Odd Public Sculptures
Public sculptures can get pretty weird.
Dream of Electric Sheep
These are not the electric sheep Philip K. Dick was writing about.
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InstaKindle
Instapaper, Kindle Edition
For my breakfast this morning at Eggbert’s, I decided to opt out of the increasingly sparse print edition of the Tulsa World. Instead, I took both my Kindle and my iPhone with me.
After scanning the Tulsa World headlines on my iPhone via their mobile site, I opened up my Kindle and activated its web browser to read some online articles I’d save with the marvelous Instapaper site, which I’ve written about before. But for some reason I couldn’t login to Instapaper via the Kindle’s primitive web browser. I’d already been disappointed in how the Kindle browser was rendering the new icon design of Instapaper, and now this.
But I wasn’t about to give up on Instapaper, which has been so incredibly useful to me. So I pulled out my iPhone, started its Instapaper app, and used it to read Jerry Pournelle’s latest Chaos Manor column. The iPhone is great for reading articles when I don’t have my Kindle with me, but its cramped screen really slows down my reading.
This evening I decided to look into what was amiss with using Instapaper on my Kindle, and was delighted to discover that Instapaper now has native Kindle support. You can have a digest of your saved Instapaper articles emailed automagically to your Kindle and then browse through them like a book, which is even more convenient than accessing them via the Kindle’s web browser.
You have to configure your Kindle account to accept emails from Instapaper and provide Instapaper with your Kindle’s email address. Then digests of your saved articles can be sent to your Kindle, each one complete with a hyperlinked table of contents. This is far more convenient than logging in through the Kindle browser and bouncing back and forth between the saved articles and the Instapaper website’s index. And, to top it off, the Kindle’s rendering of the articles in this format is far better than its web browser’s rendition of them.
Amazon will charge you 10 cents to convert and upload each emailed digest from Instapaper, but even if you sent yourself a daily update, that would only amount to $3.10 per month at most. And Instapaper let’s you send updates daily or weekly, and delay updates until a set number of unread entries have built up.
Hooray for Marco Arment, who has added great value to my Kindle, my iPhone, and my web experience in general. Instapaper just keeps getting better.
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The laptop is dead! Long live the laptop!
Blue Devil is replaced by Bland Devil
I always like to run computers into the ground before I replace them, and today my school laptop foundered after six years of steady use. Blue Devil was purchased as part of equipping our brand new Science Wing back in 2003. It’s a Dell Inspiron 5100 running Windows XP on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 microprocessor with 512 MB of RAM. We purchased six of these units, one for each lab, and all but two had already been retired by other frustrated teachers.
But Blue Devil had hung in there until today, when the district’s new Lightspeed Security Agent software humbled her. The security software was running the CPU and disk so hard that the unit was virtually unusable and by noon had overheated to where it shut itself off. I reported the problem so that Tech Services might eventually look into it, but clearly it was time to move on.
Thankfully the district bought some science laptops last summer, so now I’m using Bland Devil, a Dell Latitude D630 with a terribly boring appearance. I thought Inspirons were uninspiring, but Latitudes lack any attitude at all. They bring drab to a whole new level. But inside that boring Latitude case is a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo microprocessor and 2 GB of RAM, so at least it can stay afloat while running the security software. One thing I don’t like is its 16×9 ratio screen, which is not a good match for my 4×3 ratio LCD projector: I lose screen height on the projection when cloning the display. But I shan’t complain much, since I’m lucky there was anything available to take Blue Devil‘s place.
Thankfully the new machine is still running Windows XP and not Vista, which I despise. And I suppose I should be glad to have Office 2007 on the thing instead of 2003, but I’ve yet to adapt to that stupid ribbon interface.
Next week I’ll introduce Bland Devil to Corel WordPerfect X4. Yes, I’m still using WordPerfect after almost a quarter century, and I love it! The granular control over a document in WordPerfect with its “reveal codes” feature still beats Word hands down for me. And I still use Corel Presentations Graphics X4 for vector graphics work. But I will happily admit that Excel and PowerPoint are better than whatever Corel bundles with WordPerfect.
Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!
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Ground Zero
Little Boy hits home
Back in my college days I did a report calculating the effects of a 20 megaton nuclear bomb being detonated over Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City. A new web mash-up makes that sort of thing terribly easy these days. Ground Zero from CarlosLabs lets you detonate a variety of atomic and thermonuclear devices over any spot on Earth and see the effects. They even include asteroid strikes. The BLDG Blog has an interesting article on this.
Meador Manor 