books
Volunteer to get killed – get paid
Norwegian crime author Jørgen Jæger wants to kill you in his next book. But only if you want to. And you’re getting paid. Here’s what he says on krimjager.com (in Norwegian):
Kjære krimvenn!
Jeg sitter i disse dager fordypet i skrivingen av neste års kriminalroman om lensmann Ole Vik. Handlingen tar til på Korsneset syd for Bergen, [...]
iPhone, my new book shelf?
1) The new Apple iPhone has a 160 ppi screen, when you flip it 90 degrees, the screen flips too, it can show pdfs… And you have it with you all the time…
2) The iTunes store has sold two billion tracks or so, has a system that works, and has their frontend (iTunes) installed [...]
Write in your books
Kottke links to a new series from Moleskine: City guide books with lots of blank pages for your notes, adresses, stories and drawings. Great idea!
I wish more books came with blank pages. More space for notes. Books like “Blink” and “Freakonomics” – books that triggers tons of ideas as I read them.
Maybe Moleskine could [...]
Japan #3: Did J. K. Rowling visit Kyoto?
I visited Kyoto, Japan lately. We walked the “The Philosopher’s Trail” in Kyoto, a walk next to the river in Kyoto, with lovely Sakura hanging over you.
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A bit down the trail we found these rocks dressed with pieces of cotton:
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So my daughter (for whom I have read the six Harry Potter books twice each, and [...]
Books you must read
The Guardian posts the Librarians must-read list, a list of books every adult should read before they die. (And booh to the spell checkers at The Guardian that managed to spell three of the titles wrong).
Let’s run down the list and see how much you score (and post it here):
The list
To Kill a Mockingbird [...]
What if every video was tagged?
Basketball blog True Hoop writes about Synergy Sports Technology, a company that will record and tag every miunte of NBA basketball played. The C|Net article they refer to, has an interesting point:
In an e-mail interview, Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks owner and the co-founder of Broadcast.com, said he has been impressed with Synergy but was “only [...]
Amazon plogs
When logging on to Amazon.com today, I was welcomed by this:
So what is a “plog”? Amazon defines it as…
Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person’s Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each [...]
Free audio books
Librivox has free audiobooks for you to download. Not the most amazing list yet, but more to come:
Baum, L. Frank. The Road to Oz
Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground
The Founding Fathers. The Constitution of the United States
Irving, Washington. Old Christmas
James, Henry. An International Episode
London, Jack. [...]
The impact of iTunes on net shopping
Some days ago I wrote about FontExplorer X, a font tool for the Mac with a iTunes look.
Now, have a look at VitalSource, a new net shop for ebooks. It looks like everybody is copying iTunes music store.
The concept is quite clever:
22 days until Harry Potter 6 is out
Either you already knew, or you don’t care, I guess…
The game for Harry Potter 4 is in production, and the trailer for it is out now. Not much too see though.
The leaky Cauldron has more about the game, which is out in November.
Previously: Harry Potter 4 – the first trailer is out
Make books searchable in Spotlight…
…without giving me the actual book. Simon Willison writes: “The thing is, you don’t need a digital copy of a book to be able to search it; you just need a full-text index of it. An index isn’t enough to reconstruct the book, but it is enough to answer questions like “on what pages of [...]
Importing audio books in iTunes
Michael has a nice post on how to import audiobooks in iTunes:
Make sure the files are bookmarkable on your iPod; AAC files can be made bookmarkable, while MP3 files cannot.
Update
Michael has updated the article for iTunes 6:
Importing CDs for audio books can be kind of painful, because there are usually a lot of them. To [...]
“42″ in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was just a joke
The number 42 in the “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” books (and movies), was just a joke. The Author Douglas Adams answered this in a netmeeting with Norwegian daily newspaper Dagbladet in 1999.
“I have officially retired from the business of explaining what I meant by 42. It was just a joke. End of story.”, says [...]
How to think when designing (or anything else)
Jeff Veen has been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”, and reflects about how he thinks when designing things. Interesting reading.
“And I sort of realized that I do design that way. I build up a tremendous amount of background data, let it synthesize, then “blink” it out as a fully-formed solution. It typically works like this:
Talk to [...]
The most astonishing adventure in the universe begins
Years ago, I was sitting in a park reading one of the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy books. It was a nice summer day, with people trying to get a tan everywhere. I was reading the passage where our hero in the book is chasing a sofa somewhere. I was laughing so hard that several [...]
