NY Times on Air

The NY Times has started trials using the Adobe Air platform. The idea is to provide readers with an experience closer to that of newsprint, and also an environment that can be more tightly controlled by the Times than an ordinary browser.

I installed their Times Reader on my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop machine. They support Windows, Mac, and (surprise!) Linux.

The Times Reader application was a bit slow on my venerable 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 CPU, but then everything seems a bit slower after the Ubuntu 9.04 upgrade. I tried to install the Times Reader on my 64-bit Ubuntu laptop, but it doesn't run natively in 64-bits and I didn't feel like messing around with all the 32-bit libraries required to get it to work.

The Reader itself is rather nice. It's like a cross between Adobe Acrobat and a normal browser. The Times stories appear in column format as they might with Acrobat, but word wrapping changes as you resize your window, as it would on a browser. There are several ways to navigate, including thumbnail views of each story.

Since I'm not a subscriber to the Times, only the front page section and the crossword puzzle were available to me. As a comparison, I took a screenshot of the same story in a web browser and in the Times Reader.

The Times Reader will also download the entire newspaper for offline viewing, and allows you to access the last 7 days. Full subscriptions are $3.45 per week. Right now I don't see a huge advantage over the (free) NY Times website. I imagine in the future the Times will limit free access to the website to boost adoption of the Reader.


Jim on 05.24.09 @ 11:11 AM ET [link]

Is that an ort in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

Crossword puzzle word of the day:

Ort Ort ([^o]rt), n.; pl. Orts ([^o]rts). [Akin to LG. ort,
ortels, remnants of food, refuse, OFries. ort, OD. oorete,
ooraete; prob. from the same prefix as in E. ordeal + a word
akin to eat.]
A morsel left at a meal; a fragment; refuse; -- commonly used
in the plural.

I don't know how I went forty-something years without knowing this word. I've used it three times today.

Jim on 05.23.09 @ 08:28 PM ET [link]

Yet another one

Yet another pen & ink purchase. This time a bottle of Noodler's Bulletproof Black ink, and a Lamy Al-Star pen with a Fine nib.

The Noodler's black ink is well-known as being impervious to just about everything once it has bonded with the cellulose on the paper. I tried a water test and the Noodler's black was completely unaffected, while Lamy black was starting to run and Lamy blue rinsed off quickly. Also, Noodler's is made here in Massachusetts. Even the bottles are made on Cape Cod.

The Al-Star pen is identical to the plastic Safari and Vista pens, but the body is made from aluminum (get it? Al-star -- Aluminum?). The blue pen body is a very nice color. Hope it holds up. I can easily switch parts between my Al-Star and Vista pens.

The Lamy Fine nib writes much more smoothly than my Extra-Fine nib, and the line width is pretty much the same. I wonder if a lot of this is due to manufacturing tolerances not being what they should.

In order to use the Noodler's bottled ink, I also got a converter, which is just a cartridge with a plunger mechanism to suck up ink from the bottle. You can also just re-fill Lamy cartridges with bottled ink if you have a syringe.



Jim on 05.21.09 @ 09:31 AM ET [link]

Lamy

Well, I got sucked in. I ordered an inexpensive Lamy Vista cartridge fountain pen from JetPens. I opted for the extra-fine nib, which seems comparable to a 0.5mm rollerball in width.

This is a clear plastic pen, and hearkens back to the clear "demonstrator" pens from when fountain pens were in their heyday. Salesmen would use these demonstrator pens to show customers the internal workings. I find ornate pens too gaudy for my tastes. This clear pen is understated to the point of almost disappearing.

The pen writes very well. The nib is a bit scratchy, but that's to be expected with an EF nib. Unlike the medium-nibbed disposable pen that I reviewed last week, this one doesn't bleed through the paper. The grip is three-sided and provides a consistent orientation when you pick it up.

Lamy is a German company, and I discovered that German schoolchildren are still required to learn handwriting with a fountain pen, hence their line of inexpensive, high quality pens. The refills are quite cheap, too, and there are converter cartridges available that allow you to fill it from bottled ink, if you so desire.


Jim on 05.10.09 @ 08:31 AM ET [link]

Fountain of Youth

The kids love the Bob Slate Stationer stores in Cambridge, Mass. Vast quantities of pens, pencils notebooks paper, paints, brushes, etc. While they were romping through the aisles I settled down to test out as many of the hundred or so pens on display as I could. Alongside with the reliable Pilot G2's and their ilk, I stumbled on a disposable fountain pen called the Pilot Varsity. A disposable fountain pen -- who would've thunk?

At only about $3, I bought one of the Varsities, mainly on a lark. I post-date the fountain pen era by a few years, so it was a bit of a novelty for me. It's kind of fun to write with. The only real writing with a pen that I do any more is tracking project progress and test results in a notebook at work. I'll give this pen a shot, just for fun.

But it turns out there's a sub-culture of pen fanatics out there. (I suppose there's a sub-culture for everything on the Interwebs), such as Pen Addict. These sites discuss the minutia of pen nibs and inks, and gush over the latest $200 pens. I even found instructions for refilling this $3 disposable pen.

I intend to avoid this particular acquisition disorder.

UPDATE: After using this fountain pen for 10 minutes I ditched it because it bled through the paper. Found a very nice Pentel 0.5mm EnerGel rollerball pen instead.


Jim on 05.03.09 @ 08:33 PM ET [link]

100K Miles

My venerable 1998 VW Golf finally made it to 100K miles. Only 900K more before the odometer rolls over.

Jim on 05.02.09 @ 06:00 PM ET [link]