Hawk's Babble-Log

Interesting! Still is true today.

Download —> 50yroldcommercial.wmv

Here’s what I loved about the Color Nook:

• It’s in COLOR!!! This is so awesome!
• It runs Android! This means it’s almost like a tablet PC or a slate. In fact, you can even hack it to be an Android slate. That’s right up my alley.
• Browsing the web is amazing. Very nice, fast, and the browser renders web pages really well.
• It’s got a ton of storage: 8Gb!
• You can watch special versions of “digital copies” of movies you buy right on the Nook!
• You can lend books to your friends. Specifically, this is not a feature of the device, but of the underlying service, Barnes & Noble.

This new Color Nook is much more the device I was describing in my Open Letter to Jeff Bezos.

Continue doing things right, Nook team!

I was playing around with my sister’s Color Nook (from Barnes & Noble). She got it for Christmas and loves it. She’s already gone through over 10 books on it. The main difference between the Color Nook and any other e-reader is it’s screen. The Color Nook has a back-lit screen. My Kindle is e-paper, and is not lit in any way.

Personally, I have never minded the back-lit nature of screens. I work on computers all day at work and all night at home. I can read a book on my Android-powered G1 phone using Aldiko e-reader or Amazon’s Kindle app (a back-lit screen). I can read a book on my computer screen using Amazon’s Kindle for PC. I can read a book on my Kindle (1st generation). It’s all-good for me. But one thing I really do mind is the trend of trying to simulate paper on a back-lit screen.

No, a back-lit screen is NOT paper!

Here’s my position: If the screen is back-lit, I want the text as white as possible and the background as black as possible. This is very similar to how I write programming code; the background is very dark, the text is very bright. However, in this example, the background is semi-transparent and the text is syntax highlighted.

If I’m reading a book on Kindle for PC, I set the background color to BLACK and the text to WHITE. This is much easier on my eyes than trying to simulate paper by making the background white and the text black, as most word processors do. Why do word processors do this? They’re trying to simulate paper. I can understand that position for desktop publishing. But that just makes it more difficult to read, in my humble opinion.

Same with the new Color Nook. By default, the background is a glaring white, and the text is a hard-to-read black. There is much more light coming off the screen this way. It almost makes me want to squint to read. Going in to the settings, I could not find a way to change this. I wanted to make the background black and the text white as it’s easier to read, less light is glaring at me, and I don’t feel the need to squint or anything.

But the Color Nook does not make this easy! I had to search the web. Finally found a reference about touching near the bottom of the book (once you’re reading the book) and then hit something like text options, then hit something like themes. They had a few themes, like standard blinding white background with black text, puke sepiatone, and some other worthless themes. The one I went with was the “night” theme. It had a dark-gray background with lighter-colored text. It’s not what I want, but it’s better than the alternatives.

Dear Nook Programmers: if you make a setting (in the SETTINGS) for an inverse, a black background with white text, I’ll buy one. The gray “night” theme is better than the rest, but is not what I want.

This is cool! Someone put a lot of work into this:

Yes, that’s the sound of the mechanical floppy drives.

[in Grandpa Simpson's voice]

Back in my day… I remember them floppies. I had my own little box of floppies… my own little set of DOS tools, DOS games, etc. 1.44Megs each. That was back when 1.44Megs could hold something… like a plaintext document. We didn’t have no fancy-smancy RICHtext documents. If you wanted something bold, you had to MAKE IT ALL CAPS! And we liked it! Ahhh, the good ol’ days….

This is awesome!

http://www.2ndamendmenttv.com/videos/miscellaneous/gun-free-zones.html