The many troubles with e-books

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , , , ,

A brief essay by free software pioneer Richard Stallman on the problems with e-books made the front page of Slashdot today. It’s everything I’ve come to expect from Stallman. I found myself vigorously agreeing with parts of it, and vigorously disagreeing with other parts of it.

But mainly I found myself disappointed that he didn’t really elaborate much. Maybe it’s because he covered similar ground once before in his 1997 dystopian 1984-ish short story, The Right to Read.

And, to me, that’s the problem. We’re on a slippery slope. Today it sounds ridiculous that it could be illegal to loan your laptop or your e-reader or your tablet to someone else. But prior to 2009, the idea that you could buy a book and then at some point the party that sold it to you could take it back from you without permission sounded ridiculous.
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Linguistic analysis isn’t hooey

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

For the second time in two months, I’ve seen a case where a linguist analyzed writing and tried to conclude whether someone was or wasn’t the author of a suspicious e-mail message. The first was a threatening letter purportedly sent to Christopher Coleman, who was convicted last month of murdering his family, and the other was Paul Ceglia’s attempt to prove he owns a substantial share of Facebook.

The inevitable flood of comments calling such analysis “black magic” followed. But as an author, I have to give validity to it.

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How to find IDE pin 1 and floppy pin 1

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Retro Computing
How to find IDE pin 1 and floppy pin 1

If you mess around with old PCs, you’ll need to know how to find IDE pin 1 and floppy pin 1 on old drives. Sometimes there will be a mark by pin 1. The connector should even be keyed so you can’t insert the connector upside down. Usually it’s one or the other, but sometimes it’s neither.

Typically a red stripe indicates pin 1 on the cable side, and either a silk screened indicator or a square solder joint on the connector side. 

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Punishing heat.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

Yesterday it was a record-setting 98 degrees officially, with heat index well over 100. According to some weather stations near me, the temperature topped out at 102. Honestly, I don’t think a couple of degrees one way or the other makes much difference at that temperature.

This morning it was a comparatively brisk 82 degrees out, so I mowed the lawn. I lowered the mower as far as I could without the mower stalling, because 90-plus degrees is probably going to be the norm until August or September. Shorter grass will be easier to mow, and if it turns brown on me, then it’s easier still.

Boom! Poof! Silence.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

We had a power outage tonight. There was a boom, then a poof, then silence as everything in the house shut down. Maybe a nearby transformer couldn’t handle everyone running their air conditioners to escape the 95-plus degree heat. Maybe a squirrel got somewhere it shouldn’t have. I didn’t bug the service guys to find out.

I’ll be back tomorrow with some stuff. I’m too tired now to post anything else for the day. On the plus side, I got the excuse I needed to move my web server to the place where it belongs, rather than the “temporary” area where I staged it and it’s been sitting since, oh, September. It was already down, so taking an extra 10 minutes to move it didn’t hurt anything.

If you’ve been delaying upgrading your network, keep delaying

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , , ,

If you’ve been procrastinating about deploying 450-megabit (802.11n) wi-fi to your house, I have a reason for you to procrastinate a while longer: Gigabit wireless (802.11ac).

It’s only about twice as fast as its predecessor, which pales next to the 8x improvement 802.11n provided over 802.11g, but if you’re wanting to stream HD media through your house, you’ll notice the difference.
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Compress Commodore programs with Exomizer

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , ,

Exomizer is a compression program for Commodore and other 8-bit computers. The compressed program still runs, but it takes up less space on disk. Decompressing takes some time, but usually less time than reading more data off a 1541 disk. And unlike native packers which sometimes take all night to run, Exomizer runs on modern PCs, so it runs extremely quickly.

The space savings isn’t as much of a consideration now as it was in 1986, but being able to cram as many programs as possible on a single disk image makes access more convenient.

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