will give away flyswatters. And a swag strainer that sees near-daily use for 38 years with no end in sight? That should be in a glass case in the Vatican, because God in heaven, it’s a miracle.

Odd Lots

Jan 29th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
13 comments

The Strangest Computer I’ve Ever Built

Jan 26th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
14 comments

COSMAC Face Card.jpg

Lee Hart sent me the guldurndest thing for Christmas: One of his RCA COSMAC CDP1802 Face Card kits. I needed a distraction from a number of things, starting but not ending with publisher disputes. Lee’s Face Card was just the ticket. I haven’t done much PCB soldering in the last few years. Most of what I have done in the electronics sphere was point-to-point, generally on tube circuits. I hadn’t soldered a 40-pin DIP in, well, um…decades?

There’s a knack to it, and I had to dig around a little to find my roll of Ersin .022 Sn63 solder, but after a few minutes’ careful practice it all came back. The kit doesn’t include a 40-pin socket, but I always socket CPUs. The CPU chip I used (see above) has a distinguished history: It was the very same chip I ordered for my original COSMAC Elf project in the fall of 1976. Later it migrated to my second, heavily hacked Elf design (here’s the board mounted on what really was a scrap Xerox 3100 platen cover) with ten banks of CMOS memory (2,560 bytes!) a breadboard block, and a hex keypad. That second Elf board, in turn, became one of two CDP 1802 machines in my well-known robot Cosmo Klein:

Cosmo Klein Color 500 Wide.jpg

Cosmo and I did the SF con circuit from 1978 to the early 80s, and we were actually featured in Look Magazine, as well as an early cable TV program that no one saw.

So I have a certain history with RCA’s peculiar COSMAC architecture, and have built a number of peculiar computers with it. I’m pretty sure none of them were ever quite as peculiar as Lee’s Face Card. Why? The Face Card has no memory, volatile or nonvolatile. It does not run software. Actually, it’s strapped specifically so that it doesn’t run software. (More on this in a moment.) What it does is light up groups of LEDs to make an animated face. How it does this is, well, peculiar: The LEDs are driven from the 1802 chip’s address lines. The data bus is left floating. The 1802, when reset, begins executing code starting at address 0000 in memory. If there’s no memory and the data bus is floating, the chip just executes empty air. The patterns that appear on the address lines aren’t quite random, but close enough so that the LED eyebrows, face, and mouth move in almost random variations. Oh, and the clock speed? One cycle per second.

Peculiar enough for you?

One of the data bus lines has to be pulled high to prevent the binary instruction 00 from executing. This is the HALT opcode, and if empty air delivers 00 to the data bus, the Face Card will freeze and the face pattern will no longer change.

I have special affection for the Face Card because one of the two COSMAC machines in Cosmo displayed an animated face on a portable TV atop his body. Cosmo could look around, smile, frown, and (on a touchtone signal from my 2M HT) lick his chops.

I built the Face Card in about an hour and a half. I’m careful, I work slowly, and I test most components before soldering them into a circuit board. It worked as designed when I turned it on. Theoretically, the system can run on any power source from 4-6VDC. I found that a 5V supply didn’t quite cut it. Some of the LEDs didn’t light fully, and the patterns seemed to get “stuck” now and then. The board has been running at 6V for two days now, and things are brighter and livelier. They’ll be even livelier when I cut the clock generator resistor in half and double the clock speed to two cycles per second.

$19.95 + $5 shipping. CPU socket not included, but I think using one is a good idea.

Highly recommended.

Odd Lots

Jan 25th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

To KU or Not to KU, Part 4: Who It Helps

Jan 17th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Continuing a series begun in my entry for 1/13/2015:

Judging by the ruckus indie authors have been making for a couple of months, you’d think that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) service was universally hated by the author community. Not so: A few vehement dissenting voices have piped up. Christa Lakes blogged that because of KU, October was her best sales month ever. Kathryn Le Veque‘s revenues are up 50% C. L. R. Dougherty writes that although his revenue per unit has declined by 9% for the second half, his total revenue was 46% higher than the first half. Here’s the money quote from his essay:

Borrows increase rankings and make your book more visible, as well as making it less risky to people who don’t know your work.

That may be it, in a nutshell: KU is a mechanism to promote your writing, and like all promotion efforts, it comes at a cost. The downside is that the cost remains even if the promotion won’t make you much more popular. The more popular your work is already, the more damage KU seems to do to your revenues. In the case of an extremely popular author like Holly Ward, it can do a great deal of damage.

Understanding this requires understanding how KU affects author visibility and reader risk-aversion. The risk effect is easily explained: A couple of power readers have already told me that because there is no marginal cost to trying unknown authors, they’re much more willing to do so. If you borrow a book and the first chapter makes you gag, you can return it and borrow another one immediately, having lost nothing more than a little time.

Alas, for readers to try you, they first have to be able to see you, and as you might imagine, the noise level in the Kindle universe is astonishingly high. This is why sales rankings are so important to the KU indie community: They get you above the noise, and if you’re lucky you’ll get noticed. The more borrows you get, the higher your rankings become, and the greater your visibility. It’s precisely the sort of feedback loop you want to kick off, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have much of an existing fanbase. If you get high enough in the Kindle rankings, KDP Select pays “All-Star” bonuses every month that are not trivial:

  • Top ten KDP Select authors get $25,000.
  • Authors in the 11-20 rank get $10,000.
  • Authors in the 21-30 rank get $5,000.
  • Top ten KDP Select titles get $1,000.

with other, smaller bonuses further down the ranks. So there is more than just visbility at stake: That Christmas tree has a golden angel at the top.

KU is an outgrowth of KDP Select, and KDP Select is basically KDP with two major promotional features: Kindle Coundown Deals, which are limited-time discounts, and “Free Days,” which are limited time periods during which a book may be downloaded free of charge. Quite apart from letting your titles go cheap or free, the cost of KDP Select is exclusivity. If a title is there, it isn’t anywhere else. Beyond the drop in revenues, this is what much of the commotion is about: Since KU revenues are unpredictable, authors would like to have alternate revenue streams outside the Kindle ecosystem. Exclusivity makes that impossible.

Although borrows cannibalize sales to some extent, the effect is complex. You can’t “keep” a KU book, so in those cases where a borrowed book is a big hit with a reader, that reader can turn around and buy the book from KDP. This sounds to me like a subtle push toward quality writing, or at least writing of a quality that exceeds what most other KU authors are producing. I’ve read a lot of books that I will only read once, but when books are spectacularly good, I read them more than once, and keep them close at hand.

There’s a pecular unintended consequence of the way that KU pays: Short works are more lucrative than long ones. All titles pay the same on a borrow, irrespective of length. A short story pays you the same $1.40 (or whatever it is this month) as a 100,000-word novel. So little by little, KU titles are shortening up. This has been a trend in ebook fiction generally; I recall thinking a year or two ago that ebook retailing might herald in a new golden age of the short novel, which since the demise of the pulps has been an almost-forgotten form. Things have gone much farther than that on KU: We may be seeing a whole new publishing venue for short stories.

A related consequence: Authors are cutting up their novels into what amount to serials, and making each installment a separate title. Recall that there is no limit to the number of borrows you can do on KU, as long as you only have ten titles on your shelf at any given time. So if a novel consists of five chunks, you can read one in an hour, return it, borrow the next installment, read it in another hour, return it, and so on until the serial has been consumed. (This reminds me of binge-watching TV series.) It’s a minor nuisance to the reader, since each installment has to be separately borrowed and returned, but a major revenue enhancement to authors. I’ve seen some grumbling from readers about this already. Authors are jumping in with both feet.

I’m going to leave the question of whether KU devalues ebooks, or reading itself, for another time. There are different types of reading, each of which engages a different suite of mental machinery. I’ve seen speculation that power readers are creating a new type of reading, in which they skim familiar descriptions and pay greater attention only to what differs from other titles in the same category. I’m going to have to think a little more about that.

But for the moment, I think I have a grip on who is best-served by KU: The new genre fiction writer (especially in romance and mystery) without a fanbase but with some skill and a great deal of determination. In a way, KU is like an online game: You compete with other writers for the attention of readers, and keep score by sales rankings. Money earned is also feedback, but not as immediate as the rankings. If you’re just getting started, playing this game is mandatory. I can’t think of any other way to get noticed faster beyond pure genius or insane luck.

If you’ve got some time in grade and some sort of fanbase, KU is a tougher call. For writers in this category (like me) KU can make the long tail work in your favor. Put your older stuff on KU and use it to keep your flag flying. Put your new stuff on KDP (not KDP Select!) and draw attention to it among your fans any way you can. How well this works I don’t know, and won’t know until later this year, after I get my novelettes out there on KU. I’ll certainly keep you informed. I’m guessing that SF works less well on KU than romance. Since I don’t write romance, it’s a test that I’m unable to run.

If you’re already famous and making a living off your writing alone, KU may not help. It may hurt. The good news is that Amazon’s KU exclusivity runs for 90 days, after which time the title may be pulled from the program. You can run tests. A lot of writers have run those tests, and like dieting, individual differences seem to dominate results. The tests should still be run.

In conclusion, there’s something to remember: Amazon is a force of nature. You may not like it, but it’s not going away. Your challenge is to make the most of it, and not just stand on the sidelines, bitching. If KU benefits enough readers and enough writers, Amazon will keep it alive and feed it. There’s money on that table. Most of the other tables are bare. You can take the money or sit it out.

So…what will it be?

Odd Lots

Jan 16th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments
  • Verizon refuses to stop using tower-side cookies (which can’t be deleted by mobile device users) even as AT&T has caved on the issue. The solution is to stop using Verizon. That’s what Carol and I are about to do.
  • Relax. Microsoft did not pull the plug on Win7 updates on 1/13. That won’t happen until 2020. What’s going away are new OS features and phone support, two things I don’t think the world desperately needs.
  • I like molten lava as much as the next guy. (Just wait until you read my novella Firejammer, coming out–finally–this spring.) That said, I’m not sure I like it quite this much…
  • With January only half over, the Great Lakes ice cover is now up to 34%. Lake Erie has pretty much iced over completely.
  • Britain’s Royal Society has published some evidence that people born during solar maxima do not live as long as people born during solar minima. It may be folate depletion by UV. Or something else. However, the correlation appears to be real. (Thanks to Neil Rest for the link.) Carol and I are solar minima babies, whew.
  • Discovered two very good red wines recently: Menage a Trois Red, and Menage a Trois Midnight. Both are dry reds, both are fruit-forward, and (in contradiction of the vintner’s Web writeups) neither has any detectable oak. I guess if you’re going to get the hipster market you have to claim oak, even if you lie about it. In this case, nothing of value was lost.
  • I doubt that my readers are dumb enough to think you can lose weight by ingesting chemistry sets like Slim-Fast. But just in case, read what Tom Naughton says about recent diet rankings in content-free publications like US News. Hint: The same doofi who bleat endlessly against “processed foods” (which now means “any foods I don’t like”) are endorsing fructose cocktails like Slim-Fast over Atkins and paleo.
  • Popular Mechanics lists the 14 best cities in America for startups. None are in Silicon Valley, and all are in relatively low-cost areas. Maybe hipster city cachet is finally starting to lose its cachet. Or so we can hope.
  • Lots has happened in CPU architectures since the 1980s, when a lot of us learned it. (I started a little earlier, but the IBM PC brought most of us to a new starting gate at the same time.) Here’s a decent summary. One consequence of all this is that human-written assembly language is less of a win over compilers, and the best reason to learn assembly these days is to understand what your damned compilers are up to in there.
  • Before he broke into the SF business, Keith Laumer was an ace model airplane designer. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Physically small, fanless PCs have been around for awhile, and I was bullish on them until I began using Dell USFF (ultra-small form factor) machines like the Optiplex 780, which are pretty small and almost entirely silent. Should we settle for 1.6 GHz? Only if there’s a specific application in mind, like education (think RPi) or embeddedness.
  • Bill Cherepy sends us news of a thermostatic butter keeper that can keep a stick of butter (block? It’s a form factor we don’t make in the US) at any arbitrary temp from 15 to 23 degrees C. Butter is definitely coming back into its own, bravo halleluia!

To KU or Not to KU, Part 3: How It Pays

Jan 15th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Continuing a series begun in my entry for 1/13/2015:

The benefits of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) program are reasonably clear for readers, especially “power readers,” who read over ten books per month. In fact, the program seems to have been designed for power readers, and I’m starting to hear from power readers who use KU and consider it a good deal for the money.

Now let’s look at the flipside: Is it a good deal for authors? That’s a kind of a tangled question.

First of all, my research suggests that Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP) has been very good for indie authors and publishers. As I mentioned earlier in this series, much depends on what you’re writing and how quickly you can crank it out. Amazon has a program called KDP Select (KDPS) which is mostly about promoting your work, and all titles on KDP Select are also on KU. I’ll explain how KDPS works in a future entry; it’s complicated.

A fair number of authors writing in popular categories have been making their sole living off Amazon’s various Kindle programs for some time now. With KDP, payment is pretty simple: For books with cover prices falling between $2.99 and $9.99, authors get 70%, Amazon gets 30%. For those 99c novels you hear about (or anything with a cover price less than $2.99) authors get 35%, Amazon 65%. Authors are paid after the customer orders the book and pays Amazon for it, whether the book is actually read or not.

Under most author agreements with KU, this all changes. KU books are borrowed, not sold. A borrowed book generates a royalty payment when the customer has read 10% or more of it. (Yes, Amazon knows how much of a KU book you’ve read. It’s a cloud system, and the cloudowner knows everything about what goes on in its cloud.) KU borrows of books published by traditional publishers generate the same royalty payment as a conventional sale, but that’s a much smaller group of authors, and not what I want to talk about in this series.

So: How much is the payment for a KU borrow? It depends on two things:

  1. How much money Amazon has placed in a payment fund for KU borrows, and
  2. How many borrows actually happen.

Yes, you read that right: All KU borrows share funds from a fixed pool that Amazon “fills” at the beginning of every month. If the pool contains a million dollars and a million borrows happen, each author of a borrowed book gets a dollar for that borrow. That simpleminded example is not far from real-life. Roger Packer published a nice chart of KU payouts from July to October, 2014. In July, payouts were $1.86. Payouts dropped each month, until by October they were $1.33. Then, in November, payouts rose to $1.40.

Why? My guess: All hell was starting to break loose.

On a thread in the KBoards forums, bestselling author Holly Ward reported that since she started with KU, her income from both KU borrows and KDP sales had gone down by 75%. Lesser-known authors complained about the same drop in sales later in the thread. (Read it all; it’s an eye-opener.) It wasn’t just a reduction in the payment per borrow; conventional KDP sales had dropped as well. KU was evidently scavenging sales from KDP, and authors were starting to yell. Amazon allocated more money for KU borrows, hence the November rise. (The December 2014 payout level is not yet known.)

Remember that titles published under KU are exclusive to Amazon. Authors give up sales from B&N, iBooks, Kobo, and every other channel. So if KU and KDPS revenues fall, there’s no other money pipe running.

KU is still pretty new, and author discontent is even newer. Nobody knows if Amazon will respond with a bigger money pot or just ignore the author anguish and ride it out. I’m following the matter closely now and will report here when anything interesting happens.

In the meantime, in the wake of November’s author explosion, the question arises: Why do any authors stay with KDPS/KU at all? There are certainly costs, and as Holly Ward discovered, those costs are significant. Are there benefits? Well. Let me scratch my head a little, and in the next entry in this series I’ll explore that, which is the gnarliest KU question of all.

To KU or Not to KU, Part 2: How It Works

Jan 14th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Continuing a series begun in my entry for 1/13/2015:

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) is an ebook subscription service currently available to the US market for $9.99/month. KU books aren’t “sold” (the term used is “borrowed”) and you don’t get separate ebook files. The service is totally cloud-based, and (unlike the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, from which KU evolved) works with the Kindle app as well as Kindle hardware. So you can read KU books on any device for which there’s a Kindle app. However, maintaining your KU account must be done from either a Kindle device or a Web browser.

When you establish a KU account, you’re given a bookshelf on the cloud with slots for ten books. You can borrow books to fill all ten slots without any sort of time limit, but to read an eleventh book, you have to “return” one of the ten on your shelf. Otherwise, the books you place on your shelf stay there until you return them or until you cancel your KU account. Interestingly, your place in the book and any notes and highlights you create are retained, and if you borrow the book again, your place and your notes come back down with it. This is true even if you cancel your KU account and start it up again later on.

Here’s a link to the KU browse screen. The collection is quirky, though what you see initially looks pretty reasonable. Life of Pi is there, along with the Hunger Games books, The Handmaid’s Tale, and a fair number of other things that I recognize. The catch is that power readers have probably already read most of the good stuff.

There is only so much good stuff by that definition. At this time, the vast majority of KU books come from Amazon’s Kindle Desktop Publishing (KDP) Select program. All books published with KDP Select are automatically available through KU. Authors who want to stay out of KU (more on this in my next extry) need to stay out of KDP Select. (Note that KDP Select is not the same as KDP.) Amazon is cutting deals with conventional publishers for ebooks to include in KU, but the larger publishers are holding back. Statistically, a KU title is a KDP Select title. For the vast majority of KDP Select authors, KU requires an exclusive; that is, if you sell a title through KU, you can’t sell it through the B&N store, Kobo, iBooks, etc. (Amazon granted an exclusivity waiver to many larger publishers and a small number of very popular KDP authors to rope them into KU.) I’m getting a little ahead of myself with that; the exclusivity thing is worth further discussion, which I’ll get to in connection with author issues.

As I suggested in my previous entry, whether KU makes sense for you as a reader depends entirely on two things:

  1. How many books you read a month; and
  2. Whether the books on KU are what you’re looking for.

If you read at least a dozen 99c novels a month, KU may be just the thing. A lot of power readers (and I know more than a few) read a whole book every day. For those who prefer novels in the higher-priced brackets, breakeven on the $10 monthly hit happens a lot sooner…if the sort of material you like is on KU at all. Right now that’s an imponderable, though I’ll say straight-up that nonfiction is pretty scarce. You won’t know until you go digging.

Well. That’s how it works. Now, what about those unintended consequences? And is it a good deal for authors? Stay tuned, kiddies: The head-scratching gets serious in my next entry.

To KU or Not to KU, Part 1: What Is It?

Jan 13th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Back last July, when Amazon announced its Kindle Unlimited (KU) program, I scratched my head and said, “Well.” When I scratch my head and say, “Well,” it generally means that I’m confronting something that appears to be a good idea but will definitely generate unintended consequences. So it was with the ACA, and so it is with KU.

Thankfully, KU lacks the power to bring down an entire industry…or does it? Stay with me; I’ll offer up what insights I can.

KU is a subscription service for ebooks. Pay Amazon $10 a month, and it’s all-you-can-slurp from a 700,000-book collection that includes both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Sounds great! Except…once you get past Harry and Frodo, the slurpins get mighty thin mighty fast. From what I’ve read, not a single one of the Big Five has placed any books with KU. KU is populated by small press, very small press, and (overwhelmingly) self-publishers. The material published on KU leans way toward genre fiction, especially romance, erotica, and mysteries. (Good numbers on KU categories have proven hard to come by. If you have them, please share.)

I compare KU to Netflix, where much of what you find is what nobody wants to pay for as individual titles. It’s not about “Where’s the show I want?” so much as “What’s out there to fill an hour or two of dead time?” In that respect, KU could be considered the mass-market paperback shelf of the ebook world. MM paperbacks were created to be read once, just like the pulp magazines that preceded them. They were a way to kill time. I’m not sure anybody expected that they would remain on reader shelves for decades, as some of mine have. (Most have been given away or tossed in the recycle bin. And I admit that my favorites have been falling apart for decades.) There were power readers back then who would read a book basically every day, picking a library fiction section clean in a couple of months or less, and spending an extraordinary amount of money on new titles at the bookstore. I think we have more power readers now than ever before. KU goes to great lengths to connect power readers with (mostly) new titles. So it’s a Really Good Thing for authors, right?

“Well,” he said, scratching his head.

Next entry: How it works.

Odd Lots

Jan 9th, 2015
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Intel’s announced the Compute Stick, a complete $150 Win8.1 machine in the format of a fat thumb drive. Looks like the plug is HDMI, though, and the device gets power from an uncommitted USB port. I could see this melting seamlessly into a big-screen TV (or any monitor with an HDMI input) and giving you something that indeed approaches (as Michael Abrash said probably 20 years ago about 21″ CRT monitors) Windows on your bedroom wall. (Thanks to Eric Bowersox for the link.)
  • It’ll be awhile before this becomes available, but a brand-new antibiotic has been isolated from bacteria that live in dirt. I’m doubly enthuisastic because this may encourage researchers to look harder at bacteriophages, which live in dirt and worse.
  • If you haven’t heard of Smart Pascal, it’s an interesting concept and worth a look: A commercial Object Pascal compiler that generates HTML5 apps. It’s basically a way of writing sophisticated Javascript apps without having to wash your mental hands and rinse your brain out every twenty minutes. To me that would be worth $42/year.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: A selfie stick (also known as a narcissistick) is a camera holder that allows you to take pictures of yourself or groups by parking your camera on it and holding it up in the air so that the camera is facing you. It’s usually just a rod with a handle, sometimes telescoping. Many support bluetooth to trigger the camera, though the details remain obscure to me.
  • Beware the Facebook Logic Fallacy: One member of Group X is evil, therefore all members of Group X are evil. Much of my objection to Facebook memes is that this is a very common template. Attack memes must die. Not sure how to get there from here.
  • The percentage of ice cover on the Great Lakes is now 18.7%. Keep an eye on this graphic, as I think our current winter stands to be an…interesting…season from a Great Lakes ice perspective.
  • In general I’m no fan of government regulation, but here’s an excellent argument that both broadband providers and airlines could use a little consumer-oriented regulation.
  • Related to the above: Air travel is a lousy business (rather like health insurance, in fact) and merciless price competition has led to creative fee-hiding and generally charging extra for a travel experience that hasn’t been made deliberately miserable.
  • From the Department of the Painfully Obvious: There are many benefits in finding a spouse who is also your best friend. I guess it’s nice to have some research behind it, but damn, is this really news to anyone? (Maybe New Yorkers.)