A bit of tech banter with Labour activist ((how demeaning to reduce a person to one trait. I’ve never met him or spoken to him in person, but I know he’s also a beer drinker, a cricket watcher and Scampi Fries enthusiast – and I fear that if I say anything even vaguely positive about him it will end up in a leaflet with TOP LIB DEM RECOMMENDS LABOUR VOTE all over it at the next Council elections)) reminds me to share the news that I have made one decision after my tech wavering, leaving plenty more up in the air.

So, I convinced myself that I do, in fact, need an Amazon Kindle, and have plumped for the Wifi version, which I have pre-ordered and hope to receive before Lib Dem conference.

I can’t possibly carry that many books with me on our honeymoon, and so a technological response is called for.

If I’m canny, I could even subscribe to free fortnights worth of trial magazine subs and cancel them on my return.

An entirely technological response however, won’t be feasible, as I will still be buying some books. The basic compromise I have made with myself is that those books that I would normally pass around the family, that can be bought cheaply second hand, will still be bought as books. I shall need the latest secondhand paperback Evanovichs and Graftons and Reichs. ((I still wouldn’t spring for the hardback prices)) And I’ll always have a quick look at prices across multiple formats to check there aren’t cheaper alternatives.

(commercial break:)

So in preparing for my new arrival, I have already bought a few books to put on the Kindle. I thought I would go for stuff I know I like, because I can probably get absorbed into that quickly enough to get over the weirdness of a new format.

The four titles I’ve paid for for my Kindle are:

Monstrous Regiment – a Pratchett. Haven’t read any pterry for ages, so now is as good a time as any to catch up.

Girl with a Dragon Tatoo – Stieg Larsson, I think I remember reading somewhere, has made a massive milestone in terms of ebook sales, so I thought I would help out.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – well, why not?
4-hour Work Week – I keep buying self help titles and then ignoring them. I read Getting Things Done
when we were on holiday, so why not this too?

In addition to paid-for titles, there is a wealth of free, classic texts available for Kindle, including anything available on Gutenberg. So the following have also made their way onto my Kindle, when it finally arrives:

• Adventures of Sherlock Homes
• Treasure Island
• Homer’s Iliad
• Heart of Darkness
• The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens
• Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes
• Dracula’s Guest
• Life on the Mississippi
• The Captain’s Toll-Gate
• Welsh Fairy Tales
• The French Revolution (Thomas Carlyle)
• A Rogue’s Life (Wilkie Collins)
• Prisona of Zender
• Beasts and Superbeasts (Saki)
• When William Came (Saki)
• The Toys of Peace (Saki)

Unresolved tech decisions

Still no decision made about new laptop – and I still need it before Conference in late September.

I have totally ruled out an iPad. Nice, but too expensive.

And still no decision about a new phone. Orange have confirmed that I am now entitled to a free upgrade, although it would be another few months before I could freely leave for another network.

I think I have decided to go for an Android phone not an iPhone as the latest iPhone is so expensive and not readily available.

I’m seriously considering changing networks – only really for better reception in the vicinity of Nottingham city centre, and London. It’s all but impossible to connect to the internet on 3G anywhere in the city centre and anywhere in London. There’s a point on the Mansfield Road coming home from town, usually around the General Cemetary, when all the text messages I should have had during the afternoon suddenly arrive at once, as I change cell towers. When I came home from London after the week singing, all the photos I’d been trying to send to the internet for a week just magically uploaded in a few minutes, when it wasn’t possible to send them at all before.

Having looked closely at tariffs, it doesn’t appear any other company can beat what I currently have on Orange, particularly now they are rewarding my decadesworth of monthly payments, so the only question is – is it worth the hassle of changing networks for the unknown carrot of better 3G reception on another operator? I can’t know whether I will get better reception until I’ve already committed to a two year contract with someone else!

I have identified a need for a number of gadgets and am presently trying to decide how and when I can afford them, if at all.

1 – a new laptop

I had a rather good laptop last in 2007, which was my main computer, and what I used for work in Chesterfield. It got stolen while we were on holiday (along with all my files – now I backup using Mozy) and since I had just stopped working in Chesterfield, I elected to replace it with a desktop computer, which is still pretty much everything I need for routine work, internet and light gaming. It’s regrettably not beefy enough to play the last version of Civilisation on, and so almost certainly won’t be beefy enough to play the next version. ((link helpfully doesn’t use Vista’s system of calculating system spec and I basically can’t understand a word)) ((the fact I can’t play Civ may actually be a good thing – I’m not going to have the time in the forseeable)) ((have mostly been playing Freeciv recently and it keeps whupping my ass)) ((I basically need to write a post about Civ, clearly))

The main use for potential future laptop is for the few weeks in the year when I have to work away from home – essential would be the ability to write blog posts and edit sound files using Audacity.

I’ve tried using one of the early Linux EEE PCs and the Council lent me a sub-notebook when we were doing the paperless pilot, and I think I confirmed to myself that they are just too small to be useful. The EEE PC is a bit of a pain to type on, and the Council mini computer had such a tiny screen it wasn’t easily possible to use the Council’s email system on it.

So, I think I need a proper laptop. Wandering around PC World presented me with an enormous, almost bewildering, degree of choice.

One thing’s sure, though: I don’t have Mark Pack’s budget.

2 – an iPad

I’m a little promiscuous when it comes to OSes – my present active gadget list includes a Mac Mini doing media work on my desk, playing DVDs and iPlayer, an iPod Touch, a broken Linux EEE PC, a Nokia phone and a main PC. Somewhere I have my beaten up 2003 laptop, an IBM Thinkpad which really refuses to die, also running Linux. although doing so so slowly as to be next to useless for actual work.

For a long time, I was an iPhone refusenik. I’ve been a Nokia user ever since I first had a mobile phone. But unless they do something amazing pretty sharpish, my N95 will be my last Nokia phone. I’m not sure whether to go iPhone or Android next, but either platform simply leaves the Nokia miles behind.

In fact, I only bought the iPod touch because using the N95 as a media player is such a terrible experience. If you put anything like 8gb of media on it, it slows to a crawl. The software for syncing is awful, just awful. Their recent “upgrade” of the sync software from PC Suite to Ovi Suite made matters worse – and actually removed functionality in favour of funky videos, to howls of protest from anyone who actually uses the phone rather than sees it as some Nathan Barley-esque SpeechTool.

The UX of using the iPod Touch is so good that it’s become simply the best way of having a mini computer near the telly for all items such as checking twitter, email and facebook, feeding my Foopet eKitteh, or checking out any of the numerous apps, many of which are brilliant – including Carcassone, the Good Beer Guide, and Monkey Island.

And of course the iPod Touch is good for listening to things on. iTunes makes adding podcasts to it really easy, and I mostly use it for that whilst leafleting. It has 60Gb of songs on it that I almost never listen to and the most uptodate BBC podcasts that help make leafleting less of a chore.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying I could totally see how there would be room for an iPad in our household as the not-quite-a-computer that lives in the sitting room, for light gaming, light internetting and light pretty-much everything else.

But the only thing about it that rules it out is the price tag. The cheapest one is the best part of £500, which could buy you a proper laptop that could do full on everything instead of light. I have reservations about whether it could be used for typing more than a couple of hundred words for away-from-home blogging, and the fact that it doesn’t have any way into it apart from the Apple cable means I couldn’t use it for editing sound files, one of the key things I have to do when I’m away from home.

3 – an Amazon Kindle

I’ve gone into some of the reasons I want one of these in an earlier post. Partly it’s the early adopter thing (although I’m way behind on the whole ebooks front). Partly it’s the idea of carrying a lot of books in a small space – something that’s particularly exercising my mind as for practically the first time ever, I’m going on holiday abroad by plane for a full fortnight on our honeymoon. I don’t think I can fill a suitcase with enough books to keep me going 2 weeks, and it’s vitally important I have something to read on the plane coming home as trashy paperbacks are the only way I can stay sane through all the hours of sitting in departures and on the plane itself.

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=26&l=ur1&category=kindlestore&banner=1QVAVYTJKE8XAVG9FP82&f=ifr

Another email arrived from Amazon today to goad me into buying a Kindle by announcing the launch of the Amazon UK Kindle Store – which lets me get a feel for how much more I’d be spending. The costs don’t seem too bad, particularly for titles that aren’t in the first flush of youth, but they are more expensive, for the most part, than secondhand paperbacks, without even the benefit of being able to pass them around friends and family.

Loading the thing with a fortnights’ worth of books is going to set me back a fair bit, and doing so would be a bit of a leap into the unknown – would I in fact get along with reading books on a gadget I’ve never actually touched or played with? I’d be lumbered with the bugger if I spent all that money, loaded it up with a fortnight’s worth of reading, and then found it was actually a major pain to read. I’ve played with a Sony Reader in John Lewis and they seem essentially OK, but really it would only ultimately be possible to road-test it by owning it and trying to read a novel on it.

Conclusions

Well.

They’re sort of overlapping decisions, and a “perm any 2 from 3” type problem.

All three should be able to be used for reading committee papers on the Council, assuming the Council keeps its promise about unrestricted wifi in meeting rooms. (( currently you have to use a Council computer in the few rooms where wifi is available. Long term, I don’t want to have to have a Council computer because I want one computer I can use for Council and personal use not separate Council and personal computers ))

You could read e-books on all three, but it would make more sense on the Kindle and the iPad.

You could buy a reasonable laptop plus a Kindle for the cost of the most basic iPad.

Both the iPad and Kindle are essentially only gateways to make you pay more to either Apple or Amazon.

The main things ruling the iPad out are the price, the lack of keyboard and not being able to use it for sound.

I’ve gotta make my mind up soon because I need the new laptop before conference.

Decisions, decisions.

(NB, one suggestion, put it on the wedding list – has been half-ruled out for a number of reasons including trying to stick to things that will last for all of married life, not just the next few years, the lack of certainty of getting it, and the fact that these are things for me, not us!)

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B002Y27P46

Amazon have very kindly got in touch with me, as a valued customer and one who tries to make a few pennies from their advertising programme on these pages, to give me a heads-up about the launch of their new version of their e-book reader, the Kindle.

Their most basic version, the Kindle Wifi, is almost, just within the sort of price range where I might be able to justify to myself buying one.

I do appreciate that it’s basically another hi-tech way of making you spend more money at Amazon than you otherwise would… but ooh, gadget, shiny shiny.

It doesn’t entirely fit too well with how I currently consume books. I don’t read much these days: my life and free time for reading is almost entirely spent on the internet looking at funny pictures of cats. When time does allow for reading, it tends to be low-rent, hi-entertainment fiction of the violent murder / comedy ‘tec variety. I’ve been reading detective fiction my whole life, so why stop now?

So, consuming books: I generally go for mass-market paperbacks that have been out some time. I buy them in volume very cheaply – sometimes the £0.01 secondhand special on Amazon, sometimes at fleamarkets. They sit on Mount Toberead for a while and eventually I will read them – often when I am on holiday, sometimes at a rate of 2 a day. Once I have read them, the books often go on a journey around family and friends, and some of them return, and some of them don’t

Ultimately I end up with huge numbers of books sitting in piles, and I’ve no final way of getting rid of them once they’ve been around the family. Some I do want to keep, but many I’d be happy to offload. But by the time I’ve finished with them they have no value, and selling them is a pain. I must find somewhere I can donate them.

But that pattern of book-buying would come to a screetching halt if I bought an e-reader. For starters, the books would cost more than the current penny plus P&P. Secondly, I would get less value out of them, as I wouldn’t be able to pass them around the friends and family. But on the plus side, I wouldn’t end up with a house full of dustgathering dustjackets. And when I do go on holiday, I wouldn’t need an extra suitcase for the books!

The other half of ideas that are going around my mind Kindle-wise are the potentials for work use of it.

On the council last year, we had a paperless committee pilot. I’ve not got around to writing about that here seriously, but there is a lighthearted look and some serious comments here.

There is scope for using a Kindle for committee papers – all the papers are available online, and all start off as Word docs or PDFs. It could be pretty easy to send them by email to your Kindle address so that they show up for use in committee. I can’t really tell in advance how easy it would be to handle the multiple documents you need (typically in committee you have the agenda front page, a briefing document, a report for each item, slides for half of them and your own notes, which is a lot to juggle electronically) and there would still be the thorny issue of page numbering, of which more later.

Sending docs to Kindle seems to be free for the Wifi version, but there is a strange cost for the 3G version (which I do not intend looking at much.) The 3G service is billed as free (read: included in the cost of the books you buy) but there is a small charge for using the 3G service to download your own documents.

A Kindle does look like it would be quite fun to cart around Lib Dem conference – all the papers for conference are available electronically as well as in print, and you could shove them all into a 250 gram gadget much more easily than cart all you need with you. But will the daily sheets be so easy to find? Will the wifi work with commercial hotel wifi that often needs you to input credit cards etc? Questions questions.

(and the thinking ahead to conference reminds me: I had promised myself I would finally buy myself a new laptop before conference to help with blogging and podcasting. I can barely afford that at the moment, still less if I buy a Kindle too. Hmmm…)

Here’s a question. I’m sure it must be possible to do, and I’m sure it’s a kludgy, nasty way round a problem.

If I’ve got a TV making a noise, and I want to make recordings of that noise using my Zoom H2, which has a Line In hole, is it possible to plug the line in into the TV’s headphone socket, whilst still having the TV making a noise to the people in the room? What’s the minimum amount of kit I would need to do that? headphone splitter, one cable, one set of portable iPod speakers?

I know ideally I want a pre-amp feed (( please stop me if I’m talking nonsense here )) but I think that might be on the complicated side.

I could just sit the recorder in front of the telly and let it tape the sound using its built in mics, but that seems a lossy way of doing it and would have the added disadvantage of including in the recording all the sarcastic remarks of the people present.

Bonus marks available if you can guess the application I’m going to put this knowledge to 🙂

Will Howells writes a good piece about removing the game Bejeweled from his phone.

Bejeweled is a PopCap game and they are very good at making games. Worryingly good.

From their stable I have enjoyed Zuma, Zuma’s Revenge, various versions of Bejwelled, and Plants vs Zombies. Especially Plants vs Zombies. But I came to PopCap firstly through Peggle.

Once you move beyond Bejeweled, they have a curious “try before you buy” policy. You can download any of their games and play them for an hour on a free trial before you have to pay up to continue.

They know they can afford to do this, because they know their games are so good that you’ll play them for an hour, barely notice the time passing, and then feel seriously aggrieved when your time is up. So aggrieved, you’ll reach for your card and stump up the usually fairly reasonable sum of money just to carry on playing.

Each of their games starts really simply, so anyone can play them. They even run on an average specced machine. They ramp up the skill level fairly steeply, but train you as you go so that you keep pace. Plants vs Zombies, for example, teaches you a new plant and a new zombie each level, and it’s fun, cutely drawn, and the music is good. Before you know it, you’re battling with dozens of zombies in a wide variety of scenarios. Peggle was the same. Start with the simplest of levels, and build up gradually.

Many of the games are easy enough to complete, but even if you play every level and defeat the ultimate boss monsters, the game doesn’t end. You can replay every level with a higher win ratio. There are seemingly infinite challenges based on the basic game engine. And the reward for even little wins is pleasing enough to make you want to keep playing: every successful Peggle level end ends up with rainbows, unicorns and the Ode to Joy. Srsly. And despite how that sounds in words, it’s great! Here’s a review of PvZ – and I endorse everything in it.

Peggle, PvZ and Zuma have a basic level structure and a game you can complete. Bejeweled, Chuzzle and their ilk get increasingly more complex, but technically if you got good enough, they’re probably infinite. (( Much like Cybertron Mission, where after the first four levels, you just got the same levels again with nastier bad guys )) They even have normal modes, where you get hazards, and “zen” modes where you just have the fundamentals of the games without the pesky threat of dying. So you can keep playing for ever.

I’ve been more than happy to pay for several of these games multiple times over, so that I can play them on more than one computer. Then, when I got an iPod Touch, mainly for leafleting (( and mainly because the UX of trying to get podcasts and music onto my Nokia N95 8GB – and still use it as a phone – is just too ghastly to do routinely )) I bought the games all over again through the iTunes store.

I have an ever so slightly addictive personality. If I like something, I get a bit obsessive about it. This usually manifests itself in reading all the books by an author, renting all the films with an actor and eating all the chocolate in the house. (( Unhelpfully, the addiction generally only manifests itself in unproductive ways. I have never been addicted to work. Or canvassing. Or leafletting )) Heaven knows what would happen to me if I even started taking a little bit of drugs. But with videogames it manifests itself with unhelpful obsessive playing. I’ve had nights where I’ve played PvZ all night. 6 hours straight is not all that uncommon. I’ve definitely played each of the games for so long that they have caused me pain in the mousing hand. And when I’ve switched hands, they make the other hand hurt too.

But the worst game I’ve been playing lately from the Popcap stable is Bejeweled Twist. Like Bejeweled, you have to match gems into rows of 3, 4, 5 and 6, and when you do, they explode and new gems cascade down. The method of moving gems is different – you have a rotator cursor that takes four gems and moves them clockwise. If you can pop gems with every turn for a successive 10 levels – well over 100 consecutive mini-wins – you get a Fruit Gem. If you pop 4 gems, you get a Flame Gem; 5 gets you a Lightening Gem. If you fail, the game makes a heart-rending “disappointed :(” noise at you. On the way, there are hazards like gems that are stuck and won’t rotate, bombs that tick down with each turn, and DOOM GEMS that tick down with each non-productive turn, but that can’t even be exploded!

Look at the screenshot. I’ve been playing this game for days. I’m on Level 57. There are fruit gems galore. I’ve over 9 million points. Somebody stop me!

Colleagues, if you value your free time and your wrists – and Will, this is especially applicable for you – DO NOT DOWNLOAD BEJEWELED TWIST.

And if you don’t want to download it – here’s a handy link