Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

Once I read that the Nook Tablet could be hacked into running the Android Market, I decided that it would be a fine choice of e-reader: lightweight, good screen, slot for a microSD card so I could give it a boatload of storage. The form factor is just right for fitting in the paperback-sized pocket of my jacket.

The stock Nook is pretty limited; Barnes and Noble have hidden a lot of standard Android functionality. It comes with Pandora, Netflix, and Hulu, and you can download EverNote and Skitch from the B&N app store, but there’s not a lot of choice there. It’s pretty easy to download the Amazon App Store, which gives you some more choices; you don’t need to be a hacker to install the Kindle app on the Nook and get the advantage of both bookstores.

Getting the full benefit of Android, though, requires rooting it— hacking the device to give yourself administrator permissions. At the moment, that means you need to download the Android SDK to your computer, download a program like AppMenu or Any Cut to the Nook so you can access the hidden part of the UI that lets you turn on the flag that will let the debug tool in the Android SDK talk to your Nook, and then load up a program that will break the security. This is pretty straightforward if you’re already comfortable with the command line (though there were some false starts until I found the right version of AppMenu), but I wouldn’t recommend it for someone nontechnical.

Once that’s done, installing the Android market, then using that to install ADW.Launcher to get a real launcher (and directly installing HomeCatcher to let you override the big N button on the front of the case to take you there) finally makes it a real Android device. It takes some abuse of root permissions to get the Swype keyboard working (which is a relief, since B&N have their own keyboard that acts different from all other Android keyboards), but I didn’t have any issues getting Adobe Reader, Aldiko, Kindle, and Google Books all loaded up, and Zinio and the Economist work just fine. None of the Android apps for Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps, or Google Plus are marked as compatible, so the Android Market won’t let you download them.

There are still some odd hitches, like the erratic availability of the Back and Menu buttons (which usually appear when needed, but occasionally get left out). I’m hoping that the intrepid hacking community will soon have a full Ice Cream Sandwich build to overwrite B&N’s hack.

My old G1 was regularly running out of space for the applications I wanted to run, and the Nexus One was getting good reviews, so I got one. Upgrading was easy— just pop the SIM card out of the G1, pop it into the Nexus, turn it on, and sign in to my Google account— and it quickly synced my data out of the cloud. (Downloading all my applications again took a while, though.)

Thus far I’ve been pleased with the performance; I haven’t been having any of the 3G connectivity issues that some people are complaining about, and it performed quite well as a music player today, finishing out a day of listening with 39% charge in the battery. It comes with a 4GB microSD card, and when the 32GB cards come out in February, the thing will have more space than my first iPod did. The turn-by-turn navigation has been quite good thus far.

I’m glad that the EU has been throwing their weight around about phone chargers; the G1 used a mini-USB connector, and the Nexus uses micro-USB, so I can charge it from any USB port with a cheap cable instead of having to buy a special charger. At Fry’s, I went down to the AC Adaptors aisle and found a couple of useful widgets, one of which is just a wall wart that has a couple of USB ports on it, and another that is the equivalent for a car’s charging sockets. This is much more flexible than getting one of the dedicated phone chargers from the cellphone aisle, particularly with two ports so obsessivewoman can charge her Nintendo DS while my Nexus One is doing navigation.

Anyone want a used G1? You can get service for it from T-Mobile for $55–$60 per month with a $35 activation fee.

A few Sundays ago, obsessivewoman encouraged me to camp out in the early morning to pick up a Wii Balance Board and Wii Fit. (Went to my local Best Buy with a good book, got their at 8:30 and there were already half a dozen people ahead of me in line. More people trickled in after a while, and the line was around the corner by the time the employees came out at 10:30 and handed us tickets. The store opened at 11:00 and people came in to ransack their entire supply of 28 Wiis and 27 Wii Fits.)

Wii Fit is a very different experience from yourself!fitness and Eyetoy: Kinetic. The other games give you an entire workout, with warmup, exercises, and cooldown; you can exercise a bit of control over what you’re getting at the beginning, but once you’ve started, you’re committed to it. Wii Fit is more the buffet style of exercise: it gives you a collection of four categories of exercise (yoga, strength training, aerobics, and balance), and exercises that last from 1–3 minutes (which you can gradually increase up to 10 minutes as you continue to play the game and unlock more exercises and extended play). It’s up to you to handle your own warmup and cooldown. I usually start with yoga until I feel like I’ve limbered up everything I’ll be using in the aerobics exercises.

The buffet style is very good at getting the “just one more turn” syndrome to make you apply your gaming addiction to exercise. Every exercise has a score, even the yoga (which is usually grading you on how well you kept your balance through a pose). Do you want to go back and try again to better your score? Or that of someone else who’s been using your Wii and has their name on the high score list?

The yoga and strength exercises are correlated, so if I do Warrior in yoga, it’ll suggest I do Lunges in strength to match. Doing workouts in one category will tend to open up new options in others; when you start Wii Fit, it only has about a dozen exercises, but over a couple of weeks it’s easy to get it to make most of them available. The aerobics have a good variety as well: a couple of hula hoop games, a couple of running games, a couple of stepping games, and a rhythm boxing one that uses the Wiimote and nunchuk.

The place where it really shines is the balance games, which put the most fun into the gameplay. They’re just minigames, but they’re still a good deal of fun, with things like a ski slalom, a “tilt the board to drop balls through a hole” game, and even a whimsical one where you tilt an iceberg to make a penguin slide around catching fish. There are plenty of Balance Board games in development, and We Ski is already available.

It also encourages you to weigh in every day and take a balance test to see how well you’re doing, and it calculates your “Wii Fit Age” based on how well you do in the balance tests. I recommend doing this after a few yoga exercises and a balance game, but before doing the aerobics; this gets your brain into the mode of controlling a Wii Balance Board, but your muscles haven’t gotten tired yet.

obsessivewoman

Turns out that the two of us have accumulated over 6,000 of them.

Last year, hypothermya introduced me to a rather interesting Web 2.0 site called LibraryThing. I had a go at entering a few books, but I just didn’t have the stomach for the daunting task of entering it all by hand. After getting my 3000+ works of fiction into the ReaderWare database, though, I checked back at LibraryThing, and discovered that they have a bulk upload feature that takes ISBNs. So I dumped the whole database up there.

ISBNs are not entirely unique identifiers, so it’s necessary to go over these things with a fine tooth comb. I’ve also been collecting relevant hyperlinks such as author home pages, weblogs, and wikipedia pages, though those are only in my ReaderWare database as there’s no useful way to put them on LibraryThing as yet. And I’ve finally finished my first pass through my fiction section, and I think I have at least 99% of the books in the house now in the database. (Next thing to do is to start tagging all the works that have won or been finalists for various awards.)

You can look at my LibraryThing profile, see the linear catalogue, or try the author cloud or tag cloud as alternative ways of navigating the collection. Feedback from my manga-literate friends on the manga collection is particularly welcome; I’ve been going by Wikipedia’s notions of shōnen and shōjo, but would appreciate the insight of the connoisseurs. obsessivewoman’s collection is mostly tagged cookbook and mystery; she hasn’t had as much time to get into the detailed tagging as I have.

This could be handy: just wave your hand over a sensor and the server in your pocket acts as keyring and unlocks a door for you. That’s even better than the skin-based data transmission, which is much slower and less hygienic when used by crowds. (I’m expecting telecommuting to take off in a big way when the next pandemic hits.)

It’ll also be good for “personal area networking” (or “personal aura networking”, as I’m sure this will be dubbed). Right now, if you want to have all your devices talk to each other, you’re pretty much stuck with Bluetooth, which means interference with everyone else’s favorite use of unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum: Wi-Fi, cordless phones, you name it. This will be more difficult to eavesdrop on (like with the BlueSniper), and less likely to suffer interference. It also means that devices will be able to specialize: you can wear something that’s just storage and a little data display on your wrist, and your headphones can talk to it for playing music, your phone can talk to it for getting addresses, and your headphones can talk to the phone when you talk. (But expect a very rocky start as the protocols all get shaken out.)

Other things to expect: high-tech pickpockets will specialize in getting close enough to people to try and hack any devices in their body network, or subtle devices will be planted at chokepoints to do the same to passersby. Demonstrations of ad-hoc packet switched networks across tightly packed crowds on dance floors will get about as much media attention and last about as long as flash mobs did.