In which Nikki holidayed!
I have just got back from holidaying with my lovely Cambridge neighbours - we went to the Lake District, and played cards and made brownies and admired the pleasingly named and very pretty surroundings, and walked and picnicked and read books and did crosswords and generally had an excellent time! Also, importantly, the only time it rained was when we were already indoors and not planning to go out. We had amazing weather when we went away together last year, too, it's kinda uncanny!
My family was mostly absent when I got back; my brother was the only one nominally at home, but he's been off at work two out of three days. Still, the day he was home he actually did housework without complaining, so I almost forgive him for having left an empty milk bottle in the sun without washing it out (I dunno how long it'd been there, but it was clearly too long).
In other news, I decided to reward myself for spending all almost all my pay from my summer job by buying an ebook reader, because, well, I'm a Linux-using Internet-dwelling kind of a geek as well as the kind who's gone to university to study Lots Of Old Books, and the prospect of being able to combine these two loves is intriguing. Especially when it offers the prospect of collect everything out of copyright for free via the internet. So once I'd noticed the new generation Amazon reader ebook reader was rather shiny-looking and just over £100, and that the proprietary format Amazon sells its ebooks in wasn't the only thing it supported, and that indeed there was a shiny piece of software that could convert almost anything into an ebook, I decided to preorder one...
It arrived yesterday, and I'm pleased. It's light and the screen's a good size to read from, and the fancy non-back-lit screen does make reading more like reading printed pages than reading something on a computer. Putting things on is as simple as clicking and dragging, and all the .pdfs I've converted into the ebook .mobi format have come out with their formatting reasonably intact and their fonts changed to the right size for the reader.
The only ways it's annoyed me so far have been that it's sometimes slow to bring up the "Home" screen that displays all the files you've got on the device - it can take about twenty seconds to bring up a page that's only got about twelve filenames on, which is kinda worrying given I've got 60 books on there already and I've had it less than 24 hours... That, and that trying to connect it to our house's wireless network it threw up ambiguous and unhelpful errors until as a last-ditch attempt I took the thing downstairs and right next to our router. Apparently a low signal had been the problem, but from the "could not connect" message that wasn't at all obvious.
Still, it's a very nice toy, and it's extremely cool to be able to put essays from the internet and fanfiction alongside Official Classical Literature. Not that I don't love solid printed books (and I definitely don't think I'll be giving up second-hand bookshops any time soon), but I'm psyched about ebook readers and what they could mean for "amateur" writers. It'll be very cool to see how they work out! (And I'm be eagerly looking out for places to find ebooks or .pdfs or interesting writing-y things in general other than Amazon's store, so if anyone has cool links for me I shall be pleased)
My family was mostly absent when I got back; my brother was the only one nominally at home, but he's been off at work two out of three days. Still, the day he was home he actually did housework without complaining, so I almost forgive him for having left an empty milk bottle in the sun without washing it out (I dunno how long it'd been there, but it was clearly too long).
In other news, I decided to reward myself for spending all almost all my pay from my summer job by buying an ebook reader, because, well, I'm a Linux-using Internet-dwelling kind of a geek as well as the kind who's gone to university to study Lots Of Old Books, and the prospect of being able to combine these two loves is intriguing. Especially when it offers the prospect of collect everything out of copyright for free via the internet. So once I'd noticed the new generation Amazon reader ebook reader was rather shiny-looking and just over £100, and that the proprietary format Amazon sells its ebooks in wasn't the only thing it supported, and that indeed there was a shiny piece of software that could convert almost anything into an ebook, I decided to preorder one...
It arrived yesterday, and I'm pleased. It's light and the screen's a good size to read from, and the fancy non-back-lit screen does make reading more like reading printed pages than reading something on a computer. Putting things on is as simple as clicking and dragging, and all the .pdfs I've converted into the ebook .mobi format have come out with their formatting reasonably intact and their fonts changed to the right size for the reader.
The only ways it's annoyed me so far have been that it's sometimes slow to bring up the "Home" screen that displays all the files you've got on the device - it can take about twenty seconds to bring up a page that's only got about twelve filenames on, which is kinda worrying given I've got 60 books on there already and I've had it less than 24 hours... That, and that trying to connect it to our house's wireless network it threw up ambiguous and unhelpful errors until as a last-ditch attempt I took the thing downstairs and right next to our router. Apparently a low signal had been the problem, but from the "could not connect" message that wasn't at all obvious.
Still, it's a very nice toy, and it's extremely cool to be able to put essays from the internet and fanfiction alongside Official Classical Literature. Not that I don't love solid printed books (and I definitely don't think I'll be giving up second-hand bookshops any time soon), but I'm psyched about ebook readers and what they could mean for "amateur" writers. It'll be very cool to see how they work out! (And I'm be eagerly looking out for places to find ebooks or .pdfs or interesting writing-y things in general other than Amazon's store, so if anyone has cool links for me I shall be pleased)