Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, July 29, 2022
Four Things
1. Thanks to Hacker News and The Verge I had a trip down memory lane in the form of their look back at Asus Eee PC-branded netbooks:
There were two products that arrived in 2007 that fundamentally changed computing: one, of course, was the iPhone. The second, obviously more important product was the $399 Eee PC 701. It originally ran a custom Linux operating system that reviewers loved (Laptop Mag's Mark Spoonauer said it was "ten times simpler to use than any Windows notebook") and was generally heralded as a new kind of computer with tremendous mass appeal. Spoonauer: "Pound for pound, the best value-priced notebook on the planet." [link omitted]I bought one of these and and loved it.
The Verge piece argues that the netbook paved the way for the iPad, which is probably true in that most people used them to consume media.
But I found the form factor so useful for traveling -- and the iPad so not useful for so many of the things that I ended up using my netbook for -- that I would eventually buy a second netbook. And, when that bit the dust -- and that segment of the market had died -- I bought a Chromebook and installed Linux on it, with an assist from the wish-granting genie that is the internet. (I use an encrypted Micro SD card to have a decent amount of storage.)
It's five years old now and I use it far more often than the iPad I also own.
2. Illegible Work isn't just something an elementary teacher might write in red on a schoolboy's homework:
Cook, a consultant, goes on to note that much of his work is illegible.When James Scott uses the word legible, he doesn't refer to handwriting that is clear enough to read. He uses the word more broadly to mean something that is easy to classify, something that is bureaucrat-friendly. A thing is illegible if it is hard to pigeonhole. I first heard the term from Venkatesh Rao's essay "A Big Little Idea Called Legibility." [link omitted]
Asemic "writing" is beyond illegible! (Image by Marco Giovenale, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)
He follows on with a crack about trying to search for his type of work on Google -- with terms that one wonders might cause more potential customers to land on his site.
3. The next time you want an electronic version of a classic that has passed into the public domain, know that Project Gutenberg is hardly the only game in town. A volunteer-driven, "low-profit LLC" project called Standard Ebooks is worth considering:
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.The landing page explains what makes them stand apart from other similar projects, including: modern typography, proofing and corrections, rich metadata, and support for some popular e-reader features (e.g., popup footnotes).
4. It's an oldy but a goody, and I found it one day when I was puzzled by a practice I see now and then and asked Why? The title just about says it all: Why do people (people) put numbers (numbers) in parentheses?
A sample:
I was reading an application for a grant program at our local library recently when I encountered a series of phrases that were couched in terminology that just set me afire with curiosity.I can't say, If you ever wanted to know where this came from, wonder no more, but I can still recommend the post for a good laugh.
The author, who is a colleague of mine, had put Arabic numerals in parentheses after each mention of a number. For example:
The application shall be completed in three (3) parts, and with three (3) copies to be turned in by June 30, 2012.
I have always been irritated by this style of writing because it seems so insulting. Does the author think I'm stupid? Or do they think that I don't know my numbers?
-- CAV
3 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write, "A volunteer-driven, "low-profit LLC" project called Standard Ebooks is worth considering: Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks."
Nice. Has lots of early Wodehouse, I see. Might that be how you found it? [Grin.] As for their wares, there's some good stuff there I haven't found easily in the usual places, such as Kuprin, Andreyev, and Frances Harper. (Though a lot of them I have for the simple reason that about 6 or 7 years ago, one e-book company made something like 6000 of their offerings available for free. I was selective enough I only nabbed a bit over 2000. Suffice it to say I ended up with excellent coverage of any gaps I might have had. Now if only I ever had time to read them all...)
After looking through the first half of the site, I'd recommend these if you don't have them: Fritz Leiber's short fiction, M.R. James's short fiction (some of the best ghost stories around), and James Branch Cabell's Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, which when I read it c. age 12 was a hoot and a half and no mistake. Hopefully it's still good. (Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice was named in tribute to it, but when I read it sometime after the Cabell, I didn't like it as much on the whole--but then much Heinlein after about 1963 I never have liked much.)
Yo, Gus, and now that I've been through them all, I'd also recommend the Algis Budrys stories (a fine SF writer not well enough known outside the genre or by more recent writers), Poul Anderson stories (ditto), Lieber's The Big Time, perhaps the Stanley Weinbaum stories (an interesting SF writer from the 1930s who published around a dozen stories before dying far, far too young), and if you're in a mood for the great writers of weird stories worshipped by Lovecraft besides M.R. James (who did not have a favorable opinion of Lovecraft's writing at all in return), there's some Dunsany and Machen there--though they thus far lack the fourth of the quadrumvirate and my favorite, Algernon Blackwood. (Oh, and they have Robert Chambers' The King in Yellow, which is well worth a read, definitely a masterpiece of its kind; Chambers' weird tales I find stylistically very impressive in a sort of slipperiness in conveying background info in such a way as to evoke the background well, and have often meant to sit down some time and pick one or two apart to see how he makes that tick.)
So, in short, they're off to a great start in both regular literature and SF/fantasy (not so much mysteries), and I expect it could turn out to be a superb resource.
Snedcat,
Thanks for doing some scouting over there! I merely had annotated it as something to do later after I'd found this.
Good to hear about Wodehouse, but this find was was from a recent daily visit to /Hacker News/.
I've read a fair amount of Wodehouse thanks to Project Gutenberg. It will be interesting to see if Standard Books had material new to me and, if they do, probably, a lot easier to read.
Gus
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