{"id":1935,"date":"2011-05-24T19:17:17","date_gmt":"2011-05-25T01:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1935"},"modified":"2011-05-24T19:17:17","modified_gmt":"2011-05-25T01:17:17","slug":"odd-lots-155","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=1935","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve just added a book catalog page to my primary WordPress instance of Contra. There&#8217;s a link on the title bar at the top. If you&#8217;re using LiveJournal, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?page_id=1808\" target=\"_blank\">here&#8217;s the direct catalog link<\/a>. From my WordPress instance you can also go direct to an individual title within the catalog by clicking on one of the cover thumbnails in the right sidebar. It&#8217;s a little barebones for now, but it&#8217;ll do until I finish getting the Copperwood Press site rehabbed.<\/li>\n<li>This sounds worse than it probably is: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teleread.com\/android\/bn-restricts-nook-color-internal-storage-to-1gb-for-non-bn-items\/\" target=\"_blank\">B&amp;N has restricted sideloaded content to only 1 GB of the Nook Color&#8217;s internal memory<\/a>. The NC has become very popular as a somewhat broader device than an ebook reader, and I&#8217;m sure B&amp;N is worried that people will fill the little slab up with so much of their own stuff that there&#8217;s no room to buy more from B&amp;N. The key is the MicroSD slot, which (for the time being) can hold up to 32GB. If sideloaded content stored on the MicroSD card is completely accessible to the Nook&#8217;s machinery, it&#8217;s really not a terrible problem. (I don&#8217;t have an NC so I don&#8217;t know for sure.)<\/li>\n<li>B&amp;N&#8217;s certainly been busy: There&#8217;s a new, inexpensive, smaller, lighter e-ink Nook in the pipe called <a href=\"http:\/\/gizmodo.com\/5804989\/the-new-barnes-and-noble-nook-the-cheap-kindle-has-a-challenger\/gallery\/\" target=\"_blank\">Nook Simple Touch<\/a>. 6-inch display and two months on a charge (sheesh!) will appeal hugely to commuters who just want to read books and not do seventeen things at once. $139; mid-June arrival.<\/li>\n<li>Then again, if you want a cheap Nook ($99) and don&#8217;t mind the orginal model, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.engadget.com\/2011\/05\/24\/barnes-and-noble-selling-new-nooks-for-99-on-ebay\/\" target=\"_blank\">go to eBay<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imaginaryplanet.net\/weblogs\/idiotprogrammer\/2010\/11\/ebookepub-production-secrets-tips-tricks\/\" target=\"_blank\">an expert&#8217;s braindump on ebook creation\/formatting<\/a>, which clearly highlights the appalling nature of ebook formats and ebook creation tools. Mobipocket in particular comes in for some (well-deserved) hard whacks with the baton. <em>None of this crap should be necessary<\/em>. An epub file is basically a collection of HTML documents with an external TOC, all wrapped up in a ZIP archive. Why is this so hard to do? (My thought: Immature rendering engines, like Web browsers in 1994. We are compensating for bad software.)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/science-environment-13506289\" target=\"_blank\">This is the high road toward SSTO<\/a>, and I hope to hell they can pull it off. The trick isn&#8217;t so much getting to orbit as getting back intact. We&#8217;ll see.<\/li>\n<li>From the Words-I-Didn&#8217;t-Know-Until-March-But-Forgot-Until-Yesterday Department: <em>oneiric<\/em>; meaning of or pertaining to dreams. Also the adjective in the next Ubuntu animal version code: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linuxfordevices.com\/c\/a\/News\/Ubuntu-1110-tipped\/\" target=\"_blank\">Oneiric Ocelot, due this November<\/a>. Not new news, but I forgot to mention it in March. Dreams, sure. But having read some of the fights that the discussion of Ubuntu Natty&#8217;s Unity desktop has triggered since then, I also picture an ocelot that lost one ear in a bar brawl.<\/li>\n<li>Bichons are notoriously hard to housebreak. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ilovebacon.com\/fresh-bacon\/doesnt-like-being-left-in-the-car.html\" target=\"_blank\">Carbreak too, evidently<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>From the Painfully Obvious Research Department: A study (<a href=\"http:\/\/spp.sagepub.com\/content\/early\/2011\/01\/20\/1948550611398416.full.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">PDF<\/a>) suggesting that when we see people breaking the rules, we assume that they&#8217;re powerful. Duh. (One wonders if a lifetime of watching powerful people be abject shitheads could have anything to do with it.)<\/li>\n<li>And a <a href=\"http:\/\/wattsupwiththat.com\/2011\/05\/24\/forecast-thunderstorms-with-a-chance-of-germstones\/#more-40514\" target=\"_blank\">much more interesting study on the role that some airborne bacteria play in acting as seeds for precipitation<\/a>. Get a look at that hailstone! (Duck!)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.demotivation.us\/books-1247061.html\" target=\"_blank\">Amen, brother<\/a>. (Thanks to John Ridley for the link.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just added a book catalog page to my primary WordPress instance of Contra. There&#8217;s a link on the title bar at the top. If you&#8217;re using LiveJournal, here&#8217;s the direct catalog link. From my WordPress instance you can also go direct to an individual title within the catalog by clicking on one of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[38,17,15,43,59,55,31],"class_list":["post-1935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-dogs","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware","tag-humor","tag-linux","tag-space","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1935\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}