Jim Willis

  • Could Competition from Private Equity Make Kindle Suck Less?

    I received a Kindle for Christmas. I love it despite the fact that it feels like Amazon has done little if anything to advance the technology of the ebook reader in the 10 years that have passed since I bought my wife her first Kindle 2.

    Highlighting passages in an ebook on a Kindle still feels janky and broken. The interface, or lack thereof, forces users to hunt and peck around the screen with a fingertip, making wild guesses about what effect various taps will have.

    Much smarter people than I have thought hard about how much better ebook reading could be. Craig Mod is one of those people and has written about this on Medium and his personal site.

    That said, receiving the Kindle for Christmas motivated me to dig out my Princeton University library login and see what kind of books were available on loan for me to read.

    Some background: This was not my first attempt at borrowing digital materials from the library. A few months ago I tried borrowing an audiobook from the PU library and was prompted to download an application on my iPhone called Overdrive to search and borrow materials.

    The Overdrive experience was awful.

    So bad in fact that I immediately shelled out $15/month to audible.com even though the user experience there is only a bit less tedious.

    No doubt part of the friction with my first attempts using the Overdrive application to borrow digital materials from the library was having to jump through Princeton’s dual-factor authentication to validate that I could borrow materials.

    As I switched back and forth from the Overdrive app to Safari, back to Overdrive, my inner-coder could sense just how precarious and failure-prone this authentication process would be.

    This is all to say that I didn’t have very high hopes when on the day after Christmas I grabbed a completely unnecessary plate of Christmas cookies and fired up my iPad to see what ebooks might be available for me to borrow from the library to read on my new Kindle.

    This time though instead of using the Overdrive app to access the library’s materials, I was promted to download an app called Libby.

    Libby is a much better version of the original Overdrive. More polish, less janky. Moreover, it did two things straightaway that indicated it had been completely rewritten from the ground up:

    • it handled the two factor authentication without a hiccup. Library authentication was dumbfoundingly easy and very elegantly integrated into the Libby app. Morevoer, Libby seems to handle multiple libraries with ease.
    • the app asked me right out of the gate if I wanted to read ebooks that I’ve borrowed in the app or on my Kindle. It handled the Kindle integration with ease as well.

    With Libby the friction of borrowing ebooks from the library is barely any more difficult than purchasing an ebook from the Kindle store. [note: When I read something (physical, digital) from a library and I really enjoy it I will in most cases purchase the hardcover version of the book for my bookshelf. Both to support the author and to give me some visual cues of what I’ve read. That’s just me. Judgement-free zone here.]

    I get that borrowing digital materials from the library comes with its own bag of problems around revenue and timing of book sales (publishers now delay making digital versions of their books available to libraries for a few weeks after the hardcover hits to avoid cannibalizing sales, etc.). Throughout my career I’ve worked with libraries in various capacities and experience has taught me that on the whole, librarians are both passionate and vigilant.

    So, when private equity behemoth KKR announced their purchase of Overdrive from Rakuten at 6:30pm on Christmas Eve there was a bit of a stir on twitter about how this spelled the end for Overdrive and its swell Libby application:

    https://twitter.com/kawy/status/1209741083900628992

    https://twitter.com/bibrarian/status/1209690019633475584

    https://twitter.com/juliegoldberg/status/1210442912762335232

    Twitter has me thinking that librarians, who may be our most vocal ambassadors of a freely available commons of knowledge and information, don’t seem to have a lot of love for the folks in private equity. In particular a lot of angst seemed to stem from KKR’s acquisition and dissolving of Toys R Us and there appears to be some expectation that they’ll do the same with Overdrive.

    BoingBoing.net’s Cory Doctorow seems to take a similar view with his coverage of the acquisition noting KKR’s model here is:

    to buy profitable, productive companies, load them up with debt (paying themselves out of the money that was borrowed), cut costs by slashing wages and degrading the quality of their products and services, then allowing the company to go bust, stiffing the creditors, workers, and suppliers (that is, libraries, publishers and writers).

    I am a fan of BoingBoing as well as Doctorow’s fiction but something wasn’t sitting right with the way this acquisition was being portrayed. So I did some Googling and found a few interesting facts about KKR:

    • First off, while I’m sure many Toys R Us employees would have preferred to have kept their jobs instead of seeing their employer go under, KKR and Bain put up $20mil as severance pay for Toys R Us employees who were let go. I thought that was interesting and somewhat overlooked in the Twitter rage-fest about KKR’s evils.
    • Secondly, why buy such a strange, niche company/product as Overdrive/Libby just to drain revenue? Where is the revenue? Did I miss something about the cash cow lurking in libraries and digital media? So then I discovered that KKR has also recently acquired RBMedia, an audiobook publisher that also owns audiobooks.com and RBDigital.
    • Thirdly, I read this paragraph in a Forbes piece on KKR (the whole article is worth reading):

    According to Kravis [one of the K’s in KKR], Japan is littered with cheaply priced conglomerates loaded with underperforming assets. He recalls asking the CEO of one of Japan’s big trading companies how many subsidiaries the company owned. The Japanese executive said 2,000. When Kravis asked how many were core, the answer was still 2,000 . .
    “I’ve been going to Japan since 1978. I always saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Now it’s real,” Kravis says with a youthful glint in his eye. Roberts adds, “Japan today reminds me of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States.”

    Taking these three points together (Rakuten is, of course, a Japanese company with a bunch of subsidiaries) seems to me like KKR may actually have some kind of strategy here to integrate these disparate acquisitions. Maybe they want to make money the old-fashioned way by building something that makes it easier/better to borrow digital materials from the library than what currently exists in the market? Who knows?

    All that said, this whole thing would have been way more interesting if KKR had purchased Rakuten’s Kobo (ebook) subsidiary.

    I don’t know enough about libraries to know who KKR is competing with as it (hopefully) builds out its Libby/audiobook.com/RBDigital integration. But I do know that it they buy Rakuten’s Kobo subsidiary they may have enough resources to wake Amazon from the complacency that has allowed the flaws in the Kindle to exist for so long. Maybe Overdrive was just the first bite at the apple? Who knows. But in contrast to most of the hot takes on Twitter, I’m skeptical that KKR purchased Overdrive just wring out revenue and shut it down.

  • Troubleshooting PDF OCR using Python on Mac

    I wrote a script to extract some text from a PDF (image-based text, so pdftotext wouldn’t work).

    Using pdf2image convert_from_path I simply could not get any data out of the pdf. I tried multiple PDFs while testing and convert_from_path just kept returning an empty variable.

    Turned out that my homebrew install of xpdf was interfering with my homebrew install of poppler.

    Uninstalling xpdf (brew uninstall xpdf) and reinstalling poppler (brew install poppler) seemed to fix things up. My suspicion is that they both come with their own versions of pdfinfo which is used by pdf2image. Just a hunch, I don’t know enough about what’s going on under the hood. So, anyway, if pdf2image isn’t working correctly for you and you’re on a Mac, make sure you’ve got poppler installed and that xpdf’s pdfinfo isn’t being used.

  • Book Notes: The Alchemist

    The Alchemist by Paula Coelho was recommended to me by the Goodreads algorithm, which apparently stinks as the only thing that kept me turning the pages in this book was the suspense of trying to figure out why the heck this book was recommended to me.

    Not my bag I suppose.

    Have been slowly making my way through Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations this winter and I did enjoy the parallels in some of the ideas in this book and Meditations, especially around the sentiment when Coelho articulates that the timing of death is largely irrelevant if you are truly living in the present.

    Still, maybe Goodreads was suggesting this for the 14 year-old me? I think I might have appreciated it back then. Not sure. But will definitely be more skeptical of future algorithm suggestions.

  • Book Notes: To Kill A Mockingbird

    We will be seeing the new production of To Kill A Mockingbird in a few weeks so I decided to re-read the book on the kindle I received for Christmas.

    Having read nothing but non-fiction for a long time now I forgot how much I enjoy the sensation of getting lost in the atmosphere created by good fiction writing. Lee does a good job evoking the feel, the routine, and the patterns of a neighborhood from a kid’s perspective. I feel like my own feet have worn a path in the ground from the Finch’s to the schoolyard over these past few days.

    It’s interesting that the book ends with Scout seeing her neighborhood from Boo’s perspective and really underlines how important that notion of empathy is that runs through the book.

    Also I had completely over-simplified the story in my head over time and forgotten just how much this is a story about class structure as it is about race. Such a great and important book and am glad for the experience of having read it again.

    The book’s message of empathy, the importance of seeing the world from someone else’s shoes and how most people are nice “when you finally see them” seem more relevant now than ever.

  • Mac radio nirvana

    Setting up my new iMac, I’ve found a nice combination of apps to make listening to radio at my desk a real pleasure.

    [update Jan 8, 2020: this setup still works great but I have also purchased the subscription to Triode and also use the Mac desktop version of the app when at my desk]

    First up is Triode on my iPhone. A terrific iOS application from a long-time Apple software developer, the iconfactory. On my drive out to Princeton, I lose reception to WBGO* (an NPR jazz radio station out of Newark, NJ) so being able to stream the station over the internet is necessary. Triode makes the whole internet-radio station experience much better by looking up track info and making artwork available, etc.

    Paired with Airfoil Satellite (also from a long-time Apple developer, Rogue Amoeba) installed on my iMac, I can send the audio from my iPhone to my iMac as if it were just another Airplay device. I use some combo of Airfoil, Airfoil Satellite and and the Airfoil iOS remote all around my house on Mac hardware of various vintages. It is a fantastic audio utility—my only grudge here is that it doesn’t send stereo output to my pair of HomePods but I think that is an Apple limitation more than an Airfoil limitation.

    A few notes:

    • My iMac sends audio output via 1/8” connector to one of these cool Tripath solid state mini-amps. I love this thing and have a few of them around the house. Sounds great. Easily powers a pair of bookshelf speakers.NewImage
    • I can’t get the WQXR Holiday Station to stream on Triode. The app, thoughtfully, has a way to add a new station manually using the stream’s URL but after spending a while inspecting WNYC’s page code/resources, I can’t find the URL. Would love it if anyone can share the actual URL.
    • *I support WBGO with a donation and if you’re a jazz fan, might want to consider the same!

  • Essential Mac Apps – 2019 edition

    This week I’ve been building up my new iMac from a base-install of Mojave. I have a text file that lists all of the apps that I had installed on my dead MacBook Pro (and, good backups, thankfully), but instead of just reinstalling all of the apps I had, in the spirit of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, I’m just installing the apps that are essential to my intentional use. We will see how this goes!

    Here’s what I’ve got so far as apps that are absolutely essential for me:

    • Things – best todo list manager ever. Installed on and syncs with all of my iOS devices.
    • DayOne – best journal application ever. Installed on and syncs with all of my iOS devices.
    • Reeder – my RSS Reader of choice. Linked to a Feedly account (but only because that was the free/easy migration path from Google’s RSS days)
    • Byword – my Markdown/editor for the past year or so. I use this on the desktop and iA Writer on my iOS devices. Both editors read from the same iCloud folders.
    • Spark – returning to this email client because I can never get the default Mail.app to mirror what is going on in my Google Inbox in any relevant, useful way. My fault probably, but I’m tried of futzing with it and Spark, generally, just works.
    • MarsEdit – where I write/edit weblog stuff. Though, notably, my first drafts usually go in Byword or iA Writer depending on what device I’m working on.
    • Pixlemator – been using this forever. you never know when you need some layer-based image manipulation.
    • TextMate – No idea why/how this ended up as my programming tool of choice but I can not remember ever not using it. Always been very happy with its syntax highlighting regardless of what language I’m in.

    When I’m remotely working for Princeton University Press:

    • MS Office 365 (Mac versions, including Outlook for mail)
    • Teams, thankfully, runs on my iOS devices, so I don’t really ever have to spend too much time in Windows, but when I do there’s . . .
    • Parallels with . . .
    • SQL Server Management Studio because I need a SQL client.

    Sort-of essential/system utilities stuff that I’ve installed in addition to my “essential” apps:

    • Spotify
    • Backblaze (offsite backup for all the Macs in my house)
    • iStat Menus (nerdy, probably unnecessary)
    • Mosaic (nerdy, necessary)
    • SuperDuper (for my local backups. Easiest most-bulletproof backups ever)
    • Alfred (new to me but needed text expansion and a better Spotify interface, so. . . ) and the Alfred Spotify Mini Player
    • Linen background from Initial Charge

  • Brydge Keyboard vs Studio Neat Canopy for 11-inch iPad Pro

    My first immediate inital impression of the Brydge keyboard for the 11-inch iPad Pro is that it feels like the keyboard is too small and it won’t work out, not that I have huge hands or anything but because I am a pretty damn fast touch typist and the size of the keys makes me just a little bit too aware of what key I’m hitting, like I have to be aware of aiming my fingertips just a little bit more than I do on a full size keyboard.

    Even though the Apple Magic keyboard, coupled with the Canopy case from Studio Neat has some shortcomings of its own that I detail below, the Brydge is not for me and I am going to send it back.

    Keyboards compare

     

    I can still type pretty quickly on the Brydge but make more errors on it and it just feels cramped a bit compared to the Apple Magic keyboard that I usually type on.

    That said, with the Brydge I can sit on my couch with my feet up and the whole ipad/Keyboard combination balances great on my lap, way better than the Studio Neat case coupled with the magic keyboard. The Brydge feels so much more stable.

    That’s an overall feeling about the Brydge keyboard: it just feels solid and stable. It is much heavier than I expected, which no doubt contributes to its stability on my lap.

    And the little clamps on the side that hold the iPad feel much more substantial than i expected and the resistance on the hinge is also really spectacular. Not sure how well/long that resistance will hold up but for now it ‘s great.

    Compared to the Studio Neat case, the Brydge feels like a much more solid and stable solution (especially when using it on my lap) and were it not for its cramped size, I would adopt it in a heartbeat. In fact, if you have a 12.9-inch iPad Pro I couldn’t see using it without the Brydge keyboard. But on the 11, it is too cramped.

    Here’s a quick photo to show the size comparison:

    IMG 0661

    Depends on how you use your iPad

    If you have an 11-inch iPad Pro, it really comes down to what you mostly use it for. Shopping? Browsing RSS feeds? Quick emails? The Brydge is absolutely your best bet.

    But for me the iPad is a portable writing device. I love the distraction-free writing in iA Writer, especially in portrait mode with the Apple Magic keyboard. It is a focus, writing output machine with nothing standing between me and my thoughts.

    Downsides of the Studio Neat + Apple Magic Keyboard

    The downside of course is that the Studio Neat solution is not nearly as stable on my lap as the Brydge keyboard, but it is stable enough. Over the past few weeks I’ve figured out how to keep it mostly from wobbling off of my legs when I sit on the couch.

    The other downside of the Studio Neat setup is that while it protects your keyboard, it does little to provide any protection for your iPad. So I continue to just toss my iPad in my briefcase with the Studio Neat case and hope for the best. That, and when I’m walking around the office at work from meeting to meeting it feels sort of weird to have to undo the case and setup the iPad on it at the start of each meeting.

    And, importantly, I need to always remember to turn off the keyboard before I fold it up lest the F8 key gets pressed by the folding case (and it’s always the F8 key) which is, of course, the Play button and The Cars You Might Think starts playing. I’ve ended many a meeting over the past few weeks with my iPad playing that song as folks filter out of the conference room.

    My iPad is a portable writing device for me and the difference between writing on the Apple Magic Keyboard and the Brydge keyboard is night and day.

  • Hue bulbs not quite bright enough

    Man, I wish I had thought of this earlier!

    I love my Philips Hue setup. If you’re a parent of a kid who gets up every day at, say, 4:50am, there’s nothing better than being able to come downstairs on an early December morning to some very dim orange-hued lights and Windam Hill playing low on the stereo HomePods (thanks iOS automation!)

    Keeps everyone chill, right?

    But now that it’s winter and dark I’m thinking my hue bulbs are not quite bright enough in the late afternoon. Leave it to reddit to come up with a solution:

    https://smile.amazon.com/Leviton-128-Light-Socket-Adapter/dp/B000RN19V4

    Now I can put two Hue bulbs in some of the larger lamps. The dingus is on its way, will try it out tomorrow.

    Follow up: awesome! Highly recommended. If you want a brighter setup with your hue bulbs, definitely pick up a couple of these socket adapters, well worth it to help brighten up the long, long nights of winter.

  • Time-stamped log entry in Day One

    I don’t typically create multiple entries for a given date in Day One. Rather, I just use Markdown and add bullets as things occur throughout the day, usually with a time stamp. e.g.:

    – 8:20AM: made requested modifications to Joe’s SQL query

    This is pretty basic stuff here but I wish that there was some way in Day One to automatically expand a time stamp but there isn’t and there’s no way to do so using iOS built-in keyboard shortcuts, either.

    So this is a basic shortcut that captures the text in a dialog window, adds a bullet and time stamp, copies all of that to the clipboard and then opens Day One.

    Refinements:

    • Find a way to programmatically determine today’s Day One entry so that when Day One opens, it opens to the correct entry
    • Modify shortcut so that it can all be done using siri with speech-to-text conversion

    Shortcut Link

  • iPad Pro External Keyboard Portrait Mode

    It feels a bit like watching Hendrix play his Strat upside down, but I have really settled into enjoying using my iPad Pro in portrait mode with an external keyboard. There is something about the dimension of the screen being closer to that of a piece of paper that I’m filling with text that is more visually appealing to me than typing with the screen in landscape mode.

    Super-meta, you’re looking at this post in this post!

    The problem here is of course is that it really limits my external keyboard options. Right now I’m using the Apple Magic keyboard in a Canopy case from Studio Neat.

     

    Canopy

    I have a love/hate relationship with this case:

    Cons:
    – Whenever i forget to turn off the keyboard and fold up the case, inevitably the F8 key gets depressed and my iPad starts playing music.
    – It is only so-so stable when typing on my lap. Not impossible but not like a laptop.
    – It doesn’t protect the iPad Pro, just the keyboard so i always feel a little weird just putting the iPad in my briefcase.

    Pros:
    – it is well-designed and looks nice
    – because the iPad is just sort of balanced in a little slot between the case and the keyboard it is super-easy to just grab the ipad and walk around with it. I don’t have to disconnect anything.
    – I can type in portrait mode or landscape mode, the canopy doesn’t care!

    So I’ve been thinking about getting a Brydge keyboard which would:
    – provide some protection of the iPad when it’s in my briefcase
    – Provide a more stable typing environment when using on my lap

    However it would not allow me to type in portrait mode. Also, I’m not so sure how easy the iPad is to connect/remove from the Brydge keyboard’s connector slots.

    That said, i haven’t ordered the Brydge yet and may still find some kind of solution that allows me to protect the iPad when it’s in travel. And typing in portrait mode (especially in ia Writer and Day One where i do about 80% of my writing) is really so nice, maybe i just stick with what I’ve got here.

Current Spins

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Posts Worth Reading:

Free Internet vs Internet of Free Stuff

Letterboxd

Reading Notes

  • Read: Manufactured Anxiety: How Self-Improvement Became a Self Destruct Sequence
    Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you […]
  • Read: My Friends Aren’t Reading
    the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, […]
  • Read: Pema Chödrön’s Three Methods for Working with Chaos
    • No more struggle: “Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. […]
  • Read: Why Not Bluesky
    The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make […]
  • Read: The Tech Coup
    . The EU invokes a mechanism called the precautionary principle in cases where an innovation, such as GMOs, has not yet been sufficiently researched for […]

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