The Ink-Pot and the Palette

As desperately as I believed I wanted an oh-so-shiny, thin, sleek, sexy ASUS Zenbook, as imminent the failure of my beat-up old Dell Studio, and notwithstanding my having saved up for a fancy new laptop, the universe said, "Whoa, Nelly."

( 'Listen to your heart and what it has to say.' )

And bingo, I'm back in business. Total cost: $100 and an afternoon. I feel like I've saved a failing marriage or something.

Moral of the story? You tell me.

Late last night I was up on my stepladder, sticking glowy-stars to my bedroom ceiling, when my brand-new Nest Protect smoke and CO detector first flashed yellow, then turned red and started shrieking at me.

"Emergency, emergency," it said (yes, it talks). "There is smoke in the room."



( Spoiler: there wasn't. )

Productive weekend.

( More power! )

( More light! )

( More books! )

I'm testing Spreeder, a browser extension for speed-reading online content. It's awesome. You highlight some text, right-click and select Spreeder, and it plays the text one word (or two or three words) at a time, fast.

First I did a quick test of my speed when reading conventionally, and came out at about 290 words per minute. So I set Spreeder at 300. That felt really slow, so I tried 400, and finally settled at 500.



I tried it on some fic, a New Yorker political article, and a post on BikePortland. I'd say my comprehension of each was at least as good as it would have been reading conventionally. That's an instant 70% speed increase.

The average American never surpasses speech-speed in reading, about 200 words per minute. We subvocalize--read aloud in our heads. Spreeder helps force you past that limitation. Apparently most of us spend about 30% of our reading time "regressing"--re-reading and checking back. Obviously Spreeder eliminates that option altogether.

What's lost, of course, is rhythm and cadence and the other auditory qualities of text that, in speed reading, you're actively trying to get rid of. There are times when you want those, and that's when you'd put down the toys and techniques and go back to 200 words per minute.

A couple of really valuable aids for reading online material the conventional way:

Beeline Reader: colors the text progressively, making it easy to follow from line to line. A very good aid for focus. (Hat tip: ravurian.)

Clearly, a browser extension associated with Evernote, and Readability, an independent browser extension. Both present text in the font, size, and page layout of your choice, without ads or distractions, thereby aiding both focus and poor eyesight.

Gosh, it's the third of September, which makes me three entries behind in my putative Post and Read Every Day In September plan, which I told no one about and only vaguely hinted at to ravurian. I guess it will be make thirty posts in September, a slightly different commitment.

So, thing the first: Google+ Hangouts. Really cool. My sisters and I have been using Hangouts for a few weeks now. We all live in the same town, but getting together in person is a big production number. We're working on manifesting improvements in our lives (me: remodeling), and we like to meet to share our progress. Hangouts work perfectly.

What I like:

• The interface is reasonably intuitive
• It's free
• It easily accommodates several people and switches focus seamlessly to whoever's talking
• The sound quality is good, and the system eliminates cross-talk and echoes amazingly well
• You can start a Hangout on your phone, then switch to your tablet or computer, also seamlessly

What I don't like:

• It's a wee bit glitchy and isn't 100% reliable on all devices and operating systems (yet).
• It's a bit of a shock seeing myself as if on live TV. But I'm getting used to that. I'm figuring out makeup, lighting and angle.

It would be really cool if the geniuses of technology could figure out one thing: how to make it so that when I'm looking at you on the screen, I look like I'm looking at you. As it is, I have to gaze interestedly into the tiny pinhole front-facing camera on my device in order to look like I'm listening to you--and then I miss the nuances of your expression. Someone get on that, please.

...that I love the internet?

Recent studies show that young Americans are losing interest in driving, and are actually preferring mass transit and active transportation over car ownership.* Of the many reasons suggested for this decline in driving, my favorite is that when you take transit you can amuse yourself with your mobile device the whole way.**

Eleanor O being in the shop overnight, I was riding the #8 downtown this morning, enjoying this very benefit. I was reading the many emails flying among vampirefan, sffan, llaras and me speculating about what the hell is going on in Teen Wolf, when ravurian pinged me from the end of his workday in London. I ended up chatting with him all the way to work. (Swype works quite well as an input method on a bouncy bus).

Is it just me, or does that still feel like magic? Sometimes--seriously, at least once per day hour--I am simply awestruck with delight at the global brain and what it has wrought.

* This shockingly un-American trend has sent a panicked auto industry into an advertising blitz, some of which targets the uncoolness of riding the bus, riding a bike, or walking. You know it's real when they're that desperate.

** Yes, you can do this while driving, but please, please don't.

Chrome to Phone is a one-click extension that sends the web page you're looking at on your computer to your Android device. (It requires a free app on the Android side.)

I have a single use-case for it: fanfic.

Here's how I use it:

1. Find a story on the AO3 using my nice big computer screen
2. Click the Chrome to Phone extension icon
3. Go to my phone and open the page I just sent
4. Use the Download/Mobi option to get a Kindle-compatible ebook version
5. Move the .mobi file to my Kindle app
6. Read!

(Chrome-to-Phone has a dozen other use cases--basically, any time you want to make something from your big web browser immediately available on your little mobile screen.)

One of my most-used Chrome browser extensions is Clearly. You install it and it puts a little button at the top of your browser window.

Then, when you come across a page like this:
,

you click this little reading lamp:


and you instantly get this:


I like it better than ad blockers because a) sometimes I do want to see ads, but get them out of the way for serious reading, b) as far as I know, the web page still gets an ad-hit for my click, and c) Clearly, besides removing extraneous crap from the page, renders the main content in a font size and line width I can specify for my own reading ease.

ETA: Oh, and a page rendered in Clearly usually doesn't display comments--believe me, a huge boon when reading anything about bicycling in any local press anywhere.

In his article Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere, Duke University sociologist Kieran Healy takes a time machine back to 1776 to show how powerful the collection of impersonal data can be.

( Listen, my children, and you shall hear... )

It took the better part of eight hours, but I'm now the curious and interested owner of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, "Precise Pangolin" (the P entry in Linux's longstanding alphabetical animal naming scheme--my previous O/S was Lucid Lynx so I've skipped M, N and O), and my backups are restoring now. The microphone and recording problems are fixed! Everything works again! \o/

The new operating system takes some getting used to, but it's extremely good-looking and quite fast. There's really very little left in Ubuntu that's uber-geeky (though I did have to do a couple of command-line operations this afternoon), and for the first time I can imagine Linux as an OS for everyday home computer users.

Now to treat myself to an episode of Lewis (thank you, emungere, for tempting me into it--because I needed another show to watch!).