It’s starting to be a bit of a single topic this week - guess I have phases.
In a recent post I mentioned deciding to take the Mount TBR challenge to read some of the books I have owned a while and not yet read (or meant to re-read but never got around to).

I figure this won’t happen unless I make a list of the first few books to get publicly started. So these are the first five, chosen in part as they were in boxes here upstairs and therefore reachable.

The Robber Bride
The Derwish House
We The Drowned - not sure I can forgive what he did to that dog, strangely enough
Good Behaviour
an attempt to restart and finish The Lacuna

and for when I have to travel I have many ebooks I have had a long time

We’ll see if making even this tiny bit public will keep me on track. 25 books from the old pile should be easy

On picking open products, buying by feature not by brand or popularity, self limitation, avoiding DRM, and how it made me discover so many great books.

I spent 2010 travelling so much for work and spending a week (or more) at a time away, that I couldn’t carry enough books along. I tried watching TV but frankly I prefer a good book to much that is on TV.

I tried buying books when there and bringing them back, but this is wasteful - I didn’t have the time to go to a proper bookshop and airport selection is full of disposable clones… and it is not as if I need more random books!

Simultaneously I became aware how many books I already own and how many my technical books quickly became outdated clutter. Even when you are a keen reader with a big house (and planning some special bookshelves, but that is another blog post), it only makes only sense to own books you will either re-read in the future or lend to friends.

So I decided I’d been keeping the book-and-gadgetaholic inside me at bay for long enough, it was now more than reasonable for me to get an ebook reader. That way I could have hundreds of unread ebooks too

My rules for book versus ebook

Books versus ebooks is mostly resolving the conflict between storage and longevity. Paper lasts forever and can be shared. Ebooks take no space.

* Is it a technical reference book? ebook. They are too big and bulky as books and become obsolete too fast
* Do I already know I will lend it or reread it? book
* Do I already know I will read it once? library borrow, or ebook
* Is it an impulse or curiosity buy? ebook
* Is it available only with DRM? book or library borrow

I wanted a device using standard formats to be sure that in 10 years I still can read them in some way. I wanted to add any book in any format wherever I found it, through copying the file, not have to jump through hoops. I don’t particularly need an on-book shop (which seems to be important to reviewers, strangely) or a dictionary or some of the other bells and whistles.

It couldn’t be the Kindle. I’m not anti Amazon, by far, I buy many books from them for convenience and if they offered ebooks in open formats I possibly would buy from them some of the time - and if they made the Kindle more open I could have been tempted, its a lovely device - but the Kindle’s geography lock and the closed format are too worrying for me. I want to be able to buy french ebooks too, if I so feel.

And if I am honest I think it dangerous if too much is on Amazon only when it comes to ebooks - a monopoly on ebooks would be bad for authors, publishers and readers. So I won’t help it happen, even if it deprives me of many books.

I was not content to lock myself out of the Amazon ebook store and format by not getting a Kindle (I know there’s ways to convert files but I can’t be bothered and I don’t want to increase the monopoly anyways). No sir! I am also locking myself out of most of the other big stores as I refuse to buy DRM files.

DRM is simply a way to cripple the content to make it less yours and less reliable - I cannot trust that any DRM scheme will remain unlockable in 10 years time - after all I own a few games which I can no longer play as the “unlocking” server is long gone, or the deal between the publisher and the distributor has been severed in the last 10 years. Not to forget limited activations (i.e. you can only copy it to your next phone or ereader so many times, 5 most commonly!). I don’t want this to happen to books, which I am much more likely to want to revisit in 10 years than games.

DRM does not respect the user, and as a consequence I reject it.

My reader

So I did my research and settled for an Iriver Cover Story, and a year on I am still very pleased with it.

The screen is not as contrasty as it should be (only 8 levels not 16 like newer ones - one thing I do regret about it) but it is small and solid, has a touch screen, notes, supports many formats including for work documents, has an extension card port, wifi, email, and even supports audio. Battery life is long, recharged via USB. And it is, all in all, quite open.

And it doesn’t look half bad

So how did I manage?

I think the whole no kindle, no DRM could have gotten rather drab and frustrating, but I already knew of Baen and that and Gutenberg could keep me going for years, so I wasnt worried.

In the end it turned out to be a blessing, because I had to dig a bit and indulge in risk taking and curiosity, and found many books and authors I would not have read otherwise. And that only happened because I put these limits on myself.

I got the largest number of my books from Baen and Angry Robot - one because I knew they did open ebooks by design since the nineties (including a mountain of free ones to kickstart any reading) and I could finally now reward them. The other I found via a review and the first random books were so good I kept buying (and now subscribe). I also got subscriptions or issues of quite a few hard-to-find-in-europe magazines.

Are there many publishers and books I would get and try but cannot, because they are only on Amazon/Apple, or only available with DRM? Sure! But I found others instead, more interesting than what I would have bought on Amazon.

PS: Here are the places where I have bought good books in the past year. I will list the books with 1 line comments in a separate post, this is long enough

Directly from publishers:
* Baen webscriptions and the Baen Free Library. Now found at http://www.baenebooks.com Also have books from Nightshade Books from the Baen store
* Angry Robot - got so many good books from them I now subscribe to their entire output!
* Apex Books http://www.apexbookcompany.com/collections/ebooks
* Almost all computer and science/reference books publishers sell their own without DRM, I bought from dozens.
* wizard tower (genre) http://www.wizardstowerbooks.com/ also has some magazines and other publishers books
* rebellion http://www.rebellionstore.com/
* 1889 labs http://1889.ca/books/
* OR books (non fiction) http://www.orbooks.com/
* Ps publishing is starting to have ebooks and eshorts http://www.pspublishing.co.uk/ebooks-31-c.asp
Small ebook stores:
* Fictionwise http://www.fictionwise.com << also has some genre periodicals like Analog, Asimov's, Ellery Queen etc. awesome!
* Weightless books << http://weightlessbooks.com

From the author:
Also bought direct from the author eg: Cory Doctorow but these are few and far between.
Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher at http://www.closed-circle.net/WhereItsAt/catalog

Please feel free to spam this with comments regarding any place where you found good DRM free ebooks

To the occasional visitors still checking this place now and then - this is an old and tired site, but it is not dead. A lot of the content is old, though. It is the descendent of the original iphi.net which started in 1999, which itself was a reboot of imagisphere.com (1995-1999). It was mostly a site about keeping friends informed about activities and fun discoveries, sharing photography and natter on about games, software and books.

I then dabbled with the idea of making it a more general blog, including more related to my more professional interests, as well as perhaps sharing more aroung hobbies, learning an resolutions - perhaps finding other kindred spirits and a support network )
Blog about all the things I know - tools and resources I found and take for granted, but which are often of far more interest than I would have imagined. Blog about the dog and walking and great food. Lots of ranting too, as I so well can do. And still more about games and books and computers, too.

So what happened?

1) I have been busy. Since my last update about “work” was in, what, 2002? you can imagine that indeed a lot has happened. I started an agency, grew it, then moved on. I was a CTO, an serious solution and technology architect, a coach, an agile consultant, an entrepreneur. I got too busy,worked too much, lost hobbies. Recoved a bit of a life, then lost both my parents. Worked a lot abroad too. Was not all that much in control of my time or my life. Could not find the time to tackle this site much… intention and guilt, yes, time and action… no

2) Adding all those types on this site will make for an inconsistent mash unless some clever reorganisation happens - tags at the very least. Of course there is no problem if I add as rarely as I have, but still, blogs are supposed to be focused… I’m not sure any of my 10 occasional readers wants to see all that extra stuff, and as for others, who knows?

3) The site is ugly and that is hardly motivating. It needs a redesign - but I have no will to find, adapt and cut/deploy another template. I should find someone who would take my current pages just as HTML/CSS, improve them, then give me the sources to chop/deploy. That I could imagine doing.

So what now?

Well I intend an nth attempt at catch up and revival of this.

Keep up traditions:

* catching up at least to add the games I own and games (especially non AAA) I am watching, as was the tradition on this site
* catch up with at least some book and film one liners to share the goodness
* do the annual “software I live with” post
* update “where to find me online”

After that:
* tales worth sharing from the past few years
* photography and hikes
* cage rattling and opinions especially around web/technology
* sharing discoveries beyond just bookmarks
* track learning, progress and resolutions

It will be messy and random and who knows how much I’ll actually do…

The points and questions made in that blog about beauty are intriguing and challenging - why is the expectation that women must always be pretty so strong in our cultures, what does it do to us, and why do women buy into it so fully, and what happens if you try to get out of that?

   

•           Beauty, and What It Means: Month Without Mirrors 5.25 Update: You Don’t Always Have to Look Pretty   

  That is: I fear a loss of control over how others see me—a control that none of us has to begin with. Letting go of the imaginary control the mirror gives forces me to not only replace that control with trust—in myself and in the world around me—it forces me to lift the controls I believed I have over my physical allure. I thought I always had to look pretty because I thought it was something that was within my control, when it isn’t. Yes, I take various measures to meet a certain standard of attractiveness. But I can’t do a damn thing to ensure that you think I’m pretty; none of us can, really. Clean, groomed, and reasonable, yes. Beyond that? It’s up to you, not me.

                           
   

•           What happens if you don’t look in any mirrors for a month? - The F-Word   

  What I didn’t realize until I was unburdened from some of my self-imposed (and likely invented) expectations was exactly how much of my energy was going into appearing. Appearing to be interested, appearing to be womanly, appearing to be a professional lady, appearing to be pretty.

                           
   

•           Create Flash Games with Stencyl   

                               
 

quick comments:

1. I have preordered starfarer but not really played much yet - that was before he quit his job too go full time, gutsy thing to do

2. how can they pretend it’s a “bombshell” that climate change would affect food, isn’t that the most obvious thing?

   

•           Starfarer » Full Steam Ahead   

  ’ve tried for quite a while to verbalize exactly why I finally decided to quit, and was having a hard time picking out a reason that doesn’t sound like something out of a self-help guide. “Follow your dream!”… pshaw. There certainly was some of that, but would I give up my job and take a leap into the unknown “just” to do that? I’d love to say yes, but I honestly can’t. The reality was less uplifting and inspirational. After a year and a half of working long nights and weekends, I was, well,  tired. The whirlwind of activity after the release, while still working full-time, was the proverbial last straw – except it was more like a lead pipe. Traveling at a high speed. So when the pipe hit (if I may take a bad metaphor too far in an attempt to make it “so bad it’s good”), it hit hard. I got extremely burned out, stressed, irritable, you name it. Also a bit delirious due to the lack of sleep. Walking around, muttering to myself. I’m pretty sure I even heard voices once – which made me sympathize with people that do on a regular basis – it’s very unnerving.

                           
   

•           Working together to eliminate all gender based violence - The F-Word   

  Gender based violence is used as a way of controlling or ‘policing’ the heteronormative and patriarchal status quo within society, keeping women and/or those who are LGB or T in inferior positions. It is a tool that is used to enforce gender inequality. Gender based violence has two primary functions: It maintains a system of gender inequality in society, where men have disproportionate political, social, economic and cultural power. It polices and punishes individuals and social groups who do not conform to rigid gender norms, notably LGBT people.

                           
   

•           NY Times Bombshell: “The latest scientific research suggests” climate change is “helping to destabilize the food system” | ThinkProgress   

  Now, the latest scientific research suggests that a previously discounted factor is helping to destabilize the food system: climate change. Many of the failed harvests of the past decade were a consequence of weather disasters, like floods in the United States, drought in Australia and blistering heat waves in Europe and Russia. Scientists believe some, though not all, of those events were caused or worsened by human-induced global warming. Temperatures are rising rapidly during the growing season in some of the most important agricultural countries, and a paper published several weeks ago found that this had shaved several percentage points off potential yields, adding to the price gyrations.

                           
 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

1) I’m a 5 minute cat detector, due to an extremely strong allergy (although it has gotten better).

2) When I was 4 years old my parents asked me if I would prefer a little brother or a little sister. I replied I’d rather have a dog. It somehow took the wind out of their sails, since I never got either sibling or dog and had to wait 30+ years before I finally go a dog.

3) In spite of the story in 2), I was a fertility expert at 4 - we had friends of the family visiting, married 2 years previously, and somehow the conversation went to their yet unsuccessful attempts to have a child. I embarrassed my mother by explaining in sufficient detail how these things worked. It was worth it though, as a few months later they were expecting. I don’t remember this at all, but supposedly I was very proud that my advice had worked.

4) I have my mobile phone ringtone set really low, so I don’t hear it if I am concentrated on work or a conversation. Most people I have worked with really cannot understand this, but it makes sense to me. If I am working well, or in a conversation with someone, I don’t want the phone to interrupt!

5) I find it hard to remember numbers, and often also mathematical formulae. The number thing goes for phone numbers, but also for a lot of the physics and mathematical constants which we always use - quite crippling. It took me years to remember the basic trigonometry rules, I used to have to rederive them on a side piece of paper. That pattern went on - I can go through the reasoning again, but can’t remember the exact final result without going through it. I suspect it made my studies harder than necessary!

6) On the other hand I can remember almost every fiction book I have read, what I though about it, and where I got it - which library or store etc.

7) I’m better at starting things than finishing them, will put the 7th entry later

(uk centric)
http://www.supermarketownbrandguide.co.uk/intro.php

Test all the supermarket licensed products to see which ones are really good. Save money where it’s worth it

Another good resource is the forum thread http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=23002