When I travel, I usually limit my luggage to one backpack about the size a college student would wear to class. This backpack has room for a few articles of clothing, maybe 1 pants, a couple of shirts, a sweater, and an extra underpants. Then I put in a laptop, sketchbook, pencil, snacks, toothbrush, dental floss, dramamine tablets, and a few gadgets besides my laptop: a flashlight, mp3 player, earbuds, batteries, cell phone, camera. A few books top it off. Everything is easy to choose and pack except for the books. I struggle with trying to decide which books to take. There's usually whatever I'm currently reading, and then a couple I might start on the trip. I might throw in a few magazines as well. Then there are technical papers I need to catch up with for work. But what if I'm not in the mood for any of these or I'm tired of what I'm reading and want something else? What if what I want to read is huge?
This comes up not only with traveling, but with mountain climbing trips as well. When I'm in the wilderness, I like to get my hike done by mid afternoon, then set up camp and have time to relax, do some stretches, take in the scenery, read and write, and push some boulders off the mountaintop (just kidding). No matter where I go, I have to take reading material with me. This is a psychological compulsion.
My material includes everything from outdoor military style survival guides, topographic maps, climbing route guides, to every field guide one could conceivably use from tree, bird, wild flower, mineral, edible plant, mushroom, to star charts so I can some star gazing, and fiction books. Those and some technical papers for work. So, I end up with a lot of heavy stuff in my pack. I would take a laptop or a tablet into the wilderness if they weren't so fragile and had better battery life.
I recently looked into e-readers. These are small, portable, tablet-like computers which are about the size and weight of one paper-backed book. They display books published in the form of electronic media the way one would read a pdf file, new article, or a word processor document. And for some, the battery lasts a couple of months without needing to be recharged.
One drawback is that many are locked into a proprietary format that the tablet's particular manufacturer wants to force you to purchase (kindle/mobi/epub/djvu/etc...). Well there are always ways around restrictions such as proprietary formatting, so with that in mind, I bought one, a second-hand "Nook Simple Touch" e-reader posted on craigslist by a guy in Sausalito. The day I bought it, I loaded it with over 7,000 electronic texts.
Upon researching its specs, I found that for a brain it has an 800 MHZ CPU. The memory is 256 MB, and it has up to 32 GB hard drive space. It also has built in wifi and runs an "Android" operating system. What that means in non-technical terms is that if it could be unlocked, it could have the computational power of a desktop computer circa 1999 or so and the storage space of an entire library. Such a computer could surf the internet, do word-processing, play videos, display any kind of text document, pdf, or e-book.
So how to unlock this potential? Upon googling, one learns that some clever people have devised methods (also known as hacks) to do this. I chose an easy hack known as the touchnooter which can be done in several simple steps. I followed the instruction and was done in 15 minutes or so. I installed a few games, mostly old text games from the 1980s like Zork and variants. It uses the Java programming language. I've even started writing a "lunar lander" game for it in Java but am having trouble figuring out how to implement Java screen touch events to control the maneuvering thrusters. I've also installed software to let it read ebooks in any format including word processor documents, pdf files, ebooks, mobi, epub, and others formatted for other e-readers.
Sadly, there are some glitches. Although I'm reading bluelight with it, and I can read forums and blogs, bluelight goes to mobile-mode by default and I have no idea how to post in bluelight's mobile-mode. And while i can watch Youtube videos on it, there is no sound. Apparently it has no audio circuitry built in.
This comes up not only with traveling, but with mountain climbing trips as well. When I'm in the wilderness, I like to get my hike done by mid afternoon, then set up camp and have time to relax, do some stretches, take in the scenery, read and write, and push some boulders off the mountaintop (just kidding). No matter where I go, I have to take reading material with me. This is a psychological compulsion.
My material includes everything from outdoor military style survival guides, topographic maps, climbing route guides, to every field guide one could conceivably use from tree, bird, wild flower, mineral, edible plant, mushroom, to star charts so I can some star gazing, and fiction books. Those and some technical papers for work. So, I end up with a lot of heavy stuff in my pack. I would take a laptop or a tablet into the wilderness if they weren't so fragile and had better battery life.
I recently looked into e-readers. These are small, portable, tablet-like computers which are about the size and weight of one paper-backed book. They display books published in the form of electronic media the way one would read a pdf file, new article, or a word processor document. And for some, the battery lasts a couple of months without needing to be recharged.
One drawback is that many are locked into a proprietary format that the tablet's particular manufacturer wants to force you to purchase (kindle/mobi/epub/djvu/etc...). Well there are always ways around restrictions such as proprietary formatting, so with that in mind, I bought one, a second-hand "Nook Simple Touch" e-reader posted on craigslist by a guy in Sausalito. The day I bought it, I loaded it with over 7,000 electronic texts.
Upon researching its specs, I found that for a brain it has an 800 MHZ CPU. The memory is 256 MB, and it has up to 32 GB hard drive space. It also has built in wifi and runs an "Android" operating system. What that means in non-technical terms is that if it could be unlocked, it could have the computational power of a desktop computer circa 1999 or so and the storage space of an entire library. Such a computer could surf the internet, do word-processing, play videos, display any kind of text document, pdf, or e-book.
So how to unlock this potential? Upon googling, one learns that some clever people have devised methods (also known as hacks) to do this. I chose an easy hack known as the touchnooter which can be done in several simple steps. I followed the instruction and was done in 15 minutes or so. I installed a few games, mostly old text games from the 1980s like Zork and variants. It uses the Java programming language. I've even started writing a "lunar lander" game for it in Java but am having trouble figuring out how to implement Java screen touch events to control the maneuvering thrusters. I've also installed software to let it read ebooks in any format including word processor documents, pdf files, ebooks, mobi, epub, and others formatted for other e-readers.
Sadly, there are some glitches. Although I'm reading bluelight with it, and I can read forums and blogs, bluelight goes to mobile-mode by default and I have no idea how to post in bluelight's mobile-mode. And while i can watch Youtube videos on it, there is no sound. Apparently it has no audio circuitry built in.
