Monday various

  • This is mostly for my own future reference, but should also be of interest to anyone else with an ebook reader in the audience. (I’m really loving mine by the way.) One Dollar Orbit. Orbit Books is offering an ebook a month for just $1. I’m not too interested in this month’s selected title, but I do think I’ll pick up Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons in February. Maybe it will encourage me to finally finish Consider Phlebas.

  • Also mostly for my own benefit, xkcd’s Guide to Converting to Metric. We’re making very slow progress on this in the United States, and I find it very difficult to think in terms of degrees Celsius or kilometers instead of miles. When we were in England this past November, a co-worker and I were walking around Brighton when someone on the street asked us for directions. We had just passed the building they were looking for, so my co-worker said, “It’s about maybe half a mile back that way.” To which this clearly more-local-than-us gentleman replied, “Half a mile?!” Like we’d told him it was 23 and a third radishes away or something equally nonsensical. We probably should have stuck with guessing the number of city blocks.

  • Alberto Gonzales: casualty of the Iraq war. Won’t anybody think of the real victims? [via]

  • Speaking of real victims, though: There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. This is a very disturbing idea. [via]

  • But rather than end on a downer like that, may I present — Cute Things Falling Asleep. It’s like a very specialized Cute Overload. [via]

2 thoughts on “Monday various”

  1. I got a Sony Reader for XMass, and I’ve been using it quite a bit as well. I take it to work to read on my lunch breaks, and for bed-time reading, too.

    I don’t know if you’ve seen Book Designer:
    http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_Designer

    It’s a medium-simple program that you can use to quickly change crappy .txt files (like from Project Gutenberg) into formatted .lrf (sony reader’s format) files.

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