Month: October 2006

I’m Going to Pass on the Sony Reader

So the Sony Reader is finally out and getting generally favorable reviews, though also with a lot of reservations. I really hoped Sony would get things right with the Reader, and they appear to have gotten a lot of things right.

The thing is, I’m not so much a reader as an annotator. When I read books, I am constantly underlining passages and making comments/asking questions in the margins. The Sony Reader has no ability at all to do any sort of annotating of texts.

If that weren’t bad enough, the device can’t even do a basic text search. That’s pretty much unforgivable, as searching through texts is something that e-books are far and away superior to paper books.

So the display may be revolutionary, but feature-wise my $125 eBookwise (which is a rebranded Rocketbook) is more functional than Sony’s $350 Reader.

That makes choosing whether to be an early adopter on the Sony Reader a fairly easy decision. Hopefully the Reader will sell well enough to warrant a second version that will include annotation and searching. Until then, I’m sticking with my eBookwise.

Custom Prince for that Katamari

Last month, I finally got myself one of the custom Katamari’s that Amy’s Babies sells on her Etsy.Com shop.

I was so impressed with the Katamari, that I sent her an e-mail about getting a Little Prince to go along with the Katamari. Amy sent me a reply saying she was working on a pattern for the Katamari DamacyPrince, so I patiently waited. And believe me, the wait was definitely worth it. This is the final result, which looks awesome,

But wait, there’s more. Just as the original custom Katamari has magnets inside of the nodes so it can pick things up, the ends of the arms of the Prince are metal, so you can position the Prince to appear as if he’s rolling the Katamari along,

Excellent.

Best North American Scrabble Score Evar

Slate’s Stefan Fatsis has the rundown on what the article bills as “the highest Scrabble score ever,” but which really appears to be just the highest score in North America.

Earlier this month in a game between two lower-level players, Michael Cresta managed to score 830 points, besting the previous North American record of 770 points. The gist of the article is that it is the fact that both Cresta and his opponent, Wayne Yorra, were middling Scrabble players, they missed a lot of opportunities that better players would have missed.

That, in an odd twist, led to the board positions to open up so Cresta could score 830 in a mad gamble to play quixotry,

That put another letter, the R, in a triple-triple lane. Cresta, who held I, O, Q, U, and X, recognized he was three-quarters of the way toward a really huge triple-triple: QUIXOTRY. (He had studied words starting with Q.) He exchanged two letters from his rack in hopes of drawing the needed T and Y. From Cresta’s vantage, 57 tiles were unseen, including three T’s and one Y. The probability of pulling one of each was 532 to 1.

Cresta beat the odds. And when Yorra didn’t block the open R—because he played his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG, for 72 points—Cresta laid down his 365-point QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought).

But Fatsis doesn’t point out that 830 is not the highest score ever. That mark belongs to the UK’s Philip Appleby who scored 1,049 points in a competition game in 1989.

And, for those who still care, apparently the highest possible word score would obliterate both records — playing benzoxycamphors on the edge of the Scrabble board will yield 1,970 points (here is a mock-up board that shows how this might be done, though this site claims it would be worth only 1,830 points).

Source:

830! Stefan Fatsis, Slate, October 26, 2006.

X-Men Cologne?

I haven’t been able to find a link to it online, but November issue of Previews — the enormous catalog that Diamond Distributors sends for orders to comic book stores — features Marvel comics-branded “fragrances.” At $14.95 a bottle, there will apparently be a Storm, X-Men and a Wolverine fragrances.

That’s several shades of WTF. And where’s my Ben Grim cologne?

Update:

Lisa FTW! She digs up a link to the X-Men fragrance, as well as a Hulk and Spider-Man fragrance,

Hulk smash puny Banner cologne!

Sonos “Upgrade”

I was so close to buying a Sonos system until I read about the 40,000 track limit on its hand controller. The weird thing is that I’ve read dozens of reviews of the Sonos system in computer and audio magazines and not a single one mentioned this limit. Maybe most people don’t have 40,000 tracks, but I’m guessing the subset of music lovers willing to spend $1,000 or more on the Sonos are likely to (I’ve got about 35,000 tracks at the moment).

Now, I’m seeing stories about Sonos’ 2.0 firmware upgrade, but again no mention of the track limit. To Sonos’ credit, they have done something about the track limit, but unfortunately the upgrade is underwhelming on that point.

According to Sonos’ web site, “the maximum library and queue size has expanded to 50,000 tracks.”

Well, it is an increase, but 50,000 tracks is still relatively small for such an expensive system.

Sorry, no sale.