No, I am better than that! » Reviews

Audio, audio, and more audio … books

Rick Osborne — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:22:05 +0000

I’ve been remiss in keeping up to date on the audiobooks I’ve gone through lately. Here’s a quick catch-up, in no particular order:

The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality by Brian Greene

Rating: 5/5

Awesome. Brian Greene does a great job of explaining the building blocks of quantum physics and string theory, such that even a guy who hasn’t taken a hard science course in a decade can still follow along. I’d recommend this for just about anyone, even non-hard-science-types.

Life in the Treetops: What is the Value of Biodiversity? by Dr. Margaret Dalzell Lowman

Rating: 1/5

Meh. The talk covered almost nothing of the topic. It was more of an hour-long synopsis of her book. Even that isn’t quite true, really—it’s was an hour of “in my book I talk about …” with no real content. Almost worthless, unless you want an hour-long intro to help you decide whether or not to read the book.

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

Rating: 2½/5

I wanted more from this. It’s not horrible, but I was hoping for something a bit more … interesting. The anecdotes and investigations are mildly amusing, but ultimately shallow.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

Rating: 4/5

While not Douglas Adams’ best book, this was enjoyable.

Rainbow Six and Net Force: Hidden Agendas by Tom Clancy

Rating: ½/5

Horrible. I really enjoyed Clancy’s longer, more serious books. I’ve read The Hunt for Red October several times, and have worked my way through pretty much the entire Ryanverse. These two series are not in any way nearly as good as the Ryanverse books. These two are just testosterone silly-fests. (Which is too bad, as I enjoy the John Clark and Ding Chavez characters.)

Timeline by Michael Crichton

Rating: 4/5

After rereading Jurassic Park and The Lost World a few months back, I decided to buy/rent/borrow as much Crichton as I could, as I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed his books. (Up to the generally horrible last few pages—Sphere, I’m looking at you!) Timeline didn’t suck, and went pretty much where you’d expect it to go.

Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot

Rating: 3½/5

(What can I say? I have diverse reading habits.) While certainly not a “must read” for guys, this book wasn’t bad. The characters are (purposefully, I assume) a little too saccharine, but the plot and dialogue were interesting and amusing.

So … I know it looks like I queued up a bunch of time travel and quantum physics books, but I didn’t mean to! I swear! It just worked out that way.

My iPod informs me that I have 51 items for approximately 9.2 days worth of audiobooks queued up. Sigh. I’ll get through them eventually.

Working on a Mac, Day 4

Rick Osborne — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:05:04 +0000

The Good:

The screen on the MacBook Pro is bright and the dot pitch is low enough that it doesn’t bother me at all.
Text is very, very pretty.
Most of the software I’m used to on my Ubuntu machine works on the Mac, too.
The whole Disk Image (.dmg file) concept is brilliant. Dragging apps into the Applications folder to install them is truly awesome. I miss Synaptic for app discovery, but you can’t beat the Mac install process.
iTunes on Mac is wicked faster than iTunes on Windows.
Once you get used to the multi-touch and gesture support on the touchpad, it’s not half bad. By default the touchpad is set to be braindead, but once you turn on the right-click functionality and some of the gestures, it’s just as fast. (I do miss the nipple mouse from PC laptops, though.)
Battery life on the MacBook Pro is decent, and certainly better than an equivalent PC laptop. It’s maybe a little better than my Ubuntu laptop, but not by much.
Inter-app communication seems to be much more advanced than on Windows or Linux. You did something in Rick’s Music App that iTunes should probably know about—I’ll just let iTunes know for you. (Quicksilver, of course, being the ultimate example of this.)

The Bad:

Busted keymaps: Home and End don’t go to the start and end of a line. (They want to go to the start and end of a document.) This makes them useless for single-line text fields, where they do exactly nothing. You can remap them with customized keybindings, but applications have to be coded to specifically pay attention to that, so support is spotty. There’s a Command-Arrow combination for each, but that’s still slow.
Busted keymaps, part 2: There doesn’t seem to be any logical distinction between Control, Option, and Command. In Windows, Alt is shorthand for start this task while Ctrl is shorthand for apply this setting. Mac accelerators seem to be willy-nilly chaos.
Busted keymaps, part 3: Delete and Backspace are not reliable. Like maybe some applications are overriding them? I need to do more research here to figure out what the deal is.
Mac, Vista, and XP all follow the same set the default options for the idiot user and let the gurus dig to find a way to change it mentality. (Reference above: you have to dig to find the setting to turn checkboxes into tab stops.) Linux apps these days seem to get this, offering a single simple/advanced mode toggle that unhides all the interesting stuff.
Command-Tab is somewhat broken: it seems that I can’t use it to switch between windows, just between applications? I’m sure there must be a setting somewhere for this, right? (Update: Command-~ cycles between widows with an app. I’m not sure if I love it, but it’s better than nothing.)

The Ugly:

Far too many applications, I’d say almost all of them, are coded to assume that you want to use the mouse to get around. Many are downright unusable from the keyboard alone. I get that Macs are mouse-centric, but it’s still annoying. I never realized how much I should appreciate that nearly everything on Windows is a tab stop, because almost nothing on a Mac is.
There seems to be a dearth of utility software. If an official Apple product performs a function, no matter how bad it does it the consensus seems to be just use iTunes/Pages/Time Machine/this AppleScript. (Linux also suffers from the here’s a shell script dysfunction, but in its defense that’s part of its underlying philosophy.)

I’m still not completely sold on the whole Mac suite, and some of it makes me want to throw the laptop across he room, but I have to admit that it does a whole lot of things right.

Review: Simply Audiobooks rental service (one month in)

Rick Osborne — Thu, 28 May 2009 19:03:13 +0000

Reviewed by Rick Osborne
May 28, 2009
Rating: 5/5

I signed up with the Simply Audiobooks CD rental service one month ago today. The service is similar in concept to Netflix: you use their website to queue a number of audiobooks, which they send to you in postage-paid returnable packaging. You pay a price determined by how many audiobooks you want to be able to rent at one time—I’m using the plan that gives me 2 audiobooks at a time for $27 per month.

I’m a bad-first-good-second kind of guy, so be sure to stick around for the good.

The Bad

In the one month I’ve been signed up, I’ve received 6 audiobooks from Simply Audiobooks. In all cases, I was able to get the audiobooks onto my iPod and the CDs back in the mail by the next business day. Given my 2-out plan, that’s an effective 10-day turnaround per audiobook. Those used to or expecting Netflix’s 2-4 day turnaround will be disappointed. Simply Audiobooks doesn’t have the number of urban distribution centers that Netflix has, and they are bogged down by slower postal times for the larger media packages.

Simply Audiobooks also doesn’t have the number of titles, and therefore the selection, that Audible has. Or, to be fair, they may have comparable numbers, but not all of their titles are available for rental. They also offer audiobooks for purchase and for download, and many titles are not available in all formats. But, their selection is still pretty good—we’re not talking about the wastelands of your local bookstore’s bargain audiobooks bin. If you read mainly bestseller titles and new releases, you shouldn’t have any problems.

Oddly enough, I may be breaking the Simply Audiobooks terms of service by listening to them on my iPod. There’s a bit of ambiguity, but as near as I can tell the terms only allow you to listen to the audiobooks on a CD player and nothing else—you’re not supposed to transfer or shift them to another device. This seems like an antiquated restriction, but I doubt it’s one imposed by Simply Audiobooks—more likely it comes from the content owners from whom the audiobooks are bought. Those concerned with this technicality may want to partake of their download service, instead.

The Good

I moved to Simply Audiobooks after constant frustration with Audible. It’s not that Audible was doing anything wrong, just that their price point wasn’t effective for me. Audible’s credit system, where you pay a monthly fee to accrue credits that can be used to buy books, isn’t cost-effective for people like me who go through more than an audiobook or two per month. The rental arrangement via Simply Audiobooks is less effective for lower volume, but very nice for me: those 6 audiobooks for $27 cost me $4.50 each. You can’t beat that.

The Simply Audiobooks customer service has been excellent. When I mentioned them on my blog and then twittered about them, they took it upon themselves to send me an extra audiobook above the two I already had checked out. Awesome! I also submitted a few website suggestions and got an email back from an actual person thanking me.

The quality of the CDs has been about what you would expect: there have been a few discs with scratches, and a couple of irreparable skips, but nothing too bad. It’s equivalent to what I get from the audiobooks at my local public library.

Summary

I admit it: I am completely enamored with the Simply Audiobooks rental program. It fits my price point and my schedule. Selfishly, I’d love to see them expand to a distribution in my area to cut down on the turnaround times, but that’s the only real complaint I can think of. I’d recommend their service to anyone who goes through more than a single audiobook per month.