Starry Wisdom

Last month Amazon released the Kindle for iPhone application. It’s a pretty silly idea in some ways, because while the iPhone has a large screen for a phone, it’s a small screen for an electronic reader. However, the screen is very nice, so the experience works in it’s own weird way. Here is a screen shot of the reading screen:

As you can see the text is crisp and clean – there’s just not much of it on the page. You advance “pages” by thumbing side to side on the touch screen. It’s a straightforward enough interface, and I don’t see how you can do any better. It’s a simple app, but it’s missing some features that you get with an actual Kindle e-reader (although it keeps the pesky DRM, of course) – periodicals being the most major, but also annotations. I am not even sure it syncs properly with a linked Kindle, which would lower the utility for those that have both, but that’s not the point of this review. I’m going to focus on it as a stand-alone app.

I was very skeptical when I downloaded it, but it was free, so what the heck. I found that Random House is offering a free versions of some science fiction and fantasy novels through the end of May. Now, it just happened that His Majesty’s Dragon was the only 2007 Hugo Award nominee that I had not read (because it’s fantasy, which I tend to avoid), so I quickly snatched it as a test read.

So here I was, set with a free book to test out the free application, and you know, I rather like it. It’s convenient to have something to read when I need to pass a bit of time, waiting in line at the grocery, on the bus, or what have you. It sucks up batteries a lot due to the screen being mostly white, which is a down side. The novel is much better than I reckoned on it being as well, which I guess shouldn’t surprise me considering how strong the other nominees were that year.

To sum it up iPhone oweners could do a lot worse than downloading the app and one of the free public domain e books that are available. I’m just not sure it’s worth actually buying content for, for various reasons including it being a less than perfect general purpose reader (but it’s a very nice entertainer!).

So, I cannot claim that things are settled yet, but yesterday night I powered through unpacking the kitchen so I can cook again. So I have cooked the past two nights – more info on this will follow later in this post. But first, I must discuss my new favorite thing – using the xbox 360 to view downloaded vidoes over the network. Quite simply it is able to access video files stored on a windows PC (or another computer that runs the windows media player sharing protocol) and then show them on your TV. This is cool because I have a lot of British TV shows in .avi format. Historically I watched these mostly on my macbook pro, usually lying on my bed. Occasionally I would hook the laptop up to the TV via HDMI and watch specific things, like Doctor Who episodes, like that – but it’s sort of a pain. This is quite seamless, and simple, and great. The 360 is the best console I’ve ever owned.

Ok, on to food. Last night I made carnival squash with chili-maple oil:

1 small squash (acorn, carnival, small butternut)
2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 small dried chili

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees
2) Cut the squash in half (crosswise for roundish squash, lengthwise for butternut). Scoop out the seeds. Spray the cut side with cooking spray. Bake face down on baking sheet for 45 minutes, or until flesh is soft when poked with skewer
3) While the squash is baking, seed the chili and cut in to thin strips. Melt the butter and mix with the syrup and chili strips.
4) When the squash is done, allow to cool slightly, then either brush the halves with the butter and serve whole, or scoop out the flesh and mix with the butter.

Tonight I made some garlic cooked shrimp with “BBrazilian style” collard greens. The shrimp were just cooked in olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper and a little bit of wine until done – simple. The recipe for the greens, which I got from wohali (I halved it):

1 1/4 pound collard greens, stems and center ribs discarded and
leaves halved lengthwise
3 garlic cloves
1 tablespoon olive oil

1) Stack half of collard leaves and roll into a cigar shape. Cut crosswise into very thin strips (1/16 inch wide). Repeat with remainder.
2) Mince and mash garlic to a paste with 3/4 teaspoon salt. Heat oil in a
12-inch heavy skillet over medium heat until it shimmers, then cook garlic, stir
ring, 30 seconds. Add collards with 1/4 teaspoon pepper and cook, tossing, until
just tender and bright green, 3 to 4 minutes.

There is a particularly nasty iPhone bug going around. Judging by the scuttlebut on the internet (and from the guy I talked to at the apple store) it is no rare occurrence, yet it doesn’t seem to be all that well known. The bug is that all downloaded applications stop working – they load up until the splash screen and then crash. Given that the iTunes applications were a major selling point of the 2.0 software, this is sort of a big deal!

From what I’ve gathered, this is a problem in the DRM signatures of the applications. They aren’t matching with the information with the phone, so they just silently fail. Evidently the information in the phone and computer you sync to can come out of sync. The silent failure is a big problem in and of itself – it sure would be nice if there was a crashlog built in where you would see “Facebook – unable to load, invalid DRM signature” or such. The other big problem is that the solution to this bug is incredibly heinous. You have to erase your phone (a 90 plus minute process on the 16GB phone, maybe it’s faster on the 8GB – but this appears to be a byte-by-byte reset of the NVRAM). Then you have to restore it as a NEW iPhone via iTunes (my roommate, stega, claims you can restore it to your backup, but I had no success with that, but the new phone image worked on the first try). Most everything you had on the phone of value – photos, contacts, music, is easily backed up to your computer such that they survive the process. But there are two things that are ONLY backed up as part of the old image – SMS conversations and Notes, and as such these are completely lost.

Furthermore, the way to avoid this bug is to not download any itunes applications via the phone, and only to do it on your computer. This is an inconvenience to say the least. The next software update is suppose to cure this but I am not holding my breath!