Beckism.com

Almost exactly three weeks ago, I read MacInTouch’s fantastic Kindle review (thanks to Daring Fireball for linking to it) and it threw doubt on everything I had thought about the Kindle. When I first saw the device and read some other people’s opinions on it, my immediate impression was “eh, kind of cool but definitely not for me.” I simply love physical books too much; I’ve been collecting them since the first Scholastic ordering form was handed to me in grade school. I dream of someday living in a place where one room’s walls are nothing but bookshelves. I may not be a full-blown bibliophile haunting the local used bookstore with a crazed look in my eye, but I’m the next closest thing.

Aside from the MacInTouch review, there were two things that made me sit back and re-eavluate myself as a potential Kindle owner:

• After a mere seven months of living on my own with some expendable income, I am out of shelf space. Worse, I am out of space for new shelves. And since I need to move closer to the city center, my next apartment will likely be smaller rather than larger. Plus moving the shelves and books that I’ve amassed since I moved in is going to be a heinous bitch in and of itself.
• At the time, I had a four-day weekend in a cabin in the woods coming up, and for most of my life vacations have meant packing a bag full of books that I then have to lug around with me. I have never enjoyed this, but I read too quickly for one or two books slipped in my suitcase to suffice. Up to 200 books in a device that weighs 10.3 ounces was sounding pretty good (price notwithstanding).

Although it took some intense deliberation, Twittering, and Amazon review-reading, I ended up purchasing a Kindle in time to take it with me on my mini-vacation. I haven’t been that torn over an electronics purchase in years.

And having owned the device for about two and a half weeks now, including four days of hard-core stress-testing in a cabin in the mountains with no cell service or internet (reading inside, reading outside in the sun, reading in the car, reading in bed with few lights, reading for upwards of six hours straight), I have come to realize that buying a Kindle was a huge mistake.

In my first week of Kindle ownership, I read the equivalent of over 3,000 pages, to the detriment of sleep, work, and time with my girlfriend. I’ve been going to bed 1-2 hours later (and getting a corresponding 1-2 hours less sleep every night). I’ve spent in the neighborhood of $100-200 on ebooks (which, given how long I’ve owned it, means almost $100 a week). I’ve gone from checking email and RSS feeds regularly throughout the day to checking them once or twice every two days. Owning a Kindle has in short disrupted a wide range of my daily habits and routines by making it ludicrously easy to read anytime, anywhere, without effort.

Imagine handing a crack addict a $400 device that allows them to download cocaine directly into their brain. That is what owning a Kindle has been like. Although it does not provide the visceral pleasure of a well-designed hardback, it has allowed me to consummate my addiction to the written word in a way that nothing prior in my life has ever approached. Like MacInTouch I’ve found that what looked like a clumsy device in screenshots is actually a joy to use that has obviously received intense attention to its design.

In short, I’m hopelessly in love.

That isn’t to say that the Kindle is perfect, however. Although I’ve grown accustomed to it, the form factor is still something I’d love to see improved. Turning the page accidentally (particularly if I’ve briefly set the device down and am picking it up again) is all too easy. The refresh rate of the display, although fine for turning pages, is unwieldy and frustrating when it comes to looking up words, accessing the internet, or doing anything where only part of the screen needs to refresh. It is very difficult to, say, jump back ten “pages” to review what just happened.

I hope that these flaws are rectified in the next version of the Kindle (which likely isn’t on the immediate horizon), but even all of them combined aren’t enough to diminish my enjoyment of the device here and now. Partially this is because the Kindle is a fantastic and novel service rather than just a reading device. Partially it’s because the reading device is designed well enough that it fulfills its function with style and grace sufficient to outweigh its demerits.

But mostly it’s because my obsession with books is firmly grounded in a much stronger obsession with reading, and the Kindle makes obtaining and reading quality new material as easy as the turn of a page.

Every once in a while my girlfriend and I will take her Wii remotes over to my Dad’s house for some Wii bowling, and having to synch the remotes every time was getting really annoying. I couldn’t find any information about using your Wii remote at a friend’s house in the manual, but after digging through the Nintendo support pages I finally found how to use your Wii remote with a friend’s Wii without synching it. It’s called One Time Mode Synchronization.

One tip: in my limited experience you need to add the remotes after you’ve loaded the game (instead of doing it in the Wii menu) or you’ll have to do the process twice. Definitely nice not to need to resynch your Wii remote when you get home, though.

I love my MacBook Pro. When they came out, I knew the fifteen inch, top-of-the-line MacBook Pro with an Intel Core Duo was my dream machine, and even though it took me a while to get one, I’ve never looked back. I’d suffered with a 700 pound eMac for so long that I’d forgotten how beautiful a Macintosh can be.

Fast-forward to late 2007 when I’ve graduated from college and somehow managed to acquire an income, an apartment, and a widescreen TV. My TV is also a thing of beauty. Thirty-two inches (which is the perfect size for my living space), 1080p high definition, and a gorgeous shining black surface. It’s a Sharp Aquos 32″ HDTV, and if you’re in the market for a television at that size, I highly recommend it. Beautiful picture, perfect for gaming (which is why I bought it), and the built-in speakers are quite good, as well, which is a major plus because I hate the neighbors thanks to their sound system, and wouldn’t wish to become what I despise.

With two such wonderful gadgets in my house, naturally I wanted them to get together, so I went out and bought an HDMI cable and an audio audio cable to connect the MacBook Pro to the TV. As best I can remember, it worked great the first few times I watched movies.

But the last couple times, as soon as I plugged in the audio cable, the TV started outputting a high-pitched whine through the speakers, which was extremely annoying.

I figured it might be the audio cable, but that didn’t make much sense; it was new and worked fine a few times. Magnetic interference seemed like a long shot, since there was nothing electronic nearby except the TV and the computer itself. Before I rushed off to buy a second audio cable, I decided to consult the internets.

After a little research online, I found there was some info about whining MacBook Pros, but it all had to do with the computer itself whining. Fortunately, Daniel Jalkut had quite a lot to say about CPU whining in MacBook Pros. I tried his QuietMBP program, and surprisingly, it fixed the whine through the television speakers.

Here’s where it gets fun: the QuietMBP program basically uses up idle time in the CPU by running pointless data through it. You can control how often the program runs stuff through the CPU with a slider, and you’re supposed to set the slider as high as you can to alleviate the noise (lower numbers = smaller gaps between CPU usage = more power consumption). I started dragging the slider, and the whine started changing pitch in real time.

Seriously, I could have played music with the damn thing. It was bizarre. Why the heck does a piece of software that’s supposed to help with CPU-related whining change a whine going through external speakers? Why have I never heard a whine through either my computer’s speakers or my trusty JBL Creatures? What god of electronics did I offend, anyway?

It’s baffling to me.

Now that I’m sensitized to the whine, though, I’m realizing that I do sometimes get a strange high-pitched whine when my MacBook Pro is running off battery. Why it took almost two years and a TV to bring this to my attention, I don’t know. Possibly because the eMac was basically a jet engine with a screen on it (think noise, not speed) and my ears have been ringing all this time.

In any case, if you’re experiencing problematic whining when you hook your MacBook Pro up to a pair of external speakers that otherwise behave well, it might not be your cable, your speakers, or really anything involved with getting audio from your Mac to the outside world. It might be your CPU.

Go figure.

Recently my boss started asking for more graphics editing and it was the perfect excuse to buy a Wacom graphics tablet, which is something I’ve wanted since college but haven’t thought I’d have a use for. I’m not really the artistic type. The drawing below (which I drew yesterday after work and probably speaks loads about the state of my unconscious) pretty much epitomizes my abilities:

I opted for the 6×11 Wacom special edition, which is a sleek black color instead of their standard gun-metal gray and is huge (and a widescreen ratio!) without completely depriving me of desk space. The actual tablet is gorgeous, and over the past week and a half I’ve fallen completely in love with it. I had thought that tablets were only useful for drawing (hence my years-long hesitance over buying one; see above), but it also stands in as a great alternative to mousing (or, in my case, trackballing — which, incidentally, sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is). And, to be honest, although I’m no da Vinci, I find drawing the occasional diabolic clown a lot of fun.

But the real reason my introduction to tablets has been so great is because it’s opened up a whole new realm of software that I never before had a reason to explore.

Scribbles was the first thing I downloaded, of course. The program has some issues (no eyedropper, inability to move single layers around, etc.) but it’s still one of the most brilliant interface designs I’ve ever seen, and it makes drawing a quick after-work diabolic clown far easier than it should be.

ArtRage, on the other hand, was a program that I’d never heard of until I went looking for cheap, easy-to-use drawing programs, but it’s fantastically cool. I haven’t really found a use for it yet, but who doesn’t want to be able to use paints and canvas on their computer? Just swooping the paint brush around makes me feel so classy.

Then there’s Sapiens. I took a look at Sapiens when it was originally released and had absolutely no use for it. While I love the concept of circular contextual menus, I’m a hardcore LaunchBar fan who likes to keep his hands on the keyboard. When I’m using the tablet, though, LaunchBar becomes pointless because it’s a long trip back to the keyboard (and I have to put the pen down). When I realized that, Sapiens was the obvious choice for a mouse launcher.

And of course xGestures, which I’ve used for years, functions great with the tablet. (The key: large, steady strokes.)

The last thing that I’ve been finding myself using the tablet for has been taking notes (primarily useful during phone calls when I only have one hand available). Unfortunately, I have not yet found my perfect solution for this. SketchBox is a cool piece of software, but the stuff you sketch isn’t searchable. inkBook promises searching, but is less than stellar in actual use (just try using the erase tool and watch it casually destroy stuff you never touched; not fun). Circus Ponies Notebook 3 looks promising (and, considering past Notebook versions, will certainly be far more polished and feature-rich than inkBook), but it isn’t even available in beta yet.

I’ve tried using Apple’s Ink technology for note-taking, and while it’s mind-blowingly amazing that it can recognize my handwriting (which is legible to a select few people in this world), the technology’s implementation is a little too clumsy for quick text entry.

So the hunt continues, which, to be honest, is how I like it. I am admittedly a bit addicted to software demos. And I am, at least for the moment, hard-core addicted to tablets.

Apple just released the newest member to the iPod line: the iPod Touch, and I just gotta say: wow. Expected, but still wow. It’s basically an iPhone without the phone. Very sleek.

Even if I had the loose change, though, I don’t think I’d get one, and here’s why: 16 GB is the biggest model. I’m sorry, but my music library alone is 16 GB (sure I only listen actively to about half of it, but still). Add video on top of that, and I’d fill the thing without bering able to buy a single video over iTunes Wi-Fi.

I wish Apple would stop making expensive gadgets that are almost perfect enough to buy without thinking about it, but not quite. It just means I sit staring longingly at my screen way too often.

Via Daring Fireball:

17-Year-Old Unlocks iPhone

The teen estimates he spent 500 hours developing his technique, sometimes working until 9 am and then waking the next day at 4 pm to resume his work.

Obviously, anything that requires soldering is only going to appeal to a miniscule niche, so this isnâ??t really huge news. But thereâ??s something admirable about a kid willing to put that amount of time into an obsessive project like this. Someone at Apple ought to line him up for an internship next summer.

Or find the kid a good psychologist.

Via Daring Fireball:

Send Voicemail to Yourself on an iPhone

Nifty trick for sending voicemail to yourself on an iPhone â?? a poor manâ??s voice memo feature.

Poor men have iPhones?

I love my desk, don’t get me wrong. But it is not set up very well for computing. There’s a roll-out keyboard holder, true, but not really anywhere good to put the mouse. I had it up on the top of the desk next to the computer, but ever since I’ve started doing web design and using the mouse a lot during the day, I’ve been getting pretty bad pain in my wrist (okay, maybe the unfortunately small Nintendo DS that I’ve been crouched over for hours every day wasn’t helping, either).

In any case, after eyeballing the amount of room I had on the keyboard rollout, I realized I simply couldn’t fit a mouse there unless I wanted to be constantly tracking. I decided to look into trackballs; they’re stationary, after all.

Turns out that it’s barely worth the plural. Local stores carry, at most, two of them; both wired, both Logitech, both very red and speckly looking. Okay, whatever. I bought the one for the thumb (Logitech’s optical Trackman Wheel), because I wasn’t willing to make a gamble on an online trackball that I’d never got to try.

Wrist pain pretty much instantly went away. I’m a fan of the trackball. I’ll probably develop some horrific thumb problem, but who cares? The trackball lets me hold my hand at a more natural angle than the mouse ever did and, even better, lets me keep it entirely relaxed. It was a bit squiggly at first, but it only took me about a day of heavy use to get used to it.

Two thumbs up. Well, maybe one thumb up, and one kind of limply sprawled nearby panting at all the extra work it’s had to do.

Alright, I’ll admit it. In a moment of weakness, I bought myself a Nintendo DS. I am not sure what made me start thinking about buying one, but I found myself peering at them through the glass at the local electronics store, perusing the games, and thinking to myself, “Should I? No! Spending money bad! But they’re so shiny…”

I held out for a while, but after reading the reviews online (highly positive), taking a long bus trip in my now car-less existence and watching the guy in front of me play PSP the whole way, and then agonizing over it for days I finally gave up and just bought the damn thing.

And wow. I’m loving it. Along with the system, I purchased Puzzle Quest and Mariokart DS. Today in another moment of weakness, I also purchased Final Fantasy III.

In any case, this is possibly the coolest piece of gaming equipment I have ever purchased. Granted, the handheld and stylus are slightly uncomfortable after extended usage in my much-larger-than-a-child’s hands. But it’s worth it. The dual screens are gorgeous, the touch-screen mechanic useful, the games that I’ve bought so far extremely fun. And integrated Wifi? It doesn’t get cooler than this.

I may be late to jump on the handheld gaming bandwagon (this is my first handheld), but I am a whole-hearted believer now. If only I had more friends with DSes so that I could play Mariokart against them online…

There’s always something to strive for.

At long last, I think that I’ve transferred everything from my old eMac onto my new MacBook Pro. I certainly hope that this is indeed the case, since I am currently sitting here twiddling my thumbs while the eMac is initialized and has the operating system reinstalled. I decided that it was just too much work to uninstall all the random crap that I’ve got on there, and figured I may as well just wipe it all and reinstall the few things that I (or my sister, if I can get the computer across the state) might want.

In other news, Valerie is in town, which is a very happy thing. I helped her and her mom move all of her stuff out of our house yesterday, and then left the two of them to the task of unpacking and organizing. I do not envy them; it was a lot of stuff.

I probably should be doing work right now, but the prospect just isn’t very appealing. Maybe I’ll go play Call of Duty 2; I have to review it for IMG, so it’s almost work, even if it’s kind of play at the same time. I’m running out of other ways to procrastinate (been messing around on and off with a lot of various software applications that I need to get tweaked into making the perfect user experience; finally got a registered version of Path Finder up and running, and there’s a new, somewhat buggy, version for TextSoap that I’ve been fighting with for the past day or so).

Lastly, there’s a possibility that I might be over on the West side of the state this next week (starting Monday). It’s not for sure yet, since I have to get back by the 19th and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do so, but if it does work out and anyone wants to hang out, let me know. I’ll be mostly puttering around Seattle and Covington for half a week each if I’m able to get over there, so I’ll have a pretty open schedule (although not necessarily any access to a car).