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Written by Roberto Montagna
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Sunday, 24 October 2010 15:47 |
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I've had my Kindle for a few weeks now. I bought it because I wanted a new gadget, which I hoped would turn out to be useful. I have to admit that I didn't spend ages pondering over it: I read a few reviews, a couple of comparisons, and once it was clear enough to me that the Kindle has the best screen screen for an ebook reader, I went for it.
Am I happy with it? Yes, it's a nice gadget with a clean design and I have been reading on it a lot since I have it. Would I recommend it to someone who doesn't feel quite ready to give up paperbacks? Not really, no. Not yet at least. I have a few reasons for this, and I'll start with what I think is more of an opinion rather than a fact. Buying an ebook is not quite the same as buying a book. Someone argued with me that this is true also for music albums, yet the market of online music has exploded in the past few years whereas that of cd's has constantly declined. There's one difference between the two things: the actual fruition is different. You need a player for a cd, and so you do for an mp3. The latter is much smaller and contains way more music, so the appeal is huge. With books it's not the same: you read the book itself and buying a new book means actually getting a new object that will stay with you at least until you finish it. But again, this is only my opinion, and it's anyway easy to see the appeal of having hundreds of books in a small device rather than in massive bookshelves that take a lot of space. The second reason I have is more technical. I think the technology isn't quite ready yet for this kind of devices. Don't get me wrong: I don't regret my purchase. Still, I have the feeling of using a 20 year old computer. The difference is that if the refresh of the screen is slow, that's not because of a slow processor, rather because of the screen technology, not to mention the fact that it can't display colours. As a consequence of the slow refresh, reactions to user commands are slow as well and touch screen is necessarily ages away. This means that reading a pdf which was not in the first place formatted for a Kindle-size page is awkward to say the least. The holy grail here would be a device with the same user experience as an iPhone (or an iPad) but with an eInk screen that doesn't require back lighting and doesn't kill your eyes after an hour or more of reading. Even if the first colour eInk screens are due to appear next year, I think there's still a long way to go before ebook readers will be able to be effective substitutes of books.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 24 October 2010 15:52 |
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Practical advice for PC users |
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Written by Roberto Montagna
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Friday, 14 May 2010 15:55 |
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I've been thinking about this for a while, and I finally put it into practice. The computers at the UEA are ok, but the choice of software they have is somewhat poor. It would be nice to have a sort of university-wide wiki where any student can write their own advice to other students, but the organisation of such a thing would take me too much time, not to talk about the bureaucracy (besides, maybe there's already something like that, without students' contributions though). So here I am, with a couple of suggestions, that I will add to the link section of this website.
How about this? It's simply great: all the software available there can run on any computer, simply from a USB stick. Perfect for those computers (such as those at the UEA) where you can't install software. Personally, from here I installed Skype, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Notepad++ and Filezilla.
Here's another great thing. The UEA offers that great piece of crap called TeXnicCenter, that has an appalling interface, crashes if you use Adobe Reader as pdf previewer, if you're lucky enough to get your pdf built without errors. No wonder I hated it after being used to TexShop for Mac! Texmaker is free, cross-platform, and on Windows doesn't require installation. It's absolutely a must, if you use LaTeX for typesetting your documents!
Are you working on more than one computer? Do you email yourself the files you need, only to realise that you forgot that you needed also another file, and without that you can't do anything? Here's the solution for you! Dropbox synchronises a folder on your computers with an online server, so that whatever modification you do on the files in that folder, the change will be automatic on all computers at the same time. The space on the server is 2GB only, but it grows as you invite friends to join (by the way, you can join from here if you want to do me a favour). On the down side, Dropbox needs to be installed to work properly on a computer. On the up side, somebody thought of that, and released Dropbox Portable, that works without installation (you have to go through the thread in the forum if you want to find the download link). |
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Last Updated on Friday, 14 May 2010 16:59 |
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Written by Roberto Montagna
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Saturday, 26 December 2009 14:45 |
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In the evening of the 23rd December I noticed something wrong with my website: the homepage was simply a white page with a search field in the middle. It took me a while, but I finally realised that it had been defaced. In other words, somebody hacked into my website and changed some contents. I don't know exactly when that happened, but I can restrict the time frame to some time between the afternoon of the 22nd December and the evening of the 23rd, while I didn't check the internet. I don't know the details of how the attack was carried out. According to what the support of my hosting service said, it seems that I didn't upgrade the CMS I'm using. I don't think somebody actively tried to attack my website: rather, I believe that this was some kind of automated attack based on some known vulnerability of the CMS. As for the motivations, from a quick analysis of the scripts left on the server by the defacer, it seems to me that their purpose was to collect email addresses stored in the database (but there was only my address) and to attack the hosting server. Now I finally restored all the contents. From now on I'll keep an eye on the security warnings about Joomla, more for the time it took me to restore the whole thing than for the damage done, which was after all limited. |
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Last Updated on Saturday, 26 December 2009 15:05 |
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Written by Roberto Montagna
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Tuesday, 25 August 2009 14:59 |
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Approaching its third birthday, my website is getting a complete restyling. The reason is quite obvious: my most regular readers must have noticed that lately I wasn't publishing updates as regularly as before: in other words, I wasn't writing any more. In these conditions, having a blog was quite useless for me. On the other hand it's still useful to have a website where to publish my data, my contact and keep an updated CV. Therefore here's a substantial restyling, in the structure and in the content, that will still allow me to publish news, but won't be a blog any longer. |
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 25 August 2009 15:28 |
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