Notely

How to go paperless the future-proof way (without using Evernote)

2013-01-24T13:52:00.001-08:00

The short version:

Get a Doxie One scanner. For (optional) convenience, get an Eye-Fi SD card for $35, which will send documents from the scanner to your computer wirelessly and automatically.

Update: If you want to cut your scanning time by more than half, spend a few bucks more and get the Canon P-215 scanner (as recommended by The Wirecutter). It scans twice as fast, it scans both sides of the page at the same time, it has a document feeder, and it has built-in OCR.
Scan your documents to your hard drive. Put them all in one big folder. If you want, use the OCR option in Doxie’s software to make your PDFs searchable.
Date and tag the documents: use this format for filenames:
[year]-[month] name of document #tag1 #tag2 #tag3.pdf
Get an expanding file jacket. Put all your important papers in there and out of the way, and scan them all once every quarter or so (I usually do my scans once a year just before I do my taxes).
Shred the original documents.
Keep backups.

When you want to run a search, open your archive folder and run a search. Need all tax-related documents for last year? Search for 2012 #taxes.

No subscriptions. No extra software. Guaranteed to be stay portable and useful for the next 20 years.

Why the hashtags? What about folders?

Using #tags #like #this in the filename is a universal tagging mechanism. It works on Mac OS and on Windows, and the searches on those systems will have no problem finding your files.

Sticking files in a folder hierarchy is a poor way of filing that is on its way out. For example, what do you do if a document is both medical and tax-related in nature? Do you create a Taxes → Medical folder structure, or Medical → Taxes?

Tags allow a document to live in more than one box at a time, are easy to add, and are easy to search for.

Why Not Evernote? Reasons, that’s why.

There have been a couple of great posts by others lately about going paperless, and they’re definitely worth reading. But they all assume you need some kind of fancy software setup, including (most commonly) a subscription plan to Evernote.

I agree it must be nice to have someone else run OCR on my documents and host them for me. But let’s look at the drawbacks:

I have to pay someone else $60 a year in case I need to perform occasional full-text searches on my own documents.
Long-term uncertainty. Will Evernote be around in 10 years? 20 years? How do I know I’ll be able to get my massive archive back out again when they go out of business?
Handing off responsibility for your sensitive documents to someone else’s computers — this is just asking for trouble. Data corruption, security breaches, warrantless searches. Over the next 10 years, it’s almost a given that your hosted service of choice will be hit by at least one of them.

Accessing BBC Coverage from the U.S.

2012-07-29T16:29:00.003-07:00

You live in the U.S., you don’t have a cable subscription but you want to watch the Olympics live? Here’s how to do it.

If you have a Mac, you can just follow these excellent instructions by Brad Gessler.

If you’re a Windows user, follow the instructions below, which I’ve adapted from Brad’s post after a good bit of tinkering. I’m also including some details that he left out.

Brad writes¹: “Signup up for a Linode account. After you enter your credit card information and select a Linode server, you’ll be asked where you’d like to boot the server. It’s important that you select London, UK during this step so that you get an IP address from inside of London.” Note that the $20 (least-expensive) server option should be plenty for your needs.
When Linode asks which distribution you’d like to use, leave it at the default (Debian). You can also follow all the defaults for the other setup settings (disk space, swap, etc.). After configuration and setup are complete, follow the steps on the web interface to boot your server up.
Download PuTTY (just download the putty.exe file listed first). This is the program you will use to connect to your Linode server in London.
Configure PuTTY:
- Main PuTTY screen: Under Host Name enter the IP address of your server, leave Connection type as SSH.
- In the tree view at left, click Connection → Data. In the auto-login username field, enter the text root
- In the tree view at left, click Connection → SSH. Make sure enable compression is checked.
- In the tree view at left, click Connection → SSH → Tunnels. Under Source port, type 8080. Select the Dynamic option and leave the other settings as default, then click Add.
- Return to the main PuTTY screen by clicking Session in the tree view at left. Type a name under Saved Sessions and click Save (so you won’t have to go through this whole rigamarole every time).
Set up your proxy.
- If you use IE or Chrome, configure this by going to Network and Sharing Center, and clicking Internet Options. Go to Connections tab, click LAN Settings button. Make sure Use a proxy server for your LAN is checked, and click the “Advanced” button. Enter 127.0.0.1 next to the “Socks” field, and enter 8080 for the port. Leave the other fields blank as shown (HTTP, Secure, and FTP).
- If you use Firefox, go to “Connection Settings”, select “Manual proxy configuration” and follow the same procedure, entering 127.0.0.1 next to the “Socks host” field, and 8080 for the port, and ensure the other fields are blank.

Now every thing is set up.

Whenever you want to watch Olympics on BBC:

Make sure the proxy is turned on as in step 5 above — these settings will be saved from last time, all you have to do is turn it on again.
Open PuTTY, double-click on your saved session, and enter your password when prompted. You can minimize the terminal window once you’re sure you’ve logged in.
Browse to http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/tv/bbc_one_london/watchlive to watch the Olympics live, or go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/olympics/2012/live-video to pick and watch specific events.

When you’re done: Tunneling all your web traffic through a London server will make the rest of your browsing slower (and waste your Linode account’s bandwidth) so you should close PuTTY and turn off the proxy server setting from step 5 above when you’re not watching the Olympics.

Thanks to @mja for the original tip about Brad’s post, and the one about where to go directly to watch specific events.

Other approaches

I did attempt to use a VPN service to do essentially the same thing, but it was far too slow.

Update, July 30 2012:

If you use Chrome or Firefox, installing a “proxy switcher” extension for your browser will make between enabling and disabling the proxy setting much easier. Use Proxy Switchy for Chrome, or QuickProxy for Firefox.
A couple more good articles about this issue have popped up:
- A post by Colin Nederkoorn, in which he initially advocates the VPN method, but also mentions the Unblock Us service. He’s not sure how it works (and neither am I) but he says it works great.
- Dan Parsons advocates setting up OpenVPN on your Linode server, but I haven’t seen any reason why one should go to the additional step of installing OpenVPN when a simple SOCKS proxy seems to work fine.

Full disclosure: I’ve copied the Linode signup link from Brad’s original post, which means it still includes Brad’s referral code. I thought this was fair since he was the one who first posted the basic solution. In his post he expresses a wish to find some way to use his referral code to donate to the EFF; I’ll keep an eye out, and if he finds a way to do that I’ll update this post’s link as well. ↩

How To Get Inexpensive Data Roaming For International Travel on Verizon

2012-07-10T10:52:00.002-07:00

Update, Sep 17 2012: Also read this excellent article: Which iPhone 5 for a Global Traveller?

If you’re a U.S. Verizon customer with a smartphone, here’s the lowdown on keeping data roaming charges to a minimum for any trips outside the country.

Keep in mind, it’s not uncommon for Verizon to alter the options they offer. If this article hasn’t been updated in more than 6 months¹, things may have changed; in that case, look around further online or call customer service and ask them how best to handle it.

Be sure to leave a comment with your findings!

The penny-pincher method (for trips of less than three weeks)

My wife is from Canada and we do this regularly during our visits to family there.

The way Verizon charges for data outside the U.S. is (currently) very simple: They charge for global data in chunks: $25 gets you a somewhat-measly 100MB. You can’t pay in any smaller increments.

Here’s what to do. Call customer service ahead of time², and ask them to add one 100mb block of Global Data, but only for the days you’ll be outside the US. Give them the days you want it to go on and off your account (i.e., the days that you’ll be crossing the border). This will pro-rate the cost by the number of days you are on the plan, but it will also pro-rate the amount of data you get.

For example, supposing you’ll be out of the country for 11 days. Here’s how the costs for this method would work out (for each line, remember):

Cost: ($25 / 31) x 11 = $8.87
Data: (100MB / 31) x 11 = 35MB (round down to nearest MB)

Now (in this example) you’re only paying $9 extra per phone instead of $25. On a two-phone account, that would be a savings of $31.

The trick is staying under that low data ceiling (35MB in this example). If you use more than the chunk of prorated data you’ve already paid for, you’ll automatically get an additional 100MB — and charged the additional $25 as well, meaning you’ll probably pay more than you needed to³.

If you’re going to be out of the country for more than 20 days, the savings from this method become too small to be worth the hassle; you might as well just get the 100MB.

Either way, here’s how to make sure you don’t use up your “cheap” data:

Save your data usage for when you’re at a wifi hotspot (any data you use over wifi doesn’t count against you). This includes websites, email, Instagram, Facebook, etc. — pretty much app that communicates in any way. Some games don’t use data, but many do. Light usage of these things is ok, but the more you can save for wifi, the more likely you won’t break your data cap.
Don’t watch videos when not on wifi (Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
Don’t stream any music when not on wifi (Spotify, Pandora, iCloud, Amazon, etc.)
If you’ll need maps during the day, look them up ahead of time while on wifi, making sure to zoom in and out to download the tiles at various zoom levels
(For iPhone users) Turn off Push for email — instead set it to Fetch Hourly (or Fetch Manually).
Go to Settings — Mail, Contacts, Calendars — Fetch New Data, turn off the Push option and set the frequency to Hourly or Manually.

What about the inconvenient and totally free method?

Depending on your phone, it’s possible that you may be able to avoid any extra overseas data charges altogether by turning off cellular data.

When your phone is connected to a network of any kind, it is constantly “sipping” data. True, it’s a miniscule amount, but as soon as it sips even one kilobyte while you’re out of the country, you get that $25 charge for a block of 100MB of roaming data.

On an iPhone, you need to turn off cellular data under Settings → General → Network. (Turning off “Data Roaming” will not work — it’s notoriously unreliable.) Another option, if you want to avoid voice roaming charges as well, is to turn on Airplane Mode and then re-enable WiFi. Remember you can’t place or take any cellular calls in Airplane Mode, but you could use Skype or FaceTime to make calls while connected to WiFi.

The catch with this method is that it can never actually eliminate your risk. Unforeseen circumstances can very easily require you to grab an email or place a call when you’re not near wifi, and even if it’s technically possible to change your phone’s settings back and forth in just the right ways, you always risk slipping up even for a second and incurring that $25 charge. Personally I’d much rather be realistic and plan ahead so I can be flexible without breaking the bank. For short trips especially, I really don’t believe it’s worth the mental hassle, unless you want to take the challenge as sort of a game with yourself. Shoot, if you can prove you did it, I’ll personally send you a $10 Starbucks gift card.⁴

What if I’ll be out of the country for more than three weeks?

Then you really need to read this article: World travel with the unlocked US Verizon iPhone 4S — check out the comments as well.

As I said, I have family in Canada so I shouldn’t have a problem keeping this post updated with any changes I encounter. ↩
From your Verizon phone, dial 611, or dial (800) 922-0204. Press 0 at the menu to just get right to a live person. You’ll be asked to state your reason for calling and told about higher-than-normal wait times, but this is just to deter you into trying the website instead; the wait usually isn’t very long. ↩
Supposing you did use up your “small” chunk and got hit with an additional 100MB chunk, but your total roaming data for the month was still under 100MB, you should be able to call customer service and at least get credited for the “small” chunk. I’ve had to do this once, with no problems. ↩
Here’s the rules: No Purchase Necessary. There’s only one prize, a $10 Starbucks gift card given away by random drawing. To enter the drawing you must blog or tweet something positive about this blog (referencing my Twitter account @joeld) and provide me privately with proof that 1) you’re a paying U.S. Verizon customer in good standing with a smartphone data plan as part of your regular account, 2) that you incurred $0.00 in data roaming charges during any given billing period, and 3) that you personally were out of the country with your smartphone ( powered on ) for at least two days during the billing period in question. The ideal way to satisfy these requirements would be a copy of your driver’s license, a copy of your Verizon bill, and a photo of you holding your powered-on smartphone open to an information screen showing that phone’s own number, and clearly showing an identifiable non-USA landmark in the background. The photo should be signed and dated by the person who took it (not you), along with their contact info. The drawing will take place within 1 week of the first qualifying entry. Good luck! :-D ↩

Fix severe delays when loading Excel 2003 files from network drives

2012-06-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

I was recently made aware of a problem where Excel 2003 would take several minutes to load a spreadsheet from a network drive. What made it even worse was that several of these sheets were referenced inside a CAD drawing (meaning AutoCAD would open Excel in the background for each spreadsheet referenced), and the load delay for each individual spreadsheet made it was near-impossible for the drawing to ever finish loading.

I found three possible solutions to the problem.

The first (which I used) was to create or modify the following registry key using regedit:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Excel\Security\FileValidation]
"EnableOnLoad"=dword:00000000

The second option is to uninstall the Microsoft Office File Validation Add-in from the Control Panel.

The third is to upgrade to Excel 2007 or later.

The iPhone Hot Battery Drain, Fixed with a Lightweight Email Setup

2012-05-25T07:36:00.002-07:00

Recently my iPhone 4S suddenly began exhibiting symptoms of the famous “hot battery drain” problem, where the phone would become much warmer to the touch then normal, the battery would drain more quickly, and the phone would charge much more slowly than normal.

It’s been known for some time now that this is often an iOS 5 bug caused by a contact sync process that gets out of hand¹. In the process of fixing this problem for myself, I discovered an alternative to the commonly-used practice of using an extra Exchange account for syncing Gmail contacts. This new setup has dramatically increased my battery life even beyond what it was before I started having the battery drain issue.

Note: I use Gmail, and I like all my contacts to be available from there. These instructions are thus somewhat Gmail-centric, but you should be able to improve your battery life by following the general principles shown. If you have tips for other email/contact setups, please let us all know in the comments.

First, solve the battery drain issue. The following steps solved the problem for me²:

Remove all the messaging accounts on your phone, including iCloud. Remove all Calendars, Contacts, Notes and Bookmarks from the phone (so you don’t have duplicates when you re-add the accounts later).
Power down your phone (the normal way, by holding down the power button and sliding to power off).
Let it cool off, and start it up again.

You now have a blank slate: no email, calendars, or contacts. A blank slate means a chance to clean up and streamline.

Re-add your iCloud account. Wait long enough for contacts and calendars to sync, check to make sure.
Re-add your Gmail account as a Gmail account. This means it will only pull in mail (and calendar), not contacts.
Clean up your Gmail contacts by opening your contacts in Gmail (i.e., open the website on your computer), clicking the More button at the top, and clicking Find and merge duplicates...
Purchase the Contacts Sync For Google GMail app. Yes it’s $4.99. It’s worth it.
Run the app, making sure to read the User Guide to make sure it will be syncing contacts the way you want it to. (I used 2-way, so all my contacts live in both my iCloud and my Gmail accounts.)
Finally, go to the Settings app, and go to the Mail, Contacts, Calendars section. Click on Fetch New Data. Make sure Push is turned off, and select the Hourly fetch schedule.

Now you have all your contacts synced by an app that knows how to do its job better than iOS does (seriously, check out the reviews), and you have an email connection that is lightweight and uses minimal battery life.

For what it’s worth, I also have an Exchange account for work that syncs mail, contacts, calendars and reminders — also on the hourly fetch schedule.

Wait, won’t there be a big delay for receiving emails this way? No, not really. The fact is that whenever you open an email inbox in the Mail app, your iPhone instantly re-checks the account for new mail anyway. The Fetch setting only limits the background checking that the phone does when you’re not looking, so setting it to hourly just means the red “new email” number on the Mail icon won’t update itself more than once an hour³. You can always get an up-to-the-minute check by just opening the Mail app.

No one seems to be sure why, however. The most extensive troubleshooting that has been made public seems to leave a lot of unanswered questions. ↩
I based this off of this thread at Apple support — they seem to work even though they were posted as a solution to a similar problem that was before iOS 5. ↩
Seriously, how often do you really need to check your email? More than once an hour and I’d say you have serious productivity issues. ↩

How to Easily Use OpenType Fonts in LaTeX

2012-04-23T10:44:00.000-07:00

I became interested in LaTeX out of a desire to be able to produce high-quality PDFs for self-published books. Someday I hope to be able to produce books of comparable quality to these humanities books typeset in TeX. This idea became even more feasible when I discovered the text content could be written in Markdown and converted to LaTeX with pandoc (More information in this article).

Typographically, the example books I linked to above are more the exception than the rule: the vast majority of LaTeX documents use the same boring default font, Computer Modern, that was originally packaged with the software in the 1980s. Using Computer Modern in a self-published book would be almost as bad as using Times New Roman or Arial.

If you try to figure out whether and how you might be able to use your computer’s normal fonts with LaTeX, you will soon come across a lot of extremely complicated and incomplete documentation about how to convert TrueType or OpenType fonts into a format LaTeX can use.

The happy truth is that these instructions are now obsolete: you now have easy access to OpenType fonts on Windows and Mac platforms, thanks to a new version of LaTeX called XeTeX. XeTeX includes a package called fontspec that gives full access to all system fonts, as well as advanced features for OpenType fonts, such as ligatures and small caps. XeTeX is available for Mac, but what most people don’t say is that this font-accessing goodness can also be used on Windows since XeTeX is included with Windows distributions such as TeX Live and MikTeX.

That being understood, here’s how to use your system fonts in your TeX documents (source):

Use the xelatex command in place of pdflatex

Add \usepackage{xltxtra} at the beginning of your preamble (some XeTeX goodies, in particular it also loads fontspec, which is needed for font selection).

Add \setmainfont{Name of OTF font} in the preamble.

No step 4.

Note: If you are using the aforementioned pandoc to generate your TeX documents, you do not need to do step 2 — pandoc already includes the fontspec package in its default template. Also, you can set the main font by adding the option --variable=mainfont:"font name" when calling the pandoc command.

Publish multiple Markdown files to HTML in Windows

2012-04-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote this script as a means of setting up a dead-simple “knowledge base” in HTML format.

The idea is to write documentation as a collection of plain-text files in Markdown format and have a no-fuss way to publish them as HTML, re-publishing changes as necessary.

In order for this script to work, you need to be on Windows, and you need to install a program called pandoc.

How to use it:

Save a copy of this script file in any folder containing a bunch of Markdown-formatted text files. Include a stylesheet.css file in this folder as well if you want the HTML files to have CSS styling.
Run the script (double-click it) — it will silently create updated HTML files for every text file in the folder. Only text files whose HTML counterparts are out of date or nonexistent will be processed.

You can either copy and paste the code below into Notepad and save it as a .vbs file, or you can download the latest version in a zip file. The code in the download will be more extensively commented, and may also contain enhancements developed since this post was written.

Here’s the basic code (provided under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0 — http://www.perlfoundation.org/artistic_license_2_0):

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

strThisFolder = objFSO.GetParentFolderName(Wscript.ScriptFullName)
Set objStartFolder = objFSO.GetFolder(strThisFolder)
strConverterCommand = "pandoc -f markdown -t html -c stylesheet.css -o "

Set objFilesToUpdate = CreateObject("Scripting.Dictionary")

Set colFiles = objStartFolder.Files
For Each objFile in colFiles
    If objFSO.GetExtensionName(objFile.Name) = "txt" Then

        ' Check if HTML version of this text file exists in this folder
        strHTMLName = strThisFolder & "\" & Replace(objFile.Name, ".txt", ".html")
        If objFSO.FileExists(strHTMLName) Then

            ' If it exists, compare the timestamps
            Set objHTMLFile = objFSO.GetFile(strHTMLName)
            If objFile.DateLastModified > objHTMLFile.DateLastModified Then
                'If the text file is newer, add this text file to the list
                objFilesToUpdate.Add objFile.Name, strHTMLName
            End if

        Else
            ' If the file does not exist yet, add this text file to the list
            objFilesToUpdate.Add objFile.Name, strHTMLName
        End if
    End if
Next

' Update all the text files in the list.
colFilesToUpdate = objFilesToUpdate.Keys
For Each strSourceFile in colFilesToUpdate

    objShell.Run strConverterCommand & objFilesToUpdate.Item(strSourceFile) & " " & strSourceFile, 3, True
Next

Possible Future Improvements:

The script isn’t very helpful about telling you how long the process is going to take. I looked at several options for providing a progress bar or some kind of status output, but ultimately VBScript is just really sucky at this.
Pandoc is a very powerful converter. One could easily tweak the script to add options for producing LaTeX or even PDF files.

Retro click-beep sound from InstaGamer - now an iPhone text alert tone

2012-03-13T21:08:00.000-07:00

I just downloaded the new free iOS game InstaGamer and its retro click-beep snippet of a sound effect is just exactly what I’m looking for in a text alert tone. So I made it into a ring tone for the iPhone. Download it here, then load it into iTunes and sync your phone.

Backstory: I’ve long been in search of the perfect “text alert” tone for my iPhone. The ones that come with the iPhone all seem too long; to me, a good text alert tone lasts a half second or less. You potentially end up hearing it dozens to hundreds of times a day, so all you need is a slippy little audio cue, not a prolonged gag or music riff.

(Play the game too, it's fun.)

Formatting and Typesetting your Book in MS Word

2012-03-12T05:21:00.001-07:00

Format your page and text block

It starts with your page size. If you are self-publishing with a service like Lulu or CreateSpace, you select the size of your book, and this will give you a set of constraints (margins, etc.) to start with. Your page size and maximum margins will generally determine roughly how wide your text block can be.

Next, you want to find a matching set of values for your final font size, line height, and line width. The method I’m going to give you here is based on the fact that there is a set of ideal proportions between font size, line height, and line width, that give maximum readability and aesthetic appeal. See this article about golden ratio typography for more information.

Take the width of your text block in inches and multiply by 72. This tells you how many “points” there are in one line of text.
Take the square root of this number and divide by 1.618 (the golden ratio). This gives you an optimal font size, in points, for your main text.
After rounding this font size to within half a point, multiply it by 1.618 again. This will give you your optimal line height in points.

You may need to reiterate a few times until you get a matching set of numbers that fit well on your page and do not need too much rounding.

Configure Word’s typesetting

You can actually get book-quality typesetting from Word if you just change a few options.

A couple of points about paragraph formatting:

Make sure your main text is set to “justified”, and not “flush left.” While it is currently better to set text flush-left on the web, books look better justified and are nearly always set that way.
Don’t have spaces between paragraphs in your main body text.
Paragraphs should have a first-line indent of the width of about 2 or 3 characters, but only where two or more paragraphs are joined together: the first paragraph of any group of paragraphs should have no first-line indent. (This could be a pain to manage; I tend to handle it by making all paragraphs indented by default, then going back and manually removing the indent from first paragraphs at some later stage in the editing.)

Make sure the following settings are enabled under the “Compatibility” options. To get to these options, click on the circular “Office Button” in the upper left corner, and then click Word Options at the very bottom of the menu. Then click Advanced, scroll down to the bottom of that section, and click the + next to Layout Options. On older versions, click the Tools menu, then Options (or Edit → Preferences on a Mac) then click the Compatibility tab.

Put a check next to “Do full justification like WordPerfect 6.x for Windows.” This allows justified text to contract as well as expand, making the automatic adjustments look a lot better.
“Don’t add extra space for raised/lowered characters.”
“Don’t expand character spaces on the line ending SHIFT+RETURN.” This ensures that lines you end with a soft return will still be properly justified.
“Suppress ‘Space Before’ after a hard page or column break.”

Configure Word’s hyphenation settings. On the toolbar, click the Page Layout tab, then Hyphenation drop-down button → Hyphenation Options. (On older versions, click Tools menu → Language → Hyphenation.)

Put a check next to “Automatically hyphenate document.”
Set “Hyphenation zone” to about half an inch.
Set “Limit consecutive hyphens” to 3.

Finally, enable ligatures. If your font is of good quality and has alternates for character combinations like fi and ffi, this will tell Word to use them automatically. This can only be done in MS Word 2010 or later.

Open the Font settings window. You can do this by selecting some text, right-clicking and selecting Font from the menu, but I recommend setting this up in whatever “style” you use for your body text (e.g., “Normal”): Home tab, right click the style, select Modifiy, then Format button → Font.
Click the Advanced tab, then next to the Ligatures option, select Standard Only.

Sources

These tips are compiled from many sources, and in many cases updated for clarity or accuracy with newer versions of Word.

How to Enable OpenType ligatures in Word 2010
Typesetting in Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon
Golden Ratio typography by Chris Pearson

WriteMonkey: Tips and Tricks for Writers

2012-03-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

I use WriteMonkey for almost all my writing. It’s the best Windows-based text editor I have found for writing prose (as opposed to programming code).

WriteMonkey is extremely Markdown-friendly — useful if, for example, like me you write all your blog posts in Markdown format.

Not all of WriteMonkey’s features are well-explained or documented, so I’m writing them up here.

Configure Markdown features

Markdown highlighting will not work unless you have Markdown set as your “Markup Standard” — set this in the Print & Export section of your Preferences screen.
Set the font size/weight/style used on headers: in the Preferences screen’s Colors & Fonts tab, click the button labeled ... in the upper right section (why they didn’t label it more clearly is beyond my understanding).
Make your exports look great. Download the template in this zip file and place it in WriteMonkey’s templates folder. It’s a version of this Markdown stylesheet with the following changes:
- Removed padding: 0; margin: 0 rule for the ul and ol elements - this preserves indentation in multi-level lists.
- The max-width was widened to look better on bigger screens.

Some undocumented features I found by accident

You can toggle whether WM will use normal quotes or “smart quotes” with CTRL+SHIFT+' (apostrophe).
Out of the box: type /now to insert the timestamp. You can format this timestamp in the Preferences screen.

Use WriteMonkey to write your book

WriteMonkey has a number of great features for writers:

It lets you set and monitor progress goals for your writing based on either word count or time or both.
Hit F5 to toggle between your main text and the “repository,” which works as kind of a scratch pad for the current file.
You can use the Jump screen to set navigate around your text’s headings, bookmarks, and todo items.

The upcoming version (2.3.5.0 as of this writing), however, will have some great project management functionality. (See here for more info)

Folders will be treated as projects, and all the files within it will be part of the project. You’ll be able to switch quickly between text files in the same folder using a new Files view in the Jumps window.
You’ll be able to quickly merge all of a project’s files into a single text file.
You’ll be able to mark a file with “tags” using a comment line (starting with \\) at the top of the file, and filter the project file list by tags.
Special tags affect how the file is treated in the project window
- Tagging a file with a color name will cause that file to show up with a colored star in the jump screen. Multple colors mean multiples stars, e.g. // red red red will add three red stars.
- Adding the “draft” tag will move the file to the “repository section” — the file will be presented with lighter color and excluded from total word count.
- Tag with a percentage, e.g. // 50% to add a grey progress bar
- Tag with a date in order to add a deadline; the border of the file will turn red when it becomes past-due

Let us know of any additional tips in the comments!

Siri: Slow, unreliable, and maybe not a priority at Apple

2012-02-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

Siri had a lot of promise when it was released as a feature of the new iPhone 4S. It wowed everyone at the WWDC keynote in October 2011.

I’ve had an iPhone 4S since November 2011, and I would describe Siri as gimmicky, flaky, and useful only within a narrow subset of the things it was promised for.

The biggest killers of my enthusiasm for using Siri are laggy interaction and flaky availability. Interaction misses plus plain old network lag combine to make Siri slow, slow, slow.

There are five possible outcomes to each Siri interaction:

Siri misunderstands what you said due to you speaking incorrectly, or
Siri misunderstands what you said because of a voice recognition error, or
Siri understands what you said but misunderstands what you meant, or
Siri is unable to connect to its servers, or
Siri connects and responds correctly

Four out of these five outcomes result in a failed interaction. While you can get better at speaking correctly, there are few to no workarounds for the other three error conditions.

Since Siri goes out over the internet in order to analyze each spoken interaction, it can often take a good 5-10 seconds to offer a response to what you’ve just said¹. In addition, at least every other day Siri’s servers seem to go dark for a period of time, resulting in “really sorry, but I can’t take any requests right now, please try again in a little while.”

Add this delay, and a random but sizeable chance of connection failure, in between each incorrect response, and you soon get used to doing most things the old way rather than gamble on an unreliable Siri.

Someone’s bound to respond that Siri is still officially beta software. I am aware of that, and don’t expect it to be perfect².

But it’s also worth noting that Apple, like most software companies, has introduced many apps and features that they then failed to improve upon or even abandoned³. My gut feeling is that Siri is in danger of ending up as the next Mobile Me, especially given that it has received almost no improvement or attention since its release so far.

Connection failures are especially common when you are on the outer edge of a known wifi network, such as when in the driveway or parking lot, or walking to/from your house. The iPhone seems to think it is connected via wifi for some time after you have left range, causing Siri to attempt using a nearly non-existent connection. ↩
Although I do expect beta software to be at least feature-complete, which I don’t believe Siri is. ↩
See the Calendar, Weather, Music and Stock apps, iTunes Genius, Ping, and of course Mobile Me. ↩

Recommended Calendar Apps for iPhone

2012-02-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

Here are some notes on popular calendar apps I’ve tried and can (mostly) recommend.

Calvetica Classic is what I currently use and recommend for iPhone. As far as I can tell, it’s identical to Tempus (made by the same developer) but for some reason costs less. (Tempus may be the one that gets more maintenance attention from the developers in the future, however). Calvetica Classic’s interface is designed to be quick and easy to use, and to look attractive. It also happens to be reasonably prompt about automatic syncing — which, surprisingly, not all apps are (see below).

The reason for the “Classic” version is that the makers of Calvetica made a New-Coke-style error when they redesigned and rewrote the app for the new version 4.0. The regressions in the interface and buggy experience of the new version apparently left a lot of users clamouring for the old version, and from what I can tell, the developers responded by offering both Calvetica Classic and Tempus. I haven’t used the new version, but the reviews on the App Store currently show that it still needs a good bit of bug fixing, especially on the iPad.
The other really good option out there is Week Calendar. I haven’t tried it personally, but this one has been recommended by Lifehacker, and has hundreds of great reviews (many more than any version of Calvetica), so it must work well. The only reason I didn’t go for it was that Calvetica is faster for adding events¹, and Calvetica just looks more cool and elegant.
Agenda was recommended recently on Daring Fireball and was actually the first calendar app I used after getting our phones’ sync configured. It’s not as quick to use as Calvetica[^1], but it looks gorgeous, and swiping between month/week/day view is almost too good to give up. The app otherwise great except for one major thing: it’s terrible at automatic calendar syncing, especially when an event on a shared calendar is being deleted. In my experiments Agenda would not automatically sync until I had either shut down the app and restarted it, or until I had opened the default Calendar app (which triggers its own sync). You can also use the “shake phone to sync” feature of Agenda, but honestly, all three of these things are ridiculous.

Note that if you have an iPhone 4S, you can set up new events very easily on your default calendar with Siri, no matter what app you use. ↩

How to Sync Calendars on Two (or more) iPhones or iPads

2012-02-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

My wife and I each use an iPhone, but it wasn’t until recently that I got around to syncing our calendars. Now that we actually have a synced calendar system that we can both view and update from our phones, we’ve begun actually using it for planning and apponintments. In this how-to, I’ll show you how to do the same thing for yourself.

These instructions assume that each iPhone user has their own, separate Apple ID and iCloud¹.

1. Use iCloud for Your Calendar Account

I’m not saying you have to use iCloud. I’m saying it’s by far the simplest and easiest way.

Make sure each user has iCloud set up on his or her device. If you have iOS 5 or newer on your phone or iPad, you likely have signed up for iCloud: to make sure, grab your device and go to Settings → iCloud and check that it shows something next to Account. Also check that Calendars is set to On.

If iCloud is not set up on your device, read these simple iCloud setup instrctions from Apple.

Other Calendar Accounts

Gmail accounts come with a pretty useable calendar system, so a lot of people use those; but I found the instructions and process for syncing GMail calendars between multiple Google accounts/iPhones very clumsy, complicated, and unintuitive, even for a geek like myself. If you have tips on that, let us know in the comments.

Exchange accounts also include calendar functionality. I have one of these at my job, and it syncs to my phone also, but I don’t really need to share it with my wife so I haven’t tried. I expect the only way to do this would be to add my exchange account to her phone with my own password, and turn off the mail part of the account in the iPhone’s settings. Again, let us know in the comments if you’ve experimented with this.

2. Share Your iCloud Calendar(s)

This is an easy process, but not entirely obvious because you have to use a laptop/desktop computer, and not your iOS device, to start the process.

First of all, pick which iCloud account is going to “own” the shared calendar(s). It really makes no difference because both parties will have full access.
Open your web browser on your desktop or laptop computer and go to icloud.com.
Sign in using the account of the “owner” and click on Calendar.
Click on the small circle to the right of the calendar you wish to share. Under Private Calendar, enter the email address for the user of the “other” iPhone/iPad. It can be any email address for that person (it doesn’t have to be the one they use to sign in to iCloud) but it should be one that they have set up on their iPhone/iPad.
After entering the email address, click Share.

Now the other user can grab his or her device, open the email, and click the “Join Calendar” button.

Voila, you now have a calendar shared between two devices. Any events or appointments you create or change on the shared calendar on one device will automatically show up on the other device pretty quickly, and without any additional steps.

Some additional notes:

You can of course share multiple calendars with this process, and you can even share them with different multiple people. My wife and I share three calendars, because this allows us to easily colour-code different kinds of events simply by putting them on different calendars. (There are some calendar apps that let you colour-cde different events within the same calendar, but not the one we happen to use.)
When creating/changing an event that you want shared, you do have to make sure it is in fact created on one of the shared calendars. That should seem obvious, but it can be an easy step to miss. You can make it easier for yourself by setting your default calendar on your iOS device to the shared calendar you use most often: click Settings, then Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then scroll down to the Calendars section and click on the Default Calendars setting to change it. Otherwise (if you’d rather not default to sharing all your events) just be aware that your iOS device does have multiple calendars and remember to pick the right one when setting up an appointment.
- If you use Calvetica Classic as your calendar app, you can have it ask you which calendar to use every time you set up an event, which is nice.

3. Get a Better Calendar App

The calendar app that comes with iOS is plain, and has many shortcomings: the interface for creating new appointments is clumsy, the colour-coding is not visible in month view, and there’s no week view at all, to name a few. For notes and recommendations on iOS calendar apps, read my post on iOS Calendar App Recommendations.

If you happen to be using the same Apple ID/iCloud account on two phones, I would assume you don’t need this article since everything is already syncing across all devices within your single account. ↩

Personal finance software: chucking Mint for YNAB

2012-01-09T09:53:00.000-08:00

A cousin recently put me on to You Need A Budget — a personal finance software package. I just spent some time this weekend setting it up with my wife. Maybe we’re still in the ‘honeymoon phase’ of budgeting, but it feels really good to be on top of our finances and to have a flexible plan for our spending.

YNAB feels refreshingly like a “Quicken Rebooted” would feel. After a couple of years trying “finances in the cloud” a-la-Mint, returning to using a traditional program that just runs on your own computer feels like the right thing to do. I once again have control of my own financial data, and will never have to worry about potential security breaches at unregulated third-party services like Mint.

YNAB insists that you manage your transactions the Old Way: by entering them yourself. The fact that this feels very right was/is quite a surprise to me, but when it “clicked,” it felt like it had been a long time coming. When I signed up for Mint, the automatic behind-the-scenes importing of all my transactions seemed like a brilliant way to streamline things, but it turned out to have some fatal downsides. Mint’s connection with my bank was always spotty, and their automatic categorization of my spending was never more than about 60-70% accurate. This meant I had to go in and regularly sift through all my spending, making sure each transaction was properly categorized — a process even more unpleasant and tedious than just entering them myself. It wasn’t long before I stopped using it altogether. So when I read this on YNAB’s website, it jived a lot:

“We do not directly connect with your bank, log in with your username and password, and download transactions for you. That kills awareness and promotes a “set it and forget it” mentality that lets you not revisit your budget for months, leaving you right back where you started. We’ll import downloaded transactions (OFX, QFX, QIF) to make sure you’ve captured every transaction, but bank importation should not be the primary means of entering data into YNAB. (Use your phone and record it as the transaction happens, or make entering receipts a 5-minute daily ritual. Your money will thank you for it. Promise.)”

But the biggest difference between YNAB and the Mint approach is that while Mint is geared towards passive capture of past spending, YNAB’s workflow puts planning future spending at the center¹. I won’t dive into that here, but you should know that this approach is what will make even using finance software worth your while. If you are familiar with the increasingly-popular envelope system of budgeting, or with financial planning evangelists like Dave Ramsey, YNAB will fit right in with those paradigms and help you implement them.

Coming down from the cloud

YNAB’s non-cloud approach means you won’t have completely seamless access to your main financial data store from any browser or from your iPhone. When you think about it, that actually might not be a problem. Do you really need that kind of access? Financial planning isn’t one of those things that inherently benefits from being decentralized.

YNAB tries to strike a middle course by supplying iPhone and Android apps that let you record transactions on the go for easy syncing later. I haven’t yet tried these apps out; I’m not yet sure whether it’s even worth the added complexity for me personally. I can just as easily keep receipts or type transactions into a note app on my phone.

Ideally, a YNAB mobile app would allow automatic background syncing between two phones, so that my wife and I would have quick, seamless access to where our budgets are at, but YNAB’s app isn’t there yet². But in my view, it all goes back to a focus on planning rather than capture. If my wife and I actually have a plan in place for our monthly spending, we pretty much know going into the day where our money is going to go, and up-to-the-minute syncing becomes much less important. Again, I wonder if this is one of those situations where automatic syncing — an inherent “feature” of the cloud approach — would actually be counterproductive in this field, by allowing you to take the easy road and react to spending events, rather than relying on proactive planning.

NB: I’m not an affiliate of YNAB in any way, nor am I being compensated in any way for this overview.

Mint had budgeting tools, but they were clumsy to use and always felt like something of an afterthought. ↩
YNAB’s website says that they “are actively working on ways to improve the entire synchronization of your budget data across not only the mobile apps but multiple desktop installations as well,” but they decline to offer a timeline. ↩

Encryption and DropBox: Comparing TrueCrypt and BoxCryptor

2012-01-04T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you’re a DropBox user, you may have heard about the security weakpoints associated with their cloud storage service (or any such service):

DropBox has had security issues that left users’ information exposed to hackers for hours at a time. Could it happen again? Certainly.
DropBox staff have the ability to access your files without your knowledge. They have acknowledged that essentially the only thing between their staff and your data are internal company policies. This is much weaker than zero-knowledge systems like SpiderOak, where it is not even technically possible for staff to access users’ files without the user’s key.

Even knowing these weaknesses, I use DropBox anyway. Having access to some (not all, obviously) potentially sensitive files on multiple computers/phones is helpful enough for me to find some way to mitigate the security risks.

It’s important to note that if you’re putting sensitive files on DropBox purely as a backup solution, you should just stop. Find some other way to back those files up. But if, like me, you find it extremely helpful to have access to certain moderately sensitive files from multiple devices, you should find a way to add a layer or two of security to those files before storing them on a cloud service like DropBox.

There are two good ways that I have found to do this. Both are free, and neither involve sending any of your data or keys to an additional third party — all the magic happens on your computer or device. However, there are trade-offs associated with each.

The TrueCrypt Option

The most commonly offered solution is to place your sensitive files in a TrueCrypt volume and save that volume file into your DropBox.

Pros:

TrueCrypt is open source, making it the most trustworthy and future-proof option
For extremely sensitive info, TrueCrypt allows you to maintain plausible deniability.

Cons:

There is currently no way to use or access TrueCrypt volumes on your phone. This is true both for iPhones and Android phones.
TrueCrypt volumes need to be given a fixed size at the time of creation, forcing you to guess how big it’ll need to be in the future and usually resulting in wasted space.
You need to be careful not to have the volume “mounted” on more than one computer at a time to avoid corrupting it. Because there’s nothing to prevent you from doing this, you can easily end up corrupting the volume or creating a lot of large “conflict copies” of the volume by accident if you forget this.
Because DropBox can’t back up changes to any of your encrypted files until you actually unmount the whole volume, you have to remember to unmount it periodically, which can be cumbersome.

The BoxCryptor option

BoxCryptor is a newer solution that works by encrypting individual files on your computer, before they are sent to DropBox. Like TrueCrypt, the software runs on both Windows and Mac OS.

Pros:

BoxCryptor has an Android and an iPhone version of their software, making it possible to access encrypted DropBox files from your phone.
The software has limited compatibility with the open-source EncFS encrypted file system, making it at least somewhat future-proof
File-level encryption makes it much less clumsy to use, and allows DropBox to sync encrypted files just as seamlessly as normal files, and without additional likelihood of conflicts where multiple computers are involved.

Cons:

The iPhone app is $8 for non-commercial use. This seems stupidly high, considering the Windows and Mac versions are free and they have no back-end infrastructure to maintain.
No form of plausible deniability is available in either the desktop or mobile versions of the software.
BoxCryptor is not open-source, so ultimately your trust in the software comes down to your faith in Robert Freudenreich’s ability to correctly implement the security algorithms, to keep maintaining the software, and not to spy on his users. I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, just that non-open software comes with risks and weaknesses. The security community at large does not have a way of thoroughly and independently evaluating the software, and that represents a security weakness, for one. Furthermore, if Robert or his company lose interest in the software (which can happen for any of a dozen reasons) you will need to take notice and migrate to another solution before you lose all ability to support the now-defunct software.

The Best Data Collection App (And Format) for iPhone

2011-11-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

I’ve long been intrigued by Nick Felton’s Annual Reports. Felton has become the poster child for a new kind of a subculture growing up around this idea of “personal metrics.” Measuring and reporting esoteric and insane amounts of data about your personal habits can be a great way to Meet People And Make Friends.

Creating these reports will involve coming up with your own solutions to an interesting set of problems: how to capture all that data, how to store it in an analytics-friendly format, how to actually analyze it, and how to design the information displays. In this post I’m dealing mainly with the first two parts of that list: capturing data and storing it, with some hints about analytics afterwards.

In data collection, your smartphone is your friend. You want to make sure collecting data is easy and frictionless, so that you get it all. Your phone is always with you, so you can jot things down and not worry about having to get it later. And as much as I love pen and paper, if you go that route you’re going to end up collecting the same info down twice when it comes time to get it into your computer for analytics.

There are a lot of apps out there for collecting and reporting various kinds of data — running times/length, weight loss/gain, sex, sleep and eating habits — and these can be great if you’re only interested in tracking one or two aspects of your life. But as soon as you begin to raise your sights a little and think about comprehensive Felton-scale data collection, you realize what a pain it’s going to be to have a herd of seventeen apps to manage. Another problem with most of these apps is that they don’t provide any access to the actual data.

Daytum

For awhile, Felton was working on a project called Daytum that would help people create their personal reports similar to his. Daytum has always had a lot of promise, but there are a few major problems with it that need to change before it can be really useful:

Felton was hired by Facebook recently, and doesn’t seem to be actively maintaining the service anymore
The web interface is clumsy for entering anything more than simple quantities
The iPhone app — which would ordinarily be the ideal channel for collecting data — is buggy, infrequently updated, and (worst of all) has been known to randomly erase data

The Format is Text

I found what I was looking for in Ben Lipkowitz’s lifelog project. He developed a simple text format that allows you to quickly capture personal events and data as they happen. A self-explanatory sample is below:

date 2011 01 08
0000 0851 sleep
0851 0902 domestics
0902 0904 walking langton-labs
0904 0906 setup kitty
0906 0907 science guinea-pig
0908 0920 food cookie-cereal 2c soy-milk 0.6c peanut-butter-ice-cream 1c
0920 1000 net thermal-clothing, food donut-hole 2pc oatmeal-cookie-dough 3pc
1000 1052 net thermal-clothing
1052 1100 riding kaplans
1100 1145 shoppin, act tour-kaplans
1145 1155 riding langton-labs
1155 1200 chat rachel-?
1200 1210 riding rei
1210 1445 shoppin, domestics test-clothes
1445 1451 stupid rei-membership-form

The syntax is pretty self-explanatory. Each interval is given an activity (e.g., net or drive) followed by any number of tags that add detail (e.g. drive commute-home). Multiple activities and their tags are separated by commas.

The advantages of capturing data in this way are obvious:

Both the time length and frequency of activities is captured
It’s easy to add custom data to different kinds of activities (such as the quantities given in the food activity above)
You can easily enter and read the data without any special software
The data will still be easy to read ten or fifty years from now

How to actually use the data: Creating any visual displays of all this data is going to involve brushing off your script-writing chops. The good news is if you have any programming ability whatsoever, you should be able to cobble something together quite easily for whatever you want to do. Check out the lifelog project for examples of scripts for parsing and displaying the data. Ben currently produces graphs showing time intervals colored by activity, but you could just as easily build a script in your favourite language to build reports for things like average commute times, top five conversation topics, or total times you had to look for things and how many of those times you found them, etc. If you have your script output the results in a CSV format, you can open those reports directly in Excel and create charts from there.

This format doesn’t work well for capturing broader categories of events that span over multiple time intervals. For example, there’s no clear way to record that everything you did this afternoon was part of Brother Mike’s Wedding, for example. There are a couple of ways to extend this, such as adding mark, start or end keywords to mark the beginning and ending of these types of things, or simply recording that info elsewhere.

I don’t recommend trying to record your moment-to-moment moods for any reason whatsoever. That way lies self-referential madness.

The App is Nebulous Notes

Nebulous Notes has a couple of great features that make it great for this kind of data collection:

Shortcut keys: You can set up shortcut keys to quickly insert date and timestamps in right format, as well as skip forward and backwards by word or character (see screenshots above)
Dropbox support: Store your text file on your Dropbox account and it will be auto-saved to the cloud every time you edit it, and you can easily pull it into your laptop for analytics.

I recently switched to the iPhone, so if you have an Android or Blackberry you’ll need to find your own favorite app for that platform. (Personally I can’t imagine attempting anything like this on my laggy old Blackberry.) Let me know in the comments if you find anything!

For Kindle: The 33 Best Science Fiction Novels Ever

2011-09-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

Another “best of” list for your Kindle, brought to you this time by this Ask Reddit post.

The links given in this list are to Kindle editions of the books, free wherever possible, unless there have been severe quality complaints with the ebook versions. If you want to see book covers and a summary of comments by those who have read them, see this summary of the reddit thread by John Forsythe.

Dune by Frank Herbert — 1965
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams — 1979
Good light bathroom reading. Perhaps the schtick will wear off as quickly for you as it did for me, but lots of people never tire of it.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card — 1985
My personal favourite of the ones on this list that I have read.
Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov — 1942
More of a saga broken up into smaller novels with one majestic overarching connection. I really enjoyed this one.
Hyperion by Dan Simmons — 1989
“On the eve of Armageddon, with the entire galaxy at war, seven pilgrims set forth on a final voyage to Hyperion seeking the answers to the unsolved riddles of their lives.”
Neuromancer by William Gibson — 1984
“Case was the hottest computer cowboy cruising the information superhighway — jacking his consciousness into cyberspace, soaring through tactile lattices of data and logic, rustling encoded secrets for anyone with the money to buy his skills. Then he double-crossed the wrong people, who caught up with him in a big way — and burned the talent out of his brain, micron by micron. Banished from cyberspace, trapped in the meat of his physical body, Case courted death in the high-tech underworld. Until a shadowy conspiracy offered him a second chance — and a cure — for a price…”
Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson — 1992
“In California of the near future, when the U.S. is only a ‘Burbclave’ (city-state), the Mafia is just another franchise chain, and there are no laws to speak of, Hiro Protagonist follows clues from the Bible, ancient Sumer and high technology to help thwart an attempt to take control of civilization — such as it is.”
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark — 1953 (Not avail. for Kindle at this time)
“The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city — intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands: unify earth, eliminate poverty, and end war. With little rebellion, humankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? With the advent of peace, man ceases to strive for creative greatness, and a malaise settles over the human race. To those who resist, it becomes evident that the Overlords have an agenda of their own.”
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman — 1974
“Short, but fantastically well executed. It might be so good, in part, because it's short.” — “Humans first bumped heads with the Taurans when we began using collapsars to travel the stars. Although the collapsars provide nearly instantaneous travel across vast distances, the relativistic speeds associated with the process means that time passes slower for those aboard ship. For William Mandella, a physics student drafted as a soldier, that means more than 27 years will have passed between his first encounter with the Taurans and his homecoming, though he himself will have aged only a year. When Mandella finds that he can’t adjust to Earth after being gone so long from home, he reenlists, only to find himself shuttled endlessly from battle to battle as the centuries pass.”
Ringworld by Larry Niven — 1970 (Not available for Kindle at this time)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick — 1968
This is the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based. “By 2021, the World War had killed millions, driving entire species into extinction and sending mankind off-planet. Those who remained coveted any living creature, and for people who couldn’t afford one, companies built incredibly realistic simulacrae: horses, birds, cats, sheep…they even built humans. Emigrées to Mars received androids so sophisticated it was impossible to tell them from true men or women. Fearful of the havoc these artificial humans could wreak, the government banned them from Earth. But when androids didn’t want to be identified, they just blended in.”
A Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein — 1961
“The story of Valentine Michael Smith, born during, and the only survivor of, the first manned mission to Mars. Michael is raised by Martians, and he arrives on Earth as a true innocent: he has never seen a woman and has no knowledge of Earth’s cultures or religions. But he brings turmoil with him, as he is the legal heir to an enormous financial empire, not to mention de facto owner of the planet Mars. With the irascible popular author Jubal Harshaw to protect him, Michael explores human morality and the meanings of love.”
Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein — 1987
“Juan Rico signed up with the Federal Service on a lark, but despite the hardships and rigorous training, he finds himself determined to make it as a cap trooper. In boot camp he will learn how to become a soldier, but when he graduates and war comes (as it always does for soldiers), he will learn why he is a soldier.”
The Culture Series by Iain M. Banks — 1987: Consider Phlebas, Surface Detail, Use of Weapons, Matter and others
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. — 1960 (Not currently available for Kindle)
Strangely arresting and thought-provoking look through the lens of a post-apocalyptic world.
Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke — 1973 (Not currently available for Kindle)
Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton — 2004
“Hamilton creates a dense, thoroughly defined twenty-fourth-century world, in which humanity has colonized the stars, thanks to the discovery of wormhole travel, and established a successful commonwealth. The species has even encountered aliens and space-faring artifacts. One remaining mystery is the barrier around stars known as the Dyson Pair. Human curiosity still being what it is, a spaceship capable of faster-than-light travel (thanks to those wormholes again) goes to investigate. When what’s behind the barrier is discovered, the thrill-ride really starts. Aliens formerly trapped inside it, fighting over limited resources, are freed to invade human space.”
The Mote In God’s Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle — 1974
“In the year 3016, the Second Empire of Man spans hundreds of star systems, thanks to the faster-than-light Alderson Drive. No other intelligent beings have ever been encountered, not until a light sail probe enters a human system carrying a dead alien. The probe is traced to the Mote, an isolated star in a thick dust cloud, and an expedition is dispatched. In the Mote the humans find an ancient civilization — at least one million years old — that has always been bottled up in their cloistered solar system for lack of a star drive. The Moties are welcoming and kind, yet rather evasive about certain aspects of their society. It seems the Moties have a dark problem, one they’ve been unable to solve in over a million years.”
The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester — 1956
“Marooned in outer space after an attack on his ship, Nomad, Gulliver Foyle lives to obsessively pursue the crew of a rescue vessel that had intended to leave him to die.”
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan — 2002
“In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which — unless the stack is hopelessly damaged — their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body. While the Vatican is trying to make resleeving (at least of Catholics) illegal, centuries-old aristocrat Laurens Bancroft brings Takeshi Kovacs (an Envoy, a specially trained soldier used to being resleeved and trained to soak up clues from new environments) to Earth, where Kovacs is resleeved into a cop’s body to investigate Bancroft’s first mysterious, stack-damaging death.”
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson — 1993
The first in a trilogy. “An action-packed and thoughtful tale of the exploration and settlement of Mars—riven by both personal and ideological conflicts—in the early 21st century.”
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke — 1968 (Not currently available for Kindle)
“When an enigmatic monolith is found buried on the moon, scientists are amazed to discover that it’s at least 3 million years old. Even more amazing, after it’s unearthed the artifact releases a powerful signal aimed at Saturn. What sort of alarm has been triggered? To find out, a manned spacecraft, the Discovery, is sent to investigate. Its crew is highly trained — the best — and they are assisted by a self-aware computer, the ultra-capable HAL 9000. But HAL’s programming has been patterned after the human mind a little too well. He is capable of guilt, neurosis, even murder, and he controls every single one of Discovery’s components. The crew must overthrow this digital psychotic if they hope to make their rendezvous with the entities that are responsible not just for the monolith, but maybe even for human civilization.”
Contact by Carl Sagan — 1985 (Not currently available for Kindle)
“After years of scanning the galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they’ve found a message from an intelligent source — and they travel deep into space to meet it.”
The Sirens Of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. — 1959
“Plain and simple, there would probably be no Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as we know it without The Sirens of Titan.”
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov — 1950
“In I, Robot, Asimov chronicles the development of the robot through a series of interlinked stories: from its primitive origins in the present to its ultimate perfection in the not-so-distant future—a future in which humanity itself may be rendered obsolete.”
The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin — 1969 (Not available for Kindle at this time)
“Genly Ai is an emissary from the human galaxy to Winter, a lost, stray world. His mission is to bring the planet back into the fold of an evolving galactic civilization, but to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own culture and prejudices and those that he encounters. On a planet where people are of no gender — or both — this is a broad gulf indeed.”
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds — 2000
“Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses. Now an intuition he doesn’t understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare. Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity’s tiny crew have hidden agendas — Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity — and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.”
Old Man’s War by John Scalzi — 2005
“With his wife dead and buried, and life nearly over at 75, John Perry takes the only logical course of action left him: he joins the army. Now better known as the Colonial Defense Force (CDF), Perry’s service-of-choice has extended its reach into interstellar space to pave the way for human colonization of other planets while fending off marauding aliens. The CDF has a trick up its sleeve that makes enlistment especially enticing for seniors: the promise of restoring youth.”
Anathem by Neal Stephenson — 2008
“Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside ‘saecular’ world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent’s gates — at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious ‘extras’ in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn’t seen since he was ‘collected.’ But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.”
Armor by John Steakley — 1984 (Not available for Kindle at this time)
“Felix is an Earth soldier, encased in special body armor designed to withstand Earth’s most implacable enemy-a bioengineered, insectoid alien horde. But Felix is also equipped with internal mechanisms that enable him, and his fellow soldiers, to survive battle situations that would destroy a man’s mind.”
Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood — 2003
“Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.”
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — 1953 (Not available for Kindle at this time)
“In Fahrenheit Ray Bradbury’s classic, frightening vision of the future, firemen don’t put out fires — they start them in order to burn books. Bradbury’s vividly painted society holds up the appearance of happiness as the highest goal — a place where trivial information is good, and knowledge and ideas are bad. Guy Montag is a book-burning fireman undergoing a crisis of faith. His wife spends all day with her television “family,” imploring Montag to work harder so that they can afford a fourth TV wall. Their dull, empty life sharply contrasts with that of his next-door neighbor Clarisse, a young girl thrilled by the ideas in books, and more interested in what she can see in the world around her than in the mindless chatter of the tube. When Clarisse disappears mysteriously, Montag is moved to make some changes, and starts hiding books in his home. Eventually, his wife turns him in, and he must answer the call to burn his secret cache of books. After fleeing to avoid arrest, Montag winds up joining an outlaw band of scholars who keep the contents of books in their heads, waiting for the time society will once again need the wisdom of literature.”
A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge — 1992
“Vinge presents a galaxy divided into Zones — regions where different physical constraints allow very different technological and mental possibilities. Earth remains in the ‘Slowness’ zone, where nothing can travel faster than light and minds are fairly limited. The action of the book is in the ‘Beyond,’ where translight travel and other marvels exist, and humans are one of many intelligent species. One human colony has been experimenting with ancient technology in order to find a path to the ‘Transcend,’ where intelligence and power are so great as to seem godlike. Instead they release the Blight, an evil power, from a billion-year captivity. As the Blight begins to spread, a few humans flee with a secret that might destroy it, but they are stranded in a primitive low-tech world barely in the Beyond. While the Blight destroys whole races and star systems, a team of two humans and two aliens races to rescue the others, pursued by the Blight’s agents and other enemies.”

Cleaner titles for podcast posts in Tumblr

2011-09-13T12:10:00.000-07:00

After reading my post How to publish a better podcast using Textpattern, Tumblr, or anything else, Lars Jannsen of gamesandmacs.de, a new German website/podcast, wrote me a question:

“When I use an audio post to publish my latest podcast episode as .mp3 (since I want my listeners to get the Flash audio player on Tumblr) and put the link to the .mp3 file in the description of that audio post it also shows up in the iTunes description of the episode when I use FeedBurner to get my podcast on iTunes. In order to get ‘cleaner’ show notes, I’d like to exclude the link from the iTunes info field. Looks a bit weird if there’s stuff like (‘Download MP3 file’) in the show notes.”

I noticed the same thing on my tumblr-based podcast. This titling originates with how Tumblr serves up its feeds to FeedBurner. Tumblr has no descreet “Title” field for audio posts; instead Tumblr takes, from the description field, the first however-many complete words there are before the 63-character mark (or thereabouts, including spaces and punctuation), slaps an ellipses (…) on the end, and uses that as the title. This title is the one that gets passed to Feedburner and the one that your listeners eventually see in iTunes. This is what causes ugly things like seeing “Download Mp3 file” as the episode’s title in iTunes.

Fortunately there’s a simple workaround. The MP3 download link doesn’t need to be at the very beginning of your description, it just needs to be the first link in the description. So, just make sure it occurs after the first several words (or after the 63-character mark, to be precise).

In my posts, I’ve been using variations on the following template in my description:

Episode 1234: Blue-Collar Reading Habits, recorded on Aug 23, 2011, is now available for download etc etc

You can download the mp3 audio [mp3 link] (1:26:46, 59.8 MB) or subscribe to the podcast [feedburner link].

This ensures that the episode’s actual title is the first thing in the title that ends up in iTunes. The “overflow,” if there is any, contains relevant info like the record date, etc.

In the above example, the title would show up in iTunes as “Episode 1234: Blue-Collar Reading Habits, recorded on Aug 23…”.

Update, Lars responded:

By the time I got your e-mail I also figured that iTunes takes the first 63 character to create the episode’s title and the rest flows into the description field. However, I’m still wondering if there’s a way to have a shorter title (without having to put lots of spaces in there…) and the body of the audio post (without the actual MP3 link as description in iTunes). I might be a bit perfectionist in this case, but I’d really like to find a solution to that without having to manually edit the XML feed every time I update my Tumblr blog with a new episode. Maybe there’s a way to “tweak” FeedBurner to take the “Title” field you can specify for an MP3 file you link on Tumblr.

I currently don’t know of any tweaks that are possible; neither Tumblr nor Feedburner seem to expose the kind of functionality that would allow for this tweaking. Any suggestions are welcome!

How to find free e-books for your Kindle using Google

2011-08-31T14:28:00.000-07:00

Don’t waste your time with torrents. Google already indexes the locations of many ebooks, you just need to know how to find them.

Just enter your search using the form intitle:index.of Moby Dick epub mobi — replace Moby Dick with your desired title or keyword. This search will turn up file listings with direct downloads for (hopefully) ebooks. You may, in fact, get many more ebooks than just the one you were searching for.

If clicking on a search result gives you some kind of “access denied” message, just go back to the Google search result and click where it says Cached to access the copy Google cached before the file listing was made private. Usually the download links from these cached listings still work.

Kindles don’t support the epub format, so if that’s all you can find, you’ll need to convert it to MOBI format using Calibre.

How to use Markdown in Blogspot posts

2011-08-18T09:53:00.001-07:00

If your blog is hosted on running Blogspot and you want to use Markdown for your posts, here’s how to do it and future-proof your writing in the process.

Write your posts in a text editing program on your computer and save them on your computer. (I use a yyyy-mm-dd post title.txt format)
Then copy and paste the text into the online Markdown processor and click Convert to generate HTML. (Set "Filter" to "both" for extra typographic goodness.)
Finally, copy and paste the HTML into a new post in Blogspot.

This has two advantages. First, it future-proofs your blog. No matter what happens, if Blogger ever gets shut down or becomes undesirable to use for any reason, in ten years you’ll still have a very useable copy of all your writing. Second, a text-editing program is much less likely to crash than your browser. This approach eliminates the risk of a browser crash causing you to lose large amounts of work.

Getting Blogspot to play nice with your Markdown-generated HTML

This is the area people seem to have trouble with, but it’s really quite simple.

In Blogspot, go to Settings tab, then the Formatting section. Set “Convert Line Breaks” to No.
In your New Posts,
- Make sure you are using the “Edit HTML” tab
- Under “Post Options” (at the bottom) make sure
  - “Edit HTML Line Breaks” is set to Use <br /> tags
  - “Compose Settings” is set to Interpret typed HTML

It’s that simple really. Now you can paste in your Markdown-generated HTML without getting extra linebreaks or other wierdnesses.

Solution for persisting "Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer" error

2011-08-18T09:33:00.001-07:00

Solution for persisting “Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer” error

My Windows 7 laptop began displaying a notification/error every time I logged in:

Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a problem that occured with your paging file configuration when you started your computer. The total paging file size for all disk drives may be somewhat larger than the size you specified

After clicking OK, it would open the virtual memory settings without any explanation of what you were supposed to check or do there.

This evidently happens because pagefile.sys, the file that Windows uses for virtual memory, has become corrupted in some way.

This Microsoft Answers article recommends running an SFC (system file check). Here’s how to run an SFC. This did not solve the problem for me, but it is something you should try first.

Here’s how I cleared it up:

Log in under a local Administrator account. (Do this after each restart in these instructions as well.)
If it’s not already open, open the virtual memory settings by rich-clicking on Computer, → Properties → Advanced System Settings → click the Advanced tab → Under Performance, click Settings, go to Advanced tab, finally under Virtual Memory section click the Change button.
Uncheck the Autmatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox.
Set a “Custom size” for the paging file on the C drive: 0MB initial, 0MB maximum.
Click OK, close all dialog boxes, and restart your computer.
After logging in again, delete the file C:\pagefile.sys
1. To do this, you may need to change your folder settings so you can see it first. Open a window of your C: drive and click Organize at the top, then Folder and Search Options
2. Click the View tab, and make sure Show hidden files, folders and drives is turned on, and that Hide protected system files is not checked.
3. Click OK and go back to your C: drive, find pagefile.sys and delete it.
Now go back to the virtual memory settings (see step 2 above) and set the paging file for the C: drive to System managed size, and then make sure the Automatically manage paging file size for all drives checkbox is checked.
Click OK, close all dialog boxes, and restart your computer.

A summary of what this does: By temporarily turning off virtual memory, you allow yourself to delete the (now-corrupt) paging file. Then when you re-enable virtual memory, Windows automatically builds a new paging file from scratch, and voilà, problem solved.

I was helped by this thread at geekstogo.com although I did not find it necessary to do any editing of the Registry or any of that jazz. Try the simplest solution first, I always say.

How to publish a better podcast using Tumblr, Textpattern, or anything else

2011-07-01T11:50:00.000-07:00

This isn’t about equipment or recording technique, but just the cranky details of publishing a podcast that I have found by trial and error. This article assumes you have some basic computer/web/HTML know-how.

I publish a couple of podcasts: Howell Creek Radio uses Textpattern, and Anything Good uses Tumblr. So in some of the steps I have given some examples that are specific to those CMSs, in order to help you along; but the important thing is that these steps can be easily adapted to any CMS such as Blogger, WordPress, etc.

Create a separate tag or category for your podcast posts on your blog.

This is optional; I recommend it because it allows the website for your podcast to be more flexible. For example, if you use Tumblr, you can create a podcast tag, and then continue posting a mix of videos, photos, quotes, etc. alongside your podcast episodes. This way your podcast subscribers will get a clean feed containing only audio downloads, while your website readers will be able to see all your other posts as well.

Even if your website is pretty much exclusively a vehicle for your podcast, you may want to publish other kinds of things posts now and then for administrative purposes, and this will give you the freedom to keep those posts separate.

Make sure you have cover art where you need it

You need to create and use cover art in two places: first you create cover art for your podcast as a whole, and then you also embed cover art in every individual podcast recording. If you use nothing else from this article, please: add cover art to your mp3 files. Without it, your episodes show up with blank covers in iPods and most mp3 players! Your podcast episodes will look dorky without it! It’s not enough to add cover art to your itunes feed, you need to embed the cover art in every finished mp3 file. This is easy to do, yet many beginners forget to do it.

Set up your podcast feed with cover art: Create a 600×600px cover art image for your podcast and upload it to your site, or somewhere publicly accessible. (In some places Apple says 300px is OK but their technical spec says 600.) I recommend using JPEG<, not PNG — the latter is allowed but will look blocky when viewed at reduced sizes in iTunes.

Get a FeedBurner account and set up your podcast feed:
1. Tumblr: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to the RSS feed for the specific tag you created for your podcast. To get this feed, add tagged/YOURTAG/rss to your tumblr’s address. (Example: http://mytumblr.tumblr.comn/tagged/podcast/rss)
2. Textpattern: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to Textpattern’s atom feed for that category (e.g., http://foopaux.com/atom/?category=podcast).
3. Blogger: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to http://www.YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/PODCASTTAG (per these instructions from Google).
Under FeedBurner’s Optimize tab, add the SmartCast service to make your feed podcast-friendly. Set the cover art to the URL of your covert art image and add as much description, keywords and categories as you can muster.

Embed cover art for individual episodes: You’ll find that iTunes does not automatically use your cover art for downloaded episodes when they are playing in your iPod. The cover art you created in the steps above is only used in the iTunes store listing for your podcast (if you get one). In order for your cover art to actually display in people’s iPods when your episodes are playing, you need to embed the cover art into each episode’s MP3 file. Luckily, this is easy to do using only the iTunes (the simplest way I know how):

Prior to uploading, open add the episode’s MP3 to your iTunes library.
Right-click the episode in iTunes, click Get Info.
Go to the Artwork tab, manually add your cover art to the file, and click OK. (Tip: in Windows you can actually copy/paste the artwork JPG file from Explorer directly into this tab.)
The cover art is now embedded, you can now upload your MP3 file.

Create a “subscribe” link on your website.

Lots of folks use iTunes, so it’s nice to provide an iTunes instant-subscribe link for them and a standard RSS link for everyone else. To create an iTunes link, just prefix the URL of your FeedBurner feed with itpc:// instead of http://. So, for example, you could place this prominently on your website:

Subscribe in <a href="itpc://feeds.feedburner.com/MyPodcast">iTunes</a> or <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyPodcast">RSS</a>

Record and upload your podcast episodes

I use Audacity to record, then upload the MP3 to my website using FTP. If you don’t have any hosted space, you can use a free Dropbox account and host your files in a public folder. The bonus with this approach is that uploading is automatic.

Format your podcast posts properly

A properly-formatted post ensures that your subscribers will get their episodes automatically with no hiccups.

Don’t forget to set the post’s category (or tag) to the podcast category you created earlier.
Each podcast post should contain a manual, direct download link to the MP3 file for that episode. This is non-optional, and it should be the first link in the post. This will allow FeedBurner to correctly detect and include your audio in the podcast feed. For the text of the link, I recommend something like “Download MP3 audio (14.76 mb, 19:32)”
(Update, Sep 13, 2011: this link doesn’t have to be at the very front of your post, it just has to be the first link in the post. Also, when using Tumblr, to ensure cleaner descriptions see this follow-up post.)
One nice thing to do if you will be syndicating onto another service, such as Facebook notes etc., is to create a special CSS class called for-syndicate and set it to display: none. Then add a little “helper” boilerplate on the bottom of each post, in a paragraph set to that class:

<p class="for-syndicate">This is a podcast post: <a href="http://site.com/episode.mp3">click here</a> to download the MP3 audio, or visit <a href="http://site.com/podcast">site.com</a> to listen online and subscribe in iTunes.</p>

The for-syndicate class will render the paragraph invisible on your website, but it will be visible when imported into Facebook or when the feed is viewed in a newsreader, since these other sites do not import your CSS styles. (If you like, this quasi-hidden paragraph can also serve as the required MP3 link.)

Letting people listen from your website

People will listen to your podcast in one of two ways: by subscribing in iTunes or some similar program (which we’ve already covered) or by going to your web page and listening on their computer. Although they can click to listen to the MP3 file using the link you provided, it’s nice to embed some kind of player that will stream the audio and let them listen right there.

There are lots of ways to do this:

In Textpattern, install the jnm:audio textpattern plugin and include a <txp:jnm_audio> tag in each podcast post.
In Tumblr, create your podcast post as an “audio post” and Tumblr will automatically embed an audio player. (Don’t forget to also include the download link in the text portion of the post though.)
Other platforms (WordPress, etc): Let me know how you do it in the comments!

These methods use Flash programs for the audio players, which don’t run on iPhone or iPad browsers. I’ve been tinkering with ways to use HTML5 audio players when the browser supports them, but HTML5 audio support is still flaky for the time being. Check back again in a year or so and maybe I’ll have something for you.

Get listed in the iTunes Store

After you’ve gotten your production groove down and can demonstrate that your episodes come out at least somewhat regularly, it’s worth trying to get your podcast added into the iTunes store. Read Apple’s FAQ for Podcast Makers.

Free Kindle Book: Back On Murder

2011-07-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

J. Mark Bertrand, having just released Pattern of Wounds , the second in a series of mystery novels, is giving away the Kindle edition of Back on Murder (the first book in the series) for free for a limited time.

I have not read either yet, but I have downloaded the free ebook and will be reading it as soon as I can! I’m always on the lookout for new reading material and thought I’d pass this on.

J. Mark Bertrand is also known as the writer of Bible Design Blog, which centers around reviews and features of very high-quality Bibles and book-making in general. It’s actually a rather interesting subject even if you are not religious. See his announcement about his novels here.

The 50 books every child should read - With Kindle Links

2011-06-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

The Independent recently asked three of Britain’s leading children’s authors and two of their in-house book experts to each pick 10 books, suitable for Year 7 students. Their original list is here.

Unfortunately, in typical traditional-media fashion, they neglected to add any links to any of the books mentioned, losing an obvious opportunity to use the web to both their readers’ and their own advantage. So I have gone through the list and added links to the Kindle editions of every book for which one is available.

I linked to a free edition wherever possible. If a book was not available on the Kindle store, I marked it with an * asterisk. If you know of a Kindle version of a book I could not find, or of a free or better-formatted edition than the one I have linked, let me know via email or comments!

Philip Pullman

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Indispensable. The great classic beginning of English children’s literature.
Pinocchio (free) by Carlo Collodi. What effortless invention looks like.
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner. A great political story: democracy in action.
Swallows and Amazons * by Arthur Ransome. As clear and pure as Mozart.
Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken. If Ransome was Mozart, Aiken was Rossini. Unforced effervescence.
The Owl Service * by Alan Garner. Showed how children’s literature could sound dark and troubling chords.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Superb wit and vigorous invention.
Moominsummer Madness * by Tove Jansson. Any of the Moomin books would supply the same strange light Nordic magic.
A Hundred Million Francs * by Paul Berna. A particular favourite of mine, as much for Richard Kennedy’s delicate illustrations (in the English edition) as for the story.
The Castafiore Emerald* by Hergé. Three generations of this family have loved Tintin. Perfect timing, perfect narrative tact and command, blissfully funny.

Michael Morpurgo

The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson. The heroine is blessed with such wonderful friends who help her through the twists and turns of this incredible journey.
A Christmas Carol (free) by Charles Dickens. The first few pages were so engaging, Marley’s ghostly face on the knocker of Scrooge’s door still gives me the shivers.
Just William books by Richmal Crompton. These are a must for every child.
The Happy Prince (free) by Oscar Wilde. This was the first story, I think, that ever made me cry and it still has the power to make me cry.
The Elephant’s Child * from The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. The story my mother used to read me most often, because I asked for it again and again. I loved the sheer fun of it, the music and the rhythm of the words. It was subversive too. Still my favourite story.
Treasure Island (free) by R.L. Stevenson This was the first real book I read for myself. I lived this book as I read it.
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. A classic tale of man versus nature. I wish I’d written this.
The Man Who Planted Trees* by Jean Giono. A book for children from 8 to 80. I love the humanity of this story and how one man’s efforts can change the future for so many.
The Singing Tree* by Kate Seredy. The story of two children who go to find their father who has been listed missing in the trenches of the First World War.
The Secret Garden (free) by Frances Hodgson-Burnett. I love this story of a girl’s life being changed by nature.

Katy Guest, literary editor for The Independent on Sunday

Refugee Boy * by Benjamin Zephaniah. Story of a young Ethiopian boy, whose parents abandon him in London to save his life.
Finn Family Moomintroll* (and the other Moomin books) by Tove Jansson. A fantasy series for small children that introduces bigger ones to ideas of adventure, dealing with fear, understanding character and tolerating difference.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid * by Jeff Kinney. It’s rude, it’s funny and it will chime with every 11-year-old who’s ever started a new school.
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Written for a teenage audience but fun at any age.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein. Be warned, these tales of hobbits, elves and Middle Earth are dangerously addictive.
The Tygrine Cat * (and The Tygrine Cat on the Run) by Inbali Iserles. If your parents keep going on at you to read Tarka the Otter, The Sheep-Pig and other animal fantasies, do — they’re great books — also try Iserles’ stories about a cat seeking his destiny.
Carry On, Jeeves * by P.G. Wodehouse. A grown-up book ? but not that grown-up.
When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. Judith Kerr’s semi-autobiographical story of a family fleeing the Nazis in 1933.
Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Elaborate mythological imagery and a background based in real science. If you like this, the Discworld series offers plenty more.
The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson. The pinnacle of the wonderful Jacqueline Wilson’s brilliant and enormous output.

John Walsh, author and Independent columnist

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (free) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Irresistible puzzle-solving tales of the chilly Victorian master-sleuth and his dim medical sidekick.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Age-transcending tale, both funny and sad.
Mistress Masham’s Repose * by T.H. White. Magical story of 10-year-old Maria, living in a derelict stately home, shy, lonely and under threat from both her governess and her rascally guardian.
Little Women (free) by Louisa May Alcott. Inexplicably evergreen, trend and taste-defying 1868 classic.
How to be Topp * by Geoffrey Willams and Ronald Searle. Side-splitting satire on skool, oiks, teechers, fules, bulies, swots.
Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz. First of the action-packed adventures with 14-year-old Alex Rider.
Private Peaceful * by Michael Morpurgo. “Dulce et Decorum Est” for pre-teens.
Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. Lively, amoral, wildly imaginative debut (six more followed) about the money-grabbing master-criminal Artemis, 12. The author called it “Die Hard with fairies.”
The Silver Sword * by Ian Serraillier. Inspiring wartime story of the Balicki family in Warsaw.
Animal Farm (free) by George Orwell. Smart 11-year-olds won’t need any pre-knowledge of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and 1917 to appreciate this brilliantly-told fable.

Michael Rosen

Skellig * by David Almond. Brings magical realism to working-class North-east England.
Red Cherry Red * by Jackie Kay. A book of poems that reaches deep into our hidden thoughts but also talks in a joyous voice exploring the everyday.
Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah. A book of poems that demands to be read aloud, performed and thought about.
Greek myths * by Geraldine McCaughrean. Superheroes battle with demons, gods intervene in our pleasures and fears — a bit like the spectres in our minds going through daily life, really — beautifully retold here.
People Might Hear You (Viking Kestrel picture books) * by Robin Klein. A profound, suspenseful story about sects, freedom and the rights of all young people ? especially girls.
Noughts and Crosses (free) by Malorie Blackman. A book that dared to go where no one thought you could with young audiences because it raises tough stuff to do with race.
Einstein’s Underpants and How They Saved the World by Anthony McGowan. A crazy adventure set amongst the kids you don’t want to know but who this book makes you really, really care about.
After the First Death by Robert Cormier. Cormier is never afraid of handling how the personal meets the political all within the framework of a thriller.
The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd. A book that allows difference to be part of the plot and not a point in itself.
Beano Annual. A cornucopia of nutty, bad, silly ideas, tricks, situations and plots

* — not known to be available as an ebook.

How to get more use out of your Kindle

2011-06-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

So you’ve had your Kindle for a few months now, and it’s been sitting in your pack, unused for the last few weeks. What happened? Here’s how can you get more use out of this gadget you used to be so excited about.

Ask it to do less. With its apps and its web browser, the Kindle is technically capable of many things, but great for only one thing: reading. Reading, you may recall, is a wonderful pleasure that may have gotten pushed out of your life awhile back. Use your Kindle for reading more. Resist the temptation to use it for things that will tend to marginalize reading again: games, email, and so forth.

Use the magic wirelessness to your advantage. There is really no good reason to be in the habit of plugging your Kindle into anything (other than to charge it up once or twice a month).

Here’s how I manage my ebook collection wirelessly:

To put an ebook on my Kindle, I email it to my free.kindle.com address (a snap since Gmail accepts drag-and-drop attachments). Presto, book appears on my Kindle.
When I’m done with a book, I either delete it from my Kindle or put it in a “Finished” folder in my Kindle.
Gmail keeps a copy of the file in the email attachment in case I ever need it. (I also stick them in a folder on my computer.)

Using this method, there are no wires, no syncing, and there’s no need for special software like Calibri unless I need to convert an ebook to a Kindle-compatible format.

Make finding new reading material as automatic as possible. Time spent looking for new stuff to read is time you could have spent reading. Find ways to have the world send you new things, rather than digging for them yourself. This one is something I am continually looking for improvements on. Some options:

Delivereads – This is a new one, and it’s just the kind of thing I’m looking for: free, high-quality stories delivered automatically to your Kindle, roughly once a week. This one is almost a no-brainer.
Instapaper – Even though Instapaper is having some problems with automatic deliveries at the moment (which will probably be fixed before too long), if you do any browsing on the Internet in the course of a normal day, Instapaper makes a great way to collect long articles for later reading. Just try and use it as a stash for things you already run across; don’t start crawling the web just to look for Kindle material – you’re trying to get away from that, remember?
Newspaper subscriptions: Try a subscription to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Currently the reviews are very mixed; as of today you can see that not everyone finds these subscriptions worth the cost compared to the print editions. It will depend on the publication and whether you have the time to read all the issues.

Treat Twitter like a newspaper. One good use I have found for the web browser is to use it to log into m.twitter.com. This is an excellent way to catch up on Twitter. You can now check it once or twice a day at home as part of your morning or evening routine, and forget about it for the rest of the day. (Unless you happen to be stuck in a queue or waiting room with nothing but your smartphone.)

Start or join a book club. The ideal book club will center around a specific kind of book, and send you a new book every month automatically. This is just an idea of mine – I haven’t yet run across a book club like this – but it makes so much sense it’s hard to believe they don’t already exist.