TimesToCome

X Minux One Old sci-fi radio show now available on mp3.

Scott Sigler Several podcasts of his books, good old smash ‘em up, shoot ‘em up science fiction.

JC Hutchins Series of 7th Son science fiction novels of the secret government conspiracy type.

Escape Pod Science fiction shorts

Pseudopod Horror shorts

Craphound Light science fiction as social commentary

We were wandering looking for holiday presents and came upon the Sony eBook readers at the local Sony store. We were all set to get one for everyone when I read the fine print that said ‘Windows required’. We ended up with only purchasing a couple of them.

Later a fellow twitterer told us about Calibre an open source program that allows you to transfer pdfs, ebooks and many other formats to the Sony reader’s preferred format (lrf). It also allows you to edit the book information, titles, authors etc. In addition you can tag your books to create collections on your Sony reader.

It does not handle drm’d material. Nor can you use the Sony ebook store from OSX. I guess Sony doesn’t want my money? No matter, my main interest in the reader was to be able to read technical manuals and scientific papers.

I had read on many forums that Sony readers do not handle pdfs well. This is not true. If a pdf is a true text document and not just scanned images of book pages it renders them beautifully in three different text sizes. If the pdf is just scanned images it is not readable. The only scanned pdfs I’ve found have been on pirate sites so this isn’t an issue for me.  All of my technical manuals and scientific papers render beautifully.

I downloaded an issue from SciAm but because they have columns in their pdfs the text gets jumbled and they are unreadable on your Sony Reader. O’Reilly makes several books available for pdf download. These are watermarked not DRM’d so you’ll have no trouble reading them on your reader.

Should you want to read something besides technical papers check out Planet eBook which has a great classic and science fiction section, Project Gutenberg which has thousands of free books you can download or Feedbooks. Tor is also giving away pdf sci-fi books, I think they plan to do one a week. Bookyards has lots of novels and textbooks. Yet another excellent source of books, already formatted for your Sony is Munseys. Munsey’s also sells CDs of their books on eBay, I just purchased a 12,000 book cd all preformatted for my Sony reader.

A site I just recently stumbled into is Scribd, they have everything from textbooks to novels, all are available for downloading as *.pdfs or *.txt either of which you can view on your reader or convert to *.lrf format.

The Sony book store is a disgrace, but Fictionwise has a great selection of books at prices that are reasonable for eBooks. They carry non-drm’d books in the Sony format as well as drm’d in pdf format which works just fine on your reader once you’ve authorized it.

On OSX you must install a virtual machine or borrow a friend’s Windows computer to do the Adobe authorization.  Download Adobe, download Digitial Editions, sign up for an account, plug in your Sony reader and authorize it.

Once authorized you can download drm’d books to your Mac and move them to your reader using Calibre or just drag and drop them on the reader drive.  When you purchase pdf’s that are drm’d you get a reciept for the book, not the book.  You open the reciept in your Adobe digital reader, you can do this on OSX.  It will create a pdf which you then load onto your reader.

So if you are looking for a portable reader for manuals, scientific papers, classics,  ebooks drm’d and not Sony PRS-505 is an excellent choice. While the over the air software and hardware doesn’t exist like on Amazon’s Kindle, it also isn’t back ordered for three months.

I like the Sony hardware much better than I do the Kindle. It feels sturdier and is nicer looking and a bit more compact. Also to read pdfs on Kindle you must email them to Kindle, this might not be practical with larger technical manuals.

My father has trouble reading anything but big print books now. So we gave him the higher end, touch screen Sony reader which has two additional larger font sizes and a backlight.

The built in memory handles hundreds of books, both of the readers allow you to add memory cards. A 8 gb sd card will store more books than you could ever read. I’m guessing I could fit at least 10,000 books on my 8 gb card.  The Sony reader has two card slots, each of which will read up to a 32gb card.

Twitter has been a lot of fun. I realized I was behind the curve last April when I attended a garden blogger’s conference.  I was the geekiest of them all, and about the only one not yet on Twitter.

So I signed up when I came back from the conference.  Over the last few months I’ve stayed in touch with people I would not otherwise have remained in touch with and I ‘ve met a whole lot of really cool people in the surrounding communities.

The best way to use Twitter is to sign up and first look for people you already know.  Then using Twitter’s search tool you can search for people with common interests near you,Ã or any where you’d like to meet people.

It is a bit like having a text messaging party line.  I leave Twhirl running on my desktop.  You’ll have several witty comments run by, several funny comments run by, and you’ll be the first to hear if anything interesting happens near you. You can jump in and help when someone has a question, people will jump in and help you when you are stuck on a technical issue.

You can send messages to the public and to a specific person, you can also carry on private conversations under the radar of everyone else.

You can access Twitter from your cell phone there are clients for most every phone or you can just go to the website.

You can upload photos various ways to share with the Twitter crowd.

Twitter is changing the way lots of companies interact with people. About a week ago Comcast went out and I twitted ‘Comcast is out what a surprise’ seconds later I received ‘@timestocome How can we help? comcastcares’. It was spooky.

I imagine a day not too many months away when I will Twitter ‘George Bush is a moron’ and I’ll receive back ‘Step away from the keyboard, swat team is moving in department_homeland_security’.

On Twitter you’ll be limited to 160 characters per tweet. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll learn to convey things in 160 characters or less.

Many of the iPhone clients have an emergency button on the Twitter clients. You hit it and it takes a photo, your GPS coordinates and sends a tweet for help to your friend list. In Egypt an American Twittered to his friends that the police were coming. His friends then knew he had been arrested and were able to get him out of jail. One day soon not having a Twitter account will be like not having an email address.

I mentioned in passing that it is odd that people search for my name once or twice a month, visit my blogs, then never leave a note or drop an email. I never know if it is an old friend, new friend or someone just curious about me? No matter, any information I have splashed all over the web is public. But someone asked how I knew people were Googling me?

So how do you know if people are watching you? I find out from my website logs. Every log entry that comes from a search engine, shows the terms some one used to find your website.

timestocome.com-Jul-2008:00.00.00.000 – - [06/Jul/2008:14:43:13 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 2206 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Linda+MacPhee-Cobb” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SU 3.011; (R1 1.6); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; MAXTHON 2.0)”

I zero’d out the ip number of the searcher. You will have an ip number, date, search terms, browser, and search engine.

You can then search for the ip number in the logs and see what other pages that person visited.

So are you curious about who is curious about you?

You can go to Arin enter the ip number of your visitor and you might get some information back. More likely he/she will just be part of a pool of ip numbers from some isp, but it never hurts to try and occasionally you get lucky.

You can put that ip number in your web browser and see if there is a website hosted there.

You can also check your emails and see if that ip number turns up in an email that was sent to you.

If you are worried about people stalking you on the web, keep your real name off the web. Seriously I don’t see any harm in it. Tell me that you, the reader, has never Googled someone you’ve run across. I thought not. You were just curious, and I expect your visitor was as well and perhaps just embarrassed to tell you.

Suppose you want to Google someone, visit the websites that turn up, but not be identified as having Googled that person? That is easy.

Google the person in one browser, cut and paste the link into another. The search term shows up when you click the links Google servers up. It helps webmasters know what kind of information people are looking for on their site. If people are looking for information on apples and I’m not covering apples much on my site, I know I need to fix that.

Now if you want to know who is talking about you online you’ll want to set up a Google Alert. I have them set up for my name and for the website domains.

Remember, always, every step you take online is logged.

Resist the temptation to get too clever setting up a website with your name on it to see who is Googling you. It might be your future spouse or your future employer who is doing the search.

Who’d've thunk you’d see me waiting in line for anything? But the husband needed down time and it was about the only excuse that was going to get him to take off a day.

I figured we’d be in line 1 maybe 2 hours. Ha, it was more like 5.

But we were able to pass the time chatting with some geeks I know from town. We also met some cool new geeks from the surrounding areas. And we chatted about all sorts of geeky nerdy things. There is a lot of geekiness that can be covered in 5 hours. They were all impressed by Twitter updates coming through from around Houston.

About an hour into the wait Chick Fil-A sent down a cow to entertain us. The cow danced, cut up and then brought food. By then we were hearing about ATT stores selling out, though I’m told the ATT employees all seemed to score phones for themselves.

The Apple employees brought us several rounds of water, coffee and good cookies. About 2 hours into the wait they brought us 10% off accessories coupons.

3 or so hours into the wait some guy in a suit walked by surrounded by 4 foreign soldiers. Possibly Mexican, no one knew for sure, but it gave us all something to watch and puzzle over.

About 4 hours in Godivia sent over ice cold chocolate coffee treats. They were much appreciated.

Nice businesses, you can bet I’ll do business with them all again.

The Gap store freaked. The help marked out their territory with posts and ribbon and glared at us the whole time. Guess who won’t be seeing any of my money anytime soon.

Activations take place at home. iTunes servers are hammered. But shutting down and restarting iTunes seems to do the trick to get you through it all.

It was interesting talking to some of the younger nerds in the crowd. They couldn’t understand why all us ‘older’ folks are upset over government spying and talking about ‘Big Brother’. Let’s hope they don’t need to find that out. Though that prospect seems unlikely.