So, how's the dogfood going?

 It so happens that a bit over two weeks ago J managed to do something to a thigh muscle while doing some yoga at home. What actually happened we don't know, but it was painful enough to make her yelp.

Normally rest is the best answer, but over the next couple of days it was pretty painful, and didn't seem to be getting better on its own, so off she went to our GP. 

He didn't know either, so it was off to Albury for an ultrasound scan and physiotherapy to try to relieve the pain of the injury.

The upshot of this is that I've been spending a lot more time in medical facilities' waiting rooms and had ample time to work my way through James Clark Ross.

This has been a pretty good test of using the barebones Lenovo as an offline pdf reader as most medical facilities around where we live don't provide public wi-fi, and of course all the dogeared copies of National Geographic you normally see in doctors' waiting rooms  have been removed and incinerated as an anti-covid precaution.

In practice, off line reading on the tablet was a pleasurable experience, the 7" screen sharp and legible, and scrolling was smooth.

Battery life was pretty good as well, which meant that the device could be left in standby all day without the risk of running out of power.

So as far as offline reading of scanned books goes, this was a win.

Now I'd purposely started out with an item in pdf format and using acrobat, as the automated conversion of scanned books to epub tends to mess up tables and do horrible things to footnotes. In practice I've found the 'as is' pdf version preferable for anything with complex layout or formatting.

But, there's also a whole pile of nineteenth century books available from Project Gutenberg.

And the crucial difference about the books available via Gutenberg is that rather than being scanned, they've been rekeyed, meaning that epub is a viable option as I learned a decade or so ago, when I read Crawley's nineteenth century translation of the History of the Peloponnesian War on a seemingly endless Etihad flight from Sydney to London via Abu Dhabi.

So, given the success of the pdf strategy, I thought I should experiment with an epub reader as well as acrobat for offline reading.

I was a bit out of touch with epub readers on android, so after a bit of googling for reviews and recommendations I settled on Lithium as it was 

(a) lightweight with a simple interface - a consideration when using a basic tablet

(b) the free version was ad-free

(c) it was pretty highly rated across a number of reviews

I've only just downloaded it but on a first look it seems satisfyingly both functional and sparse. I've got to take J back next week for an MRI scan (the ultrasound didn't show anything of significance), and that looks like an opportunity for a decent test of its offline capabilities ...