Ramblin' Rosen

I just read today at Engadget that Bob Moog, electronic music pioneer, is suffering from an inoperable brain tumour. My first synth was a Moog–the infamous Concertmate MG-1, made for Radio Shack. OK, it wasn’t one of Moog’s classic synths, but it was still great fun in junior high, and I’d still use it today if it weren’t such a pain to bring it over to the UK.

His family have set up a site at CaringBridge, and I’ve signed their guestbook. If you have any interest at all in electronic music, please visit this site and pay tribute to one of the great musical instrument inventors of the 20th Century.

In case my loyal readers were wondering why I haven’t posted in ages, I have been busy setting up the new Tursa online shop (as well as recovering from the cold from all colds that has infected everyone in London). Ye Olde Tursa Shoppe has now gone live.

It’s running on Zen Cart, an open-source shopping cart. I’ve been very impressed with Zen Cart so far—the set-up has been relatively easy, the community is very friendly and helpful and the documentation is much better than some of the commercial options I looked into previously.

At the moment, the site design is based on the default template and using the default graphics. It’s table-based, not CSS-based, but it can be adapted to use less tables by experienced developers, and the next versions will allow switching to a standards-based design much more easily than the latest version. I’m working on redesigning the whole Tursa site, and when I do, I plan to move as much as I can away from tables for layout. In the meanwhile, the basic template provides a good starting point to develop a shop quickly.

Ramblin’ Rosen from typoGenerator
Originally uploaded by lilitu93.

typoGenerator is a web-based generator of typo posters, posters that overlay text over a processed image that are designed to look good, not to make sense. The generator works by searching images from images.google based on the words entered, adds effects to the images, and then adds the text in a random font and layout.

The site is a student project of Katharina Nussbaumer, and generated images can be used on websites for non-commercial purposes. It’s a load of fun just to play around with, and surprisingly many of the results look good.

[Site discovered at Semiproductive Boredom.]

No, the title of the post isn’t an episode name from the new series of Doctor Who. Instead, it’s the name of a very clever iPod/Dalek wallpaper on iPodlounge. If you’re a fan of iPods, Daleks or both, be sure to check it out.

[Link from Doctor Who - Thrilling Adventures in Time and Space]

Roommate From Hell by Jim Munroe is a novel being published in the form of a blog. The premise is that Katie’s new roommate Lilith may or may not be a demoness, and on the blog is a poll to see if readers think she is or not. Jim is planning to write a spin-off based on the results of the poll.

The blog will consist of 88 entries, one post each day. For those who have to find out how it ends sooner, it has already been published in dead-tree form as An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil. Unlike the blog version, the book version will not feature any of the photographs.

I’m definitely planning to follow this, both because the idea of a novel in blog form is intriguing but also to see how Jim handles my favourite demoness Lilith (or not, if she really isn’t a demoness). So far what’s been posted is intriguing and is definitely making me want to read more.

[Link courtesy of BoingBoing]

Recently both Wired News and BBC News have published articles on the two latest cloned kittens, Tabouli and Baba Ganoush. Unlike the first cloned cat CopyCat, a.k.a. Cc, these cats look remarkably similar to their genetic donor Tahini and even have almost the same coat pattern. This improvement in copying the original is mainly due to a new method called chromatin transfer that is supposedly more efficient and safer than earlier methods.

The company that performed this cloning, Genetic Savings and Clone, are now offering their cat cloning services to the public. For only $50,000, you too can clone your cat, but you’ll have to hurry as only one space is left for 2004.

Seriously though, even withstanding the fact that no one knows yet if this new cloning proceses is safe in the long term—animals cloned by the earlier method often had problems in later life—it’s hard to understand why anyone would actually want to clone his or her pet. A pet’s clone will never be the same as the original pet, despite being genetically identical, as the clone will have been raised in a different environment from the original.

Also, I have to wonder how emotionally satisfying having a clone would be, especially if the clone was a “replacement” for a beloved pet who has passed away. Whether the owner meant to do so or not, he or she would constantly be comparing Fido-Two to Fido-One, and any differences between the two could be seen as shortcomings of Fido-Two as opposed to just personality quirks of a different pet.

Part of the appeal of having pets that have personalities, such as cats or dogs, is the fact that all animals differ from each other and each pet is unique. None of my pets could ever truly replace another, and I wouldn’t want them to. I’ve enjoyed meeting and getting to know various animals, both furred and feathered, and my life has been enriched by all of them.

On the somewhat related subject of baby animals, congratulations are due for Miško & Ciuffo, the two resident cockatiels of sashaDesign, whose babies are beginning to hatch out. Unlike the two kittens in the picture above, these babies were definitely conceived the old fashioned way.

Recently Gizmondo published an article on what eBooks need to offer to compete with standard books that has been rebutted by Boing Boing and also discussed on Slashdot. All three links are worth reading by anyone interested in the subject, and reading them made me think about the two main kinds of eBooks that I’ve been reading and using this year—eBooks bought from eReader.com that I read on my Palm and the eBook versions of Open University textbooks in PDF format that I used as reference and for revision. In this post, I will talk about eReader.com and will cover the PDFs in a later post.

I’ve been reading works of various lengths on computer screens for years, but it wasn’t until this year that I started regularly buying and reading eBooks instead of printing out longer materials to read in hardcopy. The end of last year I upgraded my Palm IIIx to a Treo 600, and I decided to try the eReader demo to see if I would like reading on my Treo. I’d always liked the idea of eBooks in theory, but I’d been put off buying them before because of ridiculous restrictions on use, such as not being able to redownload books and reinstall them if I upgraded my computer. Also, when reading for fun, I want to be able to relax somewhere like my bed or my sofa and not be sitting at a computer desk.

eReader’s implementations of eBooks looked like it would offer solutions to both these problems. Although it does use a form of Digital Rights Management (DRM) that is tied to the user’s credit card number, the user can redownload her past purchases at any time and can even reassign them to a different credit card (though then the reassigned books must then be redownloaded and reinstalled). Also, eReader books can be read on various platforms, including my Treo 600, so I can sit and read wherever I want. On top of that, most books are reasonably priced, excluding some new releases, and they tend to be slightly cheaper than the US paperback. (With the low dollar, this means that most books are really cheap for UK residents, though this will change if the dollar goes up again.) They also have a decent selection of popular fiction and non-fiction, including a lot of genre novels, such as science fiction, fantasy and mystery.

At the moment, if I want to buy a novel, I look first to see if it’s available from eReader.com, as I’ve become very fond of the convenience of always having a book with me wherever I go. It’s especially nice if I feel like reading during my morning commute. As I live fairly close to work and have a short commute, it often doesn’t seem worth carrying a dead-tree book with me, and I also find them hard to read when I can’t get a seat on the bus, whereas I can hold the Treo more easily in one hand than a book.

It’s great for holidays as well. I read really fast, and I love to read when I’m on holiday, but I often find I run out of books too quickly when I’m away, as I haven’t packed enough to last the whole trip. With eReader, I can bring as many eBooks as I can fit on my Treo with me without having to worry about how much space it takes. The lack of physical space used by eBooks is also an advantage at home, as my bookshelves are always overflowing, no matter how many bookshelves I buy.

There are disadvantages, of course, the main one being that a PDA’s screen isn’t the best way to display graphics, so books that need many illustrations will suffer. I won’t be reading my favourite manga on my Treo any time soon. Also, the DRM system makes it harder to share books. I could in theory give out my credit card number to someone else, so he or she could unlock it as well, but for obvious reasons, I don’t really want to do that. But not being able to share a book means I’ll never lose it or have it returned completely dog-eared, with its spine and cover destroyed or pages falling out.

The most important disadvantage is that eBooks just aren’t ‘real’ books. Reading on my Treo is just not the same experience as reading a book, even though I get just as involved in a story whichever I read. In fact, I’m considering eventually buying the ‘real’ versions of some of the eBooks I’ve read, since I would like to own the object itself and not just have the rights to access a copy of the content. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way, and I can’t see eBooks replacing ‘real’ books in the future, but I can see them complementing them in certain circumstances.

As I posted recently, I’ve had a lot of problems with spam recently. Spam is bad enough for those of us who can see, but have you ever thought about what spam is like for the blind and visually impared? I hadn’t, but spam has become a real problem for those using screen readers. Unlike sighted people, they cannot just visually scan a list of email topics in their Inbox but instead have to wait until their screenreader reads each one to them, a slow, irritating and potentially embarrassing process, considering the subject matter of some spam. Fortunately in many cases, server-side spam filters help for now, but filters are not a long-term solution.

In addition to the problems with receiving spam, some of the methods used to fight spam are hurting the online blind community, especially the image-verification that many sites now use for those registering accounts or subscribing to mailing lists. For instance, YahooGroups now requires people signing up to a list to decipher a distorted word in an image. Unfortunately, this method stops blind people from signing up without assistance from others, and it also isn’t stopping the spammers anymore, as I know that lists I’m on are starting to get spam again, even with this system.

So what’s the solution for stopping spam? Personally, I’m fond of killing a spammer for Christ, but realistically most of us don’t really have time to deal with all the spam we get daily, so expecting people to figure out where each spam message comes from and reporting it isn’t very realistic. Perhaps we should just consider bombing Boca Raton, Florida, the spam capital of the world.

I hate spam! OK, I’m sure I’m not the only one, but I’ve recently had to change my email address that I’ve had for over eight years because the amount of spam I received had gotten ridiculous—I was getting thousands of spam emails a day, and each week it seemed to be increasing.

So as to avoid drowing in spam again, I no longer publish my email address on my website. Instead, I now have a web-based feedback form. There’s an icon linking to it below the Bloglines icon in the left-hand column on this page.

I hate having to keep my new email so private, as one of my favourite things about the Internet was the ease there used to be in contacting such a wide variety of people, but unfortunately, the spammers are ruining email for us all. I don’t know what the solution is to stop spam, but it will have to be stopped, since it is really destroying the use of email.

The other day I decided I needed to update my avatar on Anime on DVD, so I did a search for an avatar site. I found a few with avatars on them, but what I found that really exicted me was Anime Galleries dot Net. It doesn’t have any avatars on the site but instead has an archive of loads of images that can be cropped and edited in order to make avatars.

You don’t even have to know how to use a graphics program in order to make avatars with the images because the site has an Avatar Maker. With this tool, you can crop images to any size, resize the images themselves and can add effects like borders and text.

Even though I know how to use Photoshop and other programs, I still found it faster just to crop the bit I needed of the image into the size I wanted. Personally, I don’t think I’ll use the effects or text tools that much, as I’d rather do my own custom ones in Photoshop, but the cropping tool is really handy, and it’s good to see something that allows those who don’t know how to use Photoshop the ability to make their own custom avatars and banners.

Below you’ll see my latest avatar for AoD that I created using Anime Galleries dot Net’s Avatar Maker. Please don’t take it to use as your own avatar. Instead, go to the site and make your own—that’s much more fun anyway.