FreeOffice Textmaker

I've been a LibreOffice user for years. It works well enough, is feature rich, and does everything I need.

 

Until now.

I loaded the edited draft of Dead of Winter (Nina Cohen #2), to go through it change by change, comment by comment, and apply those comments to the master manuscript in Obsidian, just as though it was the old days, and we were all still dealing with typed manuscripts. With a 98000 word document, plus many, many comments (E.C. Tobler is a great editor), LibreOffice staggered under the load. Cursor movement was choppy, rendering took visible time, and was often glitchy. In all respects, it behaved like the steaming pile of Java it is, asked to do some significant computing.

This was on my desktop machine, a Core i7 4790K, 32GB of ram, video accelerator, and everything. It's not a heavy breathing gaming machine anymore, but it's no slouch.

So I started looking for a word processor that was better, ran on Linux, and was inexpensive, ideally free.

The pickings were pretty thin. They seem to fall into three camps: mediocre markdown editors, online office suites on JoeBob's server company for twelve bucks a month, and LibreOffice. There was one standout: Softmaker's FreeOffice suite.

So I tried it.

It loaded the file without a hiccup. It displayed all the comments with no issue, and somehow made it easier to read than LibreOffice. And... well, it's free. As in beer, not the other kind.

Like free beer, there's a catch. It's small. Freeoffice TextMaker is an older version of Softmaker Office, which is available as a subscription service*, or as a pro version for a one-time payment. FreeOffice is their way of advertising to the world, "Hey, we sell a nice office suite!" Occasionally, it advertises that fact when you first start it. I'm okay with that.

In truth, I've not asked a great deal of FreeOffice yet, and I've not yet purchased SoftOffice Pro, but on the face of it, if you have corner-case problems with LibreOffice like mine, it's definitely worth checking out. The price, as they say, is right.

*Every time I see "Software as a service," a line from Starter Villain goes through my head: "Imagine testicles as a service..." I can't take them seriously anymore. Thanks Scalzi. :)

 

-JRS

 

Links:

FreeOffice

SoftMaker Office 

Starter Villain 

 

 

Manuskript: an open source Scrivener replacement

 I like Scrivener. I use it constantly for writing.  Unfortunately, they dropped support for Linux in 2015, and while the old Linux version still works at the moment, it's only a matter of time until they introduce an upgrade to the main line (OS X, Windows, and IOS) that breaks compatibility with the Linux version.

Scrivener supposedly runs in Wine, but I've not managed to get it to do so thus far.  Plus, wine apps tend to be a bit on the flaky side. If you want to see an enraged author, have an app crash in a way that it didn't manage to preserve a backup first. It's painful.

Right now, and for the forseeable future, my solution to this is to maintain my mac, and instead of my Linux laptop for remote writing, use my iPad. (I have a keyboard for it. I can't imagine writing anything longer than a tweet -- and that only under duress -- with the on-screen keyboard.)

Scrivener isn't perfect. Its document compiler in particular is a turd.  You can make a lot of different formats with it, and most of them are almost right, but the control setup is horrific, poorly documented, and poorly supported. I've yet to make markdown or tex output work remotely correctly.  Also, its editor is a turd. Most editors allow you to create styles that are then remembered throughout the document. Thus, if you change a style, you change every instance of your use of that style. Not so with scrivener. You can create styles, alright, but they're not made part of the document(s) the way they should be. They're done as formatting on the fly. If you want to change something, you have to go back through every document and change it manually.

You can use external editors, but of course you can't have the system default to using one. It's little irritants like this that annoy me with my favorite tool.

The game has now changed.

Given the absence of Linux support, and the fact that Scrivener is in no way open source, the inevitable open source clone has popped up. It's called Manuskript.  I've just messed with it for a few minutes. It's... not horrible.  A little clunky in spots, yes. It's young yet.  I've not yet tried its document compiler, which for me makes or breaks it. I haven't looked to see if it fixes all, or indeed any of my annoyances with Scrivener, and it won't import/export Scrivener files that I've seen, but it exists. And it's free.

I'm not ready to switch... there's no real need. I have my writing needs taken care of with my mac and ipad for the time being. But I will certainly keep an eye on Manuskript. Geez, that and myHDL almost make me want to learn Python.

Arduino and Mile High Con

I will be at Mile High Con this weekend. I'm not on any panels or doing any readings. For the second year in a row, I'm just going as a fan. It just worked out that way. I wasn't sure enough I'd have new fiction out to sign up for anything when the deadline came...and went. But I'll be around, so if you have a copy of something I wrote and want it signed, hit me up.

 Some thoughts on Arduino: When I was writing Junkbox Arduino, I did not realize how much I was taking the Arduino IDE and compiler for granted. There are better microcontrollers out there, most notably the NXP LPC1114, a 32 bit ARM device capable of running at 50MHz, and available in a DIP package. It sounds great until you try to get a development environment for it. Just try, I'll wait. Waiting... You can get the non-free one from NXP, windows only, you can get the GNU suite (a big install, whole separate compiler and everything) or you can diddle Clang/LLVM to generate code for it... but libraries? Documentation? It's all fragmentary, and much of it seems to be unfinished. For better or worse, Arduino puts all of that in one convenient glob. (I hope they keep doing that. There's talk of a web based tool, which I can't get behind at all.)

 It's worse if you want to get into programmable logic. There, you're either stuck with closed source, licensed stuff (free as in beer in some cases, but still) or stuff that's reverse engineered and of questionable legality (to say nothing of the fact that it could be weeks or months before API changes are caught up with) Even with old ICs like GALs, the tools are either antique (DOS based) or good but undocumented (Palwiz), and all the programming devices are reverse engineered. If you're wondering why I haven't started a new technical book, this stuff is why. The proprietary BS is on my nerves in a bad way, and I have a lot of questions whether I even could write about these things without stepping on someone's IP if it's not in the datasheet. I got a taste of it with the PATA/IDE project in Junkbox Arduino, and while the ANSI folks were very kind and helpful, (full props to them) I still didn't like it.

 I may have to go back to software books. I can, at least, write about open source projects with impunity. Meantime, I'm starting to make some headway on Brass and Steel: City of Glass, the second installment of the Brass and Steel trilogy. All I can say right now is this: airship collisions are complicated. :)

 -JRS

Physics

The deeper I dig into physics (yay, another amateur physicist) the more I think that physics should be taught starting out with quantum theory and move upward to Newton, as it is in nature, rather than from Newton to quantum theory as it was discovered. Or perhaps start with Newtonian mechanics and then take the deep dive to explain Newton. Right now I'm finding it easier to understand Bohr's orbitals model by knowing the electron spin and so forth that lie beneath than to simply memorize Bohr. It may be that I don't understand enough to understand how little I understand. Or I'm just weird. -JRS

Scrivener, Word, and Tracked Changes

So it's not a very closely guarded secret that I'm working on getting Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences back in print. (Soon. Soon.) My modern toolchain for these old books (for those keeping score) is: Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> Epub -> Jutoh -> Epub, Mobi, and Epub for ibooks. For the hardcopy, it's Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> RTF -> rtf2latex->Tex->XeLaTex -> PDF. This sounds like more work than it really is. I have the RTF manuscripts, the same ones the Flying Pen Press typeset was done from. I imported them both into Jutoh years ago when I stopped making ebooks by hand. I imported them into Scrivener for all the modern maintenance, mostly cleaning up weird typos that seemed to crop up.

Fast forward to a few days ago. While finishing up the ebook version of Looking Glass, I decided to go through it one more time with the Jutoh spell checker. (Jutoh's spell checker is awful. Slow, primitive, based on ispell or aspell (I forget which), and Jutoh likes to hide the cursor permanently when you've been spell checking a while. It also crashes occasionally.) And I turned up dozens of errors. Looking closely at them, some of them I /knew/ I changed back in the early days of 2007, when we were editing the book. Something was horribly wrong. Looking more closely, these were present in the PDF as well. Walking back through the toolchain, I discovered them in the Scrivener file. When I reimported the original manuscript into Scrivener, I got the same results, plus a lot of "typos" I'd chased through the ebook version over the years. 


My first thought was "Oh crap. Is the file corrupted? Is the import process broken? Is this somehow in the original manuscript?" So I went back to the original manuscript, last edited when I cleaned it up prior to hand-making the first ebook version. Some time in '08, I think, and opened it up in Nisus Writer, just like the old days. When I searched on one of the errors, up it popped - in tracked changes. Every one of those glitches was a change Scott or I had made with Word tracked changes. Every stinking one. About 400 of them in all. Those changes were invisible on the body of the text in Nisus, and in Word too. Somehow, during the import to Scrivener, they were being re-exposed. The book was, essentially, being un-edited.

I sat down to file a bug report. On a whim, because I know that Scrivener leans heavily on OS X's RTF libraries, I tried importing the file into textedit, Apple's default text and RTF editor in OS X. Same result. Same stinking result.

The upshot? OS X's RTF libraries do not do anything sane or intelligent when presented with tracked changes. They concatenate the original and the changed text, and send it on up the pipeline. I do not now recall how I did the original port to Jutoh, but I very much suspect, given the number of people who've complained about the typos in the ebooks over the years, that it used the same RTF library somewhere along the line.

The solution? Fairly straightforward. Open the original RTF up in Word, make a copy, and tell word to Accept All Changes, and save it to an RTF. When I reimported that RTF, it was clean. Nisus Writer doesn't seem to have that capability (or I couldn't find it.) It was fairly well hidden in Word.

So, moving forward, I remade both the ebook versions and the LaTeX typeset version yesterday and today. It gave me an opportunity to clean up some LaTeX code and some of the sloppiness in the way I'd set it up in Jutoh. And I finally solved the mystery of why my later ebooks were such a mess. If you're reading this, and you have one of those messed up ebooks, email me and I'll hook you up with the new version. Meantime... watch this space. I hope to have the thing for sale fairly soon.

-JRS



Render unto Proprietary...

Render unto proprietary formats (Kindle) that which is proprietary (a novel) and with proprietary tools (Kindlegen.) Calibre, with their obsession with reverse-engineering the kindle formats, can't produce output that KDP will accept without mangling, but they continue to shriek that plugins to use kindlegen aren't needed. Pedantic behavior like that, I can live without. Just have to redo the book in Jutoh. What book, you ask? Well, a little bird tells me that Looking Glass may be back on the market in the foreseeable future.

Relay Computing, Redux

On Saturday, November 26, 2011, I posted about my nearly-twenty-year-old furnace and its relay computer control systems, and installing An AprilAire humidifier. Two days ago, instead of cool air, to combat the ghastly late July heat, we were treated to the smell of burning insulation. At first, we assumed it was my jumkbox PC (see Separating Work from Play, along with Update 1 and Update 2). I'm loading its very cheap Chinese power supply fairly heavily and it has been very warm. Alas, sniffing the heating duct proved this not to be the case.

Diagnosis: the fan motor had burned out. Our technicians who serviced the thing had been saying, virtually unanimously, "It's working ok now, but it's (19,20,22) years old, and it's not worth spending a dime on parts for it." We took their advice.

So new furnace, one of these Lennox modulating furnaces. Instead of waiting for the house to drop to a low enough temperature to make firing up the big guns worthwhile, it has a range of low power settings down to 35 percent, and will use them when the house is only a degree or two low. It's rated at 97.5 efficient. We also got one of these air conditioners with it. It's a midrange model (whereas the furnace is top of the line) since we cool sporadically 3-4 months a year and heat continuously nearly 8, and the furnace's uber-blower serves both systems.

Expensive? Yes. Does it come with a lot of cool bells and whistles? Yes. The control system on this furnace is impressive. It can control the humidifier. It has an outdoor temperature sensor built into the air conditioning unit. It runs diagnostics on itself It has, I'm told, a Carbon Monoxide sensor built in. It has a directly connected air intake. Its exhaust flue is PVC and plumbed out through the side of the house. The system is nearly silent. It can download its own firmware. Did I have surge suppressors put in on both the AC unit and the furnace? You betcha.

It's not quite to the point of saying "Hal, turn up the air conditioner, please." But it's close.

Naturally the weather broke just as they started testing the air conditioner. Now it's lovely and temperate, after a small rain storm. We have the windows open, and we're enjoying the fresh air. And the amazing, impressive, digitally controlled HVAC system that looks as though they've installed warp drive in our basement... is turned off.

Go figure.

-JRS

Lag in Real Life

Stumbled across this: Lag in Real Life. Is it just me, or do they move exactly the way a lot of artificial limbs move? (See also: the Luke arm), and compare it to this: 3d printed hand controlled by human muscles. In the absence of feedback, movements become robotic. If you want to know where cybernetic evolution needs to go next, realtime broadband feedback of vast amounts of sensory data seems to be the answer. -JRS

Cha cha changes

As of tomorrow, Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences are officially going out of print. (How long this will take to percolate out to Amazon, I have no idea.) I will be removing the free downloads some time tonight or tomorrow and modifying them to reflect that they are no longer available through the auspices of Flying Pen Press.

This isn't an acrimonious separation. My contract with FPP allowed me to pull the plug starting in 2010. I didn't do so then, and I didn't do so now. Mostly it's about falling sales, and FPP refocusing on other product lines. Whatever else is said about Flying Pen Press, ultimately they took a chance on a science fiction writer with exactly zero publishing credits, got me professional editing, and made the book available to the public. If you're reading this, there's a good chance it's because of an FPP version of one of my novels. Their timing couldn't have been better, either. 2007, the year Looking Glass was released, was also the year my father passed away, but he did live long enough to see me published, for which I'm grateful, and it's been very valuable to me to have books in print all this time.

That said, what do you, the reader, do if you came here looking for one of my books to buy? Well, as of right now, it's still alive on Amazon. Hit the buy button quick. If it's not there anymore, there are a couple options. First, I own the ebook versions outright - I created them in the first place, and I've been updating the free download version from time to time, so once I've made a few small changes (mostly to the cover and copyright sections) I'll be putting those free downloads back up. Second: I have a fairly abundant supply of the Flying Pen Press edition of both of my first two novels. I will be making arrangements on my website so you can order one via email and paypal direct from me (signed, if you like.) Finally, I own these two novels free and clear again. Moving forward, I'm hoping to find them a new home, perhaps with a third book in the series, even if it's a matter of typesetting them myself (I don't own the FPP typeset version) and putting them on Lulu. You haven't seen the last of my cyberpunk books.

Meantime, I'm making good progress on City of Glass, finally. I added about 10,000 words to it this week, (very) rough drafts of several pivotal scenes that help a lot in fixing the book in my mind. That those four chapters were written in Wordstar won't be obvious in the finished novel, and probably aren't that interesting to you, but it amuses the hell out of me. There are a lot fewer distractions in a 1980s toolset, and it helps with focusing. :) (If you are interested, the computer is one of these, which I built myself, running CP/M 2.2 and Wordstar 4. I have a functional but incomplete Wordstar to rtf translator written that I'm using, and one of my side/hobby projects has been a complete Wordstar to rtf translator, to handle everything Wordstar can do. Turns out that's far more than I thought, so it's taking a lot more time than expected. :)

So yeah. Things are changing around here.

Regards,
-JRS

MileHiCon Schedule

I will be at MileHiCon at the end of this week, and I have my schedule now:

Saturday at 11:00AM in Grand Mesa 8c: Researching Fiction (my favorite thing) How do you do research for fiction? What are good places too look? How much is too much?

Saturday at Noon in Mesa Verde C: Reading with Stant Litore. If I have the right guy, he's writing zombie horror, so it could get pretty ugly. :) (I might not have the right guy. Ask me some time about the exquisite corpse reading I was in once. The dangers of searching the interwebs.) I'm not sure what I'm going to read yet, but I may polish up one of my unpublished short stories from the Brass and Steel universe. Probably not the 7500 word one.

Saturday at 2:00pm in Wind River B: Future of Biology and Medicine. Where are we now, what do we see becoming science fact, limitations of genetic research, new medical tech.

The rest of the time I'll be wandering around like all the other fans. :)

-JRS

Separating work from play, update 2.

There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately about the harsh blue light of lcd screens making it hard to sleep, etc etc. How much of that is actually true, I don't know. By way of an experiment, however, I have put a bright daylight beach wallpaper on my work machine, which I use mostly during daylight hours, and a night cityscape on the play machine.

Does it make a difference? I don't know. I do notice that I get the same "ugh! Daystar!" reaction to the day wallpaper at night. Whether it helps or hinders my sleep, I have no idea. I figured it can't hurt.

The Next Big Thing, In Pencil

I've been busy doing something I've never done before: laying out a novel before it's written. One of the things I learned at Taos is the art of storyboarding, which seems much less restrictive than an outline, if only by breaking it up into easily modifiable chunks. With 6 or 8 of us working on it, we storyboarded out one brave member's novel, fixed where the plot hung up, and built the story line all the way out to the end. It took us about 4 hours, as I recall.

I gave myself a month.

In the planning, I've had all the usual plot problems. Things like, "Why is it bad to be a Doppelgänger?" "Is the main character causing this action, or just being dragged into it?" "Does this bring in the themes I want to bring in?" "Argh, the cast is getting too big!" and so on. The advantage is that instead of having thousands of words committed by the time these problems come up, I have one or two pages of hand-written notes, so changing things isn't that painful. I can revise, relocate, and rethink to my heart's content. It lets me lay out plots more complex than I can hold in my head at once. So far, so good.

A word about writing utensils: There's something very comfortable, not to mention focusing (no twitter in a legal pad) about using a jumbo #2 pencil, the same as most folks my age and older used to learn writing in kindergarden; about the smell of the cedar shavings and the moment of thought while I sharpen; the ease of erasure; having a nice big eraser; the joy of twiddling a pencil in my fingers that coaxes the ideas out. Maybe the cedar shaving and graphite smell smells like schoolwork.

Naturally I roll these storyboards into Scrivener when they're done, and have Scrivener give me a dump of all of them in order to move forward. Naturally, I'll have these storyboards at a keystroke when August rolls around and it's time to actually lay down the prose. I'm looking forward to writing this one, even though if anything it's rougher and nastier than Brass and Steel: Inferno. I call this next novel, Brass and Steel II: The City of Glass.

-JRS

ps: if you find yourself looking for the jumbo #2 pencils of our collective youth, it's surprising to find that they're not in most stores with back-to-school supplies. M found me some at Wallmart after much searching, and I mail-ordered about 48 of them in a batch from Costco, so I'm set for a while. I do go through them quickly though.

Shay locomotives

If, at some point in the future, you should read Prodigal Son/Color of my Blood/whatever it winds up being called and you should wonder what on Earth a Shay locomotive is, it's one of these. Toward the end of the steam era, there were proposed (but never built) much larger Shay locomotives with a 3 cylinder steam engine on both sides, and that's really what I was picturing. They're weird pieces of equipment, originally evolved for use on lumber railways with primitive wood and/or wood and iron strap rails, where a large, powerful rod locomotive would tear the track to bits or derail quickly. I figured these were just about perfect for the precision movement, lots of stops and starts, and so on of combat track laying. Yeah. Combat track laying. Welcome to armored war in the 19th century. :)

Why is the #844 called a rod engine when the Shay is distinctly not? Those long things on the driver wheels that connect them to the steam pistons? Those are called side rods or coupling rods. -JRS

Work vs Play - Photoline 32

I've been a photoshop user since the early 90s, and it's either come with a digital camera of mine or I've paid for it (ouch). Frankly, that time is gone. I've got CS4 on my mac. It barely works on Lion, and I doubt it will work at all on Mountain Lion. What all of these large corporations would like me to do is buy a fairly high performance mac, then rent photoshop for about $50 a month. Really? I have a better idea. I've been migrating away from cs4 for nearly a year, and really most of my photoshop work falls squarely into the 'play' department anyway, and thus, belongs on the linux box. Obviously, GIMP, being free, would be the obvious choice. Except that I /hate/ GIMP. Now I know that some folks love the thing, and I've seen truly dazzling digital art out of it, but for me, GIMP's UI is constantly annoying, and when I do get the software to do something, I find it's missing important features. Like adjustment layers.

Enter PhotoLine 32. Truth be told, back when OS X was new (10.1, to be exact), photoshop didn't run on it at all. Your only option for editing images without going into classic was to buy PL32. As CS4 became more and more flakey, I downloaded the current version of PL32, updated my license (yes, they honored my early-aughties license for an upgrade. Try that with Adobe some time.) and I've been slowly migrating to PL32 over the past year or so. The catch, of course, is that there's no Linux version.

On reading the fine print on the Photoline 32 site (www.pl32.com), however, I noticed that they test photoline 32 with wine, the windows emulator for Linux, and make sure everything works properly. So I tried it on the linux box. Lo and behold, it works as advertised. Yeah I bought a new license, even though technically I didn't have to. For 59 Euros (about 77 bucks - 6% of the price of CS6, or about a month and a half of creative cloud last I looked), it was a bargain. Yes, when PL32 does a major revision, they'll charge me to move up - usually about 20 bucks. I'm still ahead.

Not much else newswise. I'm actively seeking an agent, dealing with family matters, and knocking out a third short story in the Brass and Steel universe. Hopefully I'll be getting back to work on Brass and Steel II, whatever it winds up being called, in the next couple weeks. Also, I know how the series ends. Our heroes will be fighting Armageddon. Stay tuned. :)

-JRS

frustration

The most frustrating thing about writing preqel stories to Brass and Steel: Inferno, is that all my favorite antique methods and mechanisms are still anachronisms. Today: carbon-zinc dry cells (invented 1886) and Bowden cables (invented 1896). Previously: bicycles as we know them today - aka Safety Bicycles, that is, a bicycle which has two wheels of about the same size and your feet can touch the ground while riding. (Invented: 1879, but the bike boom didn't happen until the 1890s).

The stories? They Also Serve (Tentatively named, set in 1887) and A Boy's Life (Set in 1883). The technology in The Color of Blood (Set in 1883) is pretty much fantastical anyway, so fewer problems with that. It's just interesting (if frustrating) how sharply the technosphere I'm used to cuts off in the late 19th century. -JRS

Separating work from play (Also Ubuntu on a PC)

My mac has hit end of life. I can no longer upgrade the OS (thanks, Apple.) Given a lifespan of 6 years, not including upgrades, my mac has cost me about $300 a year, give or take, and I can't replace it for what I spent on it. With upgrades, that figure goes to about $500. The upgradeable mac no longer makes sense. I can buy a mini for $700 and if it lasts me two years, I come out ahead. The minis can do everything my Pro can do, right?

Almost. I play exactly one high powered graphics game. Until now I've been running it on my mac. No mac except the pro has the video oomph and upgradeability to keep up. PCs, by contrast, do it much, much more economically.

To that end, I've put together a junk box pc, literally made up of stuff purchased at very low price from other peoples' junk boxes and slapped together with a new HD and a new power supply. It's noisy, it runs pretty hot, and it smells. (New power supply insulation volatiles cooking out, I hope.) The junkbox PC's video card is a Geforce 9600, running in a pci-express 2.0 slot behind a 3ghz core2duo CPU, running Ubuntu 12.10 (no stupid names here). This, as compared to my mac pro 1,1 with a Radeon 5870, pci-express 1.1 slots, and a 2.6ghz quad-core xeon running OS X 10.7.5

Results: Despite its video card having about 1/4 the graphics horsepower of the one in my mac (according to the specs I've read), the junk box linux machine consistently outperformed the mac, both in terms of out and out framerate, and in graphical options turned on at the same framerate. This, despite the notoriously convoluted Linux graphics stack and the fact that I'm running the geforce drivers from Ubuntu instead of the latest and greatest from Nvidia. (Perhaps on a card as old as this, it doesn't matter so much.) I think, as Adam Savage once said, that's a result.

Will I leave the Apple fold? Not any time soon. Literally all of my paid-for software runs on my mac. My family uses macs, so it behoves me to have at least one of them around so I can see what they're seeing for support purposes. And there's a real question whether I can be comfortable with my computing world slung across two completely different machines with very little software overlap. Right now I'm having a bad case of "it's on the other machine," which is annoying. There is also the usual total lack of polish in Linux. Sorry Linux guys. When you're used to OS X, everything else feels crude and sloppy. Especially if it's based on Xwindows. Especially if it has no safe mode mechanism, and you have to twiddle config files in the USB and Xserver to get your mouse to behave sanely. (One little mistake and you'd better pray you have SSH server running and another machine.) Especially if it takes a separate app to add applications to the Unity launcher. (Unity is pretty, but awful.) Still. For a gaming machine, it might just be enough. We'll see.

What I meant by 'Ice'

I did some confusing things when I wrote Looking Glass, back in 2004. (Egad.) One of them was I took Ice, as described by William Gibson et al as software, and redefined it to software + a dedicated, powerful, cheap CPU. Your deck, then, became the means by which this was displayed. Deck, tank, pocket computer, all these did the same thing - hosted the ice. That I failed to consider the TV as more than a peripheral to one of these is probably a sign of the times. It was 2004. Dedicated media computers were few and far between, and we still thought bluetooth was cool.

Anyway, I got the idea for this mechanism from Plan9 (From Bell Labs) which treats everything as a resource which can be accessed over IP - including processor resources, display resources, and so on. Having now tried Plan9, the UI shell is a turkey, but the idea still seems sound.

Fast forward nearly ten years (egad, again) to 2013, and we get this: http://liliputing.com/2012/11/closer-look-at-fxi-cotton-candys-199-any-screen-computer-video.html Which is an android or linux stick that plugs in to either your tv or your computer. It lets you execute apps on it, and virtualizes the output for display on your desktop machine, or displays it on your tv, whichever is handiest.

That's pretty much what I had in mind. Now these are expensive (though there are much, much cheaper ones), but suddenly the future I imagined seems to be occurring. When software makers realize that a dedicated CPU with software in ROM and some virtualization will mean their software is functionally copy-proof, things will change and change fast. I predict that when Adobe gets tired of renting photoshop CS6 at exhorbitant prices, they'll start shipping the suite on a stick like this with a cpu and gpu designed for the job, and you can buy the stick, or you can do without.

-JRS

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, Hippocampus Shrinkage, and PTSD (Revised)

So my local fish wrapper, the Denver Post, carried this article. http://www.denverpost.com/ci_21960079. The print version had some pretty convincing MRIs showing the vascularization of a previously damaged area of a given veteran's brain. I'll buy that. Extra oxygen lets tissues metabolize faster, and this encourages the increase of vascularity. What struck me at the time was the almost throwaway mention that oh yeah, these veterans also had reduction/elimination of their PTSD symptoms in some cases.

This caught my eye, since somewhat less recently, I read studies like this: http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-3223(10)01013-9/abstract and others, which suggest that PTSD has a strong component of hippocampal shrinkage, and that antidepressant therapy with SSRIs can reverse the shrinkage and ultimately cure the PTSD. Wait, whoa, stop. Antidepressants can change your brain structure? Permanently? Yes, they can. According to the wikipedia article, (I know, I know.) SSRIs can cause the formation of new neural pathways and act as an anti-inflammatory in the brain.

My question is, are anti-depressants and HBOC doing the same thing to the PTSD sufferer? Are they revascularizing and/or reducing inflammation in the hippocampus? And if these things are possible, what else can you treat with HBOC and/or antidepressants?

Unlike what we were taught when I was in high school, our brains make new neurons every day. The difference is if we don't use them, they die. Why? I haven't read any theories about why, but I'll speculate. If you can destroy cancer by normalizing the vascularity of a cancerous tumor (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/307/5706/58.full), and if vascularity of muscle increases as the muscle becomes hypertropic, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9737744, and if we can effect the vascularity of a human brain by increasing activity levels in existing brain tissue and reap the benefits of better cerebral circulation, then it stands to reason that some neurons are retained and others lost based on usage might be a result of available circulation. If you have neurogenesis in an area of your brain you use continuously, the circulation might be better, and the new neuron might stay. If it occurs where you're not using it, it might not. If that, in turn, is true, then the very act of increasing activity of existing neurons and thus causing them to demand more circulation might be not only improving circulation to existing neurons, but encouraging new neurons to replace the ones that were lost in the original brain damage.

As a mechanism, this is fascinating. How many mental diseases resemble, on their faces, parts of the brain not getting enough circulation? Can you treat, for example, depression with HBOC? Could you cure it?

Medicine is complex. As with all science, there's probably more to it than this. But circulation seems like at least the most basic, brute force tool to make permanent changes to someone's brain short of sticking an ice pick through their eye socket. And what is really fascinating is that the 'mind' changes with these structural changes. Allowing the hippocampus to regenerate relieves some forms of PTSD. Revascularizing damaged brain tissues releaves chronic pain, coordination, and yes, PTSD again in some veterans who've had head trauma. While brain chemistry is excruciatingly complex, circulation comes down to plumbing, and that's something we humans have a pretty good handle on.

Exciting stuff.

-JRS (Revised for clarity. Yesterday's version kind of fell apart at the end.)

Felix Baumgartner Breaks Sound Barrier

Unless you've been hiding under a rock today, you already knew that Felix Baumgartner made his parachute jump from more than 26 miles up, and made a maximum speed of 833.9mph - faster than the speed of sound - in freefall on the way down. Among the records he broke were Col. Joe Kittinger's altitude, freefall time, and freefall speed records. This stuff interests me - there's a scene like that in Irreconcilable Differences, of course, but really, right now, congratulations belong to Baumgartner and his team - including Kittinger himself - for a successful jump, a safe landing, generally not punching a very large, messy hole in the desert floor. -JRS

Vacuum Cleaners

In my dining room, under the table is a Persian style rug. It's large, very close napped, brought back with us from the wilds of Costco (I think) where it was made of genuine polyester. The rug grabs and holds cat hair like nothing else I've ever seen. I keep expecting the cats that inevitably lie on it to be stuck there, meowing pitifully, until some kind human slowly peels them up from the rug like velcro and sends them on their way, leaving a perfect cat-shaped fur patch, like the shadows from the Hiroshima bombing.

This rug is where vacuums go to die.

Cheap Chinese Hoover? Destroyed in 2 years. Uber-expensive Miele? simply refuses to clean it. "Nein." it says. "Ich will nicht mein Leben riskieren, um diese zu reinigen." (The Miele is a bit finicky like that. I really don't recommend them.) This is the rug I had in mind whilst garage-sale shopping. This is the rug for which I bought a Kirby.

Kirby vacuums, for those who've not heard, are one of those weird throw-back products. They are vacuums engineered like tanks, sold by door-to-door salesmen just as they have been for nearly a century. The Generation 4 I bought, made sometime between 1993 and 1997 was probably a $1500 vacuum when it was new. I gave 50 bucks for it. New bags? No problem. Genuine Kirby, from a dealer at Amazon. New power-head drive belts? Again, no problem, factory new, from a different dealer at Amazon. Most vacuum places I've seen online will service Kirbys, and the array of spare parts for them is astonishing. Power head rollers, belts, bags, hoses, cords, motors, power-assist system, you can even replace the wheels, for pete's sake. Ours, to be frank, stunk when it ran. Well hell, I can fix that. New bags, new power drive belt, clean 20 years accumulated dog hair out of the power head, and darned if I needed /any/ tools to do it. Not even a screwdriver. Everything works properly now and the machine doesn't reek of dog-hair-and-rubber-tires-on-fire.

But the question remained, does it suck?

Ladies and gentlemen, it does, indeed suck. That 20 or 30 pound aluminum behemoth, with its variable speed power drive (akin to my lawnmower) goes over that rug and leaves a swath of clean, cat-hair-free polyester in its wake. It digs crud out of our berber carpets that has resisted five years of lesser vacuums. While this whole post smacks of hyperbole (because it's fun), I'm serious. This machine is impressive.

So if you are looking for a good vacuum, especially if your home is all on one floor (the blasted thing is heavy), keep your eyes open for a Kirby. I don't think I'd buy one new at full price unless I was really flush, but a 20 year old model for 1/30th the price plus some TLC? Might be just the trick.

-JRS