The Baen Free Library offers one of my favorite reads ever!

I enjoy the adventure of Miles (and his parents before him) so much I actually own 2 copies of “Young Miles” so I can lend one and not be without. There are very few books that I have ever done that with. It is Trickster Space Opera and you don’t need to be a SF reader to have fun with it.

Available in more formats than is sensible, too. No excuse!

It was one of my “themes” last year to buy less and use what I have. Whereas it worked OK with books (I certainly bought less except for grabbing tons of free ebooks) it didnt work at all with games. I bought a couple new titles, bought several “preorder to support” indie titles, and raided too many old games when on sale on any digital platform. Games I hadn’t bought when they first came out as I was either too busy, or didnt have the computer for it.

And even though 2012 have an absolute plethora of games coming, I still want to play some of these games I missed, because I am curious, because I enjoy all sorts of gameplay that I won’t necessarily find in new games, and in some cases because I feel I ought to have played them.

So, just like I have the Mount TBR challenge, here’s the (totally unofficiall) Dusty Mousemat, challenge (yeah, I know, won’t win any awards for that name, but “dusty mouse” sounds evil to anyone who ever had a mechanical mouse and “dusty joystick” could be misinterpreted)

The rule I make up for this is simple:
- play an old game you never finished or never played. 1 per month at least.
- old means it came out before 2010, ideally before 2006. It can be a game you have owned a while or it can be an old game bought “new” this year in a bargain bin or digital distribution
- it should be a game you wish you’d played at the time, or think you ought to have played since people keep mentioning it
- give it a chance, play it at least a couple evenings

Here’s a random selection of games I might revisit this year - if I arrange it right I could revisit (or discover) 4 a month!

The first game at the moment is Port Royale 2 - simply because I started on Pirates of the Black Cove and encountered a bug, and hadn’t quite sated my nautical wish yet. I have mostly played the commercial sim part of the game, I fail many of the missions due to not figuring it out, and whereas I can handle some sea battles, the battles against towns just defeat me (even in the tutorial). Still, there’s a lot to figure out and I shall at least master the commerce a bit more, before I get myself annihilated trying to take over a town and quit

I could continue on a nautical theme for quite a while as I have Pirates of the Caribbean, Tortuga 1/2, East India Company, Ship Simulator and Sail Simulator, Sub Command, Silent Hunter IV, Tradewinds, Patrician (2 and 3), Naval Warfare (that’s actually a shooter). Don’t ask…

I’ll probably switch to an RPG or action game before I go through all these, though.

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

Game: Warlock: Master of the Arcane

From: http://nohighscores.com/node/1882

“*There are a LOT of Warlock options to start with and you can customize their starting abilities.

*The races are odd. You have “Humans”, “Undead” and “Monsters” as options. A fantasy game without Elves as a race option? What’s wrong with these people? Anyway the “Monsters” are stuff like Ratmen and Orcs. I do wish there more than just three though.

*Undead have access to Flying Rats, which at first I thought was weird but they are in fact “undead hybrid flying serpent rats” which is the coolest thing ever. They also act as scouts and can shoot at stuff from 2 hexes away.

*Units auto retreat if they take a lot of damage, which is great. “

More about Warlock: Master of the Arcane

Game: The Witcher

From: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-02-20-retrospective-the-witcher-article

“The Witcher’s legacy to me is that it encouraged me to play an actual role, rather than flesh out a cipher with a range of canned goods and evils. It illustrated that game developers needn’t rely on reward or punishment to make us care about the choices we make: provide compelling narrative, not shiny trinkets, as the preeminent consequence of our decisions and that will be enough. We’ll even forgive you the sex cards.”

More about The Witcher

This is all I bought in 2011 - not counting games… in case someone wants to ask

Webuilder - needed a web editor again for occasional use and my web designers had made me buy it for them (at a previous job) so went for this
JRiver Media Center (upgrade)
Paragon Rescue Kit (upgrade)
BitDefender
Goalscape
ECMerge
Ashampoo® Burning Studio 10
ConceptDraw OFFICE 2 (upgrade)
Postbox
Driver Cleaner.NET (for the purpose of installing an ATI driver on an older laptop using one of these laptop cards ATI refuses to install new drivers on)
Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Professional (upgrade)
Genie Timeline
O&O Defrag 14.5 Pro (upgrade)
Rainlendar2 Pro
SmartDraw 2012 (upgrade)
ACDSEE Pro 4 then 5 (upgrade)
Linkman Pro
DisplayFusion Pro
TwistedBrush Pro Studio / Curvy 3D / Genetica / Dj D Artagnan / Project Dogwaffle 4 / Archipelis Designer 2 / Texture anarchy / AnyFX / DAP (all DC’s fault)
PDF Annotator (update)
CrossOver Linux Professional (renewed)
Object Desktop Renewal (renewed, but might be the last time)
TaxCalc 2011
Recovered my license of Spherical Timesheet Tracker (never found suitable alternative!)
Wireless IRC (phone)
Gravity (phone)
Syncplicity (not renewed)
Expression Engine 2 (web)
Lifejournal

Paid Web Services/memberships:
Spideroak (renewed)
Fastmail (renewed)
Hiveminder (renewed)
FreeAgent
Newsblur

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…