[COFF] Re: Reader, paper, tablet, phone (was: Re: Reading PDFs on a mobile. (Was: Requesting thoughts on extended regular expressions in grep.))

On Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 10:45:43AM -0500, Michael Parson wrote: [...] Hello again and sorry for the late answer. Busy, hardware glitches, tired, etc. There is no use pattern as such. It was just very convenient to have one. When I bought my first reader, PocketBook 622 (or something like it, a good decade ago), it only had 2GB of flash. Of this, about half was already prefilled with free ebooks, free photos to see in some app. I decided to keep all this, which left me with .LT. 1GB for my use. If I wanted just epubs, this was more than enough to have few thousands files. But, an atlas of human anatomy from Internet Archive was ca. 8MB, Lisp 1.5 manual from bitsavers was another 9MB and if I wanted some more, space would quickly ran out. An 8GB card solved the problem. Later on, a member of family fell in love with e-reader, too. But, in her hands they died rather quickly. So we struck a deal - she will buy me a new one and get mine, which after a year of use was still mostly like new. I just replugged SD card and it was it. Now I have two broken Pocketbooks 622 in a drawer, waiting for their chance - just replace their displays. Later on, I bought me an Inkpad (again from Pocketbook, probably I am a fanboy). This one had about 7.8'' display, many more inky pixels and not too big cpu, so was a bit sluggish. But I liked it. Alas, it entered nirvana as a result of botched upgrade. If I am to believe internet, it can be pulled back into this world with the help of specially crafted serial cable and kermit. So, later on I bought me a Pocketbook 633 (definitely a fanboy!). This one can display 256 colors on outer LCD display and 16 levels of grey on inner e-ink display, which combines into 4096 colors. I wanted to give it a try, but if this specimmen dies, I will go back to normal e-ink b/w. The colors are there, but nothing outstanding. Ok for office kind of documents - pie charts, graphs etc. Space photographs, ukiyo-e, n nono no. Besides, if I use color, it powers on the LCD layer and consumes significantly more power than when it goes with e-ink only. For some documents, color can be turned off, for icons on main page, they show in color. Each time I just replug the card. So next time, I guess I will be looking for another reader with a slot. As of what you write about using cable and or BT for file transfer, it is all true but if reader does not work anymore, it might be hard to get files back. Or impossible. I have a smartphone, just to make a photo sometimes, nothing more, and I store it all on sdcard, again. This one phone does not want to emulate pendrive when I plug it into my Linux box, I had to install ftp server on it (phone). If it dies, I will unplug the card. Easy as a pie. No need to spend days looking for some bloody program which maybe is Windows-XP-only or maybe just been dropped from manufacturer support website. So I guess my next phone should better have a socket for sdcard, too. This is the future - if I have a need to support, I need to support it by me. Investing money in something that may turn into a brick and get my stuff with it - I do not think so. Too bad if some manufacturer does not want to play along, but they come by a dozen so maybe I can find what I want :-)... [...] Well, somehow all readers without sdcard tout about them being waterproof. Like I wanted to read in water. [...] I bought me a cheap mechanical clock from China (say, 17 bucks). It only needs a "mechanical recharge" once a day and I have to turn it back 5 minutes once a week to keep it somewhat accurate. Good enough for me. [...] Well I went the other way - bought some pencils to see how it goes with paper notes. Color crayons, some other thingies for making circles and lines (compass, ruler). Now, seems I will have to make some kind of notebook (in a future, not now) because what I see in my shops somehow does not convince me to buy (yeah I know about moleskines and leichturms, but this is not what I want, not sure what I want). Right now, it is just a normal crappy school notebook but with nice cover :-) . "Dropbox baaad, shoe box good" :-) -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola@bigfoot.com **