Skip to main content

A bookshelf in your palm

With the advent of e-books, software readers, hand-held devices and the Project Gutenberg, you literally have access to more than a book shelf.

A good e-book reader for your mobile when you are standard at some place with nothing to do is Mobipocket reader. It comes along with a good PC based e-book creator that can take simple HTML or .txt files and convert into a format usable from a mobile device.

With the text files combined with Emacs and a few regexps, I was able to convert most of the files to readable html files in a few minutes and feed them back to the e-book format converter for hours of readable entertainment.

So, my current bookshelf contains:

  • Arabian Nights
  • Robinson Crusoe by Defoe Daniel
  • The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker
With these books with me, who would mind waiting on a long queue?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Inside a Text Editor Ever since my college days, after dabbling with vi and a few other editors, I always had an yearning to create my own. Now, I am still stuck with XEmacs and jEdit and had a chance to compile / study the sources and documentation of EMACS and a free editor component called Scintilla. Until now, I was under the the belief that text editors used a doubly linked list to represent the text in memory. The advantages of this approach being insertions and deletions are much more easier which is just a matter of just un-linking a node off the list. But the shortcomming is that they tend to fragment memory with each node or line take a bit of memory. The other alternative approach is to have a dynamic array which is a contiguous space of memory and can sometimes be directly written off to a file. The disadvantages are that insertion and deletion are costly and you need to reallocate quite frequently. While goint throug the source and documentation of text editors, I chanced ...
The time machine Managed to get a copy of the King Solomon's Mines by Henry Rider Haggard. The book was originally published at 1855, more than 150 years since I am reading it. I'm sure that it would transport me back in time revealing how people lived and the problems that they faced. Of course, you can get the text in an electronic form from the Project Gutenberg for free, but I prefer the traditional form of reading where you can 'shutdown' any time and 'restore' in a jiffy. The other book that I have in reserve is The Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864). There are so many classics that you can get access to for free if you do not mind staring at your display or PDA. But don't miss them out.
Battle of Wesnoth Been on the lookout for a free turn based strategy game and chanced upon the Battle of Wesnoth . Despite it being an open source game (meaning, you get the source), it was incredibly polished akin to any of the other turn based strategy game (Alpha Centauri), be it the background score or the graphics or the tutorials. The game itself is set in a period similar to the D&D or nethack era. For the film buffs, if you have read or seen the Lord of the Rings, you would probably be able to relate to the clans that populate the game world. The game play, as with any turn based strategy game requires background information on each of the units that you own, their strengths and weaknesses and a lot of planning (a kin to chess, but with a lot more parameters) where factors like day - night cycles are taken into account (e.g, humans fight well during the day, but the orcs are better during the night). It is encouraged to keep your older units as they gain experience and beco...