A Mind is a Terrible Thing

Okay… in lolcat-speak, as regards Barnes & Noble’s new ‘Nook’ eReader device, “I haz one.”

For better or worse, I was in the first bunch to get one, having pre-ordered early enough to get first dibs.  Better, in that I got one — and I understand these things are now going for up to twice their retail value on eBay, and current orders won’t ship for at least 6-7 weeks due to the backlog.

Worse, in that as an early adopter, I get to experience the various flaws and problems that come with a 1.0 release product.  On the other hand, I did avoid some, in that I wasn’t opening my Nook up and connecting to the registration servers for the first time on Christmas day, when I hear they melted down due to the load.  And to their credit, they’ve already released a point release upgrade on the Nook’s operating system, downloaded automatically via the device’s free 3G network or over wifi.

I’ll not bother with a review of features and stuff that you can see for yourself at the link at the top of this post.  Instead, I’ll just go over my own impression, what I’ve liked and haven’t liked.  This is my first eReader of any kind, aside from laptop computers and PC desktop software, so it took me a while to get used to it.

First, the tactile:  The Nook feels pretty good in the hand, or both hands.  I quite like the fact I can page forward or back using buttons on both sides of the device.  You can also page with finger-swipes across the touchscreen at the bottom, but I haven’t bothered with this method.  It doesn’t feel like a toy, and in fact the leather cover/protector I got for it just enhances the impression.

The visual: The electronic ink display is remarkably sharp and easy on the eyes — I can read for hours without eyestrain, and the ability to change the font (3 choices) and size (5 choices) is nice.  I also rather like the customization feature, in that I could load my own wallpaper (what displays when you’re not reading) and screensavers (what displays when the device is asleep but not off).  The small color touchscreen at the bottom is a nifty feature — I like it way better than the multitude of tiny buttons I see on Kindles… There my only complaint is it really shows finger oil smudges too easily and I find I’m frequently cleaning (maybe one of those iPod protectors would help, if trimmed to fit).

The functional:  I’ve already added 16GB of MicroSD RAM to my Nook, but it comes with 2GB and truthfully I haven’t even filled that yet, not even close.  But it’s nice to have that much space to expand into as I like.  It also supports a variety of book formats, including PDF, PDB, and EPUB — and with the tools I already have, I can turn just about everything I own (including some old Microsoft Reader LIT books, as well as my own Word docs) into PDFs the Nook can handle.

Actually, with Calibre, a free open-source utility, I can convert into any Nook supported format from just about anything else.  Calibre also has a feed-subscription feature that lets me compile online stuff for reading later on the Nook — although the only way to get it onto the Nook is via USB cable.  I’ve enjoyed reading NASA news releases, Scientific American, and a couple newspapers in this way.

The WiFi (b/g) and Wireless 3G capabilities are quite cool, downloading books I bought on B&N’s site automatically.  And it was a pleasant surprise one morning when I woke up the device and it began downloading the software update; additional goodness: I then turned on the WiFi (usually leave it off to conserve battery) and the Nook switched to using that much faster connection without my doing anything else.

The speed and responsiveness of the Nook, especially on page changes, was really not good in the initial release, but the software update fixed about 80% of that.  Unfortunately they then introduced a problem where a lot of people, myself included, experienced intermittent loss of bookmarks and last-read-point saved information.  Not good.  Word on their support site is they’re working on it, as well as a few other glitches people have reported.  Again — this is a 1.0 product and I have expectations accordingly.  I’m actually surprised it hasn’t been worse, and that although there have been some hardware issues and returned Nooks, the bulk of the problems are software based (and therefore fixable).

Areas for improvement:  For some reason, battery life isn’t what it ought to be — and others have reported this.  Not like a week between charges; for me, it’s been more like every 3rd day.

The page transitions could be smoother and faster.  The 1.1 software was a big improvement in this, but it could be better.

Three fonts and five sizes is nice…but this could be expanded upon in the future.  Also, it does need a zoom/pan feature, so you can look closer at illustrations and graphs.

They put a lot of effort into the design aesthetics and even the packaging for the Nook.  C’mon guys — throw in a 25-cent stick-on/removable smudge protector for that bottom touchscreen at least.

They definitely need to beef up the ability to organize a given ebook library, and there’s no reason why there is no organization at all in the non-BN section of what is stored on the device — none, not even alphabetical by title.  I think it sorts by the order in which you put it on the device, but I’m not sure.  Ideally, people should be able to set up categories, keywords, sub-libraries, that sort of thing.  BN-purchased books can be sorted by author, title, and so on — but I’d also like to sort by genre or keyword, or to browse just among a subset of books, among all my Nook-stored books.  My actual preference would be that the Nook let me mingle both BN and non-BN content in one big searchable library.

There’s also an MP3 player function, and the sound surprisingly good even on the little mono speakers on the Nook — but the player itself is pathetically underfeatured.  Anything you put on the Nook is played in alphabetic order by the embedded title tags and that’s it — no picking an album, or even manually organizing your music into separate folders and playing those.  I have a cheap USB stick MP3 player device I got years ago and it can handle rudimentary folder organization better than the Nook.

The experience:  It took me a couple days to really get used to reading on the Nook…but now I enjoy it very much.  True, nothing will replace the look, feel, and smell of a book — paperback or hardbound.  However, I’d not experienced the way an eReader device can disappear with respect to the reading experience.  No matter what I’m reading, what’s in my hands is roughly the same — the page buttons are in the same spots, the display is the same. When I need to put it down, I don’t even need to remember to mark my spot, it just stays there (well, most of the time…again, they’re working on this).

For some reason (probably the cleverness of the e-ink display engineers), the crisp blackness of the text and the not-too-white background are extremely easy on the eyes.  My spouse has had cataract surgery and is plagued by lots of floaters — she hates reading, because of the latter — but reports to me she has no problem with the Nook’s display and finds it quite readable.

So, my grades:

• Aesthetics: A (looks good and feels good in the hands, with or without a protective cover)
• Features: B- (but room for improvement, and the fact they can do so on-the-fly is a big plus)
• Display: A (very easy on the eyes)
• Responsiveness:  B- (still a touch laggy at times and with certain books, but better with the 1.1 software than it was with 1.0)
• Expandability:  A (can add memory and the battery is replaceable; the Kindle doesn’t have either of these features)
• Connectivity:  A- (let me transfer files wirelessly between my PC and the Nook and that minus comes off; let me do it FROM the Nook and it would become an A+)
• Battery Life:  C+ (acceptable, but not spectacular)
• Format Compatibility: A- (add TXT and Word Doc to this and I’d remove that minus)
• Library Organization & Searching: D (BN-purchased content organization gets a B, but anything else I put on there can’t be organized or searched at all, so that part gets a failing grade, alas)
• MP3 Player:  Pass (as in took this pass/fail…and didn’t technically ‘fail’; really needs SOME way of letting people play music in the order they wish, short of manually editing embedded MP3 tags to add ascending numbers as I did)
• Graphics file support:  C+ (JPGs, BMPs, PNGs, and GIFs all display nicely, but there’s nothing resembling any kind of viewer or browser for looking at them — this would be an easily implemented feature, too).
• Product quality in general:  C (again, room for improvement via software update, but the early units were rushed to production and the bugs do show)

Overall assessment:  Would I buy this again or recommend buying it?  Yes.  Would I have opted for one of the other eReaders out there, based on what I know about this one from experience and my prior research on the features, reviews, and capabilities of devices such as the Kindle or Sony’s eReader?  No.  I like the Nook.

Why, despite the flaws I noted above would I have gotten the Nook anyway?  The main reason is because the underlying hardware is solid, in my opinion — it’s the operating system which needs improvement, added features, and bug-fixes, but all of these can be addressed and broadcast to all the Nook owners, whether they got their on December 9th as I did or will be opening theirs in mid February.  Based on the fact there’s already been one such software update, I have faith there will be more and soon.

Still kind of in the waiting phase here.  Status is as follows:

Mr Beer Hard Cider (started Dec 1st): The 8 1ltr bottles have been sitting for about a week now. In another week, I can transfer them to the garage for cooling.  The ‘experts’ all say I should wait two more weeks after that before drinking.  Well, that’s mid January… Talk about deferred gratification.  But I’ll be patient.

1st batch of Whole Foods 365 brand organic apple juice (started on Dec 4th, EC-1118 champagne yeast):  Made in the convenient 1 gallon glass jug with nothing more than warm water activated yeast, a #6 rubber stopper with a hole through it, and a cheap reusable homebrew airlock ($3).  Initial tasting a week ago proved light, slightly tart, but with a noticeable kick.  As for flavor, I’d put it as a kind of combination between Blackthorn and (yes) champagne, perhaps at a 80/20 ratio.  The jug, minus the yeast sludge and that 4oz or so for tasting, has been sitting in the garage since a week ago; I’m planning to try it on Christmas eve.

2nd batch:  2 gallons WF 365 apple juice and 1 gallon of cold pressed local apple cider.  Started on 14 Dec, using ‘liquid cider yeast’ from homebrewery.com.  Didn’t have another spare gallon glass jug, so I reused a disinfected plastic apple juice jug from  Costco.  Added a cup of sugar to the cold pressed cider and brought nearly to a boil.  The WF juice I just did as I did with the 1st batch and added yeast to them.  All three were bubbling within a day.  The cold pressed went a little wild though and fouled the airlock, so I cleaned that out.  A week later, they’re all still active, but slowing.

Meanwhile, I did get 4 glass jugs, some rinse-free disinfecting powder, and several packets of lager yeast, which is supposed to be pretty good with the WF juice.  Today, we happened to be at Whole Paycheck, so I got three more gallons of juice and one of an all natural apple/pear cider.  When that 2nd batch is done and settled — I’m guessing by this weekend — I’ll probably go ahead and start the third batch.

Yesterday I decanted the “Mr Beer” cider yesterday into the 1 liter bottles, it having been two weeks since starting that batch.  Those got a little sugar into each bottle to reactivate the yeast for the sake of carbonation.  Supposed to sit for 2 more weeks like that, then get refrigerated (or, in this case, into the unheated garage) for 2 weeks more…so this batch won’t be ready until mid January at the soonest.

Still, I tasted it as there was a little extra at the bottom of the barrel.  Seemed okay, but not as flavorful as the semi-finished Whole Foods brew 1st batch.  Maybe it’ll improve.

Meanwhile, I started two more WF organic juice batches (1 gallon each)…and I had a gallon of cold-pressed cider from a friend which I wort’ed up by heating on the stove and adding about a cup of sugar.  Unfortunately, I lacked a spare glass jug and so ended up reusing an old plastic one, carefully disinfected and cleaned.  I’ve had a few issues with it, most notably the yeast foamed up overnight and fouled the airlock…but I cleaned it out, reduced the amount of water in the u-tube, and now it’s bubbling steadily.  I used a special liquid cider-specific yeast this time for all three.

Oh, another thing I’ve done has been to put the jugs in pails of water, to help buffer the temperature over time, since we turn down the furnace at night.

Meanwhile, I have more glass jugs and some lager yeast on order from yet another homebrew company…

Okay — my 1st attempt using Whole Foods organic apple juice (in the convenient-for-homebrewing gallon glass jug) is on to the 2nd phase.  After about a week of fermentation, I noticed the bubbling had decreased significantly and nearly (but not quite) stopped yesterday.  So I put the jug in our unheated garage overnight (temp in the upper 40s) and then today I set it outside where it was only in the 30s — this for the purpose of ‘crashing’ the remaining yeast.

Just now, I siphoned the new hard cider into a plastic jug, washed out the gunk (dead yeast) in the glass one, then put the cider back in — this so I can cap it and leave it to age another week or two.  (Actually, I’m thinking this might be a good Christmas decanting.)  It’s back out in the garage.

Well, minus a half glass for taste-testing.  Stephy says it seems gentle and mild, but she’s extraordinarily sensitive to alcohol — and in a minute reported she could really feel it.  My own tasting:  It’s slightly fizzy from natural yeast carbonation, rather dry but with solid apple undertones.  For sure the yeast gobbled up the sugars, so instead of sweet it’s pleasantly tart — but I like that very much in ciders.

Tomorrow it’ll be time to decant and bottle the Mr. Beer batch.  There the process is more involved, where I need to sanitize bottles, add a little sugar, and then fill each.  The recommendation is 2-2-2, where it’s 2 weeks in the keg (fermenting), 2 weeks in the bottles (a little more fermenting, plus self-carbonation), and finally 2 weeks refrigeration (due to lack of fridge space for nearly a dozen bottles, it’ll probably be “sit in the garage”).

Okay — that half a glass is half gone.  Oh yeah… This stuff is deceptive.

Next batch I’m gonna try the lager yeast; 1st batch was champagne yeast.

I haz one.  Early Yule present and it just arrived today.

Will play with it for a few days or a week or so, then post a review.  For now?  I rather like it.  Glad I pre-ordered.

Those who know me usually know of my predilection for hard apple cider; my preferred brand is Blackthorn, which actually I haven’t been able to find here in New Mexico — and so I buy out the entire stock at Trader Joe’s in Sunnyvale CA whenever I’m visiting there.

I’ve always been intrigued by the idea of homebrewing, too — although I hate beer, ale, stout and the rest.  So, waste of time there.  But then I heard you can homebrew hard apple cider and started to look into the ‘how’.

At first, it looked too hard and complicated, all kinds of expensive gear and not knowing if I’d even like it or find the effort worthwhile.  Finally, I decided what the hell, let’s try something cheap first.

So I ordered a “Mr. Beer” Hard Cider rig from Amazon, which comes with everything you need to brew up 2 gallons of cider, including some cider syrup concentrate, a plastic brewing barrel thing, and 8 quart-sized bottles for post-fermentation bottling.  Again, all plastic, but that keeps the cost down, I’m sure.

Last week (1st Dec), I started the first batch and have been watching with interest as it developed the layer of yeasty foam… The instructions say wait at least a week before bottling, so I’ve a ways to go yet on that — I’m planning to let it go at least 10 days, maybe two full weeks.

Additional research, of course, led me to alternative methods of cider making (including some interesting notions for deriving applejack, which is freeze-distilled cider).  One of the most intriguing I found via Google at this site here.  The method?  Even simpler:  Buy a gallon of organic unfiltered apple juice at Whole Foods ($7), which happens to come in a glass jug perfect for fermentation.  Add some homebrewer’s yeast; I went with 1/3 a packet of Lalvin EC-1118 champagne yeast ($0.85), mixed in warm water to activate.  Then topped the jug in-situ with a #6 rubber stopper and S-curve airlock (these cost about $2).  (Later, I may try lager yeast, as the website recipe suggests.  I also got a packet of ‘liquid cider yeast’ which could prove interesting, but would best be for when I’m going to make at least 5 gallons at one go.)

Did this last night, with two more gallon bottles — and stoppers and airlocks — in reserve…figured I’d try it 1st and see what happened if anything.  Initially, for the first 12 hours, it didn’t look like anything would.

This morning though, I woke to discover bubbles coming through the airlock at a steady rate of about one every 1.5 seconds and a steady stream of tiny bubbles making a froth at the top of the juice.  Still active, too.  According to the website, I should have something drinkable in about a week and a half.  We’ll see.

Best OS upgrade experience since Windows 95 (many don’t remember what a huge step up that was from Win 3.1).  Really solid, and not a single BSOD.  I think I had Firefox crash once, but that was more likely due to FF and/or Adobe Flash.

I usually keep my computer running most of the time because it’s also a publishing weather station on the ‘Net…and sometimes I forget how long it’s been since a reboot (which tends to happen now only when there’s been some major software installation or update).  By now, on Vista, I would absolutely have had to restart every day or two given the frequent Dragon Age: Origins gameplay, iTunes, and late evening video watching.  I did install a memory recovery utility called CacheBoost, but even with that back in the Vista days, given heavy use, I’d say I had a week max before the entire computer bogged down.

Absolutely it boots faster than the previous Vista installation, with noticeable ’spinning icon’ activity ending at about 2/3 the time it used to take.  Shutdown is faster, too.

I’m liking the Task bar for the most part and really like the pop-up thumbnails (Aero Peek) when you mouse over an active application’s icon, but I do wish it was a little more customizable.  Like for example to choose to have active applications move to the right of the inactive ones.  And to alter (increase/decrease) the Aero transparency effect.

No regrets on the upgrade, and I’m really super happy I opted in early for the half-price advance purchase (we got 2 Win7 Pro upgrades for $99 each…normally, it’s twice that).  I’m sure the ‘Home Premium’ edition would’ve been good enough, but I always like a few extra bells and whistles — and in this case, it was the instanced WinXP feature.

I got the game “Dragon Age: Origins” a few days back, PC version.  While I definitely have enjoyed Fallout 3, I haven’t been this addicted to a game since Knights of the Old Republic (which also happens to be a Bioware-produced game).

Just finished a segment where I ‘collected’ the ability (temporarily) to change into four different forms, learning along the way how to use them to achieve the quest goals.  Huge fun using a mouse form, spirit, burning man, and golem — because only in using all four at the appropriate times is it possible to solve the quest and break out of a strange dream realm called The Fade.

Nearly 2:30am here and I have to resist the urge to play Just A Little Bit More.

The pros: Slick, noticeably more responsive than my previous Vista 64-bit installation.  Some details are a little kludgey as I figure them out, but in general Microsquishy took nearly all the things I hated about Vista and made ‘em better.  The newly redesigned taskbar is da bomb.

The cons: Given it was physically possible for me to upgrade from V64 Home Premium to either Win7 Home Premium or Win7 Ultimate (the top-end product), it seems clear to me it was purely a marketing decision to restrict people from directly upgrading from Vista Home Premium to Win7 Pro (which in features sits right between Win 7 Home Premium and Ultimate).  It’s obvious there’s nothing even vaguely resembling a product or software limitation as to why I had to do the custom clean install and was barred from the simple upgrade.  Otherwise, Vista Home Premium to Win 7 Ultimate wouldn’t have worked as an upgrade path.  Really dumb, and not a good idea to annoy your customers in this way for no good reason than what has every appearance of greed (as in, “If they want to upgrade to a higher product, let’s make ‘em all buy the most expensive version.”).

That said, I’ve decided to see the glass as half-full — in that it actually is a good idea to do a fresh OS install now and then, and in general is the better choice when upgrading if you have the time.  It’s just a pain in the butt to have to reinstall everything though.  Fortunately, I’m well versed in how to manually move settings and files back — hence within an hour, I had both Firefox and Thunderbird looking exactly like they did, with all my settings and files and emails, yesterday morning.  Today, I’ll take a stab at the rest of my usually installed programs…which I might as well do because we’re somewhat snowed in here (about 5 inches worth outside right now).

Some advice and caveats:

• Have lots of disk space available on your main system drive before attempting the upgrade, because your entire previous Windows installation will be renamed Windows.old…and with the new OS being added, it can chew up a lot of space.  On my system, Windows.old is 115 GB.  One suggestion:  Pre-uninstall programs you haven’t been using much, because you’ll likely need to reinstall them again anyway.
• DO back up your documents, emails, music, photos, videos, and other personal files.  It’s just dumb not to, especially when performing software surgery at this level.  Also, if you know how, make a backup copy of your entire “Documents and Settings/(user)” folder (where ‘user’ is your login name).  Having this backed up can, if you’re a clever sort, enable you to restore a lot of stuff on your own, including your browser and email settings, iTunes, etc.  You’ll still need to reinstall the programs, but right from the get-go you can have ‘em working and operating just like they did before.
• If performing the upgrade from an existing working Windows installation, at the first system reboot, do NOT let your computer boot from the DVD-ROM disc in the drive.  In fact, upon each subsequent reboot, you STILL don’t want it booting from the DVD disc.  If you do, it will act as if nothing has been done and prompt to copy your old Windows OS files a second time…and I have a feeling it has the potential to mess up the upgrade process majorly.  Just let your computer boot normally from the hard disk.  For a couple seconds, you’ll see a screen that’ll let you pick between the upgrade or to boot into your previous (and still functional) operating system — with the default auto-selecting to do the upgrade.
• I noticed that the “completing installation” phase took a very, very long time on my system.  I have no idea if that was because some piece of hardware wasn’t responding as it ought to or that part of the installation actually takes that long.  Microsoft ought to have put in more indicators as to what was actually happening, some better progress indicator.

I’m referring to the weather station site & WeatherUnderground data updates from our local sensors & station.

It all depends on how smoothly this Win 7 upgrade goes.  It ought to be one of the relatively pain-free upgrades: I’m already running Vista 64-bit.  But there’s a chance the serial-to-USB driver I’m using won’t make it…and that’s the piece that lets the Oregon weather station talk to my computer.

I’m taking all the precautions though, including a lot of disk clean-up today, and tonight I’m planning to do a complete partition backup of the Vista system drive.  Just in case.

Sometime in the coming weeks, I’m also thinking about a facelift for this here blog…