Stuff

Delicious Library is one of the slickest apps on the Mac, and won countless design accolades. Essentially, it is a database for your books, CDs and DVDs (version 2 added gadgets), and it looks glorious on a large monitor like mine. It seems like a novelty for collector-fondlers, and I myself unfairly dismissed it as a toy in 2008, but behind its playful user interface lies a remarkably powerful organizational tool, and the new 2.5 version has made major improvements in stability and performance after 2 years of relative neglect.

My wife and I are both avid readers—one of our common dreams is to someday have a home with a dedicated room for a library. We are squarely in the demographic for the Bookshelf porn website. Here is a montage of mine alone, not including the books I reluctantly had to consign to storage, or those in my parents’ basement back in France:

With well over 900 books, I needed a system to manage. At some point I discovered Delicious Library has a writeable location field in its database for every item, and you can create virtual shelves to organize your books. I literally have one DL shelf for each shelf in my bookshelves, one for each box in storage, and one for all the books I keep at work. This way, I can browse shelf by shelf or box by box, or conversely look up the location of a book I need.

You may think recording the location of each book would be a mind-numbing task, but Delicious Library makes it effortless. It can read ISBN bar codes using the iSight camera included in most Macs, but a better option is to use the Microvision RoV Bluetooth barcode scanner they sell and support. It is quite expensive at well over $200, specially compared to the inexpensive Symbol CS1504, but the convenience makes it well worth the price if you have a serious library to wrangle.

If you select a shelf on the left sidebar, then scan a barcode, the book is automatically added to the selected shelf. I filed a feature request with them in 2008 for precisely this, and I do not know when they added it, but it makes a world of difference. The scanner has a memory, so you can zip into an adjoining room, scan all the barcodes on a shelf, zip back and let the scanner pour the shelf’s inventory into DL. It even reads out the titles as they are added. Repeat the process and quite quickly you can compile an inventory of your entire library.

The search function in DL is somewhat primitive, but Smart bookshelves (similar to iTunes’ Smart playlists) help. I have Smart Bookshelves for:

• Books I have already read
• Books I have yet to read
• Books that now have significant resale values on Amazon, to identify candidates for decluttering (you would be surprised to see the markups some art or technical books can fetch once they go out of print, even temporarily, such as my old copy of De Marco’s Peopleware).
• Books signed by the author
• Science-Fiction and Fantasy books, using Amazon’s (probably Bookscan’s) categorization
• Computer books, similarly

Delicious Library tries hard to use cutting-edge functionality in OS X, which is why version 2 only supported Snow Leopard and later. It has a top-notch AppleScript implementation. I am no AppleScript guru, but I relatively easily wrote my own scripts to:

• Copy the bookshelf name into all the books it contains. This essentially eliminates the data entry, but you have to be careful to make sure a book is not misfiled into two shelves at the same time. The sample script Highlight shelves containing selected media is helpful in this respect.
• Find the BookMooch entry for books I want to give away.
• Find the book in the San Francisco Public Library, in case they do not have it and might be interested in a donation.

Thanks to the user interface, browsing books on the Mac is almost as fun as doing so on the bookshelves, and infinitely faster. Of course, this is true of most book catalog programs, including many fine free options available for Windows and Mac, but most others do it with less aplomb.

The hard drive in my October 2006 vintage 80GB iPod 5.5G died a few weeks ago.  I wasn’t keen on upgrading to the iPod Classic as:

1. With a maximum capacity of 160GB, it is still too small to house my entire 220GB music collection
2. Apple introduced encrypted audio outputs on the dock connector, to force accessory makers to pay royalties, thus making it incompatible with many accessories and forcing you to buy new ones.

I use my iPod mostly in my car. The classic hard drive iPods have one key capability iPhones and iPod Touches lack—the ability to shuffle by album, which is essential when you listen mostly to classical music and where an opus maps to an album.

While investigating repair options, I found out Toshiba now makes a two-platter 240GB (224 GiB) hard drive. The iPod Classic won’t recognize the second platter (a third strike against it) but the 5.5G will. I sent mine to RapidRepair for repair/upgrade and received it back yesterday. The flip side of such an enormous drive is that the sync takes forever: I started it around 10PM yesterday and it is till running, over 9 hours later. They handled the repair very professionally, there are no marks on the casing, and I now have a fully functional 224GB iPod for less than the price of buying a new 160GB iPod Classic. The only feature it is missing is the ability to play 24-bit/96kHz ALAC files like those I made out FLACs purchased from Linn or the B&W Society of Sound.

I can’t understand why Apple does not make this new high-capacity drive available in iPods or the MacBook Air.

One of my bosses got a Kindle 2 a few months ago, and was wondering how an avowed gadget lover such as myself did not have one already. I am perfectly comfortable reading books in electronic form on the small screens of PDAs or phones, but I have little interest in carrying yet another device with its bevy of chargers and accessories, so I just humored him. As far as I am concerned, the Apple iPad pretty much killed the e-reader market. E-ink technology has a place in digital signage, but a general-purpose computing device with Internet connectivity like the iPad wins over a unitasker any day.

My main objection to commercial e-books as they are mooted today is digital rights management. e-books cannot be resold or even given to family members. Even if DRM were acceptable, the value of a restricted e-books is a fraction of the value of a real book, but pricing today is much higher, despite massively lower costs of production, and short-sighted publishers want to take them even higher, to the same levels as hardbacks.

All tech companies fall somewhere on a spectrum of evil. Microsoft is on the bumbling side—their products are inferior and their marketing practices sharp, to say the least, but they are a fairly open company when it comes to developers using their platform, and Bill Gates is a modern day Robin Hood of sorts, taking from rich Westerners and giving to the poor in the Third World. Apple embodies the seductive dark side—superior products but a company that has no compuction in stabbing developers in the back, and with a demonstrated penchant for control freakery as shown with the iPhone App Store. Google is on the undecided side, ruthlessly violating privacy, but still capable of the odd principled gesture such as facing down Chinese censors.

Amazon as a company lies quite far on this spectrum. Good customer service does not excuse their behavior:

• Jeff Bezos is personally listed as an inventor on the obviously frivolous “one click” patent and has been using it to extort royalties and stymie competitors.
• At one point they removed all gay themed books from their search listings by classifying them. Faced with a firestorm of controversy, they unconvincingly claimed it was an operator error. Why do they have a bulk blacklisting facility in the first place?
• In an example of life imitating art, they pulled e-book copies of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” from Kindle users who had paid for them. Apparently, they had never bothered to check if they had the rights to sell them. The simple fact Amazon has the power to pull books back from electronic bookshelves is unacceptable.
• They are trying to leverage their dominant position in online book sales to monopolize print-on-demand publishing by refusing to carry books not published by their own on-demand imprint, BookSurge, even though the latter is higher priced than competition and has serious quality issues.
• This is only the tip of the iceberg. Publishers speak in hushed tones about Amazon’s thuggish “negotiating” tactics, but never publicly out of fear of retaliation.

Since the launch of the Kindle, which is estimated to have 70% market share in e-readers, Amazon has been trying to leverage its market power in paper book sales to corner the market in e-books. One of the prongs in their strategy is to keep the legacy model where the publisher treats the e-book store like a dead-tree book reseller, rather than a model and revenue share more in line with the true costs of e-books (which are obviously much lower than for physical books, as the bandwidth required is piddling).

Apple’s iPad and its associated iBooks store has changed the way the debate is framed, and offers publishers an attractive agency model to counter Amazon’s diktat. It is not surprising that five of the big six publishers (all but Random House) signed up for the iBooks store.

Last Friday, in an escalation of mind-boggling arrogance, Amazon decided to punish Macmillan, the smallest and weakest of the big six (at least in the US) by withdrawing every Macmillan book from sale, including paper books, not just e-books. Among others books by Macmillan affiliate Tor, the leading label in Science Fiction and Fantasy, are not available for sale by Amazon (although they are still available from third-party sellers via Amazon’s site). Essentially Amazon is trying to use its dominance in printed book sales to twist Macmillan’s arm. As far as I am concerned, this is racketeering.

Disclaimer: my wife used to work for Macmillan in the UK. Not that it matters, Amazon’s behavior would be just as reprehensible with any other publisher.

I do not approve of the publishing industry’s doomed attempts to impose premium pricing on e-books, or their attempts to impose unacceptable DRM, but customers are perfectly capable of voting with their feet, as I do, and a middleman like Amazon behaving this way is intolerable. Booksellers censoring books or limiting supply is not an innocuous act. Norman Spinrad is in self-imposed exile in Paris because B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, the dominant booksellers in the 80s, would not sell his more controversial books (like Journals of the Plague Years) out of fear of offending conservative audiences in the Bible Belt.

Small independent bookstores are failing everywhere, and even the large Barnes & Noble and Borders chains are in dire straits. A company like Amazon with a demonstrated history of abusing its market power cannot be permitted to continue. I always buy my SFF books from the lovely Borderlands Books in any case, and my classical CDs from Arkiv Music, but I will henceforth abstain from buying books from Amazon altogether.

As for the Kindle, it can go to hell. I would not take one if they gave it to me for free.

Update (2010-02-04):

Like the SFWA, I replaced all the Amazon links on this site to Indiebound, a website that helps support independent booksellers.

Update (2014-05-28):

They are employing their racketeering tactics again, this time against Hachette.

From 2000 to 2007, I lived and worked in downtown San Francisco, and did not need a car to commute, so I never bothered to get one. When Acxiom purchased Kefta, they moved us to Foster City, 23 miles away and with no credible transit options, so I ended up buying a BMW 525i. I considered getting a Prius or a Lexus GS 450h hybrid, but opted not to. The Toyota faulty accelerator pedal fiasco makes me glad I passed.

In the eighties, Audi lost two thirds of its sales due to an unjustified rumor that its cars were prone to “sudden acceleration”. It took them 15 years to recover. The damage to Toyota will be even worse, since in this case there is in fact a problem, and the company’s damning slowness in responding will be excoriated in the court of public opinion, destroying a mostly deserved reputation for building reliable, if ugly cars. Ford, Hyundai and Honda must be licking their chops right now.

To my surprise the recall was brought home to me. Two months ago, I was car #3 in a 4-car collision (I braked in time, but the car behind me did not have as good brakes and tires as mine and rear-ended me into the car in front of me). My car has been in the garage since then and I rented a car from Enterprise Rent-a-Car (I try to patronize my clients whenever possible). The car is a Pontiac Vibe, which is essentially the same as the Toyota Matrix, both made right here in the Bay Area in the recently shuttered Fremont NUMMI plant. It has the faulty part, and Enterprise called me to exchange the car (kudos to them for being so proactive).

On August 28, 2009, California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor died in a horrendous car crash in San Diego county, along with his wife, daughter and brother-in-law, while driving a loaner Lexus ES350. The brother-in-law actually called 911 to report the accelerator was jammed. This was a different issue, one of incorrect floor mat causing the accelerator pedal to jam in the fully opened position. The car was traveling at over 100mph before the driver lost control, the car went airborne, turned over and crashed with an explosion, killing all the passengers instantly. The dealership bears a heavy responsibility in these deaths for fitting the incorrect mats, and failing to respond to a previous driver’s report of a similar incident. The rubber mats on my BMW have bolts that lock them in position with no chance of slipping, and I am surprised Lexus had such shoddy engineering in the first place. Perhaps the reputation of German engineers is not overdone, after all.

On modern cars, the brakes and even the handbrake have enough stopping power to counter the engine’s maximum torque. There is the option to switch the car to neutral gear, assuming there is no malfunction of the transmission. Shutting down the engine is not recommended, as that would also cut power to brakes and power steering, but in any case this car had a keyless ignition system, which requires pressing and holding the ignition button for three seconds. If you are in a panic situation with an unfamilar car, it is highly unlikely you will get this maneuver right, assuming you have three seconds to spare in the first place. I have a similar system in my own car, and had no idea what the procedure is to shut down a running engine.

Modern carmakers are integrators, assembling parts made by their subcontractors. It is not an exaggeration to say the German carmakers are mostly Bosch OEMs. The accelerator pedal involved in the Toyota recall is made by CTS, a US telecom gear maker who only incidentally makes auto parts. Historically Japanese companies have been resistant to using parts from non-Japanese suppliers. In many cases this was due to the keiretsu system of companies interwoven by complex cross-holdings, a successor to the zaibatsu system outlawed after the post-war US occupation of Japan. In other cases, it was due to objective factors — Japanese electronics manufacturers use high-speed power screwdrivers to speed up assembly, and US-made screws used inferior alloys compared to Japanese screw makers, stripping too easily. It took severe pressure and the threat of sanctions from US trade representatives to convince Japanese carmakers to give US suppliers a chance. This incident is likely to harden Japanese executives’ suspicion of gaijin suppliers.

On modern cars, the accelerator pedal is “drive by wire”, i.e. it is an electronic peripheral that feeds the engine control computer. Airbus introduced fly-by-wire controls in its aircraft as more conservative Boeing stuck to hydraulic controls, and this was a significant factor in Airbus overtaking Boeing in airliners. Change takes time, and carmakers are understandably hesitant to change a critical safety organ like brakes. The brake pedals are still hydraulically linked to the brakes, but have an electronic sensor to control the rear brake lights and disengage cruise control.

BMWs, Audis, and even cheaper cars like Volkswagen or Chrysler have a feature called brake override where the engine control will disable the accelerator when the brake pedal is applied. Toyota deliberately chose not to implement such a system, which would have saved Mark Saylor’s life and his family’s. This refusal is particularly incomprehensible since the hardware is already here, and the change should only require a software change and the ensuing QA and certification cycle. The software was not bad per se, but the requirements were incomplete, and this is yet one more case where bad software kills.

Update (2014-03-19):

Toyota was hit today by the Department of Justice with a record $1.2B criminal fine for its attempted cover-up, and admitted guilt. GM is apparently next.

The decline in computer prices in the last 10 years is not an unqualified blessing. Something had to give, and component quality is one of the areas where manufacturers skimp. There is no room in a $500 computer for a $100 CD-ROM drive, even a quiet yet ultra-fast one like the Kenwood 72X drives.

Another area where components have been cheapened is keyboards and mice. The impact on mice is lessened by the simultaneous transition from gunk-prone mechanical ball mice to more precise optical ones. The latter are cheaper to manufacture because they use solid state circuitry and far fewer mechanical components, but they are still pitched as a premium product.

Keyboards are another story. Anyone who writes or codes for a living (i.e. anyone who uses a computer for anything but games) benefits from a good keyboard. Longtime Byte Magazine columnist Jerry Pournelle used to rave about his Northgate OmniKey with a layout customized specifically for him. There are basically two main technologies: mechanical keyswitches and rubber dome ones. The first give that old-fashioned “clickety-clack” feeling, the second are quieter, but often a bit mushy (although there are some excellent rubber dome keyboards as well).

A few years ago, I bought the excellent Matias Tactilepro 1 keyboard. It uses premium Alps mechanical keyswitches, and has all the Macintosh special characters combinations silk-screened on the keys so you don’t have to remember that the copyright sign © is Option-g. I liked it so much that just to be on the safe side, I bought two.

At Macworld 2007, Matias announced its replacement by the Tactilepro 2, which replaces the Alps keyswitches by ones of Matias’ own design. They claimed the change was due to Alps discontinuing the manufacture of its keyswitches. By Macworld 2008, the 2.0 was itself discontinued, and the promised version 3 replacement kept being postponed until they finally announced a release date of January 2010. Interestingly, they are said to use Alps keyswitches. I guess they were not so discontinued after all…

While my version 1 Tactilepros are still working fine, the silk-screening on some of the keys has faded, and they have accumulated a fair bit of gunk like hairs under the keys. I ordered two version 3 replacements (I passed on the version 2, and read many reports complaining about it) and received them today.

The differences are subtle:

• The top of the keyboard is now a translucent milky white instead of transparent. That should help reduce the visibility of hairs and other crud that lodges itself under the keys, and is very hard to eradicate afterwards, even with canned air.
• The power key on top is gone, replaced by a dual-use Escape and power key.
• The warranty was dialed all the way down from 5 years to 1 year, hardly consistent with the claims of improved build quality.
• They now claim the keys are laser-etched and thus more resistant to rubbing out the labels. Obviously it is too early to assess the accuracy of that statement.
• The feel of the keys is slightly different in a way that’s hard to describe. They seem a little bit quieter, but just as precise.
• The 2-port built-in USB 1.0 hub was replaced by a 3-port USB 2.0 hub
• There is no tacky tactilepro.com URL on the space bar any more.
• The typeface is no longer italic and somewhat less elegant. I am a fast hunt-and-peck typist, not a touch-typist, and they feel canted backwards, much like early flat-screen monitors seemed concave compared to convex CRTs.

The warranty change is a bummer, but the keyboard is still a huge improvement over standard ones, specially Apple’s nasty laptop-style chiclet keyboards that have been included with all recent desktop models. For people who have to type a lot, it is well worth the expense.

Update (2012-03-05):

Sure enough, the space bar on mine failed after 14 months. I contacted Matias last week for support, with no response so far.

One alternative worth considering is the upcoming Das Keyboard for Mac, which uses Cherry gold keyswitches. It doesn’t have option characters engraved on the key caps, however.

Update (2017-10-05):

I replaced my Tactilepros with the CODE Keyboard. It’s not perfect either, the black coating on the keys wore off on some keys like the corner of the space bar on the one I keep at work, but the backlit keys are a god-send and my colleagues find the quieter yet still very tactile key action much less objectionable.

Interestingly, Cherry, the maker of the key switches in the CODE and many other premium keyboards, is a sister company of ZF, the makers of the automatic transmissions in BMWs.