{"id":489,"date":"2008-02-19T13:54:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-19T17:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=489"},"modified":"2009-01-14T23:23:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T03:23:29","slug":"odd-lots-45","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=489","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting                 but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I&apos;m                 gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts.                 I&apos;ve discovered that it doesn&apos;t take me a great deal more time                 to write more detailed posts than shorter ones, but not posting                 at all on some days allows me to concentrate more fully on other                 projects.<\/li>\n<li>There is a major total lunar eclipse tomorrow night, 2\/20-2\/21,                 which will be almost perfectly positioned for viewing in the US.                 <a href=\"http:\/\/sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov\/eclipse\/LEplot\/LEplot2001\/LE2008Feb21T.GIF\">See                 the NASA page for details<\/a>. And if you&apos;re not up on lunar eclipses                 generally, ask <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mreclipse.com\/Special\/LEprimer.html\">Mr.                 Eclipse<\/a>. <\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.com\/8301-10784_3-9872058-7.html?tag=nl.e501\">Flash                 memory is getting bigger<\/a>; a 16GB SDHC card would hold a <i>lot<\/i>                 of ebooks.<\/li>\n<li>Pertinent to the above: I&apos;m not bullish on solid-state drives                 based on Flash, especially if they&apos;re positioned to replace ordinary                 spinning-disk hard drives. Flash storage cells can change state                 only so many times until they cease holding a state reliably,                 and extra hardware is needed to &#8220;spread the wealth around&#8221;                 so that frequent write activity in a particular location doesn&apos;t                 kill cells. Flash is thus best used for things like storage of                 music and ebook files, where you write data rarely but read it                 a lot.<\/li>\n<li>Also, Flash may evenually be superceded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/Infotech\/20148\/\">nonvolatile                 phase-change memory<\/a>. We&apos;re still a few years off, but phase-change                 is faster than Flash and may even replace volatile RAM. No information                 yet that I&apos;ve found on whether the cells degrade or die after                 a certain number of write cycles.<\/li>\n<li>One other ebook note: Although most early reviewers claimed                 that the Kindle&apos;s SD slot was limited to 2 GB cards, the truth                 is that the card slot is SDHC and many owners have reported success                 with larger cards up to 8 GB. I don&apos;t have 8 GB of ebooks yet                 and may not for several more years. I just don&apos;t read that fast.                 For people who are actively converting their print library to                 ebooks, however, larger cards are a very important issue.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/bryantpark\/2008\/02\/video_satellite_watchers_watch.html\">This                 nice link to NPR<\/a> came over from Don Doerres, concerning the                 growing hobby of watching satellites. We used to go out and freeze                 butt looking for Echo in the early 1960s, but these guys are calculating                 orbits, photographing flares (momentary bright sunlight glints                 off polished satellite parts) and profoundly irritating the spooks.                 Watch the videos. <i>Really<\/i> watch the videos.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry for the silence here; I rarely go a week without posting but a lot of things ganged up on me. Many have noticed that I&apos;m gradually moving toward posting less often but doing longer posts. I&apos;ve discovered that it doesn&apos;t take me a great deal more time to write more detailed posts than shorter [&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":[61,41,40,17,15],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots","tag-aerospace","tag-astronomy","tag-blogging","tag-ebooks","tag-hardware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":501,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions\/501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}