Hyper Gumbo » books

Shatnerquake

Don — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:49:53 +0000

A book where all the characters William Shatner ever played have come to life and are seeking to kill the real Will? Hell yeah, I’m gonna read that.

Shatnerquake – Jeff Burk

Free Yellow Submarine in iBook

Don — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:25:04 +0000

There’s a multimedia remix of the Yellow Submarine movie, as an ebook, in the iTunes store currently, and it’s free even. Looks pretty cool so far, but I always loved that movie.

Quirk Classics

Don — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 20:24:22 +0000

Zombies started it all, and now a kitten replaces a cockroach in the intriguing The Meowmorphosis, best of all, the kindle version is only 99-cents, versus 11 bucks for the paperback.

Seattle Edible Book Festival 2011

Don — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 16:15:41 +0000

Made it down for a second year, to the Edible Book Festival, a unique fundraiser event for the Seattle Center for Book Arts (SCBA). Basically people make book related foods, often puns on the titles, but sometimes more abstract. This year there seemed fewer professionally done entries, but still plenty of entertaining ones whatever their creator’s skills. Easily my favorite was the pixel-painted Jesus in French Fries.

Flickr’s uploader had a bit of a hiccup and split my pics into two events with the same name. One and Two. About 1/3 of the way through fixing titles and creators.

Oh yeah, me!

Don — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 02:15:42 +0000

I’m at Half-Price books, waiting for them to total up my latest drop-off, wandering through the store, and notice they have two Melissa M Snodgrass books. Oh wow, I think to myself, don’t see those very often. And then it dawns on me, I recognize the books because they are ones I’ve sold them. It got me wondering, how long it takes them to get rid of everything I’ve sold to them, and how long till they turn a profit on me, if ever.

Missed Opportunity

Don — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:45:52 +0000

I’m watching Y&R, and they have a scene in a book store. In the background behind one of the characters, they had a book cover prominently displayed, for “Bumpy the Camel”. I’ve never been more disapointed in not being advertised to. OK, that’s a little hyperbolic, but still, I can’t believe no one has written a book with that title yet. Maybe I will.

One day there was a camel. A camel named Bumpy.

“I’m not bumpy

I am humpy” he cried, whenever someone called him “Bumpy”. So naturally, all the animals called him Bumpy.

….

Finally Found

Don — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:34:39 +0000

Finally found the right search terms to find another childhood book series I only half remembered. Turns out it was “Danny Dunn“. I could really only remember two stories’ plots, and that only pieces. One was a robot dragonfly, and the other was a cold ray that they used to cause rain, IIRC. I was about ready to spend an askme, but for once, there really was a previous question that applied to my current question, and the answer was revealed.

happy happy, joy joy

Uncovertable TXTs?

Don — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:56:35 +0000

A new kindle curiosity today. I have some .txt files that an author put up on his website, of some of his classic short stories, for free. I’ve been slowly kindleizing them, and ran into one today that Amazon’s online converter choked on. Bringing the file up in UltraEdit showed nothing immediately obvious, so I try resaving as a UTF-8 only txt, still no joy. Bring it up in MS-Word and save as a doc, and now everything is happy. Someday when I have nothing better to do, I’ll start chopping up the original txt file, till I find the smallest subset that amazon will choke on, figure out what it doesn’t like.

Kindle Encryption Curiosity

Don — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:47:59 +0000

There are now three Kindles in my family. The original one, the 2nd Gen, and now the DX of infamy.

I’ve bought lots of for-fee books from Amazon for each one, converted a lot of Gutenberg-esque free texts for them, and “purchased” a bunch of the free books that Amazon offers as well. Plus a half-year of subscribing to a fiction magazine.

Lots of content, all scattered about. Turns out, more of it is capable of crossing devices than I would have suspected. As someone who works with cryptography for a living, I always wondered about the security implied in the service Amazon supplies, to convert your personal documents into the kindle format. I need not have worried on their behalf; they don’t encrypt your personal documents, only re-encapsulate them. They give you a different target address for each device, even when you’ll just be downloading to PC, so I assumed they were doing some sort of differentiation in content sent back. But when trying to play around with Kindle for PC, I had to set up a separate Amazon account, I discovered that not only were all the personal documents, regardless of target machine, openable by the different account-ed PC, so were all the free-from-amazon public domain books, and the magazine issues.

So, it turns out you can share kindle docs with other users, just not ones you paid for. Seems oddly reasonable.

Small Nostalgiac World

Don — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 15:28:50 +0000

20-30 years ago, halfway around the world, a boy found wonder and escape in a book that mixed science fiction, historical facts, and a very British space comic, into one memorable, albeit confusing, book.

The other day, I stop in the hobby store down the street, a once a year expedition, and find it again. Just as I remembered.

What’s crazy is, I was about to waste an AskMe question to figure out the title, and here the actual book drops into my lap, and on sale even.