I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.
I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected. Read more →
I was backing up WordPress, using the backupwordpress plugin. It got hung up on a file name it felt was too long, so I canceled the backup.
Or I thought I did.
This morning, in trying to fix it, I have somehow wiped the contents of this blog, or at least, it’s now in a place I can’t find it.
The blog that goes to this plugin has been inactive for two years, and I can’t find an email address for the plugin maker.
So there you go.
Fucked up beyond all recognition. Nice start to my Saturday.
UPDATE as of last night: Obviously, I’m still here. Linksky, my fabulous host, saved my bacon. It seems that the backupwordpress plugin not only caused me great consternation, but a whole lot of people across the server I share with them. I was told, in no uncertain terms, never ever ever to use that plugin again. Furthermore, that I need to start using the CPanel backup utilities, not the WordPress ones (excluding, I’m going to assume, the export function.) So I’m sharing that advice with you.
Some time back ago, I said I wanted an Asus EeePC to read digital books because it was kind of an all-purpose device. As time went on, I decided maybe I’d rather have an iPhone or a BlackBerry, but then I found out about their mandatory data plans and I’m a cheap bitch, so no thanks. I wanted something reasonably portable that I could 1) read digital books on in any format I wanted; 2) listen to music; 3) keep my personal data on (now that I have this awesome personal information management standalone app); and 4) to basically be able to haul my brain around with me. I don’t like talking on the phone, so I would rather not have one at all, but must. I want to keep the phone separate from my other tasks.
Anyhoo, money’s been a little too tight for frills, but then our old (you don’t want to know HOW old) desktops (all three) started nickel’n’diming us to death, so we bit the bullet. I have been given an assignment to return and report the specs and my digital reading experience.
The assignment:
On the Asus, install:
Adobe Reader
Adobe AIR
Adobe Digital Editions (requires AIR, hence 2)
Microsoft Reader
MobiPocket Desktop
Sony eBook Library
FBReader
Then BLOG wtf it’s like to use them on that Atom CPU. (You DO have ATOM, right, not Celeron?)
ADDITIONAL: Try a GOOGLE BOOKS PDF!!
Here are the specs:
Asus EeePC 901 (black, if you care)
Intel Atom
CPU N270
1.6 GHz
1.99 GB RAM
Windows XP Home
2-1/2 pounds (about the weight of Atlas Shrugged, I believe)
~5 hours battery life (>2 hours better than my Dell laptop)
Here’s a gallery with examples of Adobe Reader, ADE, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, and FBReader. I have no reason to care about Sony Reader, but will do later, and I haven’t done a Google Books PDF yet.
In normal computer-user mode.
Closeup
Microsoft Reader (LIT). Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
Microsoft Reader (LIT). Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
Closeup Microsoft Reader (LIT). Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
Adobe Reader (PDF). Netbook in normal computer-user mode.
Adobe Reader (PDF). Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
Mobipocket (PRC/MOBI). Netbook in normal computer-user mode.
Mobipocket (PRC/MOBI). Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
FBReader reading EPUB. Netbook in normal computer-user mode.
FBReader reading EPUB. Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) reading EPUB. Netbook in normal computer-user mode.
Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) reading EPUB. Netbook rotated for reading as a book.
So, for the reading part. Thus far, I’ve just been on MobiPocket, reading Soul Identity by Dennis Batchelder, in my recliner. For regular reading, it’s a bit heavy, but if you find your “sweet spot” where you can press the arrow with your thumb and still be comfortable holding it, you get used to it. Naturally, the back light is sweet in the dark.
The only real annoyance I have (besides the weight) so far is how long it takes to turn it on and off. It’s not like my eBookWise, where it’s one button and on, it turns itself off after 15 minutes (or whatever you set). The Asus acts like a computer because, well, it is.
More later after I’ve had a little more time with it.
I have a bunch of beautiful books. They’re mostly in hardback because I don’t see paperbacks as objets d’art the way I do my hardback books. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I read hardbacks, certainly. If I have it, I read it. But there’s just something substantial about a hardback book. Specifically, I’m thinking of my faux leatherbound books, but no matter.
As I go around the ebook blogs like Teleread and The Book is Dead, a bunch of dissociated rememberies from my childhood plague me. They’re always the same ones, played in different order, but in a loop:
Remembery #1.
The mp3 player was only a Wish when I was a child (think 1970s) with my little panda transistor radio barely capable of tuning in the jazz station, but playing disco just fine and dandy. Rock the boat, don’t rock the boat, baby. Rock the boat, don’t tip the boat over.
I had my Wish in my mind like a jukebox, playing all the songs I loved and none of the songs I didn’t love, all in one place, in the palm of my hand. Even as I got older, I couldn’t afford to buy albums and then, once I got a “boom box,” couldn’t afford to buy cassettes, either. I taped random songs off the radio and tried my best to come up with as clean a version as a K-Tel compilation cassette as I could. It didn’t work and my wish became a longing so intense sometimes I couldn’t bear it. Then I got a Walkman, which was a step up, but my ADD/OCD could not be happy. Why, oh why, was there no way to buy a song at a time? What would that look like? How could it be done?
My Wish: a jukebox in my hand, with all the songs I loved and none of the songs I hated, with the ability to purchase one song at a time.
Remembery #2.
Dark house post family bedtime. Flashlight. Book. Covers. You all know this routine. For my mother, it was hiding in the back of a closet. With a flashlight. And a book. Why didn’t my book come with a light? You know, something handy, that I could clip onto it? That way I didn’t have to give my flashlight a blow job every time I had to turn the page.
Remembery #3.
Jean-Luc Picard sitting in his cabin reading a hardback book. To me, this was nothing until a crew member questioned him. Wesley, maybe? I can’t remember. Too young to know what a hardback book with paper pages was. To Picard, it was an antique. To Wesley, it was a novelty.
DISCLAIMER: I didn’t watch Star Trek much. Not the original, not the Next Generation, not Voyager, or many of the spinoffs (although I actually enjoyed Deep Space 9 because everybody on that show had serious faults and weren’t a bunch of Mary Sues and Gary Stus running around knowing how to deal with every situation). This is why my remembering an STNG episode is so…exceptional. And it had to do with a book and what must have happened to books to evoke the reaction Picard’s hardback paper book evoked.
eBookwise reader
Something that could store a library in one spot? Like my dream of a jukebox in my hand. Could it be? A library in my hand?
Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was old enough to know it could be done, but I wasn’t getting my hopes up because the jukebox in my hand hadn’t materialized yet or if it had, I didn’t know about it.
You have to know something about me that makes my need for such things a compulsion (you know, besides my mental disorders): I am an anti-packrat. I hate Stuff. I have Stuff I don’t hate, really, but if it can be condensed, packed, and stored out of sight until I need it, so I can have SPACE, I am more kindly disposed toward Stuff. (Oh, Space Bags, how I would love thee if every blanket we own weren’t in use because it’s as cold as a witch’s tit outside.) I don’t like knickknacks, either. And as I get older, the Mies van der Rohe school of architecture (mid-century modern) gets more and more attractive to me.
The only things I collect and store without driving my OCD/ADD batty is data. And mp3s. And now, ebooks.
(I like lots of art, though, so as soon as the Tax Deductions stop coloring on the walls, I’ll paint and put up my art. It’s difficult to deal with the child who writes her name on the wall and then blames her little brother, who doesn’t know how to read, much less write.)
I haven’t quite figured out how to go completely minimalist, given the life of a family and its needs for Stuff.
But the jukebox-and-library in hand is a good start.
I spent all weekend with my Netgear wireless router trying to figure out why I couldn’t get into my own website. I could connect direct from the cable modem, but not through the router. I will spare you the details of the acrobatics Dude and I did to get back up and running. (It included editing the registry, so I am now completely traumatized.)
This morning I contacted my host to say, “Hey, I know it’s not you guys, but do you have any advice?”
It was them guys. My IP addy got blacklisted somehow.
But does it have wings?
