Dawning.ca

This the little story a weekend project to add more of a soul to my computery-workspace at home. The result has really delighted me and I’m already well in to plotting out a similar project for my office. I’d suggest those who are considering such a project themselves should jump in to it!

The Story of the Desktop Aquarium

Lately I’ve been itching to setup a Terrarium of sorts. I found this website and it got me fairly excited on a few levels. I ordered a bunch of Bonsai seeds (mostly Japanese Maple variants), but my short-term drive to set up a little world of life remained.

After viewing all the neat and bizarre terrariums on that website I mentioned, I was starting to take notice of some of the glassware my “better half” occasionally hordes. A beautiful fat 4L jug/jar thing really caught my eye and away I went, on a relaxing tangent to get a funky desktop aqarium up and running.

In blog-geek style, I naturally took photos at various stages of the project. I had set out to have something full of life but also fairly self-sufficient. I therefore decided to have some aquatic plants before anything else. Then I thought, well, I may as well huck a fish in there too – afterall the fish should help provide CO2 to the plants and the plants can suppliment the O2 that a Betta (or similarly hardy fish) could just grab from the surface as needed. Anyway, I dumped about $40 in to plants, rocks, water treatment stuff, plant food and the fish itself. Seperately I added a grow light on a little timer thing to help the plants get the necessary rays.

This site also has some cute Terrarium tips..

So, how would you arrange your own desktop aquarium?

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Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Upon my recent acquisition of a Kobo eReader, I’ve been recreationally reading quite a lot lately. Two books I recently finished reading were Ender’s Game and Pirates Latitudes. Both were entertaining in their own right.

Ender’s Game

Ender’s Game is a classic Sci-Fi novel that I’ve heard referred to on multiple occasions. It seems to be a classic favorite amongst the geek crowd. I had high expectations of it and upon reading it, found it to be reasonably predictable. THAT said, I really quite enjoyed it. I often found myself thinking: “I knew they’d do that! .. huh, that’s STILL awesome”.

The novel is written in the form that I think makes for a good story – that is, in being a sci-fi, the ‘technology’ involved is only a plot device. The story is about people, perceptions and human nature. It’s a powerful commentary that I feel warrants at least a single read. I think I’ll find myself re-reading this book every few years.

I give Ender’s Game it a strong 4.7/5.

Pirates Latitutes by Michael Crichton

Pirate Latitudes

Pirate Latitudes is basically a mature version of Pirates of the Caribbean, kind of. The topic of pirates doesn’t generally interest me and there were some graphic moments that were both entertaining and distasteful. I was delighted to emerge from the early chapters with a much better notion of how a real-world pirate ship of the 1600s could have actually come to exist. I found the book to be fairly tense, easy to read and overall what I’d expect from a novel about pirates.

There were many twists and I found this one not especially predictable. Some of Crichton’s directions with the tale left me a bit confused as to why a certain sub-story was there at all. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in a fairly adult look in to the mechanics and politics of old world privateering, give this novel some consideration.

I give Pirate Latitudes a 3.7/5, perhaps a bit harsh as I’m not entirely keen regarding pirates in general.

Upon graduating recently, I found the Engineering group had a special treat – a copy of Seymour Schulich’s “Get Smarter” was given to each grad. In an atypical move, I decided to read this non-textbook source of information.

Worth Reading

I quite enjoyed it, Schulich has arranged the book in to a ton of tiny chapters. In each, he quickly and effectively conveys an opinion or experience of his. If you’re not interested in something, it’s easy to skip on (granted I never did) and the rest of the book will still make sense. Given Schulich’s history, this is a man with some neat concepts to convey. He discusses a vast range of topics from his opinions about assessing career options to finding meaning in life.

For Who

I think especially for the target age group (20-40), this book is a must read and since doing so takes a few hours, there’s every reason to have a gander. I’ve even recommended it to my 60-something year old father. It’s an interesting collection if topics and history.

Look Closer

Check it out here.

I’ve recently acquired myself a Kobo eReader. Read on to learn of my initial experiences, thoughts and reactions..

For those who remain unaware of what an ereader is…

They are little device designed to replace physical books. The key to success of the major ereaders (of which the ipad is NOT included) is the use of a completely distinct display technology called E-Ink. The important detail about that is that things displayed on E-Ink look just as though they were printed on paper. Compare this to viewing a typical LCD screen (like that of your phone) in the bright sun. The LCD has to overcome the ambient light, which is really tough in the day. The sharp contrast in brightness is similarly tiring for eyes in good lighting. E-Ink is free of that burden.

Deciding against the Kindle and Nook

In the moments since I got my Kobo the eReader world has changed. When I ordered it, it was about $100 less than the Nook or the Kindle. However, as the battle heats up, both of those competitors have been re-priced and thus I likely would have ordered a Nook if I could go back. HOWEVER.. I’m finding the insanely minimal approach of the Kobo to actually appear to be it’s winning feature. It’s damned thin and very light. The Sony ereader is the only other that sort of rivals it in this regard – I looked at that one in a store and noticed its screen was quite reflective and I kind of don’t enjoy burning my eyes out via glare.

So I suspect even with the new pricing, the Kobo is still worthy of MAJOR consideration. This is for those people who are interested in getting a device that does one thing especially well. The Kindle comes pretty close in this regard though, but it has more parts and complexity. Still, if you’re completely afraid of operating a computer to a basic level, you should probably just go with one of the others. I, like many of my generation, don’t even consider operation of a computer effort.. So whatever to that point for me.

Acquiring the Kobo

Right now the Kobo is an ultra-hot item in my area.. They’re hard to come by in the many stores the try to stalk them. So, I ordered directly online and it arrived in 7 days, far sooner than the order form told me to expect!

Go here for some unboxing photos.

Regarding Linux

As a keen Linux user I really do prefer never to have to boot my machines in to a inferior Operating Environment. To this end, I invested some time getting the Kobo software to function in Linux. Kobo delightfully provides both a Windows and an OSX version of their software. There’s some mention of them having a Debian package and I applied to get access to that. But being inpatient, I decided to just try running the Windows build on top of Linux via Wine. The process required some trial and error and resulted in a mostly stable setup that’s totally working under Ubuntu 10.04.

Here’s the steps I followed:

1. Added the Wine PPA thing to apt (http://www.winehq.org/download/deb)

2. Installed “wine” and “winetricks”. “sudo apt-get install wine winetricks” should do it for ya.

3. Ran “winetricks” and added some stuff that the software seemed to need (read error messages from wine when trying to run it to try to figure out what was missing). I believe Dot Net 2.0 was required. I think the Visual C++ 2008 redistributable also helped. I think I have IE8 installed too, though I of course never use it, but that may be helping in the background (I hope not).

4. Run the Kobo software installer thingy: “wine Setup.exe” (I don’t call the file name, may have been an MSI, I dunno, I used wine to install it though).

5. In my case, a short cut was dumped on my desktop to launch the Kobo software, you can use that to get the necessary command-line call to run it, then open a terminal, paste that in and review error messages for hints for if you need other stuff installed via winetricks.

6. Plug in your Kobo to your computer if it’s not already (make sure your computer mounts it too, verify you can see the Kobo under Nautilus or some other file browser thingy).

7. Run “winecfg”. I manually added my Kobo binary and then edited settings just for that, but you can just edit your global settings (by default) if you don’t use wine for other things like I do.

8. Click the “Drives” tab, if you don’t have a letter mapped to your Kobo, add one. Mine’s under something like “/media/KoboReader” (which automatically set itself up — on Ubuntu 10.04)

9. Select the entry for your Kobo ‘drive’ and then click on “Show Advanced”. Change the type from “Autoscrewup” (more or less) to “Floppy Disk”. You might also want to set your Windows version to XP under the “Applications” tab, though that probably doesn’t matter, it’s what I did.

10. Launch the Kobo software via the link that was created on your desktop. Alternatively, my wine build also has a wine menu under “Applications” on my desktop that I could use to launch the Kobo software instead. If you have no such icons, it’s probably visible in the terminal via ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Kobo/Kobo.exe (give or take).

11. Attempt to sync things up, if it hangs a lot of returns with a sync error, either try again or restart the application. I’ve had to semi-frequently do both, it’s a small price to pay next to having to actually run a blasphemous OS.

12. Smile, cause you’re like.. Happy.. or somethin’ now.

Overall Feelings on the Kobo

With the new pricing of the Kindle and the Nook, I’m less certain about my Kobo. I am however REALLY LOVING using it. It’s ultra thin and straight forward to use. I’ve caught myself on many occasions noticing only after much use that I’m not reading from a classical book – to me that’s exactly what one is going for. I love the ability to have an SD card with books on it. The relatively tiny 1GB of on board memory is still FAR FAR more space than I’m ever going to want for books on the go as having even that many books available on the device would be gruesome to navigate. More space could be handy for music or video – but as an ereader, this thing’s display isn’t capable of supporting video and there’s no sound output device (so more space may make better sense on a Nook for example – if you’re going to listen to music on that – for that, I have an MP3 player like anyone else who lives through the 2000s).

The Kobo still remains worthy of much consideration aside from the Nook and the Kindle, in that it does precisely what you’re buying it for very well. It doesn’t take a pragmatic approach and try to give you a universe of computing options (for that, use your phone or your laptop) on a platform that’s main function conflicts with that. Instead, it focuses on what you justified buying it for in the first place and to me, is how things should be designed.

Afterthoughts

As much as I love the Kobo’s philosophy as a consumer device, as a user, I like to hack stuff up. So I’m also hoping that the company will consider providing a little bit of help on getting users started towards writing their own applications (feel encouraged to add a comment to that post to0). The Nook’s use of Google Android (which I completely adore) puts it in sweet spot for that option and the Kindle already has some neat hacks for it. As for the Kobo, the first step towards hacking out some fun times can be enjoyed through this tear-down article.

As for devices like the ipad, the lack of e-ink disqualifies them for actual book reading in my view. ALSO, the iPad is hilariously heavy. You may be new to these kinds of devices and still have to waste money as I had to, in order to learn that holding a remotely heavy device in the same position for as long as I like to read in a sitting is a fast-track to joint problems. When more hardware vendors can get their hands on decent colour E-Ink with fast enough refresh rates to run video, such as that made by Pixel QI, then I think having multimedia pads like the ipad will become a prospect worthy of intense attention. For now, if you want an ereader, doing that job well is mutually exclusive to other functions.

What do you think?

Other people have other devices, what are your thoughts??

Well, for those that know, it’s been a damned long time in coming, but I have finally fully graduated as of June 7th and 8th 2010.

The tale of my 8 year tenor at the University of Calgary is somewhat of a unique animal, there was a lot of pain and a great deal of fun. As I look back after just completing that journey I am delighted to be through it and I’m keen to move on in to new areas of life. But I also know that these years were great and I’ll happily reflect upon them as I drift away from this phase.

How it Happened

In short, only with the support and encouragement of others. I certainly had a lot of drive to do both of these myself, but without some key people pushing at key moments, I don’t think I would haven’t taken it as far and I doubt I would have got going when I did either.

I started with Computer Science (feeling lucky to have been admitted at all from High School). I had wanted to apply to Engineering but decided I wouldn’t get in and thus I didn’t even try (by the way, always give things a chance). After LOVING Computer Science, by the end of my third year I found myself in a tough spot, I had done all the core courses, but still had to take a year’s worth of options. Back then I had recently joined the brand new Solar Car team and had been around quite a few Engineering students. This got me thinking that while I still figured I wouldn’t get in to Engineering, I could at least take some of their courses to satisfy my Computer Science requirements.

How it Went

As I took more and more courses I found myself irritated that, for example, “Operating Systems” wasn’t nearly as hardcore as I hoped for. I often expected to emerge from a class with a vastly improved understanding of that subject matter. I often found that not to be the case. Of course there were some serious gems that I loved. I found it hilarious that my grades tended to be worst in “easy” courses and best in “sadistic” ones.

How it ended

After many occasions of considering leaving and wishing it would move faster (while having no interesting in subjecting myself to a lifestyle demanding all my time was sitting in class or doing homework), I eventually settled in to a groove. I found that taking only 3 courses (some times 4) per semester allowed me enough extra time to work a little and do some of my own projects on the side. I needed that variety and that coupled with progressively thoughtful organization led to my ending the program sane, happy even with a GPA over a full grade point above my average of my earlier years.

If I could go back

If I could go back I don’t know if I’d do it again, I think I would. Definitely the Computer Science.. But overall, it all was a ton of work, but a ton of fun and a ton of learning. Eight years is probably going to amount to around 9% of my life span, which is a lot, but in the end I had a pretty awesome time and of course did more than just school in that time. My parents had told me NOT to enter university right out of high school and I think that was sage advice, but I think I lucked out in that I probably would have taken the same stuff eventually anyway.

…. So…. Now for a masters? I think so, but for now, I’m going to worry about paying off a mortgage first.

I’ve long since loathed the wide range of drinking vessels that I know react with my water. I’m already seriously irritated about the mandatory fluoridation of my drinking water. So I hardly like that drinking from a metal container tends to make my water taste metallic. Then there’s my instinctual concerns about anything plastic.

This led me to glass. However, I remained unconvinced that typical glass products are plain nonreactive glass.. Thus, I decided upon chemistry glasswares. From there, I decided to run with an Erlenmeyer Flask as it’ll sit well on my desk and can defend against the attacks of cat tongues.

This was an expensive way to go but some people, like me, are willing to pay for some decent piece of mind – and I’ll be drinking from this thing for.. well.. as long as I can.. So may as well pay once for something decent that you use every day!

My copy of 'The Guild'

The Guild has been around for some time now and I’ve enjoyed watching it many times over. It’s about the woes of RL existence for a group of gamer geeks.

I first noticed the main drive behind The Guild, Felicia Day, from another similarly awesome project – Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog. Aside from that, I’m also a casual but frequent World of Warcraft player. Thus, when I encountered The Guild I was absolutely trilled as it does a great job of illustrating the tone of some of the weird social stuff that comes out of leading a dominant online life.

The Guild has gone on in to a third season and I see no end in sight. I’m loving the third season and finding the earlier times remain well worth watching. I’ve also found the DVD is cool as they’ve tossed in the various little extras one might expect from a DVD (commentary, etc).

Check it out some time if you are willing to have a good giggle..

For the lazy, I’ve embedded the first episode below / after the break and if you like it, I’d suggest you toss a few bucks their way as this isn’t some lameo cash grab, but rather sincerely creative people producing something of real value and substance. You can also watch The Guild on youtube of from www.watchtheguild.com.

Here’s episode #1 of The Guild: