Finding Ebooks

Recently, I paid money for an ebook that I could have found myself for free. Purely my mistake, I wasn't paying attention and ended up paying 10 bucks for a pdf when I could have found a more useful epub for free.

What's interesting here is what the people who sold me the pdf must have done.

• they must have trawled gutenberg and various university archive sites to build a comprehensive data base
• uploaded the database to Abebooks
• set in place the appropriate automation to pull a particular book from its location when an order came in, upload it to yousendit and send me a yousendit link.

Very slick. As I suspect there's not a lot of interest in nineteenth century travel literature I suspect that no one will get rich out of this but it shows what one can do with cloud services and a very little thought.

Incidentally I'm not pissed off - it was a learning experience. I actually really liked the use of yousendit - we've played with something similar to allow people to make restricted access datasets available for download to anyone requesting early access.

In fact I'm a little envious. I'd thought of starting a little side business as a finding service. The model was similar.

• You pay me twenty bucks to find a book for you.
  • If I find it I keep five bucks
  • if its available as a mobi, epub or pdf
    • if you want me to download it in your preferred format and send it to you that costs another five bucks
  • if it's a paper book
    • you send me the excess and I order it on your behalf

You of course get any money left over back at the end of the transaction. I didn't expect to get rich out of this -it was more of a hobby business. But some people in Ohio have beaten me to it (and done it better) ...

Written with StackEdit.

ipads and female empowerment

It's long been claimed that access to mobile phones has helped empower women in various poorer, more traditional countries, by allowing them to have conversations outside of the immediate family group.

We have of course, also, over the last few years, had the facebook phenomenon in various countries where facebook has become a platform for political discourse and social change.

I also wonder whether we might see a similar effect indirectly due to the adoption of iPads in various of the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia.

This is completely unscientific, but when we were in Sri Lanka we stayed a number of days at a reasonably nice resort in Habarana as a base for visiting Sigiriya and Polunaruwa.

For some reason this resort also appeared to be particularly popular with families from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. While their menfolk were dressed in western clothes, almost to a woman the women were dressed head to toe in a black burka. There were variations, some were clearly more stylish than others, and there was the occasional woman who dared to walk round with her husband with her veil up and her face exposed to feel the sun.

But the interesting thing is that they all had iPads, and walked round the resort using  them. Not every person who uses an iPad is of course a potential revolutionary, but of course it opens a window on the outside world, and perhaps provides a way for women to communicate outside of the family group ...

Today I ordered a Chromebook ...

I've written about Chromebooks in the past, and some of my doubts still remain and the lack of Skype is a major irritant.

However last night my Windows 7 Dell laptop took 45 minutes to boot after Microsoft's latest upgrades. To be fair, after a restart boot time was about the same as usual - reasonable but by no means fast.

While I was in Sri Lanka we took a Windows netbook with us, which worked well, but took an irritatingly long time to boot, and would, as always with windows, download and then insist on installing updates at inappropriate times - when you are about to go for a flight like hell do you want to wait while Windows fiddles with itself.

I've also said in the that I can do most of my work on the web. I've also been successfully using my seven inch android tablet and keyboard combo for note taking, but I'm afraid Steve Jobs was right, and I either need some surgery on my fingers or a bigger keyboard for full out writing.

So, I've put my money where my mouth is and ordered a Chromebook - a refurbished unit from Acer's factory outlet. I did think about the sexy Samsung model but more prosaic Acer alternative seemed a significantly better deal, especially if I end up screaming in frustration and installing Chrbuntu or Crouton ...

[update 16/07/2013 - it's taken Acer to decide  that they can't deliver to a post office box despite the fact that their website states they use Australia Post, the very same people who provide my post office box - we'll see how it arrives ...]

Google Reader replacements

Well, nearly a week since Google Reader went to the great filestore in the sky.

After a few dalliances I've settled on InoReader as it doesn't seem to have some of the performance problems/growing pains of the OldReader or Feedly.

InoReader, being web based allows me to switch platforms easily, but does have the disadvantage of not currently having an android client.

During the transition I used netNewswire occasionally and I still have an affection for it as a product - simple, light, and with a sensible set of integrations but without remote syncing it loses some of its usefulness.

And that's the rub - I'm an OS tart flitting from Windows, to Mac, to Linux to Android and back again. The loss of reader reinforces how dependent I've become on synchronisation and the ability to flit between platforms and at the same time to what extent the underlying operating system has become irrelevant, with the use of browser based applications, or for more classic applications files increasingly saved to dropbox or Google Drive, and then reopened on a different platform with a different application.

If it wasn't for the wonderfully erratic state of our home internet connection, something reinforced by our recent trip to Sri Lanka where the internet was pretty nearly universally available and very stable, a Chromebook would almost certainly work for me. 

Hojoki

I've been playing with Hojoki, a web based application that moniors activity on your Google Drive, Dropbox, Evernote and Skydrive accounts (and others), and allows you to add taks and todo's to files.

Nicely, it also records activity on shared documents so you know when changes have been made.

Very simple, but if you have documents spread across multiple locations it certainly helps keep track of things.

It's early days but it's looking promising as a productivity enhancement tool ...

[update 05 September 2014]

Well, I've been using Hojoki pretty successfully for a couple of years, but this morning brought news that the service is to close as of 15 September ...

Reading Books on the MRT

As part of our recent trip to Sri Lanka we had a couple of days in Singapore on the way back - the connecting flight times were horrible - and during that we rode the MRT - Singapore's internal train service - to quite a few places.

Previously I've written about my impressions of people reading books on the bus in Canberra, so while I was on the MRT I looked around to see what other folks were doing.

Singapore is assertively high tech. Everyone seems to have a smartphone and a good number of them seem to be in use at any one time - certainly a good many people were using their on the train, either to make calls, text, check email, or play games.

Oddly, and this could be an aspect of the time of day as we were not riding during peak hour, there didn't seem to be that many tablets in use although quite a few people sported oversize phablet phones, and as far as I could see, no e-readers.

But there were people reading books - good old paperback books. Now some of them could be students reading them for school - quite a few of the books being read seemed to be nineteenth century English classics - but they were books, not versions downloaded from Gutenberg ...

African contacts in Sri Lanka

I've previously written about how African Kilwa coins could have ended up in norther Australia courtesy of a Somali sailor signed up with the Dutch East India company.

I've recently just come back from Sri Lanka, and was quietly amazed at the extent of Dutch colonial remains and forts on the island. While we tend to think of the Dutch East Indies as present day Indonesia, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century a lot of the Sri Lanka spice trade was under Dutch control. When I saw the extent of the VoC presence in Sri Lanka I began to wonder if the presumed boat might have come from Sri Lanka rather than  from further west

At the same time Somalis and other east Africans had been sailing to Sri Lanka for the spice trade since Ptolemaic times or earlier, which might have provided an alternative rout for Somali sailors to sign up with VoC.

However I also saw something that made me wonder if perhaps two separate shipwrecks separated by several hundred years might have been more likely and the sources of the VoC coins and the Kilwa coins.

When we climbed Sigiriya, a quite remarkable 200m high rock in the middle of Sri Lanka with substantial arachaeological remains on top of it,  we hired a guide at the suggestion of our driver. The guide turned out to be fairly useless and intent on telling us about how many concubines the king had and how the monks didn't like pictures of naked ladies, rather than the history of the place.
However as well as showing us the the standard frescoes, he did show us a damaged fresco showing a woman of clearly African appearance.

(picture by Lucy Calder - http://lucycalder.com/about)

The interesting thing about the picture is that it implies substantial contact between Africa and Sri Lanka for a long time and well before early modern European contact.

When I originally wrote about the Kilwa coins in Australia I posited that it was a single find, in part because I was not aware of the extent of Somali links with Sri Lanka. These links suggest a second possiblity that it was separate shipwreck - perhaps of an east African trading boat blown off course. This is not as unlikely as it sounds - back in April 2013 a boat full of undocumented migrants from Sri Lanka sailed into Geraldton  400km north of Perth.

The thing about Sri Lanka is that there is nowhere directly south of the island except for Antarctica, so a ship setting out for what is now Indonesia which sailed a little too southwards rather than westwards would tend to end up somewhere on the Australian coast. The same is equally true for a boat setting out from Somalia aiming for Galle - head a little too far south, miss the island, and you end up in Australia ...