The People's E-Book

I have been bitching (mostly on eReaderJoy.com) about how poor the tools and processes are for making ebooks. It is just weird and wrong that it's much easier for me to make a wonderfully formatted PDF file, which does not display well in small ebook readers, than to make a .mobi or .epub file, which does work well in ereaders, and should be simpler to make because it's just based on HTML and has simpler formatting.
Or to put it another way: it is just way too difficult to make an ebook, people either need a lot of study, or help from a pro. I think it should be a very simple process, once you have a correctly formatted script.

I don't know whether The People's E-book will provide the best solution, but they have the right aspirations.

Candace and Vanessa: Busted

Limiting the artist

'Thirty Six' app makes you a thoughtful photographer again, article.
It allows the user to take black-and-white pics on their iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. However, the brilliance behind the app is that it works like a film camera. The app operates on a system of film rolls of 36 exposures each.

It is really weird how too much freedom is often bad for the artist. It can be paralyzing, like standing in a bare desert, which way to go? If there's a road, it's easier.

In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, he talks about how one of his Creative Writing students had writers block. Which persisted until he told her to write about their town. The main street. The low numbers end. Starting with the first brick on the first building. Then her dam burst.

(Dang, it's nigh 30 years since I read that, maybe I should do it again. Though I objected to the whole book being about how to define quality, and then he ended just saying that it can't be defined. Of course it can, it's how good something is, how well it works according to purpose, or its innate characteristics.)

UK weapon laws

I've just seen that here in UK, you can get 2-10 years in prison for carrying a gun visibly, even if it is just a replica or realistic toy gun!
Isn't that rather... draconian? You get two years minimum in prison, basically for scaring people? I could understand a £500 ticket or something, but...

I don't know how much of this is the same for most of Europe, but I've also seen that you apparently can't even buy pepper spray legally here. It seems to be very strict about anything weapon-like. Which is particularly odd, since anybody can go into a kitchen store and buy an 8-inch butcher knife (or an axe in a building market) which will kill a man in one second flat. Pepper spray won't do that.

Basket case kid

I wondered if it was trick video, we've seen so much of that, but it just goes on too long. This kid is just a natural.

"Twitter, Instagram, Vine: Fast track to nitwit"

Twitter, Instagram, Vine: Fast track to nitwit, article.

I'm not sure why we are becoming obsessed with trying to express ourselves in tiny amounts.
You cannot have a meaningful conversation with another human being on Twitter. You cannot produce photographic art of any value within the limitations of a service like Instagram, and you sure as hell cannot produce film as art with Vine [Vine has a six-second limit on videos shared - ed].
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40 Of the most beautiful typeface designs released this January

40 Of the most beautiful typeface designs released this January, article, showcase.
It's a very good selection, mostly at good prices, I found not one, but two new fonts I think will become favorites of mine.

Reader Bert wrote to me that his favorite is Insolente. Me too, it's so understatedly gorgeous and real looking, I'd been searching for a thing like that for years.

Sigma design

New Sigma lenses for M4/3 and Sony. These are not fast lenses. Nor expensive though. But dang, what cool design!
(They do have manual focus, surprisingly.) 

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BTW, here's a thoughtful article for the new photographer.

MJ on Cheap Criticism

Cheap Criticism, article.
...hating or criticizing everything was safe because it meant you don't have to take a stand. Liking something means you are opening yourself up; if nothing is good enough for you it's another way of saying you're superior to everything. Very smug, very snug.

(Damn that's good.)

Underwater art

[Thanks to Aniko]

Photo by Anatoly Beloshchin.

Graphic Novels and Series

If you miss ya comics, Ctein (on The Online Photographer of all places) has made an article with recommendations. Those of them I know, I agree with.

I find this truly strange: from I was seven til I was... mmm, in my early forties, I was reading comics all the time. For most of that time, the one weekly thing I always did was my trek to the comics book store. But something happened during the noughties, my comics started to stack up, I didn't get around to reading them.
When the iPad came, I hoped it could revive my interest. I still have the General Interest, I still think comics is just about the ultimate story-telling and communications medium, I mean it is simply the combination of text and pictures, with those the sky is the limit. But for some reasons I just don't finish the stories or series I begin.

Maybe the problem is that most comics are "unlimited series", and require Addiction rather than mere Interest to continue following. If a good series is just six issues (and most good stories can be told in that length), I'm more likely to complete it. (And such was the case of the one digital comic I did finish, the Batman story wonderfully drawn by Greg Capullo.)

Writer Andy Ihnatko suggests that comics are made for young people, not guys in their forties (he has also been losing interest, if I recall right). But: I don't *want* to grow out of them! Also, we are not talking about a genre, we are talking about a medium. Comics no more have to be about superheroes than movies have to be action movies. So I don't know. Maybe there currently just aren't the equivalent of the excellent writers who kept my interest alive as an adult, Neal Gaiman, Frank Miller, Alan Moore?

Imagining Ho-Hum C.E.S. as an Action Movie

Imagining Ho-Hum C.E.S. as an Action Movie, article by David Pogue.
C.E.S.’s organizers publish a daily magazine during the show that profiles new products announced there. Here are some actual examples: “Braven Expands Bluetooth Speaker Line.” “Armpocket Unveils Smartphone Cases.” “Bits Ltd. Expands Line of Surge Protectors.”