The Computer Next Door

Leave Technology Behind (But Save Your Health)

On the Road to Better Health?

A study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine indicates that the Amish are in better health than the majority of Americans because of their high levels of physical activity (they get 3-5 hours a day of being on the go).  (see also: CNN summary)

Now, you can go out and get a lot more exercise (run or walk 8-10 miles every day), or you can go Amish all the way.  After all, if you give up technology, you'll have to get more exercise by default, yes?

My family has run a winery in Amish country for 30 years.  The small community of Smicksburg, PA is home to several hundred Amish families, who live a simple, no frills existence, primarily devoted to farming and other rural occupations (logging, wood working, cheese making, etc.). This has given me a glimpse into the reality of living Amish.

Here's a sampling of what you would need to give up to Go Amish:

• Cars
• Electricity
• Refrigerators
• Dishwashers
• Washers/Dryers
• Television
• Radio
• MP3 players
• Digital watches
• Digital anything
• Computers
• Internet
• Oh, yeah, and Blogs

That's just for starters.  I'm not kidding about electricity - they don't even use it to light their homes.  They use oil lamps.  Have you every tried to read by an oil lamp?  When we first moved to Columbia County 10 years ago, we had frequent power outages.  We kept a few oil lamps around, just to keep things moving when the power went out.  Believe me when I say oil lamp lighting is for the birds.

As are horse and buggies, but that's what you're left with when you live an Amish life style.

But the bottom line is, it's good for your health to work your butt off (and it's probably good for the environment, as well). Less gas used, less emissions, you get the picture.

What'll it be folks?  Sign up is in Smicksburg, PA this weekend....German required.

The Magazine's Future is in Our Hands

I've been hearing the death knell of traditional magazine publishing for some time now.  Subscriptions and revenues are down.  Anxiety amongst management, reporters, and staff is high.  Many younger readers are getting their news and commentary almost exclusively online.  Is traditional magazine publishing going the way of the buggy whip?

Recently I traded in some airline miles for some magazines.  I hadn't been flying anywhere, and the airline (US Air) was quite insistent that I do something with the miles (I'm sure they benefited somehow, but oh, well).  And so, I obediently ticked off one magazine after another that I would have been unlikely to have ordered otherwise: titles like Dog Fancy, Budget Travel, and Martha Stewart Living.  10 in all. I sent in my little postcard and waited.

One by one, they started to arrive.  A mini-deluge of glossy reading to multi-task with while watching TV. Then, within the hour, destined for the recycling bin.

I have other magazines I care more for (The New Yorker, some art magazines), but for the most part, I find a magazine a quick "rifle" at best.  Something to take to the hairdresser.  Only occasionally to take to the bedside table. I am as much a magazine reader as the next person, but I'd have to say, they seem to have lost their sheen recently.

My question is, is magazine readership down because there are better (digital) versions or alternatives, because of the growth of other forms of news and entertainment, because of concern about the environment, or because magazines don't seem to give much bang for the buck?  (Some seem to be mostly ads).

I went online in search of answers.  I was wondering what I would do if I gave up traditional magazines permanently. Here's what I found:

1) The online version of a magazine is not necessarily better. I enjoy leafing through The New Yorker, for example, because I know I will discover a few cartoons to laugh at, find a review of interest, and possibly read a thought-provoking article. Everything is always in a certain order, so it's easy to page through.

The New Yorker's Website has no such appeal. Its long, scrolling Home Page seems to be mimicking that of the New York times, but the lack of color or imagination is at odds with the very nature of The New Yorker with its long tradition of artistic cover art. They seem to be trying to get on the bandwagon, but aren't sure how to go about it.

New Yorker online - just not the same

What's worse, I couldn't get my bearings on the site.  Some of their groupings of content seemed logical, but it simply isn't how I like to read the magazine - which is sequentially.  I like going from cover to cover.  It is reassuring in a way that newyorker.com is not.

2) Digital Editions are not the answer. These days, you can get "Digital Editions" of just about any magazine. For proof, check out Zinio.com, a virtual magazine store where you can buy access to digital versions of many magazines.  This would certainly solve the recycling issue, but is a digital edition interesting enough to consumers?

I have yet to see a fellow passenger reading a digital edition on his/her laptop on the train. Not to say it won't happen one day, but this just isn't a trend.

Zinio sets up a library where you can keep your magazines (not unlike the virtual library shelves Google allows on Google Books - see my previous blog entries on digital and virtual libraries).  Zinio.com is currently offering free complimentary issues so you can try the service out.  The digital editions load in Zinio's Online Reader.  It took a while for my March edition of Women's Health to obtain a clear focus (it was a bit blurry initially), but then it looked just like - well, the print edition. They are in fact identical - ads and all.

Zinio's Online Reader - too much work for a lot of ads

And that of course is the problem.  I didn't feel it was terribly much fun to page through the Web-based Online Reader of Women's Health.  It's certainly more work than the print version.  I had to keep squinting to make out the type, which varied in size.  On a regular Website, the type for articles tends to be all one size -and in print, the resolution is better so you can actually read it (Web resolution is far worse than print).

The digital edition of a magazine is the worse of both worlds: all the hard work of using computer software, with all the ads of the magazine. And none of the tactile experience.  Geez, I even missed the smelly perfume inserts, that's how nostalgic I was for traditional magazines after this experience.

3) There are many free substitutes for the kind of content magazines offer. This is probably what magazines are fearing.  Think about it.  There are so many ways to get your current news and information, no matter what the topic, including:

• The classic Web-only eZines (such as Salon)
• Website offered by TV stations (such as CNN.com), which have plenty of "magazine-style" reporting
• Blogs of every stripe and specialty (more specialist than magazines, often)
• Blog aggregators (such as Bloglines)
• Customized Home pages that aggregate news from global sources (such as iGoogle)

The list goes on.  Everybody has their favorite way of getting information, commentary, and entertainment, whether  specialized or general  Does anybody turn to printed magazines for the first word on anything anymore?

But after my foray online, I re-examined my pile of glossy printed matter.  What's the answer?  I will probably keep reading the magazines a little while longer.  At least until the Green Police come after me for contributing more than my share to the local landfill.

How Green Is Your DVR?

Herein, and on the record,  I want to admit I have a conflict.  No, nothing that'll cost me huge sums with a mental health professional.  But an issue nonetheless.

How do I reconcile my love of technology with an ever broadening awareness of energy abuse?  Technology lovers more and more are finding themselves in this same dilemma. All those terrific gadgets we love use lots and lots of energy.

Personally, it's a puzzlement.  How do I become more environmentally sensitive and still use the toys I love?  Take my computer as the major culprit.  I rarely shut the thing off.  Want to know why?

No, I'm not merely lazy.  There's a school of thought (quite common among television professionals) that turning your device on and off creates a great deal of wear and tear on the device. It's a habit hard to break after more than 20 years.  But, I have to confess I'm beginning to revisit the wisdom of my ways.

Take for example our friendly digital video recorder (DVR).  Would you believe that set-top high-definition DVR of yours can use the same amount of electricity as your typical refrigerator?  Well it does.

That's because DVRs use hard disks.  And hard disk drives like the kind we run in our personal computers are constantly spinning.  And all that spinning makes your DVR one power- hungry machine. The 'standby' mode of a typical DVR doesn't really reduce its power consumption when compared to the normal mode you regularly use.

Recently a cable industry publication reported that  set-top boxes in the U.S. use $2 billion worth of electricity annually, which produces 15 million tons of carbon dioxide.  The source of these estimates is the nonprofit advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Unfortunately,  HDTVs, are special offenders in themselves. You'd never know it by their thin profiles, but HDTVs are gorging themselves. They're  power guzzlers — using as much as four times the energy of  standard-definition sets. 

But before you go back to a CRT (cathode ray tube TV--the old fashioned sets of the 20th century) know that there's hope.  A new set-top software has been developed to cut the DVR's guzzling ways.  In the wee hours of the night the boxes spin down going into a standby mode that uses less than 1 watt.

Across the Pond, in the U.K.  a satellite provider began deploying the spin-down feature to 2 million HD set-tops. The feature monitors whether people are using their box between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. If the box hasn't been used for a period of two hours, an “auto standby” warning pops up on screen for 3 minutes; if nobody touches the remote, the box's hard disk stops spinning.

The key to the program: Subscribers don't necessarily even know their DVRs are putting themselves to sleep at night. The software switches the system back on if there's a scheduled recording.

Some DVR makers, including Scientific Atlanta, have also developed auto-shutoff features.  Self-interest is also served here.  Disk drives last longer if they're not churning continuously. The U.S. government's voluntary Energy Star program, which sets energy-efficiency guidelines for household appliances, is now working up new standards for digital set-top boxes and DVRs.

It's a bit early for New Year's resolutions, but with the oncoming holidays it's worth considering less passive pursuits and a bit more exercise.  A good way to save energy, while energizing oneself in the process.

Out of Copyright (and Onto Your Hard Drive): Creating a Personal Digital Libary from Public Domain Materials

 If you like collecting the classics, you're in luck: now you can do it for free (or very inexpensively).

A classic book on drawing, available as a free PDF file

A number of organizations are busy as beavers these days, building online digital libraries of books (and sometimes other works) in the public domain. You can take advantage of this wealth of free online material, and use them to build your own private library.  Although the digital books are accessible in different formats, I'll refer to them all books available online or in digital format as "eBooks". (see also my earlier post: EBooks and the Virtual Library)

WHERE TO FIND PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS

So where do you find eBooks in the public domain?  Some places to begin browsing or searching for titles are:

Google Book Search  (10,000+ public domain titles)

Google has been working with some large libraries (including the University of Michigan Library) to scan their collections, allowing the public to search not just for titles but to search inside virtually any book. If you do a search on Google Book Search (currently in Beta test), you will see the results labeled based on how much you can peek inside: either it is a "Full view," a "Limited preview," "No preview" is available or you can get a "Snippet view" of the book. To find public domain books you can download or view online, uust filter out your results to see only the "Full view," books. You results will look like this:

Full view means this book can be downloaded or read online

The Google online reader is fairly easy to use, and is rich in its links to related resources (such as where to buy the book or borrow it locally if you prefer a print version). Google also allows you to save your eBooks  to a personal, online library, eliminating the need to download large files.

The Google online reader

Internet Archive (270,000+ public domain titles)

The Internet Archive has a grand vision to archive virtually all media, from old web sites to moving images and software.  The public domain books in the Internet Archive's Open Library can be accessed either by reading them online in a "Flip Book" format, by downloading the eBooks as PDF files, or by opening them in the Internet Archive's proprietary book browser.

I like the Flip Book experience for the way it simulates the online reading experience in a fun, simple way.  If you're looking for more functionality, try the proprietary (DjVU) browser.

Project Gutenberg (20,000+ public domain titles)

Options for eBooks here include read books online as "pure text" (very fast, but no graphics), downloading text files, downloading  "Plucker" files for reading on a Palm organizer, and

Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and other Resources combined have list of 100,000 titles

World Public Library (500,000+ titles)

Every now and then this group opens access to their titles, but at other times (like now) you need to join.  But not to worry - it's still pretty cheap ($8.95 annually) to get access to their large selection in 125 different collections. In addition to classic literature, classic children's books, and science fiction, the World Public Library subscription also includes access to audio Books in MP3 format, technical reference books, and government publications. So...plenty of stuff to look at or listen to for less than $10 a year.

BUILDING YOUR OWN  DIGITAL LIBRARY

You now know where to get hundreds of thousands of public domain eBooks. So where are you going to store these books, and how do you build a personal library of your favorite titles?  Should you download the eBooks, or read them online?

Some things to consider are:

• Type and size of each eBook
• How frequently you will use the title
• Your reading preferences

Type and size of the file is probably the biggest consideration. Some older titles in the public domain have been scanned in from old volumes, and are basically a series of pictures of the actual pages. For example, a PDF of the original  classic "Bambi," which, while very pretty to look at, also takes up nearly 15 MB of hard disk space. Eeek.  More than about 10 of those titles, and you'll have to start thinking about an external hard drive.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, anything stored strictly in text format (.txt files)- with no pictures  will occupy only a tiny amount of space.  For example, the "Plain Vanilla Electronic Text" version of Sir Walter Scott's "Lady of the Lake" which I downloaded from Project Gutenberg takes up a mere 472 K of hard drive space.

Suffice it to say you can feel free to download classic titles in "Plain Vanilla Electronic Text" format  pretty much willy-nilly.  Not only will hundreds or even thousands of these fit on your hard drive easily, they can also be downloaded onto a hand-held device with little concern.

How frequently will you use the eBook? If you will want to refer to the book frequently, or if it's a favorite author or book of poems, you may want to keep it on your computer.  A one-time read could be something you want to read online and not keep on your drive.

Finally, what is your reading preference?  After you try the digital online readers on the various "library" sites, you will know if you like their different proprietary online readers -  or not.  If you don't want to have to be on the Internet when you read your eBook, you can use your favorite digital reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader or Adobe Digital Editions, and just read it on your computer (or hand held, if you prefer small screens).  These each have their own trade-offs in functionality and ease-of-use.

You need to experiment to find what you like.  For my part, I have been taking the Smorgasbord  approach:  storing what interests me (and fits) on my hard drive, bookmarking "found library" of materials on Google Book Search, and bookmarking the other archives mentioned above, for reference.  Now, I just really have to read all this stuff...

 

Toss the Manuals! (and Build a Digital Reference Library)

I'm not sure at what point manufacturers of hardware products (including electronics and major appliances) realized that they could serve their customers by putting manuals for their products online, but at this point the practice is in full swing - at least for consumer products.

If you have a tendency to misplace the original hardware manual - whether for the lawn mower or for your DVD player, you're in luck.  You can (almost always) find it on the Web.  Just go to the manufacturer's Website, then look in the section devoted to to Customer Care (sometimes called Customer Service or Support). Somewhere there you are likely to find a list of "technical documentation" or "manuals" you can download for free as PDF files, provided you have the model number for your product

The manufacturer site is your first stop in finding documentation.  But if your appliance or product is really old or the manufacturer isn't providing online documentation, you do have a few other options.

SPECIALTY SITES

Some sites specialize in providing access to manuals for many manufacturers.  Some of these are broad-based in scope; others are more specific to certain kinds of products, such as appliances.

One specialty search engine that can help you find user guides and manuals is  DeviceManuals.com.  Although I found this site's interface a little offputting, it did turn up a large number of useful links for the product I was looking for - for free.

Some sites are home appliance oriented.  One example is Appliance411, which offers both owners' manuals (usually what you'll be looking for), as well as repair manuals for a variety of appliances. If your kitchen appliance is relatively new, you might look for it on KitchenManuals.com, which requires free membership to access its library of documents.

Some of the more highly specialized sites might charge you a few dollars for manuals to much older (or even antique) machines. I spent about $7 to get a copy of the owner's manual for a 30-year old sewing machine I had inherited "sans manual."  It was worth it.  Now, instead of getting frustrated, I actually understand how to work the danged thing.

IS DIGITAL BETTER?

In spite of the name of this blog post, I don't think you really have to go "all the way" with the digital manual route. By all means hang onto your paper copies if it makes you feel better.  I admit there's some overlap in my household.  But I do find that it's quicker and easier to browse or search the files on my hard drive than it is to traipse all over the household looking for that elusive user guide or manual.

So try it.  The next time you make a hardware purchase, go to the manufacturer's site and download the manual. Then you'll always have it when you need it.

eBooks and the Virtual Libary

There is a Second Annual World eBook Fair happening  as I write this (it is running through August 4).  Sponsored by Project Gutenberg, The World Public Library, and a handful of forward-looking publishers, the World eBook Fair's Website offers a vast panorama of downloadable titles free to the public.

All in the name of getting people reading more, which is unquestionably a noble goal. eBooks - which are simply electronic copies of books - have been around for some time but are beginning to gain momentum as a force on the Web. For consumers, eBooks have a number of benefits. The principal benefit is that you can keep an entire library on a  laptop or other portable device. So, you go on a vacation and you don't need to drag all your hardcovers or softcovers along with you - they're all on your laptop (or Palm, or whatever).

If you really want to live on the edge, you can also read them in the dark, since you're reading them on some form of device with its own, bright screen.  Therefore, presumably, you don't disturb your partner who's snoozing away innocently next to you.

There are a variety of formats available, each format requiring its own reader for the device at hand (whether Mac, PC, Palm, Smartphone, Blackberry, etc.).  A common one is the PDF-type eBook.  These can obviously be opened from Adobe Acrobat Reader, but there are other, simpler readers available, as well.

Digital Editions has appealing "bookshelves" for your books

I am experimenting with Adobe's Digital Editions reader, which is available for a number of operating systems.  It is advertised as being simpler and more streamlined than Acrobat for reading eBooks.  This is a fact - it has only a few features relating to building your eBook library or viewing your electronic books.  Otherwise, the experience is very similar to Acrobat.

Reading an eBook isn't so bad - on a PC, at least

Other readers include: Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket Reader (a multi-device mobile reader) and eReader from Palm. Additionally, some sites offer online reading of their eBooks - basically Web pages.  This latter experience does defeat one of the "mobile" purposes of packing up eBooks on your laptop or device, though, it seems to me.

Sony also has a specialized hardware reader for about $300 (sounds like a lot, although they are currently offering to package about $150 worth of eBooks with the reader).  The Sony reader looks much more like paper-and-ink than other devices. Note that I have never seen anyone actually using a Sony reader - most travelers who are interested in eBooks seem to be using either their laptops or multi-purpose mobile devices to fulfill this task.

The downside to eBooks is that they take the tactile pleasure out of reading. After acquiring a few eBooks, I found I didn't really do much with them.  They sat, unexplored in the deepest reaches of my computer's directory system.

Another problem I found was on my Palm Treo's eReader software.  It drives me crazy that the Palm continually turns off after a few minutes (unless you keep touching the screen), so reading an eBook is a non-intuitive, not-very-fun thing to do on a train or hotel room or wherever.  I still bring books with me, in other words.

Finally, some eBooks feel terribly overpriced for what you get. I can understand paying close to $20 for a book because of printing and distribution costs, but electronic books cost very little to distribute in comparison.  I think they should cut consumers a break.

Luckily, there are many sources for free eBooks which you can find in the collections of the World Public Library.  They have so many interesting titles available, in fact, I may find my paper-and-ink book collection will get a run for its money after all.