Burlaki [back] on the Hudson

After my latest photobook review, in which I proclaimed Adoramapix my new favorite among the several services, the folks at Picaboo, which was my “winner” of an earlier review, got into action. I was contacted by a nice lady from Picaboo, who informed me of some of the new features of the Picaboo X product, including availability of lay-flat book style, which I so happily used at Adoramapix. After a brief email exchange, I elicited an offer of a free tryout book. Obviously, I then had to try and see how the two services compared.

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Technology & Gadgets

It has been almost a year and a half since I performed my review of three photo-book services (MyPublisher, Picaboo and Blurb). Since then, I did not have much time to engage in projects that would either involve any of the aforementioned services or bring me in contact with something new. And then, several weeks ago, a representative from Adoramapix reached out to me with an offer that I could not pass up: A free book in exchange for the review of their service and product.

I played around with the Adoramapix photo-book builder, created a neat highlights album of our European travels, and in the process got myself a new favorite for future photo-book-making.
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Technology & Gadgets

My kids love to ski. I don’t. So, on our weekend skiing trip, I had ample opportunities to use my new reading gadget, whiling the time away at the lodge.

Overall, I am happy with my choice. I like the design and the feel of the reader, the user interface and the navigation is simple enough, and the reading experience is not at all taxing on the eyes. There are few bells and whistles beyond plain book-reading, but I neither care to listen to music while I read nor have any interest in carrying grayscale versions of my favorite photos on the device. Absence of 3G connectivity (and of the ability to buy and download books on-the-go) does not bother me in the least.

PRS-505 is not as small as to fit into an average shirt or jacket pocket, but a ski jacket provided me with a perfect compartment for it, and on other occasions I think I’ll be fine carrying it in a bag. On the other hand, I wanted the device with at least a 6″ screen, and I appreciate the fact that its navigation buttons do not demand too much of “dead” space around the screen to be accommodated.

Since this particular model is no longer being produced by Sony, it makes little sense for me to go into a detailed review. Let’s just say that if it was still freely available in the stores, I’d lean to strongly recommending it to others.

It is not without shortcomings, though. The one that bugs me the most is that there does not seem to exist an option to select the initial font size when the book is first formatted for reading. The device defaults to “small”, while I find “medium” more acceptable. Pressing the font change button causes the book to be re-formatted, which can take 15-20 seconds. Having the formatting process run twice before I start reading is a minor annoyance.

The device also self-reboots on me occasionally. In fact, when the “currently reading” value exists and I want to change to a different book, the reader is certain to reboot during “new” book’s formatting. After it restarts (45-60 seconds), the “current” book is no longer marked, and the formatting goes ahead without a problem. But with one book, I could not make the font larger, as the device kept rebooting during each “second” re-formatting. I am willing to attribute this as a side effect of russification, but I need to play with various formats to find out if it can be overcome. Strangely, I have all of the books on the device currently in its native .lrf format, which I least expected to cause me problems.

[update 02/26] After playing with different formats for a couple more days, I can conclude that initial formatting step (as well as re-formatting for font size change) is specific to native Sony .lrf book format. The involuntary reboot is definitely due to using .lrf with the russification hack – it does not occur with other formats. I do not have much of a choice if I want to be reading Russian books, because support for .epub format is currently limited enough so that I’d have to perform manual task of font embedding into each ePub file, and PDF does not really do it for me (table of contents gets dropped during conversion to PDF; re-sizing of the font size does not re-page the document, but simply breaks one page into two or three with the bottom of the initial page occupying just the portion of the screen and breaking off in mid-sentence – very disorienting), so I’ll probably ignore the few annoyances that .lrf causes me now. For an English-language-only user, seems like ePub format offers the best reading experience with practically no downside. [/update]

So, no, not perfect. On the other hand, I’ve yet to see a device of any kind that would not cause me some sort of annoyance design- or performance-wise. I have already practically recouped the money I spent to buy the reader by saving on skiing rental equipment and two days of lift passes for myself. Ability to not do something I don’t especially enjoy while generally accompanying the kids and keeping myself entertained – priceless!

Technology & Gadgets

I did not decide to look for an electronic book reader only after perusing information about iPad. An e-reader was on my to-buy list for quite some time. But the iPad announcement gave me a push and I finally spent money on a gadget that I long wanted.

My procrastination was partially explained by indecision. There are quite a few of interesting devices out there and I spent a long time figuring out which one to choose.

I already stated in that iPad article that I wanted the benefits of an eInk screen for my electronic reading. iPad, with an LCD screen, was not seriously in contention, to be honest.

I have absolutely no need to “buy the book and start reading it in 60 seconds”. My only impulse buys when it comes to books are in the segment of gorgeous travel and/or architecture photo-books. Not exactly something you’d buy for reading on a smallish monochrome device. And, anyway, I read a lot of public-domain books, and the rest only on someone’s recommendation. Surely, upon hearing a most effusive of endorsements for a specific work, I can wait until I get home, download the book onto my PC and then transfer it to my reader.

As an aside, I don’t really know how book publishing economics work, but if I can get a 1000-page mass market paperback for $7.99 at Barnes & Noble, I cannot think of a case for a digital file – no physical materials, nil physical storage space, nothing-can-be-simpler no-expense on-demand reissue – to cost $9.99. Especially, when you consider that a member of my family cannot pick up that same file when I’m finished with it just as they would a traditional tome.

So, the main advantages of a Kindle or a Nook are not really that important to me. I know a couple of people who own Kindles, and they are happy with them. But their reading habits differ from mine. I heard of only one person I know who’s getting a Nook so far and it’s too soon to judge how he likes it, but regardless, it is too new a device for me (remember, late adopter).

Considerations of storage are not of big import to me. Books are not songs – you can’t go through several dozen in a day. Having your entire library constantly with you is a completely unnecessary luxury, IMHO. I’m sure I’d be fine with having just a few books that are next in my reading queue. In any case, the e-readers with the least internal memory on the market can still carry around 160 books. I don’t think I’d ever buy a flash card specifically for the reader.

When I first considered buying an e-reader, I was concerned with formats. Seeing as there are at least three dozen different ones out there, I’d rather not be tied to a specific one. All of the major players are now not as proprietary-minded about formats as they were in the past, or they provide conversion services, but I was for a while seriously considering Astak ezReader as a possibility, on the strength of it being the only e-reader on the market that seemingly handles practically every format directly. Then, I discovered Calibre, which does an excellent job converting practically anything into anything.

Finally, russification. I read quite a lot of Russian literature, and for any non-English work, I am not sure I’d prefer an English translation to a Russian one.

That more or less sealed Sony as the only serious choice. I knew for a fact that Sony readers can be updated to properly display Cyrillic, and I was not sure that any other readers had similar patches available. And regardless, I’d have to look “outside” for Russian-language books, which was another point against investing into Amazon or B&N service.

Several people I know highly recommended Sony in either PRS-505 or PRS-300 incarnation. The latter I deemed a little bit too small for my taste (5″ screen). The former has been discontinued for a while in favor of touch-screen PRS-600. But I heard a lot of complaints about the screen glare on the new model. I even went to the local Best Buy and performed a very simple test with the available display models: Sticking my finger in front of the screen of PRS-300 resulted only in some shadows on the surface; doing the same for PRS-600 resulted in a clear reflection of my finger. I don’t want to see my face reflecting back at me when I read. I am not so keen on touch-screen capability as to compromise on the reading experience.

Various online stores are offering PRS-505 at $300 and above, so I decided to try eBay first. There were quite a few listings for “brand-new, factory-sealed” items, and it did not take me long to win one of them, for a very reasonable sum of $227.50. I received the package within a few days; it was as advertized in pristine never-opened condition. I spent some time on russification, which went quite easily, and then loaded the tiny total of 47 books onto the new toy. Should last me at least a couple of months.

I’ll let you know how I like it some other time.

Technology & Gadgets

The newest Apple gadget is shiny enough and I suspect a whole lot of people are salivating at the prospect of getting their hands on one. Perusing the official iPad website, I caught myself on a stray thought about how neat it would be to own one of these.

Let’s recall my repeatedly stated admission that I am a late adopter. Let’s also admit that I am not an Apple devotee, never having bought into the unsubstantiated religious belief that Apple products are truly superior to those of their competitors’, and having never been impressed with the monetary expenses attendant to owning every “greatest” Apple device. (I do own an iPod, but I actually got it at absolutely no cost to me. I don’t own anything else from Apple.)

Those considerations pretty much negate any possibility of me going out and getting an iPad when it becomes available. But there are also considerations of “Do I need a portable – however slick – computer at all?”

I do not spend a lot of “free” time in front of a computer at home. When I do switch on my home PC it is either for a computer-enabled house chore (say, to review family finances) or for a personal project. In both cases, I am pretty sure that a desktop PC with a wide-screen 24″ monitor and a full-size keyboard is a device more conducive to efficient task completion.

I prefer to read during my lengthy commute. Books or periodicals, not daily newspapers or blogs. So, an Internet browser with 3G wireless capability, while an unquestionably nice thing to have available, is not exactly a necessity for me. And an ability to peruse emails on the go – or to respond to them – does not fit at all into my M.O. I occasionally scroll through my Blackberry inbox outside of business hours, but I am a big proponent of leaving work behind when I am on my personal time.

I am perfectly fine with using my iPod – do you know that I still have the original monochrome-screen clunky-by-current-standards model? – for music on the go. I haven’t ever bought anything on iTunes and don’t plan to – vast majority of what I listen to is in Russian and is not available on iTunes, and my tastes in music are so calcified in the past, that it is hard to imagine that I don’t own something that I like on a CD, long ago digitized for iPod.

I have my business schedule and all of my contacts on my Blackberry. Given that it is also my mobile phone and my business emails channel, I am more than happy to have all of that functionality in that one place.

I can’t work up much enthusiasm for watching movies or TV shows on a smallish screen.

I practically do not play computer games.

I can see how having all of your pictures on a device that can easily display them while being passed around has certain value as a great conversation starter. I don’t know how frequently it would be of use, though. Certainly, not a necessity.

Having maps of the entire world – whether GPS-enabled or not – with you can also be viewed as valuable, but I honestly do not see myself trying to navigate streets of an unfamiliar city while checking my progress on a tablet. If anything, it will attract thieves in no time.

I don’t engage in creative pursuits that may require jotting down ideas as they occur to me. And my retentive memory is above average in that I actually rarely take notes altogether.

I do make to-do lists for myself all the time. On post-it notes, more often than not. Replacing that media with a tablet for that particular purpose appears an overkill.

So, of all the items listed on the iPad features page, book e-reader would appear the most useful for me. Except, with an LCD screen, I would not get the benefits of eInk that practically every dedicated e-reader provides these days.

Of course, it should be noted that I have not joined the 21st century yet in buying myself an e-reader. But I suppose I’ll look into doing that rather than contemplating getting a tablet PC, however brilliant iPad looks from a distance.

Technology & Gadgets

For a reasonably technologically-savvy person, I sometimes find myself utterly amazed by what nowadays technology can offer.

Like, for instance.

I’ve been wearing glasses since my early teens. One pair of glasses that I got myself roughly 20 years ago were so called “chameleons” – the specs that would become tinted in the sunlight. I suppose that made me an early adopter of photochromic lenses, but the problem was, they did not work that well. They would take forever to darken in most blinding sunlight, and would become just barely tinted at that. I abandoned them quite quickly, and ever since always made do with having two pairs of prescription glasses on me – one clear, one tinted.

My most recent pair of clear glasses was nearing its fifth or sixth year of life – despite some fancy-shmancy anti-scratch coating that I paid for when I got them, the lenses started to get worn out. I decided to get myself a new pair and figured I’d go for the photochromic lenses again, with Transitions.

I am astounded at how well they work.

There is maybe a 5-second interval of discomfort and having to squint when I first step outside into sunlight, and then it’s as if I’m wearing sunglasses. What’s more, my eyes don’t feel covered by a darkened glass – from inside out, I can barely tell that the lenses become tinted. The first couple of days of wearing them, I couldn’t help but stop at every other shop window to check my reflection and confirm that yes, in fact, the glasses looked dark grey on the outside.

Brilliant! I’m practically in love!

How about something more domestique…

Natasha saw one at our friends’ house and decided to buy a Roomba for ourselves. I realize that robots have been in use in various industries, wherever repetitive tasks are being performed, for decades now. But I’ve never had a first-hand experience with any, let alone with a robot with a certain level of artificial intelligence.

It’s a damn vacuum cleaner!

Which goes around a room all by itself. It bumps into walls and other obstacles – not very bright, by the looks of it, – but then finds ways along the former and around the latter. It makes different attempts to get into tight corners, angling this way and that. It methodically crosses the room and seemingly finds a way to go over every square inch of the surface in a pattern that cannot be understood by mere humans.

And – wait for this! – when it knows that it’s running out of juice, it propels itself towards its base and docks for re-charging. Really!

It is not perfect; it can obviously only do the floor – no stairs or pieces of furniture. But it does relieve us from having to actively participate in the process.

Passive participation is another matter. I could watch the little thing glide around the floor for hours.

Technology rulez!

Technology & Gadgets

I am an information technology professional. While my specialty is far from being hands-on PC support, I know how to take a PC apart and then put it together. I have replaced faulty components or upgraded some such with my own hands on numerous occasions. But I do not have the urge to muck around with computer equipment. If the machine works fine and satisfies my slightly-above-average requirements for performance, I don’t ever think about opening the case and poking around.

My main home PC is about 4 years old, but is by no means obsolete. It handles various media-editing software that I use quite effortlessly and I have virtually no interest in PC games, for which a more powerful machine would be needed. If I ever think of getting an upgrade, it’s primarily because I want to replace some other computers in the house, and I’ll likely do it via buying a latest and greatest for myself and passing on my current PC down the chain, so to speak.

A while ago, the PC started getting noisy.

It would boot up quite normally and chug along without a hitch, but at some point along the way, it would acquire the whining pitch that would reach a crescendo at the start-up of an arbitrary application. The whine would ebb and flow during the different periods of activity, but once started, it would not go away until the PC was turned off.

Something was definitely getting over-worked. I surmised that it was a cooling fan picking up higher speeds as the CPU did the extra bit of memory swapping and what-not. Because of the initial quietness upon boot-up and the subsequent ebb and flow of the noise, it did not seem broken, but rather put into overdrive by CPU activity. To prevent that from happening, I thought, I should figure out which piece of software may be causing the unwarranted CPU usage hike. I ran various types of diagnostics, cleaned the registry, de-fragmented hard drives, uninstalled several dozen of applications that I never use, all in search of a possible performance culprit. There was never a true indication that the problem was with the performance, but I still spent several nights trying to figure it out.

To no avail. The annoying whine would not go away, no matter what kinds of configuration changes I made.

Finally, I had a bright idea: I should open the PC cover and confirm the source of the noise.

When I did that, I saw something that I’ve never seen before: The inside of the computer was full of dust. Not a thin layer of dust that any bit of machinery that has not been cleaned for years might acquire, but quite literally a thick coat of the stuff.

I might have mentioned in the past somewhere that, in England, dust seemingly gathers on surfaces in considerably greater amounts in shorter periods of time than I remember it doing so in the States. We maybe needed to give our shelves and desks a proper dusting once a week in America, but here, it seems like only 24 hours after a major cleaning exercise you need to do it all over again.

Apparently, inside of a computer case was not immune to the ill effects of dust-gathering.

I was certainly right about the source of the noise – it was the CPU cooling fan. Only the reason for it being overworked was the thick sheet of pressed dust on the grille between the propeller and the circuitry. Scarcely any air could get through; instead, most of it went in the opposite direction out of the case through a side vent. The CPU was not being cooled enough – and it kept giving the fan signals to work harder. The fan spun faster than it normally should – the noise was the only tangible outcome. Oy!

Twenty years around computers – and I never suspected that the good old vacuum cleaner might be an essential peripheral.

At least, all is quiet again.

Chronicles, Technology & Gadgets

By the way, while working with Flash for my World Map, I ran into a slight inconvenience.

While locally Firefox properly picked up the latest version of the configuration xml file, I could not force it to pick up the updated server version of the configuration, short of rebooting my PC. It actually caused more than an inconvenience, since external URL clicks are not allowed from within locally run Flash applications; in order to test the integrity of all of those links in the map, I had to try it online; and whenever I corrected a broken link, I could not re-test it, because Firefox refused to acknowledge that it needed to refresh the cached configuration.

Conversely, Explorer seemed to understand my need to see the very latest version of the Flash map effortlessly. More bandwidth spent for a few dozen reloads? Undoubtedly so. Less aggravation for the tester? Immeasurably so.

On a flip side, Firefox seems to be perfectly comfortable with two-hundred-plus anchors within the World Map page, seemingly never trying to reload the page once it has been loaded, no matter how many times you jump around. Explorer, for reasons that I cannot understand, proceeds to reload the page every few jump link clicks.

So, yeah, Firefox still wins. I just thought someone working with Flash may want to be aware of the problem that caching causes for testing. Or, maybe, someone more familiar with Firefox than I am can suggest an approach to deal with this particular issue (“Clear Private Data”/”Clear Cache” is not acceptable – I do not want to get rid of everything in my cache for the sake of a single page).

Technology & Gadgets

[Update Apr 16, 2010] If you are here because you’re looking for comparisons of various photo-books software – and why else would you be on this page, anyway? – I also invite you to also read my most recent follow-up at this link
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Having finished with Travelog, I spent some free time in the last couple of days test-driving two services for photo-book-making that I first mentioned in this article: MyPublisher and Picaboo. For those interested, the first-time user comparison is below the cut.

[Update Jan 2nd]: I also now played for a couple of hours with another similar service that only recently came to my attention, Blurb. The article has been updated to include that in the comparison.
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Technology & Gadgets

We always go on holidays equipped with a camera – who doesn’t these days? – and quite often bring a camcorder as well. Coming back home with several hours of raw video footage and a few hundred photographs always seems like a good idea when you tape or shoot, but then the question of what to do with all those riches becomes key.

Realizing that this topic may not be of interest to all, I’m hiding the body of this post below the cut.
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Technology & Gadgets

Natasha and I have always said that we prefer digital cameras that are sized in a way that makes them feel substantial in your hands. None of that thumbs and forefingers nonsense, holding the camera as if it were a smelly diaper half a yard in front of your face. Real photographers use viewfinders anyway!

So, even when we bought non-DSLR cameras in the past, we always opted for SLR-like types. And DSLR, by definition, is not compact.

The obvious drawback to that approach is that you cannot carry your camera with you all the time. I’ve been lately finding myself in occasional situations where I wished I had a camera, but I’m definitely not lugging my hefty Nikon with me to work on an off chance that I come upon something worthwhile taking a snapshot of.

So, this week, I made an impulse decision that I needed to get me a compact digicam. Something cheap, not necessarily very advanced, but adequate in picture quality. I’d even settle on a 4-5 megapixels model, because I don’t believe that you ever need large-resolution pictures for non-professional purposes.

I popped into the nearby camera store, surveyed the models they had in the low range, spent a couple of hours researching those models on the internet, and confirmed my usual view that you don’t really save much money on ordering a low-end item online. I also discovered, to my surprise, that photographic progress left me somewhat behind, and cameras with resolutions below 8 megapixels are becoming scarce. Conversely, even the 8-megapixel models are now often priced in the range of a tank of gas.

I went back to the store and acquired a cool Fujifilm Finepix J12 (blue). Which is now settled in my jacket pocket. Now, all I have to do is become more aware of situations worth recording for posterity. And work on not feeling silly at stopping in the middle of my commute routine to take a picture of something.

I’ll keep you all updated.

Technology & Gadgets

I’ve had Firefox installed on my home PC for quite some time, but I wasn’t using it much beyond occasionally checking how one site or another might look and behave differently from what it appeared on IE. Then, a couple of happenings with my online friends led me to try it more extensively, and a couple of weeks ago I pretty much switched over full time.

Let’s get this out of the way: I am comfortable in being a late adopter. I never ever buy the new gadgets when they first appear on the market, and practically never switch from one software to another unless there is a serious flaw in the former and a serious benefit in adopting the latter. Since I don’t use internet browsers much beyond their basic functions of browsing and reading, IE has always been an adequate tool for me. Some people I know, who do a much fancier development at their websites than I do at mine, swear – using very strong lexicon – that IE curtails their ability to do fun and elaborate stuff, but I personally haven’t reached a point where I found IE limiting.

In any case, now that I switched, I am happy that I did. Whether Firefox is truly faster than IE is imperceptible to me, but one clear improvement has been virtual disappearance of the “Cannot connect to server” errors, which I used to get occasionally for no reason at all. I blame that squarely on the browser.

Some of the Firefox add-ons – e.g., cooliris – are nothing short of awesome. I doubt I’ll find time to make use of it frequently, but it’s one of those things that is fun to have as an option.

The biggest problem I found so far is not so much a Firefox issue, as it is a built-in disadvantage of being the later comer to the market. I find quite a number of websites – including some of my own work – which are coded with HTML attributes that only IE recognizes (simplest example: “alt” vs “title” for embedded images). Some sites refuse to work properly because of that. Thankfully, those are few and relatively unimportant.

Of little annoyance is the fact that a popup login to a Windows server is not capable of remembering my credentials. I’ve gotten so used to not having to remember the strange account name that my hosting company issued me years ago that it requires a considerable mental exertion to recall every time I need to login into my CPanel via Firefox.

And that’s about it. A pretty painless transition.

I have to consider now whether I want to move to Thunderbird for my personal email. I use Outlook Express (and very simple webmail access when I want to check my inbox from the office) and the two features that I truly need in an email client – an ability to read and an ability to write – are adequately fulfilled by that. Decisions, decisions…

Technology & Gadgets

As I mentioned, our car needs repairs. So I went to look for a shop.
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Chronicles, London & Environs, Technology & Gadgets

Famous England weather. It is not too cold, just cold enough to be unpleasant, and with wind, dark skies and intermittent rain, it is hard to will oneself to go outside…
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Chronicles, London & Environs, Technology & Gadgets, That's England

On Saturday at 6:45 in the morning, we were woken up by the loud knocks on the front door. I ran down the stairs in my sleepwear ensemble – that’s as far as I am willing to go into intimate details at the moment – and accepted the package with our new camera, specially delivered from Hong Kong.
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Technology & Gadgets