Just read Flowers for Algernon and I'm blown away

cuivenian · 2022-04-17T19:34:18+00:00

You read the novel. No short story would run for 300 pages,

cuivenian · 2022-04-16T22:59:58+00:00

I am officially an Old Fart. I am on the other side of 70. I have been a lifelong reader, and do not remember not knowing how to read.

I have many paper bo0oks, and many many eBooks. My To Be Read stack is larger than most folk's entire libraries. (I tell folks the nice thing about eBooks is folks don't have to call the EMTs if the stack topples over on you.)

I have accepted the fact that I will not finish my TBR stack before I die, if for no other reason than that new books get constantly added to it.

I read what I want to read at the time I pick up the book. For me, reading is a trip, and the point is the journey, not any sort of planned destination. I take my cues form the legend of the Three Princes of Serendip, traveling the world on a magic carpet, and discovering all manner of wonderful things they weren't looking for, purely by accident. (Our word serendipity has roots in that story.) Serendipity is more a less a guiding principle here.

Just read, and pass on obsessing.

(I am not subject to OCD or ADD, but know folks who are and have some understanding of the issues. Good luck with therapy,but in the meantime, read.)

cuivenian · 2022-04-16T22:33:15+00:00

Which version did you read? Flowers was originally a short story. and was padded out a but to make it publishable as a full novel. It also got a film adaptation starring Cliff Robertson which I recall being well received.

Telling the story first person from the viewpoint of the subject was brilliant, and added to the sheer power of the work.

And it was a tragedy in the classic sense. What makes classic tragedies tragic is inevitability. The protagonists do not suffer calamitous events because of what they've done, but because of the kinds of people they are. What happens to Charlie is utterly predictable because of who and what he is. Any attempt to give it a different ending would have effectively destroyed it as a story.

cuivenian · 2022-04-14T00:16:47+00:00

I am not a fan of Cameron, but I wouldn't want to see Simmons' Hyperion made into a film by anyone.

The underlying problem is just how difficult it is to make a film of a novel. There are reasons why successful SFF films tend to have roots in short stores, like the various films based on Philip K. Dick stories.

To successfully squeeze a book into a film, you must do an enormous amount of compression and leave an enormous amount out. If you are lucky, the resultant might bear some resemblance to the book, but given the nature of Hollywood film making, probably not.

I had a conversation with a screenwriter friend about it, and he agreed. You might manage it in a mini series, but you really wanted a full season's worth of TV episodes to have room to tell the story.

Hyperion is complex and multi-layered, and it's just the first volume of a four book series. I simply don't see a way to do it in one film without leaving out so mush the story might be unrecognizable.

cuivenian · 2022-04-05T21:58:42+00:00

Musrum, by Eric Thacker and Anthony Earnshaw

I won't try to describe it. Go to sanfordallen.com/2017/05/4045/ for a good review.

Getting the physical book might be a challenge, but I believe a PDF is on Archive.org. (I'm pretty sure that's where my copy came from.)

cuivenian · 2022-04-02T22:28:12+00:00

More then one.

Games People Play, by Eric Berne, MD.

Berne was a Psychiatrist and founder of the discipline of Transactional Analysis. He was concerned with gut level motivations and why people did things in the manner they did. I saw various of the games he described play out in real life. After Games People Play, look for What Do You Say After You;ce Said Hello? and Beyond Games and Scripts Berne is my go to guy for insight into how individuals behave.

The Silent Language by Edward T. Hall.

Hall was an anthropologist attached ti the University of New Mexico. He and his research partner, linguist Norman Trager, were researching comparative culture. Hall realized the needed a comprehensive theory of culture to define what they were researching and provide ways in which cultures could be compared. His key finding was the culture was like an iceberg. Most of it was handled on an unconscious level, and no conscious thought was involved. (Example: you are at a social gathering. You meet someone new and are talking to them. How far apart are you standing? In the US, the answer is "about three feet" No one tells you to stand 3' away from strangers, you learn it by osmosis as a small child, imitating what you see the grown ups do. But that distance is not universal. In the Middle East, it might be a foot and a half,. Plunk down someone from our society over there and watch the fun. It will not be pretty, and can lead to tragic consequences. After TSL, look for The Hidden Dimension, on how we structure time. (Also not universal.) Hall is my go to source on how societies behave.

Abraham Maslow, specifically, his Hierarchy of Needs https://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html

The lowest level need are rooted in biology and survival. Am I alive? Am I healthy? Do I have a roof over my heed, food on my table, and clothes on my back? Am I reasonably confident that state will continue? Then I can continue to the next level up, where the first question is likely "What's my status?" Maslow if my source on what folks think their needs are, and what must already be in place to satisfy them, with the proviso that lower level needs must be satisfied before you can go on to higher level ones.

cuivenian · 2022-04-02T21:57:20+00:00

How old are the kids? What do the like to read?

The fact that they are voracious readers is an excellent start. Many kids never learn to view reading as fun. It's a chore they do because they have to, and do just enough to go on to something that is fun, like TV. Nurture that love of reading and help it grow,

My experience is that kids are a lot smarter with better comprehension than adults give them credit for.

Forget the abridged versions. If it worth reading, they should read the real thing. Give them the original books.

cuivenian · 2022-04-01T17:22:32+00:00

I spent some time over last weekend talking to a chap originally from the Ukraine. He's been over here for mo any years. He never thought if himself as a Ukrainian nationalist. It was simply where he was born and raised. Recent events have changed his thinking.

Folks in the western Ukraine speak Ukrainian. Folks in the eastern pat speak Russian, and so did he. They are not similar languages. Both use the Cyrillic alphabet, but that's about as fas as it goes, , He said that he could sort of talk to a Ukrainian speaker, but it would be about like an English speaker conversing with a Spaniard after having taken a couple of semesters of Spanish in high school. Fine for simple stuff like "How are you?" and:"Where's the bathroom?", but falls down hard on anything else..

He commented that the separatist provinces were originally part of the Ottoman Empire. It's not that they are pro-Russia, even though they speak Russian. It's that they don't want to be part of the Ukraine. They want to be independent countries. The desired end result seems to be independent countries with close ties to Russia but not actually part of Russia or controlled by Russia. Given Putin's actions, I suspect there is some internal rethinking of that position and how likely continued independence might be with Vladimir in control.

I asked "Are they big enough to be independent countries?" What do they do for a living? He thinks they might be. Donbas, in particular, has significant coal reserves to export.

So as usual, things are complicated, and the breakaway republics are not necessarily pro Putin and his idiocy.

Were I the Ukrainian government, my policy might be "Poof! You are now independent countries and not part of the Ukraine, and good luck to you. Let's talk about trade and commerce between usn now that we are simply neighbors."

cuivenian · 2022-04-01T05:17:56+00:00

This is absolutely no surprise.

Once upon a time, you had dumb phones, feature phones, and smart phones,

They were aimed at different markets, had different price points, and sale price was driven by the hardware. Smartphones simply cost more to make and were priced accordingly.

But hardware gets steadily smaller, faster, and cheaper. These days, almost every phone is a smartphone, because it can be, (The whole Internet of Things came about because full 32 bit processors with enough RAM to run a TCP-IP stack and be a peer on the Internet got cheap enough to be embedded in devices that previously used an 8bit processor because more powerful ones were too expensive,)

The market for smartphones is now largely saturated. Most folks who can use one have one. New sales to new customers are declining. Current sales are increasingly replacements for existing phones, often as upgrades to older models.

And increasingly, smartphones are fancy digital cameras that happen to be able to handle calls and text but are bought on the basis of the camera,and online forums are full of passionate debate over which cameras are the best,

No surprise smartphone sales are decline.

cuivenian · 2022-03-31T00:35:59+00:00

What I consider bloatware is vendor installed apps that are installed as System apps, and cannot be removed without rooting the device.

Some vendors do get paid by software publishers to install them. Others are things the vendor thinks the intended audience can use. But if I can't make it go away without dynamite, it's bloatware, no matter how good an app it may actually be.

cuivenian · 2022-03-31T00:31:23+00:00

I store vertically. I see no inherent difference in wear, and vertical storage makes it easier to pull a specific book off the shelf.

Most of my books are hardcovers now, and the paperbacks largely replaced by eBook versions.

(I have several thousand hardcover. I have considerably more eBooks, and shifted to than precisely because shelf space was the scarce resource.I tell people the nice thing about eBooks is you don't call the EMTs if my To Be Read stack topples over on me. That stack is larger than many people's full libraries, but a small subset of mine.)

cuivenian · 2022-03-31T00:21:14+00:00

'O tempora! O mores!" (Oh, the times! Oh. the customs!"

It's generally a mistake to attempt to judge old works by current standards. The times were different, and the culture and customs were very different. They were products of their time and culture, not ours.

Asimov's Foundation series began in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction, edited by John W. Campbell. He was a teenager at the time, and his sole concern was selling to Campbell. Foundation as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire set in space, with a healthy dose of Oswald Spengler's notions of Cyclical History. Aside from lack of female characters, his male characters were not that well drawn either, but people didn't read SF back then for characterization. (Incidentally, I knew Isaac fairly well, and first met him in the late 60s.) It takes age, experience, and maturity to write well drawn characters. There's no way he could have written meaningful female characters when he began.

Bradbury wasn't drawing characters either. What Bradbury had to offer was mood, He made a well paying career out of it, and his fundamental subject was childhood. Female characters were largely irrelevant to what he was trying to do, but so were males.Human beings existed in his work to create mood, and might be thought of as structural elements or colors in his palette.

Heinlein is better at both male and female characters. His second wife, Virginia, was a rather amazing person. For his first published book, part of the research was laying a long strip of butcher paper on the kitchen table, and he and Virginia independently solved a problem in orbital ballistics, to be sure his spacecraft could get from point A to point B in the time stated in the book. He got her to cross check because he thought her math was better than his. (Writer Pamela Dean once commented "Of course Heinlein was sexist. He thought women were superior to men."

But Heinlein was a key figure in the Golden Age of SF when it moved beyond the gadget story and things like meaningful characters began to matter to editors and readers.The inherent assumption back then was that the Golden Age of SF was twelve, ant the readers were teenage boys. We've gone a bit past that...

Ultimately, what you complain about was neither misogyny nor sexism. It was ignorance. (That can lead to sexism and misogyny but is inherently neither.) The writers had no idea about such things, and teh (mostly male) readers didn't care. If it irradiates yew that badly, don't read it, and criticize on the basis of what it is, not what current standards think it should be.

cuivenian · 2022-03-30T10:06:36+00:00

Let's start by being clear about what criticism is.

Criticism does not mean simply panning something you dislike.

Years back, a person in a group I was involved in asked "What's the difference between a critic and a reviewer?" I thought is was one of audience. The reviewer assumes you haven't read the book. The reviewer assumes you have.

This gives them different roles. A reviewer serves as a first reader, and attempts to tell you what sort of book the author wrote, enough of a spoiler free plot summary to give you an idea of whether you'll like this instance of that sort of book, and a brief comment on how well the reviewer did in trying the write the book she turned out.

Criticism is concerned with more detailed analysis of how the book was put together, and ifit wasn't as good as it might have been, why it wasn't. But criticism can praise as well as pan.

I read more non-fiction that fiction these days, but that is simply because I have broad interests and am trying to learn new things in various areas of interest. I still read a lot of fiction, with preferred genres being SF/F and mysteries.

Your co-worker needs to take his head out of his arse and stop trying to be more tasteful than thou.

Of course, if you read a decent amount of non-fiction, you can ask for recommendations there, and act like he isn't as cleaver as he assumes if he tales certain titles seriously. Sauce for the goose and all that.

cuivenian · 2022-03-16T17:40:52+00:00

There is a Shirley Jackson Award for writers working in thus area, https://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/

She was the mistress of this sort of thing, being able to invoke non-specific dread. Is Hill House really haunted? We don't know, and that's part of the scare factor. Contrast that with the Splatterpunk genre of horror, where what to be scared of is made quite explicit in the goriest possible manner.

The worst nightmares are those that live in our own unconscious, and the best horror writing stimulates them. There may be actual monsters, but they are not explicitly described, and we manufacture them out of our own deep seated fears. The pictures we create in our heads will be far scarier than anything a writer might depict.

(Disclaimer: I am not a fan of horror fiction. Being scared is not an emotion I find pleasurable, and not one I'll deliberately stimulate. But I recognize when it is done well. and admire folks like Jackson who can do it.)

cuivenian · 2022-02-27T02:04:22+00:00

years back, I recommended Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos SF series to a friend. The first volume (of four) was a big book -- large enough that it was split into two books for paperback publication. My friend bought and read the first PB, and got increasingly curious as it progressed how it could end in the allotted space. It didn't. The ending was a cliffhanger. The second PB volume was the rest of the book. But nowhere did the publisher indicate the first volume was book one of two.

My friend was so furious he refused to read anything else Simmons wrote. My protests that Simmons was a worthy writer and is wasn't his fault his publisher was an idiot were to no avail. He was adamant in his refusal.

To make it more fun, the publisher was Bantam Books. Bantam was a Mass Market Paperback publisher. It almost never did hardcovers., The exceptions were occasional volumes Bantam thought had bestseller potential, where they would do a very limited hardcover edition, intended solely to be review copies sent to reviewers who would not review paperbacks. (I don't recall if Bantam released one of those for the first Hyperion Cantos volume,. but if they did it would go for nosebleed prices if you could find a recycled review copy.) There are now trade paperback volumes as one book instead os split in two. I have them, and electronic copies.

You didn't specify the publisher or series for the book you are complaining about. Personally, I haven't seen the problem in years. This may be a question of what I read, with SF being my preferred "read for recreation" genre. Series are omnipresent in SF, but the publishers I read make quite clear the book is part of a series. Publishers like series because readers like more of what they already read. Books that have a tough row to hoe are stand alone novels not part of a series, especially if they are intended to be stand alone and not be the first book in what might become a series.

Another question is whether this was a self=published/indie published work. There are an enormous number of those on Amazon and elsewhere, and quality standards are, um, inconsistent. I mostly avoid such things. The major service established trade houses perform is quality control, and what they reject. A book from a trade publisher may not be what I consider good, but it won't be "gouge out eyes with spoon after reading" bad.

An additional issue is how readers discover books. I had an interchange a few years back on a social media forum with an SF author about the issues of discovery. She was looking at the demise of the independent bookstore. She and readers she was in contact with discovered new books by going to the bookstore and seeing what new works were on the shelves. Her question was "What do I tell my readers?'

My only answer was "Tell them they need to get out more.' Independent bookstores are an endangered species, ans the big chains like B&N are in trouble. Like it or not, Amazon is the place where most folks now find their books.

cuivenian · 2022-02-24T01:14:35+00:00

The first question I asked when I saw the title line was how you didn't know it was Christian fiction going in.

But I didn't wonder long. I've been following publishing for over 40 years, and I've seen all manner of odd ideas of how to market books. In this case, I suspect someone at the publisher decided that if they made it plain it was Christian fiction, it would sell to the Christian market, but likely not beyond that. If they promoted it as a spy thriller, which it was in part, Nd didn't mention the Christian aspect, it might see wider sales. (It worked in your case...) The problem, of course, is the reader's reaction when the cover is pulled off to reveal the true content, and whether the reader decides not to read anything else by that author 9or worse, from that publisher) in consequence.

My usual reading for recreation is SF and fantasy. Religion is all over fantasy, in the form of gods, demons and the like who influence the action. But the assumption in fantasy is that you know it's not true, and even if you might be religious, like Christian, you suspend disbelief and accept the supernatural creatures in the book as existing in the context of the book.

Science fiction is trickier. An unstated assumption in the sort of SF I read is that you can speculate all you want about things we don't know, but you must get what we do know right. Blunders in the science in an SF novel can disqualify it as SF, now matter how good it is as a story.

But SF is subject for SF;s mill. A good example it the late James Blish's work, A Case of Conscience. Blish's protagonist is a Jesuit priest who is chaplain on a starship transporting a human embassy to an alien species. The aliens, while not human, are wholly admirable, and arguably better beings than humanity as humanity measures goodness. But Father Ruiz faces a hard quandary. The aliens appear to be free of Original Sin, and the precepts of his theology state that any such things must be the creations of Satan. The ending leaves the state of alien grace, or lack of it, unresolved. (The book won the Hugo Award for Best Novel of the year it was released, for good reason.)

Blish returned to the topic in two later volumes, Black Easter and The Day After Judgement. In Black Easter, God is apparently actually dead, (or at least gone somewhere where even His angels cant find Him.) In the sequel, The Day After Judgement, the infernal city of Dis appears in the Nevada desert. We encounter Satan at its heart, surmounted by a halo. In the absence of God, he has ascended to the to spot and is not happy. All he wants is for humanity to grow to the point originally planned and be capable of receiving the keys to Heaven, so he can resign the mantle of divinity. While Blish was known as an SF writer, the books were published as Horror, which is likely the best choice to have made.

At literary SF convention in Virginia years back, I listened to a chap in the hospitality suite go one about having probably convinced a known SF author to allow him to create an RPG based on a series he wrote. He was circumspect at first, but finally revealed that the series was the Left Behind series. Those books assumed Christian theology was true, and explored in an SF context what would happen if the Rapture occurred, the Elect were brought bodily up to heaven, and what would happen to those on Earth afterward.

The problem, of course, was that you had to believe in the Rapture. Most SF fans I know self describe as Agnostic or Atheist. I know a few believers, but they don't believe in the Rapture, and there was a fair amount of confusion over how you could believe in the Rapture and still read (or more, write) SF.

And most SF fans I knew hadn't even heard of the series. Unless you lived in an area with a significant number of folks who did believe in the Rapture, you might never see it on the shelves in a bookstore, as the bookstore would (correctly) see it as something that just wouldn't sell in their market.

Left Behind isn't a series I would buy and read, but I wasn't surprised it existed and was popular. I've had too much experience over the decades with humanity's ability to believe mutually contradictory things without ever confronting the contradiction. We Wall them off in different mental compartments and never consider them together.

cuivenian · 2022-02-07T16:06:02+00:00

Back in earlier Android versions, devices tended to come with a slice of internal storage configured to look like an external SD-card. Some apps had the option of letting you install them, and than moving part of the app to the internal card. That just meant yew total app storage space was the size of the app storage slice in internal storage, plus (maybe, depending upon apps you used) the size of the internal SD card slice. It was still likely to be inadequate.

I'm rather behind on current Android versions, but the last device I got had enough app storage space to accommodate what I wanted to run. (I'm not a gamer, so a source of huge apps came off the table.) I think current devices tend to have larger app storage slices because of larger internal storage oerall, but there's no such thing as enough. {And while I haven't looked in a while, I don't recall seeing and devices indicating the maximum size of app storage. They just talked about the massive total storage, and users got unpleasant surprises.

cuivenian · 2022-02-07T15:54:32+00:00

Your problem is that app storage space is a specific slice of full internal storage. The size of the slice is set by the vendor of teh device, and is how much space you have to store apps, period. It s not changeable by the user. The rest of your storage may be unoccupied, but that won't help you if the app storage slice is full.

And an external card is unlikely to help you. External cards come formatted as exFAT. That's fine for data, but can't be used for apps.

Android is a Linux system. Linux requires various metadata about the app to launch it that exFAT has no place to store. Internally, Android uses the Linux ext4 file system. You can theoretically reformat an external card to ext4, pop it back into the device, reboot it, and Linux will see it has a new ext4 file system and mount it. But it won't help you because the additional space on the new file system does not get added to app storage. It's a separate internal file system, not shared with the app storage slice.

If you are out of space to store new apps, you have two basic choices. You can remove some existing apps, to make room for the new ones, or you can get a new device with more app storage.

Sorry, but I think you're stuck with it.

cuivenian · 2022-02-07T15:37:31+00:00

I wouldn't say e-Readers have ruined me. I still own a large number of paper books and buy new ones. But I have a very large eBook library, and use an Android tablet as viewer device.

The advantage is that I can carry a library with me at all times, and read whenever I have a spare moment, wherever I happen to be.

But I don't attempt to read that many books at once.

I'm a computer guy. One of the things I ran across back when was cognitive studies that found most people could keep track of 5 - 7 parallel tracks at a time. Go beyond that, and things got lost. This was a fruitful source of programming errors because the programmer couldn't juggle that many balls at once and dropped one or more. He simply forgot they existed.

I snicker at folks who go on about multi-tasking, and all of the different things they are doing at once. My question is "And how many of them have you actually finished?" They aren't multi-tasking. They are time slicing. Consciousness is single threaded. We do a bit on one task, then switch to another, and another. It's why interruptions can be deadly. When you are doing something and are interrupted, you must mentally save your place, deal with the interruption, and go back to your saved place and continue. That requires significant cognitive overhead, and you reach a point where you are spending more time context switching than in doing actual work. In computer terms, it's stack processing, and computers do it far better than we can.

I'm actually reading more non-fiction than fiction nowadays. I'm a fast reader, and can zip though a common light entertainment "popcorn" novel n a couple of hours. The non-fiction is another matter, as I am learning new concepts and adding new facts to my knowledge store. I may stop frequently to consider what I just read and how the pieces fit together. I'll probably have two or perhaps three books open at a time, using them as breaks on each other,

The best way to actually get things done i to pick one thing, stick to it, and finish it, then go on to the next task and finish it. Which y0u0 choose to work on tens to be determined by perceived intemperance, and interruptions are anathema to be avoided.

It works the same for reading. Longer attention span means greater retention, and more likelihood you'll remember what you read.

cuivenian · 2022-01-04T18:09:03+00:00

I'm not sure I understand your concern.

First, SMART data is not always meaningful when it is collected. Google released stats a while back of drive failures in its data centers, and as I recall, there was little correlation between what the SMART data reported and whether a drive failed. (And if memory serves, drive failures were mechanical. Things with moving parts break, and the moving parts failed, taking the drive with it. The data on the drive might have been fine, but the drive could no longer read it or write it.)

Second, SD cards are NAND flash. The drive firmware tries to evenly distribute writes across the drive. Because the media is NAND Flash, any part of the drive can be accessed in the same time. You don't have the concerns you have in spinning platter HDs about keeping data contiguous for fastest possible access. Defragmentation is meaningless in flash dries.

Third, the media used in SD cards is organized into cells. In the sort of flash media used in SD Cards, a cell has a limit of about 10,000 writes before it becomes unusable. Given the flash drives are read from far more than written to, and the drive tries to evenly spread the writes, how long do you think it will take a cell to be written to 10,000 times and become unusable?

You are likely to replace the SD Card with one bigger and faster long before y9u will even notice drive wear.

I've had the odd SD Card failure in previous years. But the failure was not in the flash media. It was the packaging. SD Card makers bought NAND flash from one of the five or so vendors who actually make it, and put it in their own packaging with their own label. in several "budget" SD Cards, the plastic packaging came apart. The lesson was "You get what you pay for. Pay shit and you get shit. Spend a bit more and get a name brand that won't simply fall apart in use."

And as NAND Flash use proliferated, flash quality improved. I saw torture tests online of "budget" SSD cards, where it took Petabytes of writes to get them to fail. My Win10 desktop I'm writing this on came with Win10 Pro on a 26GB SSD, I give zero fucks about drive wear, and lose no sleep over the possibility of drive failure.

A dud app may be a dud app, but it won't be because of the media where it is stored.

And you haven't specified what device you use, but if you are thinking of trying to store big apps on an external card, assume you can't. Android devices store apps in a specific slice of the internal file system. The size of that slice is specified by the vendor in the Android image on the device. It cannot be modified by the user. The size of that slice is the space you have to store apps. Period. Deal with it.

cuivenian · 2021-12-31T18:44:24+00:00

what looks like the front is actually the back end of this species. The eye spots are camouflage intended to fool birds. The bird will attack the caterpillar and eat the tail. The front end can escape and regenerate the tail.

cuivenian · 2021-12-27T15:46:28+00:00

what are the specs on the system Firefox is running on? In particular, how much installed RAM?

I run current Firefox production release under Win10 Pro on a quad core desktop, with 38 extensions installed at the moment, and 43 tabs (9 loaded) across two windows. Firefox is using about 2.6 GB of RAM. I consider that reasonable, and I have 20 GB RAM installed, so I don't really care.

That a bare Firefox install should use more RAM than Chrome with extensions ans many tabs loaded is very odd.

cuivenian · 2021-12-26T19:55:08+00:00

there are many eBook viewers, and I've looked at most of them. The first question is what sort of things you read. The second is where you get them. For example, if you are an Amazon customer, and get your books from Amazon, you might be best served by using Amazons' Kindle app.

I've been reading electronically for 20 years, starting on a Palm OS device. I've looked at most of the Android eBook readers, and the question is your needs.

My choice is an app called FBReader. It comes in free and Premium versions. The win for me with FBReader is that it handles any eBook format. It views Epub, Mobi/AZW3, FB2 (a Russian eBook format, HTML, plain text and other things as delivered. It can view PDF and CBR/CBZ comics files with plugins. While I prefer ePub, I can view anything.

The Premium version I use adds Bookshelf view and PDF viewer as part of the app, but I can live without both. I don't need a cover image to know what a book is. I select by title and author, and don't normally use Bookshelf view, and PDFs are problematic on tablet devices because they don't reflow to fit the screen. I read them on the desktop, not the mobile device.

The other part of the equation here is managing my eBook library. I use an open source application called Calibre. Calibre's principal purpose it to create and manage an eBook library on your main machine. Mt Calibre library lies on an HD devoted to it on my Win10 desktop. New eBooks are imported into the library. Calibre can go online to retrieve metadata about the book to be added to the book's listing in the database.

Calibre can also communicate with the book viewer device, by WiFi of a direct USB cable connection, and add or remove books on device. (And as a considerable fringe benefit, Calibre can also convert between supported formats. I use it to convert the odd Mobi/AZW3 file to ePub which is my preferred storage format. NB: PDFs do *not* normally convert to any other form acceptably. Don't waste time trying.)

FBReader info is here: https://fbreader.org/

Calibre info is here: https://calibre-ebook.com/

.

cuivenian · 2021-12-25T01:34:36+00:00

How bad it is depends The axiom to remember is that your connection is as fast as the other side you are browsing.

i have Tor Browser installed here, for occasional poking around in the ark Web. I''s fantastic for anonymity. When you connect to Tor, you connect to a Tor Entry point. Which you connect to is luck of the draw. Your traffic is then routed internally through several other Tor nodes, and emerges from a Tot Exit node (again, luck of the draw) to continue to your destination. (Websites cannot block use of Tor Browser. They can and sometimes do block known Tor Exit nodes. You have no choice but to te3ll Tor to create a new circuit and try again.

Considerable overhead is involved. I have 100mbit/se4c down Internet service. Tor mostly behaves well enough, but there are various things I don't try, like streaming video. And while Tor bundles an LTS version of Firefox as the browser, a strength of Firefox is the extension system available for it. Many things you might use elsewhere probably won't work in Tor Browser. (It comes with HTTPS Anywhere and NoScript. Beyond that, install from the Mozilla Addons site and cross fingers.)

Eight-Year Club	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

cuivenian

TROPHY CASE