Thursday, August 31, 2023
But it took a minute...
For years I'd ignored e-readers with e-ink displays. Hell, for a good portion of my twenties I didn't even own a computer. I bought books in hardcover, decorating my shelves with them post-read. I read the paper as... paper. I bought a copy of the Times with my morning coffee through most of my twenties.
By my late twenties -- ready to acknowledge the modern world -- I sometimes read ebooks and the daily news on my phone or iPad. At this point I was embarking on a new career, however, so my "fun" reading was scaled back, even turned into a form of career development. (It was largely reading O'Reilly books on my computer during my budgeted reading time.)
Once I'd gone far enough in the new career to feel comfortable just "reading for fun" I'd already gotten into the habit of reading on a screen, so I kept at it through that medium. I read news articles almost exclusively in digital form. And I attempted to read novels on my iPad.
That novel reading didn't work. I found myself continuously remembering something I needed to look up. Or I was receiving some text message, or email, or news alert. There was always something beyond the text. But it was a start.
And one I improved upon -- by filling in the gaps between working, researching new tech, and (ultimately) parenting -- with audiobooks. Whether driving, doing the dishes, or mowing the lawn, an audiobook could read to me. With that I was finally, regularly, "reading" novels again.
Leave it to an Amazon Prime Day sale to prompt a purchase.
I bought a baseline, ad-free Kindle on a whim. Quickly, the Kindle made sense to me.
Here's what "clicked":
- The e-ink display is completely legible on a sunny day. A Kindle encourages outdoor reading. Using a computer or an iPad in these conditions can be a futile experience, the text being barely legible on the screen.
- The e-ink display seems to reduce any screen-induced wakefulness at night in comparison to my phone or an iPad. This is especially true when you leverage dark-mode.
- You can buy an Audible audiobook bundled with your Kindle e-book and they will remain in sync. This lets you listen to your book while, say, driving, and then pick up where you left off on Kindle at night without needing to do any hunting.
- Made of plastic and being very thin, a Kindle feels weightless in comparison to even an iPhone, with the latter's stainless steel and glass. Compared to a whole iPad a Kindle is like a compact car next to a heavy duty pickup. There is no arm or wrist fatigue when holding this thing up.
- Most importantly, the Kindle is single purpose. When you're reading a book on it you're totally engrossed in the book by necessity. There is nothing else to distract you on the device.
The impact this has had on the quantity of my reading is pretty incredible. Audiobooks alone had gotten me to the point of reading nearly every day. With the Kindle, I'm now reading almost double my audiobook-only totals, putting in roughly an hour of e-book reading in a night.
And so I get it. A Kindle is not some cheap alternative to an iPad. My iPad is sitting dead on my bedside table, untouched for months. My Kindle is sitting right next to me.
Saturday, January 7, 2023
I absolutely loved Robert Harris's latest novel, Act of Oblivion. A historical novel set in the 17th century, it covers the hunt for two former Parliamentary army officers who had been signatories to King Charles I's death sentence. After the restoration of the monarchy they flee England to avoid being charged with treason. Their destination is New England. At first, the distance from power helps, but the reach of the vengeful is vast and they cannot escape their past for long.
At times this novel has the thrills of a chase story like The Fugitive, but what really had me loving it was the quiet moments of reflection sprinkled throughout. One of the regicides in particular, Edward Whalley, is able to truly question both his own past actions, as well as those of the Cromwellian dictatorship more broadly. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that he ends up recognizing that moderation, religous tolerance, and democracy are actually the underpinnings of a truly free society, and that all are ideals that Republican England fell well short of. (And, perhaps, they're ideals that the modern United Kingdom or United States fall short of too?)
Anyone interested in historical fiction and/or a meditation on executive versus democratic power is going to be absolutely enthralled by this novel.
Thursday, December 29, 2022
2022 draws to a close, so I'd like to give a quick shout-out to my "book of the year": Fintan O'Toole's "We Don't Know Ourselves".
A non-fiction work, it tells the story of Ireland in the author's lifetime, from his particular vantage point. No attempt is made to abstract modern Irish history onto some neutral plain. Rather, O'Toole sets about relating what he sees as the big moments of the past 63+ years in Ireland as he experienced them, marshalling facts in support of his own experience. What he arrives at for a conclusion might be described as this: Ireland's first crack at modernity was to cling to a conservative Catholicism, vote for an idealistic nationalism, and allow a kleptocratic capitalism; Ireland's second crack at modernity was to sideline and repudiate a conservative Catholicism, vote for a pragmatic present in the hope for an ideal future, and to channel capital's gains to the national interest.
O'Toole held my interest from the start and I cannot give a better endorsement of this, his latest book, then this: I bought a subscription to The Irish Times to read his columns there and keep my reading of this history going.
Sunday, October 30, 2022
Et tu, New York Times? 
The answer is, and always will be, no. The web -- the glorious World Wide Web -- was created to share hyperlinked content, content not unlike your own! There is no feature I need for reading your content that the web platform cannot support.
I understand this is not the point. I understand you just want more granular tracking of me to help generate more ad dollars. If I was reading your content for free I would even accept this. But I already pay you for this content and you already serve me highly targeted advertising.
If you want to notify readers that you have a mobile app, fine. Show this message once or twice to make us aware, then stop badgering us. Or at the very least add a setting that lets us turn this notification off. The way you're doing it now is beneath your usual standard.
Friday, September 30, 2022
I've owned the MacBook Air for three weeks now. I'm coming from a 14" MacBook Pro, so in many ways it might be fair to call this move a "downgrade". The MacBook Air is slower in multi-core tasks. It has a worse screen, missing the brightness and fast refresh of the Pro. It has fewer ports. It has worse speakers. It has less RAM (but we'll get back to that in a moment). What does the Air give me? Well, AIRiness. For me, that's a compelling tradeoff.
What Do I Need?
I'm a software developer doing full-stack web development and cloud-native services, so really what I need is RAM and speed in single core tasks, like JavaScript execution.
A better screen? - No, not really. It's nice to have but the work I'm doing is not in video, photography or UI design work. The screen on the Air is more than nice enough for my needs. Truth be told, I don't even have enough of an eye to notice the difference most of the time.
Multi-core speed? - Not required for my work. I'm not compiling native code. Sometimes I'm even doing my programming on remote VMs like an EC2 instance, so I'm leveraging the power of the server anyway, not my own device.
Ports? - I have a USB-C connection to my external monitor, which at once powers the device and stands in for HDMI. Otherwise, I virtually never use the ports on my devices these days.
Speakers? - Great speakers are a bonus, but the speakers on the Air are honestly not that bad. Or perhaps my ear just isn't good enough to hear where it falls flat. Certainly for a Google Meet or Zoom chat they're more than adequate. In any event, I often use my noise canceling headphones during work and the quality of the speakers there is what truly matters.
What about RAM though? - Heavy use of Docker, sometimes dozens of Chrome tabs and many open apps makes my RAM usage much higher than the average user. 8 or 16GB of RAM would be nearly unusable for me. Fortunately, for the first time ever the MacBook Air is offering 24GB of RAM -- an unusual number, given Apple tends to offer RAM in "doubled" tiers like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. As it happens, 24 is a nearly perfect number for my work and I've not hit swap once yet. On a very intense day it's possible I might exceed 24GB RAM, but given how rare this would be, I'm not going to sweat it. SSDs are unbelievably fast these days.
Why the Air over the Pro?
I don't commute and I rarely travel, so it may seem like I could get away with a desktop or heavy laptop. And let's be honest, the 14" MacBook Pro shouldn't even qualify as a heavy laptop. The thing is essentially an "ultrabook", thinner and lighter than far less powerful competitors. What I do find though is that I get antsy sitting at my desk, though it's a standing one. I love to bounce around the house: working in bed, working on the couch, working in my cozy chair before the fire...
The Air is so damn light that it invites being picked up and used as a laptop. I simply love roaming around the house with it.
It reminds me so much of an even more mobile computer that I'd owned once upon a time, the 12" Macbook. That was an even more portable (arguably more beautiful) machine, but it ran an Intel chip so slow that I sometimes wanted to throw the thing at the wall. Oh, and it had 16GB of RAM, which even then was an issue. By contrast, this Air is an absolute powerhouse, running circles around most Intel-based machines. And as mentioned earlier, it has enough RAM and a fast enough SSD that you'd be hard pressed to critique anything about its performance.
So do I miss my 14" MacBook Pro -- a laptop I've called the best laptop I've ever owned? Not at all. This machine can claim the 👑.
