Kian Ryan (.NET, Android, Geekery)

SF Gateway (publishers of classic Sci-Fi), are holding a sale between Christmas and New Year, where all of their e-books are going for £2.99.

SF Gateway specialise in putting Ebooks out there for classic SF titles that will probably never see the light of a printing press again (they also have some classic well known SF listed as well). They’re well edited, and the books I’ve had through Kobo have been excellent.

Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas.

A few days ago (17th November … cough), I picked up a new toy, a Kobo Touch E-Reader.  I made a tweet along the lines of…

Look, it’s an EBook reader that’s not a kindle! It is, rather good. Review in a day or so.

In my defence, I have been testing the device thoroughly.  So thoroughly, I’ve clocked 41 hours reading time on it and around six books.  If you don’t believe me, see the photo for proof.

It’s small (6 inch screen, quite thin border), it’s light, and comes with a touch screen.  If you need more space, just pop in a micro SD card.  The device supports EPUB, MOBI, TXT, CBR/CBZ and PDF.  It’ll also connect using Adobe EPUB if you’ve bought books from other stores.  The UI is amazingly intuitive: your bookshelf can be arranged in a variety of views and reading consists of flicks or taps to the left and right.  The font size, margins, line spacing and font can all be changed, so you can make your page look like a condensed cheap 70s paperback or as spacious as a modern best seller hard back.  Reading is an addictive pleasure.  If the on board fonts aren’t good enough, you can side load TTFs.  Finally, it comes with a pretty good webkit based browser, Sudoku and a sketch pad.  Battery life appears to happily be a few weeks with a couple of hours a day.  I personally, recharge between books.

Firmware updates are regular and come as OTA updates.  Firmware appears to be released every few weeks with new functionality each time.  Latest release (as of writing) brought notes, highlights and annotations to non Kobo Books.

One of the big winners for me, is the shop system.  Purchases can be made on the website, on the reader or on tablet/phone.  Books are delivered OTA (Wifi only).  Books purchased from the store are tracked as you read so you can pick up your position on any device, and keep track of your reading habits.  Sidloaded books are only tracked on the device.  Books purchased from Kobo can be downloaded as Adobe EPub to use on other devices.  Admittedly, my first purchase had a small hitch, but this was quickly resolved by the store and I was refunded the full value of the book as store credit, which was rather nice.

I am impressed.  Love the device, love the system.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m getting back to reading.

(Edit: Wired rather like it as well: page1, page2)

This weekend saw the global Coderetreat happen, where developers all around the world worked in regional groups to improve their coding techniques, and to try out new ideas/languages.

In Manchester, our sessions revolved around Conway’s Game of Life, a simple cellular automaton. Working in pairs, every 45 minutes we would throw away our work and start again in a new pair.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending a whole day writing code, and having nothing to show for it. So this evening I hacked out a javascript implementation of life, and a HTML/JS front end for it. Set a grid size, then click on the cells to set the initial state. Start and stop the game and alter the state at any time.

You can try it out here, and the code is available to do with as you please on GitHub.