Category Archives: Review

Medium

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This is how social networking works. I was just wandering along, scrubbing through my Feedly list of syndicated items on websites when I ran across an article about headline hunting. As I read along, I noticed the presentation layer, the UI/UX was pleasant enough to be remarkable and catch my attention. It became, quite quickly in fact a trip down the rabbit hole.

The source of this fascination was Medium.com. One well-written, well-presented article was all I needed to see that this is something special. I found myself enraptured, roped in, and signing up. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever write material for that system, but there I was spiraling into it and enjoying it quite a lot.

And this is what startups and social networking enthusiasts are really hoping will happen. That their creations will catch people, like I was caught, and reel them in. It’s the definition of good UI/UX, if the content and presentation are good enough, they become an entirely new thing, something like intellectual Velcro.

I was just floating along. Then suddenly I was reading a lot, enjoying myself, signing up, and then the magic hit: I started sharing. Links from the site to Facebook, Twitter and yes, even LinkedIn.

I think everyone I know would enjoy this site and get caught up in it like I did. In many ways Medium.com wins because in less than fifteen minutes I’ve become an evangelist of it. Check it out at Medium.com. I think you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

RSVP – A Saving Grace

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There is a fantastic class of applications that are available for the iOS, Android, and Apple/IBM Computing platforms that really assist with speed reading. These applications are based on the same reading technique called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation.

RSVP defeats subvocalization while reading. Many people subvocalize while they read and it becomes a habit. What most people don’t understand is that you do not need this subvocalization to actually comprehend what you read. The way to defeat this slow-reading habit is to fix the eyes in place and present the words too fast for you to vocalize them. Many of these applications start you off at around 300 words per minute, with sliders that let you adjust the speed up as you get used to the feeling of reading without subvocalization.

Recently I had a business need to consume a lot of written work, and I would have been hopelessly slow if I had continued my habit of subvocalization while I read. With RSVP I’ve been able to increase my reading speed to about 520 words per minute. Instead of taking half a year to polish off a 250 page paperback book I can now liesurely read it on-and-off over a weekend and be done with it. The nice part about RSVP is the faster you read the better your comprehension is, which seems to defy common sense. I’ve found that sometimes 520 words per minute is too annoyingly slow, and I’ve been known to push it to almost 600 words per minute, and it’s a pleasure to read at that speed.

Here are some applications that I’ve found that feature RSVP:

iOS –

  • Velocity – This free app on the Apple App Store can connect to Pocket, as well as act as an Open In… target for other applications that handle text. Velocity can also detect web addresses and present the text on the page as RSVP quite well. The interface to Velocity has a lot of polish and is quite a pleasure to use.
  • Fastr Pro – This is another free/low-cost application on the Apple App Store which features RSVP. This application has something special as far as I’m concerned and that is an open data locker where you can upload your ePub files and synchronize your library and last-read bookmarks across your iOS devices. I’ve run into some bugs with the software, but upon later analysis it was purely operator error, not the fault of the software. I was too impatient for Fastr Pro, and because I wasn’t willing to wait, I caused my own headaches. This app is written well and the developers have a fantastic sense of humor and are exceedingly friendly to work with.

Android –

  • Speed Reader – I’ve only been using this app for a little while. It’s free and the software is quite good. I ran into a little bug where the end of my ePub files were being missed in the conversion, as the app converts ePub files to TXT files before processing them in it’s RSVP engine. Something causes the last chunk of data on the ePub to not appear in the TXT file, as far as I can tell.

Windows/Mac Computers –

  • Spreeder – This is a website that works well on browsers on these two platforms. The site, www.spreeder.com has links to the Java applet as well as a Bookmarklet that enables one-click access to their RSVP engine. The nice thing with Spreeder which I appreciate is there are more adjustable settings with its RSVP engine. You can elect to chunk words, so it speeds up around small words and slows down around large words, keeping your average reading speed set to your preferred speed as well as a host of other thoughtful adjustments. I encourage everyone to visit the site and investigate for a full view of this product.

Generally these programs can help you increase your reading speed, allowing you to chew through written works much faster, and with much less eye-strain than with other speed-reading techniques that I have tried. I find it works better than skimming, which sometimes leads you to miss small salient details, and after a while using my fingers to release eye-strain just pushes the strain into my hands. I encourage everyone to look into this technique. RSVP revolutionized my professional career and quickly enabled me to consume a lot of written text much faster than I ever thought possible. I’m sure if I really invested serious concentration I could increase my rate to ever higher numbers as RSVP becomes easier as you get used to it, almost like exercising a muscle.

If you liked this column, please comment. Now that I am an independent IT specialist I thrive on feedback!

Many Thanks!

OwnCloud

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At work I’ve been thinking about cloud sync services, something like Dropbox without actually using Dropbox, because it’s non-kosher around these parts. I thought about OwnCloud so I went investigating.

OwnCloud is neat, it’s a PHP script that will set itself up on a web host, and then provide you with a web interface like Dropbox and access to clients like Dropbox which mirror the function of Dropbox completely. This was a possible route to satisfy our legal people and maybe leverage cloud sync at work. As it turns out, it didn’t work. OwnCloud is a lost cause. I installed it on my iPage host and got it to work all up until I tried to connect the Mac desktop client to it. It got files perfectly well, but when I put a file in the owncloud folder to be synced back up to my host it all fell apart. The error was “errno 22” and ended up being shown to me as “Bad Request” – so that was a no-go. Then I thought maybe I could install OwnCloud on my Mac Pro server at work, keep it in house maybe. That also was a failure, the web side was fine, but the client just couldn’t connect no matter what I tried.

So I’m going to abandon the pursuit of OwnCloud. I’ve tried it and found that it just won’t work on what I’ve got. It was something that could have possibly worked and been great, but it’s got too many moving parts and it was a total failure when you tried to get all the parts to spin up and run. Oh well, at least now I know I can abandon OwnCloud and move forward.

Wine Tasting Notes for 2013 Traverse City Tour

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Chateau Chantal

Bob Flight –

* Chardonnay – watery and acidic 70
* PR Chardonnay – wee butter, weakly Oaked 78
* Pinot Noir – fertilizer – basic taste uh 60 color is brown
* PR Pinot Noir – burnt sugar n slightly better 76 color is brown
* PR Trio – nasty n bacon wrapped in rotten leather. Taste is okay. 78
* PR Cab Franc – toffee coffee n early tannic pack, lame on follow through 78

Laurentide

* 11 Chardonnay – lemon and lime with light pear notes 84
* 11 Sauvignon Blanc – funky and sour nose, urinal ammonia taste, weak lemonade notes 70
* 11 Emergence white – very light burnt wood scent with a strong lime note low acid 84
* 10 Pinot noir – plaster and drywall dust nose dry with a sandy talc grip 85

Verterra

* Pinot noir 11 – curt with a nose of urinal puck 85
* Reserve red 11 – excellent development 89 great long finish

2lads

* 11 sparkling Pinot Grigio – bubbles and heat 78
* 11 Pinot noir – alcohol raspberries and strawberries n great lasting power on the palate 89
* 11 Pinot noir cuvée Beatrice – vinyl and leather n quite late on the palate 90
* 11 cab franc merlot – blackberry and raspberries 88

CGT

* Laika gruner veltliner – dry 84
* 11 barrel fermented Chardonnay – floral hibiscus. Spicy warm post palate 88
* 11 gamay noir – bubblegum nose tart cherry velvety mouthfeel 89
* 11 silhouette red wine – punchy tannins 88 nice acid
* 11 edelzwicker – melon canteloupe n funky 72
* 12 late harvest Chardonnay – pear n champagne bite and nicely sweet 85

Bowers Harbor

* Rose – simple 82
* Pinot Grigio – nice nose 84
* Wooded Chardonnay – 86
* Pinot Noir wind whistle – burnt sugar caramel n delightful finish and very tight and high tannic package 90
* Claret – raspberry and blackberry on the nose – super tight tannins. 88

Black Star Farms

* 2012 arcturos Pinot noir rose – acid 87
* 2011 arcturos barrel aged Chardonnay – caramel on the nose butter and oak with notes of caramel and apples and pears. 89
* 2011 arcturos Pinot noir – maple syrup on the nose , buttery and spicy, 90
* 2010 vintners select – spicy 89
* 2011 arcturos Cabernet franc – harsh and tannic 85

Brys Estates

* 12 Pinot Blanc pear with lime chasing it 88
* 12 naked Chardonnay – coconut and pear 87
* 11 Pinot noir – lingering spice, velvety smoothness 90
* 11 cab/merlot – half sour pickles pepperoni salami n – smooth and chewy 91
* 11 merlot – sour cherries 87
* 12 Riesling/Gris – strawberries and cherries 87
* 12 Pinot noir/Riesling – sweet with a shine of sour chasing it around 84

Hawthorne

* Pinot Grigio – light n pear and bright spicy flash 86
* 10 barrel res Chardonnay – light nose light butter and apricots 88
* 12 rose – too clenchy 80
* 12 gamay noir – delicious nose quite good with spice and peppers 87
* 10 cab franc/merlot – 88

Slogger

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Memories.Slogger

Every once in a while I run across something I’ve seen before but ignored accidentally until I see it in great big headlines and neon and stop to pay attention to it and discover that it does something I really really want. This particular afternoon it was the product Slogger from Brett Terpstra. The software is a Ruby script, and Ruby is a delightful programming language that I’ve had the pleasure of dabbling in. Nowhere near the level of Brett and the people who help him, but here and there, little things.

The need came from a simple Google query, IFTTT and Day One. Looking for some way to bridge that divide between the automatic web service that I’ve fallen in love with, IFTTT and Day One, the journaling software that works quite well and renders DropBox a “Killer App”. Dropbox is the glue that keeps my Day One system together, on my laptop, my desktop, and all my mobile devices. When I found Slogger it was a definite Eureka moment, the answer all in one place. I downloaded the code as the author describes and tried to set it up.

Monumental fail. Pieces everywhere, error codes puking on the screen faster than I could read, pages and pages of interpreter and compiler errors, all surrounding one “Ruby Gem” module called hpricot. I knew why this was fail-town for me, it was because I had installed XCode CLI tools in order to get the mac_google_authenticator PAM module built. That CLI package rendered my system retarded when it came to processing gem requests. In the Ruby world there is a system established for distributing software written in Ruby, it’s called ‘gem’ and you run it much like apt-get in Ubuntu, it’s really quite straightforward and never has given me fits – until. Everything was complicated by the fact that I couldn’t really find where XCode was on my machine, all the likely targets to search didn’t have anything relevant and my find command returned pages of errors and I didn’t have the patience to pick through a thousand lines of “Permission Denied” to find the one spot where the file was hidden.

Didn’t need to complain, as I knew the solution. Download XCode for real. So off to Apple, download the monster and install it. That satisfied hpricot, and everything else installed quite nicely. I set Slogger up, pointed it at my Dropbox and configured the plugins that I wanted. The initial run crashed and burned but I figured out why, it was an errant space in the line that points to the Day One folder, a symbolic link fixed that and I was again off to the races. Of all the plugins that I configured these were successful:

  1. BlogLogger
  2. facebookifttt
  3. goodreadslogger
  4. lastfmlogger
  5. pocketlogger
  6. rsslogger

Then there were the plugins I tried to configure but couldn’t:

  1. fitbit
  2. flickrlogger
  3. getgluelogger

The primary problem with the fitbit plugin was that fitgem, the Ruby assistant program that you have to install is a phantom. You install it, it’s successful, and then it’s gone. No trace of it exists. You try again, poof, nowhere. Plus for the plugin setup there are API codes, User codes, and oAuth codes. I get the reasoning behind all of them and getting most of them was not an issue. I felt a little awkward creating an “Application” for just myself, it seems kind of a waste of effort to ferret all these bits and peices into a semiformal request procedure, but doing it wasn’t hard or cost anything, so what the hell. The part where it all falls apart for fitbit is where you have to get the oAuth token, since fitgem never worked and it’s invocation from slogger should have opened a web browser and asked for my approval, all of that never happened. I tried to be sporting and do the heavy lifting myself but all I did was irritate the API for fitbit and I figured, what the hell, I got most of what I was after and moved the fitbit plugin into the “unused” folder and forgot all about it. Abandon ship, y’arrrr!

Flickr is a pain in the ass. It’s Yahoo and as such, it’s kind of an Internet leper. You need your Flickr number, there’s a site that makes that easy, except it doesn’t work. Flickr username? Feh, either the one in Flickr or your linked Yahoo ID is meaningless. I half figured it was in the URL anyways, but then I thought about it and I don’t really use Flickr all that much beyond a solitary IFTTT rule and that’s precarious as it is. The only attractive part of Flickr is they gave out 1TB of storage. Still lepers tho. So, abandon ship! Y’arrrrr!

GetGlue was the last great effort. Much like Klout, it’s a site that makes sense sort of, but the name is utterly silly. GetGlue. What the hell? Why? Glue has nothing to do with TV or Movies. The only connection I could think of was celluloid and horses-processed-into-glue sort of connection. They give away stickers, what a wonderful bit of pollution that is, and as a gimmick seems dumb. The plugin needs an RSS feed for the GetGlue Activity Stream. It appears as though the GetGlue folks have moved away from RSS and towards “widgets” which seems stupid as in this application RSS is the answer and widgets are worthless. Alas, Google searching for the RSS feed method was fruitless. I was half hoping for something like http://getglue.com/user/bluedepth/feed.rss, where I could just craft it up and be on my merry way. No. You have to “View Source” to find it, which is stupid because that is so full of CSS flotsam and jetsam as to be utterly incomprehensible. Again, my ardor for that particular service was fog on a hot day. I don’t need it. I don’t use it. Whatever! Abandon ship! y’arrrrr!

So I tried the slogger script, it failed, tore out fitbit goop and then it worked. Then I went into my Day One app and mopped up all the mess that testing had made. The only oddity I noticed was the BlogLogger completely missed out on the text on my WordPress site that was between pre tags. Meh. Not really a reason to kick the entire thing to the curb, just something to honestly stop using. HTML is a right bastard, almost all of the time. CSS is a filthy abomination, but we won’t go there.

I would say that tonight everything will work as it should for Slogger, but I have to race to work tonight to turn everything off because work is going to exit-stage-left when it comes to the Internet. They are turning the entire thing off, at least for a few hours. I can’t wait for tomorrow, there will be lulz.

So, to Mr. Terpstra, thank you for slogger. I’m sorry the plugins didn’t work, that fitgem was a phantom, but at least most of what I wanted worked. So we sound a victory cheer, sort of. Yaaay!

The Fionavar Tapestry – Guy Gavriel Kay

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I am all done reading the trilogy of books in this series that Scott so fondly loves. The books were written well, I’d put them somewhere between three and four stars out of five. The parts that I didn’t much care for were the pacing problems in the text, where the action comes in fits and starts, spasmodically. The background of Arthurian legend that the book rests upon is okay but the love triangle between Guinevere, Arthur, and Lancelot is rather annoying at first, but once established it evens out acceptably well.

The only other thing that I can really put my finger on, as to why I didn’t fall over myself about these books is the lack of setup for much of the book. Places with names that I don’t recognize or can’t put cognates to to keep in my head, the difference between Cader Sedat and Khath Meigol. Who and what the Paraiko are and why they are important, what skylore is and how magic is supposed to function in this fictive universe and the occasional god-drifts as godlings appear from pure deus ex machina to push the story along. You are just plunked down in the middle of Kay’s fictional creation without a map, a guide, or any way to connect common known things to what he’s trying to describe in his writings.

I was expected to feel something for the character of Cavall, but I just couldn’t emotionally connect with much of the characters in the book including Cavall. The only character I could really connect with was Dave Martinyuk’s father, in that I despised him.

The climax scene felt more accidental than momentous with game-changing details being uncovered in the narrative moments before and after the climax of the story comes and goes. While in the third volume of this series you note clearly that the author is running out of pages and hasn’t resolved the “big bad” yet, and I was worried that the resolution was going to be flimsy and cheap. That you can’t really do proper service to overcoming such a impressive villain in just a few pages. Kay takes the cake on this one, he deflates and disposes of the villain on one single page. Awesome cosmic villainy crumpled up and thrown into the trash basket, three-points!

I suppose if I was younger and still smitten with Arthurian legend this book would have read far differently. I cut the book a significant amount of slack because the general reviews are positively glowing and so I rate it higher than I feel I would if I wasn’t biased by the other reviews only because a shot-and-miss shouldn’t be a death knell for an authors work. It didn’t work for me, but three and a half stars because it might work for you. Without the other reviews I would have given it two stars and thrown the books with great force.

As I commented while reading, mocking Guinevere in these books “Oh Arthur! I love you! It’s so good that Lancelot isn’t here because then you’d be so much trash to kick to the curb. We are so lucky that I can settle with your minimal acceptability. — Oh! Look! It’s, uh, Lancelot. Hi there. {pose and moan}” LOL.

Doo

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As I was looking through my Pocket saved items I noticed an article from MacSparky in regards to a new service called Doo. It’s supposed to index all your documents and tag them so you can find them faster than with Spotlight. So, I downloaded the app and set it up. It pegged my MBP for hours and hours with fan-churning processing and made the entire laptop unusable. Then I noticed it had tried to index pictures, something I wish there was a way to turn off, but I couldn’t find it. I then noticed a section in Preferences and a place to define rules. But I didn’t know what some of the rules meant so I went online to search for documentation. All I could find was a hopelessly poor support site and absolutely no documentation whatsoever. So, that pretty much does that. Also they hand out 25GB of storage, but it’s unclear what they are storing. The index or copies of the files? Anyways, it was a mistake and I emptied the app, revoked all the links to my other cloud services and requested the company dispose of my account. I won’t ever be back. What a mess.

If you see Doo.net advertised, just skip it.

Byword 2.0

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Byword, one of my favorite apps for the Mac and for my iOS devices just upgraded to version 2.0. They have included publishing to blog platforms as a Premium feature and used the Mac App Store or iOS to distribute the added functionality for $4.99. So far I love this app and this was one of those features that I’ve been dying for, so I’m quite pleased. I can do all my writing using Byword and not have to worry about distractions or anything on the screen getting in the way of my writing. It’s all clear, clean, and simple.

The last post to my WordPress blog about Invention was written using Byword 2.0 and I’m quite impressed with it. I could suggest some other enhancements like enumerating the Category list and suggesting possible tags in WordPress posting, but I will take what I can get from the get-go. One thing that was a little dismaying, but not a show stopper was that the purchase of the Premium add-on only works for the App Store that matches the platform you are buying it for. The Premium add-on for Mac App Store is separate from the one for the iOS App Store. Their support was very clear and I pretty much assumed so even before I wrote to support, I just wanted to be sure. Frankly I could give or take the extra features on my iPad or my iPhone as Drafts works brilliantly there along with Poster app on those devices. Drafts hands off to Poster well enough without having to worry about buying Byword 2.0 Premium again for the iOS App Store. I bought the add-on for the Mac App Store because that’s where, when I blog on my Laptop or on my iMac, this will be the app that I’ll use to blog.

The only irking thing, and it’s not really anything really overwrought is the lack of pick lists and tag suggestions for WordPress, but I have faith that eventually they might take their software in that direction. Only time will tell, and developers. 🙂

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Update

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They updated the OS for the Nook HD and Nook HD+ a few weeks ago and boy, what a difference does it make! These devices are no longer jailed to the Barnes & Noble's experience with their nascent App Store, but instead they are open to the entire Google Play infrastructure.

I've had an on-again/off-again love affair with the Nook series of eBook readers. I started with the Simple Touch and that lasted until the devices page turning buttons started going “hard of hearing” and I stopped using the device to read books when paging through became a maybe-yes/maybe-no proposition. I upgraded to the Nook HD, which is the smaller model that they offer and the HD+ is the iPad size model. The Nook has a bunch of really great features going for it, like having a place to insert a MicroSD card so getting a device with a big amount of internal memory is really quite meaningless, the bargain-basement model is good enough as the material that eats up the most space can be easily stored on the MicroSD card.

The challenge to really loving the Nook wasn't about the device itself, the device itself is built very well, almost Apple well, it's reliable and is smartly designed. The challenge I have always had with my Nook was the eBook reader software that B&N ships with their stock Nook devices. Please do not misunderstand, the app itself is exceptionally good if you are a general user, someone unlike me who is perfectly fine with the certainly competent eBook reader app. I however was not fine with the app. It came down to being ever so slightly irritated at certain little niggling issues that while I was using the device would wear me down. It's like having a very small pebble stuck in your shoe – you can walk without a problem, you don't limp at all, but you know there is a rock in there and over a long period of time it just irritates you and makes everything just a little less “right”. This stock app lacked some features which I really wanted. The primary feature was having the ability to configure the reader to use the font I prefer to have my eBooks rendered as. I have fonts I really find easy to read, those are OpenSans from Google and Helvetica Neue from Adobe. This was the little pebble in my shoe.

Then B&N let go of their Nook devices and upgraded them all to full Android devices that could use the Google Play Store as well as the B&N App Store. That night, after downloading the update and starting my Nook HD with this brave new world running on it I discovered just how incredible my Nook HD could be, freed. I found, bought, and installed a new eBook reader called Moon+ Reader Pro. The cost of the app wasn't too bad, at $4.99, it had a free version which gave you a taste of much of it's great features and once I saw just how perfect a match this eBook reader was for me I decided that I could spend the money on the full-blown app. This one app makes my Nook HD awesome as an eBook reader, and here is why:

  • Custom Fonts (!) – This was exactly what I wanted all along! It turns out that Helvetica Neue has a labyrinthine licensing model so I gave up on that font but instead switched over to my other favorite, Google's OpenSans. This font is freely available and it wasn't hard at all to find it as a “TrueType Font”, aka a TTF Font version. I copied the TTF Font file to my Dropbox and used another great Nook HD/Google Play app called File Manager HD to copy the file out of my Dropbox and create a folder for it in my Nook HD's file system called “Fonts” and copy the TTF Font file there. In Moon+ it was a cakewalk to navigate to my new Fonts folder, find OpenSans and that was it. Every eBook now is rendered in OpenSans, the way I really really like it to be.

  • Adjustable screen brightness with a swipe and font size adjustment by swipe – This actually wasn't something I thought I would really need until I found myself using it a lot. It's quite handy to skip out on having to adjust settings when trying to find the right font size and brightness to suit your reading preferences.

  • BookPlay – It's a feature of Moon+ where you can play a book, it slowly (with an adjustable speed) advances the lines of an eBook smoothly while your eyes fixate at the center of the screen and you don't have to paginate at all. The book automatically, slowly, smoothly advances along like a scroll attached to an adjustable winding player. I don't really know what the feature is called, but I call it BookPlay, and it's nice when I don't want to tappa-tappa to advance eBook pages on my Nook HD. The speed of advancement can also be set to a swipe adjustment, which I find to be really quite handy and super-clever.

  • Many canned custom themes and theme colors – You can configure the Moon+ app to switch display themes with all the settings saved per theme or turn off everything but color changing so the theme selection system does double-duty as a screen color picker. Sometimes I like reading black text on white backgrounds. Sometimes yellow text on a textured blue background and sometimes dark blue text on a black background. Each color theme is useful for different reading conditions. It's nice to be able to set my Nook HD to it's brightest highest contrast black-on-white for reading outside or on the bus on my way to work, then to the yellow/blue one for leisurely reading at home and then the dark blue on black to read in bed without staring at what amounts to a flashlight in the shape of a tablet.

  • Formats? Every format! – I have a few books in the B&N Store that I “bought” because they were “Free Friday eBook deals” that I took B&N up on when the opportunity struck. For those books I will gladly go back to the B&N canned eBook reading software and that's fine for those books. In general however I prefer to obtain my eBooks in the ePub file format. To that end, I have all my ePub books loaded on my MicroSD card, so they don't take up space on my Nook HD. Moon+ has a great bookshelf organizing metaphor and installing books that are stored on my MicroSD is a cakewalk. I love having all of my eBooks available and here's something that I've always been a little grumped about when it comes to the canned B&N eBook reader app, and that is, you have to get your books from B&N to have them in the B&N “Locker” so that you can make use of the “magic bookmarks” so you can pick up your eBooks on any device and read and when you stop that new place where you stopped is synchronized across all your B&N connected Nook apps and devices. This is really quite nice, especially when you have multiple devices or one of your devices has an exhausted battery but you don't want to stop reading your eBooks. There is no way to import your own ePub files into this B&N “Locker” system so you're shit out of luck. Moon+ returns this feature and makes it more generalized, open, and way more convenient. You can set up your “magic bookmark” sync with your Dropbox account! That's the way to do it! Have individual ePub files on Dropbox or on a device and use Dropbox to store the tokens needed to make the “magic bookmark” feature work without having to rely on the closed garden that B&N provides! This is so cake and eat it too, and I love crowing about that sort of thing when I discover it.

  • Reading Statistics – Moon+ also watches you read as you use the app and records your reading speed, how quickly you read books, and it also includes per-chapter ETA so you know generally speaking how long you have left in the chapter you are currently reading and a per-book ETA to let you know how much longer the book will last if your reading rate is constant. If you slow down or speed up, these values change and you can display them on a very thin status bar that is always visible at the bottom of your eBook screen. This little status bar can also display your battery level in your Nook, so you know how much juice you have left before you have to plug your Nook back in and charge it up. It's wonderful, for example, while reading “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” to know that the chapter you are currently reading has only 15 minutes left in it. That is quite a nice feature.

  • Access to Project Gutenberg – Moon+ makes it easy to connect itself to the largest collection of publicly accessible eBooks in the world. Project Gutenberg scans public domain books, lots of classics really, into ePub format and makes them freely available online. Moon+ has a interface to Project Gutenberg so the entire archive is just a few taps away and you can download your eBook right to your Nook and start enjoying reading, without having to pay one red cent.

All in all, for $4.99 Moon+ is a steal and makes the Nook HD a wonderful eBook reader. Moon+ has single-appedly eliminated any desire I had for the iPad Mini. That Moon+ only exists in the Android marketplace (Google Play) makes this one app the central pillar that tilts the playing field in favor of B&N and Android when it comes to tablets and reading eBooks. The iBook app for the Apple infrastructure is still quite good, as much as the B&N canned eBook app is for the Nooks themselves, but Moon+ blows it's competitors out of the water.

Iron Man 3

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Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.

The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.

The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.

Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.

I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.