Next week I’ll be somewhere that (1) has no internet, (2) has no TV, (3) will probably keep the wife and kids busy, and so (4) gives me lots of time to sit around being unbusy (a rarity for me). So I decided to load my Kindle up with a bunch of books because, well, because I’m that kind of a guy.
I don’t know these authors. Mostly I selected them based on other people’s comments or based on the reviews on Amazon. I fully expect at least some of these books to be intolerable, but I also expect to find at least one or two new authors to follow. Anyway, I’m in a mood to explore untested authors, so that’s what I’m doing.
Because I’m expecting some of these to be duds, I bought far more novels than I have time to read next week.
Here’s my reading list, in no particular order:
Reamde by Neal Stephenson. I’ve actually heard of Stephenson before. I probably even read one of his novels in the far distant past (Snow Crash). But I can’t remember my opinion of his work, although it probably wasn’t great given that I failed to follow him. On the other hand, Snow Crash came out just when I entered my Great Black Hole of Not Reading — which didn’t end until the first gen Kindle hit the market — so maybe our writer/reader relationship is just a victim of bad timing. Anyway, when someone on Google+ asked me about this book I could only shrug, which meant that I just had to add it to my wish list. At $14.99, it is the most expensive novel by far that I bought yesterday. 3.5 stars out of 148 Amazon reviewers. A bit of a risk.
The Fixer: A Lawson Vampire Novel by Jon F. Merz. I have no memory of how this book ended up in my Kindle wish list. It scored four stars on its reviews, although there’s only 23 reviewers. It looks like it’s a “Superman with Fangs” story line. I have medium to low expectations for this one, but at $3.99 I’m willing to take a chance.
Magebane by Lee Arthur Chane. The pesky non-magical folk overthrew their magical tyrants a thousand years ago, now the tyrants are returning. Averages four stars from five customer reviews on Amazon. This is another one of those books that I must have thrown into my wish list “for someday” and now some day has arrived. At $7.99, it’s a little expensive for experimentation, but what the hell. On the other hand, with only five customer reviews, I could easily be getting punked. Hey, it’s been known to happen.
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest. From the reviews, I’m expecting steampunk, airships, and zombies. But it also sounds like the plot isn’t as sharp as it could be. We’ll see. I added this to my wish list after I saw a couple of episodes from Felicia Day’s hilarious web series, The Guild, and I realized that I’ve never read any steampunk. Anyway, at $2.99, this is an easy risk to take, even with 3.5 stars out of 198 reviews.
Variant by Robison Wells. A few days ago there was a book bomb on the internets for this book. Basically, a bunch of authors and readers on Twitter and Google+ encouraged people to run out and buy this book, right now, TODAY. Evidentially Robinson Wells is well-regarded by various people around the world. Okay, I’ll play. It looks like a suspense-thriller aimed at the teen market, which means that I never would have picked it up if not for the book bomb. At $9.99, it’s pricey for taking a risk. Hopefully it will be worth it, else not only will I never read Wells again, but I’ll also be a lot more reluctant to participate in future book bombs. 4.5 stars out of 45 customer reviews, though, so that’s something.
A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt. This looks a bit different. Set in the far future, it apparently chronicles one man’s attempt to discover the truth behind a war hero who lived a couple hundred years in the story’s past. Reviewers lead me to expect echoes of our own examinations of the American Revolutionary War. It’s supposed to be mythic, with a flavor of ancient Greek histories. Anyway, the book has been around for a long time, and it got 4 stars out of 55 reviews. $7.99. Based on reviews, I have slightly above average expectations for this book.
Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Jose´ Villarrubia. This is a series of twelve short stories spanning 6,000 years which describe a region in central England. Of the three authors, I’ve only ever read Gaiman before. He always makes me want to have a beer with him so I can have a good, vigorous argument about his conclusions. I probably added this to my wish list because someone on Google+ recommended Moore. $7.99. 4.5 stars from 21 customer reviews. I have high expectations just because of the usual quality of Gaiman’s work.
Agatha H and the Airship City by Phil and Kaja Foglio. More steampunk, which is a genre that I deliberately went looking for. This is a novel adaptation from a comic book. But the authors are apparently Hugo winners, and the book scored 4 stars out of 48 reviews, so I decided to roll the dice. $7.99.
A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book One by George R.R. Martin. The Wars of the Roses meets barbarians, ice vampires and dire wolves. A couple people have mentioned this book to me, so I decided to pick it up. This is a long book (print length 831 pages), so I probably won’t get to it next week, unless all the other books I bought really suck. I have very high hopes for it, though. 4.5 stars out of 2,167 customer reviews. $8.99. Since this is the first in a series, I expect this introduces a good chunk of what I’ll be reading in 2012.
A Test of Wills by Charles Todd. This departs from the previous motley list of scifi, fantasy, and steampunk stories to dive into the murder-mystery genre, which is something that I enjoy but spend far too little time exploring. Ian Rutledge is a Scotland Yard Inspector newly returned from WWI France. An army colonel has been murdered and Rutledge has to figure out Who Done It, even despite his PTSD. 3.5 stars out of 66 customer reviews and $9.99. This is the first book in a lengthy series (13 novels, to date). I bought it because I was looking for a break from all the fantasy stuff up above, and because it deals with a time and place with which I’m not entirely familiar.
For some reason, I can’t get enough of this video. I love the editing and the way the scenes fit to the sound track. Obviously, the action in the clips are worth watching too.
GoPro is clearly marketing their camera to the adrenaline junky crowd. Give what it is, and how it performs, I think they have a hit on their hands.
$300. Wow. I might have to get one of these before I go on my next backpacking trip.
As I was writing this, I kept hearing that tired old refrain from Google+ echoing in my head: “Steve, you aren’t doing it right.” No doubt I want something out of photo stream that it’s developers never intended. On the other hand, there’s that even older saying in my head: “The customer is always right.
Anyway, the short story on photo stream is, it had me really excited when I first heard about it, but it’s actual implementation is a total let down.
Photo stream is an Apple-provided service that allows it’s users to wirelessly transfer photographs between devices. The basic idea is that you can be sitting on, say, your laptop and put a photograph into your photo stream. The photograph will then “automagically” transfer to your iPhone or iPad without you having to do anything else. Likewise, you can take a picture on your iPhone, put it into your photo stream, and that picture will automagically make its way to iPhoto on your Mac OS X machine.
Photos put into your photo stream will stay there for 30 days. There is a 1,000 image limit. All of this is free for you to use, but you must be an iOS 5 or Mac OS X Lion user. There is no way for you to buy more space or a longer timeout period in your photo stream. You cannot use the service with any other devices than those that run Mac OS X Lion or iOS 5.
In the barest sense of my explanation, photo stream works exactly as advertised. The thing to remember is this is about wirelessly transferring images from one device that you own to some other device that you own. What you shouldn’t do is think that this service has anything to do with sharing images. Nor should you expect any kind of decent performance in your transfer speeds.
I tested photo stream using one of my fairly typical workloads. My wife asked me to unload her digital camera to iPhoto. It had 196 images on it that ranged in size from 1.5 to 2.8 MB. After loading the images into iPhoto, I put them into my photo stream. Then I used my daughter’s iPad to access the images in the photo stream. All of this work occurred using our home LAN and our Comcast-provided broadband internet connection.
My conclusion is that even though photo stream is a free offering from Apple, it has such real, critical limitations that I doubt I’ll make very much use of it. I think other people will have similar issues:
Photo stream is sloooow. To use this service you are transferring the image to Apple’s servers on the internet and then back down to your other devices. Any data transfers over the internet are going to be slow relative to transferring directly over your home LAN. Since the images must transfer over the internet, go get a cup of coffee if you’re uploading 196 pictures from your wife’s digital camera. I didn’t time the operation, but it took at least a half hour. The download was faster (because in the US we all have fast download speeds relative to our uploads), clocking in at a little over 10 minutes.
You’re chewing up bandwidth. I think Apple’s advertised use case is: someone takes a picture using iPhone, the picture goes into their photo stream, and it appears on their Mac before they ever get home. Yep, it will do that. But remember that cellular data networks are now capping our bandwidth. So are you really so lazy that you’re going to chew up precious cellular bandwidth instead of waiting to get home to plug a cable into your machine? I hope not. Unless you still have unlimited data from your cell company, you’re probably going to end up paying quite a lot for that bandwidth, especially if you take lots of pictures.
You can’t share photo streams across Apple IDs. This is the real killer issue for me. When I heard about photo stream, I imagined trivially sharing the photos in our iPhoto library with my wife and kids (all 11,000 photos). I thought what I was going to do was somehow push pictures from my desktop to their iDevices. But since I use one Apple ID and they all use some other Apple ID, this can’t happen. Mind you, Apple allows you to share calendars and iTunes library accounts, so why the limitation on photo streams? Being cynical, I think that whoever built this service either doesn’t have a family, or doesn’t spend very much time with their family. But those are probably highly unwarranted unkind thoughts.
Those are the big three problems that I have with photo stream. The first one and the third one are the main reasons why I won’t be using the service. But beyond that, be aware:
You can’t delete pictures from your photo stream. I’ve looked, but I have yet to find a way to delete a picture from the stream. Yeah, I know, this is a flat-out stupid limitation. But once you put something in your photo stream, it’s there to stay until it times out, or (I assume) until you add enough photos that it pushes that picture out of the stream. So you know that picture you decided to take of yourself naked and which you, for some random reason, thought would be cool to put into your photo stream? Don’t do it.
Your photo stream isn’t private. This actually goes hand in hand with the previous point, but never assume anything you put in your photo stream is private. The images are stored on someone else’s servers far away from your home, and they aren’t encrypted. This means that bored Apple IT guys, Russian hackers, and FBI agents with warrants all have a shot at viewing your photo stream. Also, if anyone gets your Apple ID and password, they can access your photo stream from any iDevice that they’re willing to reconfigure with that Apple ID. The more famous you are, the more paranoid about this you should be. Ditto for people with criminal inclinations. Ditto for people who like to take naked pictures of themselves.
A picture that times out of your photo stream will also disappear from all connected devices. I can’t 100% prove this right now because I haven’t had iOS 5 for a full 30 days, but my belief is that once a photo times out of your photo stream it will disappear from the photo stream library on your local devices. You can, however, “save” the image or put it in an album that is local to your device. But if you take no action, then when that picture times out, it is gone from your devices forever. So save the images you care about to some storage local to some device somewhere. (By the way, trying to save 196 pictures on an iPad is a real pain because you have to click on each one individually. Then again, I’m hardly an expert iPad user, so maybe there’s a ‘select all’ option somewhere, and I missed it in <snark> Apple’s highly robust documentation set.</snark>)
So what would Apple have had to do in order to make photo stream interesting to me? First, let me share a photo stream across multiple devices. My opinion, that’s the absolute minimum required to make photo stream interesting to most families.
Second, figure out a way for me to use my own local network to transfer the photos, instead of having to push things through the cloud. I mean, seriously, internet data transfers just aren’t that fast. In my ideal world, iPhoto becomes a local area network server that my iDevices can wirelessly browse when they’re connected to my local 802.11 network. Even better would be if family members could push pictures to my iPhoto library without my having to get involved.
Having said all that, are there times when photo stream is interesting? Sure. If you have an iPhone and you see a cop about to shoot some OWS hippy protester, then by all means take a picture and immediately push it into your stream. That way, the cops can’t destroy the evidence. Ditto for people into corporate espionage, or private detectives, or other such people into risky activities that benefit from photographic evidence. I suppose I can also construct a use case where I’m traveling far away from home and I want to make sure my photographs absolutely, positively make it home. In that case, photo stream becomes a kind of internet back up solution.
But mostly photo stream is a bust. I am disappointed. Hopefully my disappointment is short-lived and we’ll shortly see some of photo stream’s short comings rectified. In the meantime, give me the iPhone, give me the cable, and get out of my way.
Over two years ago we decided to try out these smart phone thingies. Actually, it was my wife that brought it up. She wanted to be able to get on the web when we’re traveling, for traffic and weather information, etc. So we decided to give them a try.
We’re pretty stuck on Verizon, but at the time Verizon didn’t have the iPhone. This was a big disappointment to my wife because she saw all her buddies using and enjoying their iPhones. But there were these Android phones available. And so we bought original Droids. I distinctly remember promising her that she could have an iPhone once it showed up on Verizon if she didn’t like the Droid.
Of course, she doesn’t like her Droid. It isn’t for lack of trying, but despite our best efforts I don’t think my wife has ever stopped struggling with her Droid, nor will she ever stop struggling with it. Typical of her, last night she was on a phone call when the damn phone application shrugged and gave up. That’s the only way I can describe it: it just shrugs and gives up.
You know, if you can’t reliably make a phone call with your cell phone, then what’s the point?
I looked at my wife and she looked at me and I could see the Wife Anger rising. Husbands do many things to placate the Wife Anger. Indeed, we spend the better portion of our days working to appease the Wife Anger lest it rise and harm us greviously. And I bowed and said, “Lo, Wife, dost thou desirest an iPhone?” And she nodded Dark & Terribly, the Wife Anger most Horrible & Hot & A Threat to mine flesh, and she sayeth, “Thou shalt Go Forth & Thou shalt Quest for yon iPhone & Thou shalt Possess it & Thou shalt Return it to Mine Hand lest Thy SLEEP be Troubled & Thy PEACE be shattered unto all Eternity.” And, humbled, I bowed and murmured, “Thy Quest be Done, my Wife. One phone, to Rule Them All.”
Anyway, that’s how I remember the conversation going. My Quee — erm, that is, my wife might remember it a bit differently.
I still want to wait a few weeks before buying new phones. I think (but cannot prove) that the Galaxy Nexus will be in stores somewhere around Nov. 10th, and I’d like to look at it before buying new phones. Not that there’s any chance that my wife will be getting another Android phone. Nooo, that isn’t going to happen. But I’m still not sold on iPhone for my personal use, so I’d like to get my hands on a Nexus before I make my final decision.
