Desperation + Luck = Wild Success

Keep reading. Just wait for the boldfacing …

The Day of the Jackal – the hit we nearly missed

In 1969, a young British journalist returned to London after spending 18 months reporting on the Biafran war. His name was Frederick Forsyth. He was 31 years old and, by his own account, flat broke. Needing money quickly, he did what any self-respecting hack would have done: he wrote a thriller.

Initially entitled The Jackal, it told the story of an unnamed assassin hired to kill President de Gaulle. The novel took Forsyth just 35 days to write. He had no great literary aspirations and certainly no intention of revolutionising an entire genre. Forsyth’s heroes were John Buchan and Rider Haggard: he simply wanted to tell a riveting story.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the novel’s publication. It is no exaggeration to say The Day of the Jackal has influenced a generation of thriller writers, from Jack Higgins to Ken Follett, from Tom Clancy to Andy McNab. Before, thrillers were self-evidently works of the imagination. Forsyth changed all that; never before had a popular novelist created a world that seemed indistinguishable from real life.

Advertisement

First Photo: Website On Nook Touch Hidden Browser

Update, June 8, 2011, there is now video! First Video Of Nook Touch Hidden Web Browser

Update Jun 8, 2011: Now you can root too! Let The Nook Touch Rooting Begin!

The readers of Romance do not fool around.

They’ve pioneered and shaped the eBook field and now they’re the first with a photo of a website on the new Nook Touch via its hidden browser!

Thanks to Bettie Sharpe (a writer with a site), via Jane Litte of the Dear Author site (whose mobile version is shown below) came a link for the photo after the break.

Missing Skyline

I think I took this photo in 2005 (the timestamp says 4:05AM, which is obviously wrong, but the year seems right).

At top is a photo of the skyline as it was prior to September 11, 2001, with the same vantage point live, post-2001, below.

I’ve made it larger than the usual VGA size, so click click.

Click = big

Screensavers For eInk eBook Devices

Of course, the thing is that eInk doesn’t require a screensaver.

Nevertheless, the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader can display an image when they go into sleep mode.

In the instance of the Kindle, it now requires a hack; that prior option was taken away probably due to Customer Support calls. See the link at the end of this post for the minor hack required.

And you’ll notice I haven’t mentioned Kobo. It has its own scheme, sometimes displaying the cover of the book being read.

Here are two resources I bumped into on Flickr today:

Nook Wallpapers
Kindle Backgrounds

R.I.P. New Jersey Public Broadcasting

NY’s WNET and WNYC To Take Over NJ Public Broadcasting

NJ Governor Chris Christie announced a deal on Monday that would transfer operations of the state-owned New Jersey Network to NY’s WNET-TV. The station will be renamed NJTV and will continue to provide a nightly news broadcast and 20 hours of weekly NJ-centric broadcasting. In addition, four NJN’s radio stations will be acquired by New York Public Radio for $2.8 million and will be merged into one public radio station focused on NJ news. The other five stations will be sold to Philadelphia’s WHYY for $1.5 million.

While thieving bankers and sociopathic traders fleece us left and right, how much will we ordinary citizens have to give up in this country before we stand up and say, “Enough, goddammit!”?

Previously here:

The Final Nail In The Coffin Of PBS

Another Reason iCloud Is Not For Me

iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Windows

And what happens once all our data is in that iCloud, is there any easy way to get it back out? Nope. It’s in there forever and we are captive customers — trapped more completely than Microsoft ever imagined.

I’ve already experienced that trap twice:

1) Tumblr not having XML export except for Macs

2) Twitter taking my tweets and making them impossible to search

I’m not up for being an eejit a third time.

You’re probably wondering about this blog. I can do XML exports of it. There are some additional tags in it, but nothing some good GREP could not strip out. That bit of labor is worth it to ensure the data is mine.

If Apple ever makes a personal cloud server that only I have control over, that resides on my property, that doesn’t flow through them, they’d have something I’d want.

Thank You, Moriah Jovan!

She took a photo I gave her and put the text on top of it, a simple operation my suite of crap software cannot do at all without making it look all fuzzy and fugly.

She is also for hire.

Nook Touch Has Hidden But Functional Web Browser

Update, June 7, 2011, there is now photo proof! First Photo: Website On Nook Touch Hidden Browser

Update, June 8, 2011, there is now video! First Video Of Nook Touch Hidden Web Browser

Update Jun 8, 2011: Now you can root too! Let The Nook Touch Rooting Begin!

At a Mobileread forum, someone posted:

If you type in a URL under Search on the Nook Simple Touch, it launches a web browser. I’m not sure if this is an oversight or a feature that they’re going to refine, but it’s good to know given that the lack of a web browser seems to be a deal-breaker for some.

Strangely, there’s been no long discussion of this or even photos proving it, but someone else replied:

Awesome! I can confirm this does in fact work as well. Searching goes to whatever URL you specify, and then a web browser opens where you can click on links OR type in another URL if you wish.

If you have a Nook Touch, try it and report in Comments. A photo would be great too!

Updated June 7, 2011, see after the break.

Quote Of The Day: Lefsetz

iCloud

Writing about how the short-sightedness of the record labels gave the entire music game, via iTunes Match, to Apple for peanuts:

This is so dumb it’s almost incomprehensible.

Well, Bob, I await Amazon doing Kindle Match, where they will swap out people’s ePub books for Kindle ones.

There is much more dumb to be witnessed!

Weiner Must Resign

He’s emblematic of the kind of “leaders” we have.

He can’t control himself.

When caught out, he throws innocents under the bus: Twitter, Brietbart — and next he probably would have claimed the women came after him, making himself out as a victim.

He’s the kind of coward who would shield himself with his own child when faced with death.

Get the hell out of D.C.. You’re a disgrace.