Category: books

WordPress, business books, and some health stuff

It’s Sunday morning. I’ve made it through another week. I’m going to start writing this post as a stream of consciousness thing, and see where it goes. I have a bunch of thoughts in my head, as usual. Maybe this will come together into something coherent. Maybe not.

WordPress

There is a bunch of crazy stuff going on right now between WordPress / Matt Mullenweg and WPEngine. I’m not going to try to summarize it or link to any of the many articles and blog posts about it. I went down a hole this morning reading some of them, and I don’t think I came out of it with any useful knowledge about which side I should take (if any) and what (if anything) I should be doing. I guess I’ll be sticking with WordPress for the time being. This doesn’t seem to have devolved into something like the Twitter situation, where the whole thing has been turned into a nazi bar, and the only option was bailing out.

Maybe I should think about switching to Drupal! I haven’t touched Drupal in more than a decade, but it’s probably still fine, right? I haven’t read anything about Dries Buytaert going off the deep end. (Though, now that I’m looking at his Wikipedia page, I’m reminded of the Larry Garfield thing from several years back. Again, no clue who’s right and who’s wrong on that… Sigh.)

Business Books

In between Wheel of Time books, I’ve been reading a few relatively short business books. I mentioned Thinking in Systems a couple of weeks ago. I’ve since also read a couple of books from Seth Godin’s Domino Project, from several years back. Honestly, I don’t remember why I was engaging with that stuff back when it was first coming out. I guess I had some kind of self-improvement thing going… maybe this was concurrent with my David Allen / GTD thing? I don’t know. Anyway, I have several of those books in my Kindle library but never got around to reading them.

I read Do the Work By Steven Pressfield last week, and I’m most of the way through Read This Before Our Next Meeting by Al Pittampalli. Neither or these really seems like something I needed to read right now. I was hoping the latter book might help me figure out how to deal with the barrage of meetings I’ve been dealing with recently, but it wasn’t that helpful.

I’m not happy with the number of meetings I have to attend at work these days, and sometimes it seems almost comic (like the one meeting on Thursday that required two separate prep meetings for it, on Tuesday and Wednesday). But there’s not much I can do about any of that other than grin and bear it.

To get back to my reading, I guess I’m about done with business books for now. I should probably start reading Towers of Midnight today, and see if I can get through the prologue. Reading these books is bringing me so much joy. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it, given that I kind of looked down on them for so many years.

My Health

I had a move streak going on my Apple Watch for quite some time. I gave up on it this week. It lasted for 52 days, which is pretty good. And the most interesting thing about it, to me, is that this means I haven’t been sick for almost two whole months! I even went to see a movie a couple of weeks back, and didn’t get sick. (Though this was a niche Paul McCartney movie, and there were maybe a dozen people in the theater, so not a typical crowded theater thing.) I need to watch myself though: I just noticed that it’s the one year anniversary of my bout with COVID last year. So I’m still going to play it safe and skip NYCC next weekend.

cleaning up my bookmarks

I’m still doing the thing where I’m going through my old unread Pinboard bookmarks, figuring out what to do with them, then updating or deleting them in Raindrop. It’s pointless, but fun, and occasionally interesting.

Today, I stumbled across this link from November 2016. Very weird to look back on that, and how we were all feeling and how it all went. In about a month from now, we’ll all be going through… hopefully not the same thing. But maybe the same thing. Only worse. Well, it’s a nice quiet Sunday morning, so maybe let’s not think about that right now.

Meanwhile, I also found this amazing video from OK Go which I bookmarked almost exactly ten years ago and never watched. (At least I think I never watched it… I have no recollection of it, and it seems like the kind of thing I’d remember. But of course a lot has happened in the last ten years.)

Books

On an unrelated subject, I finished The Gathering Storm yesterday, and Thinking in Systems on Friday. I really enjoyed both of those books.

I’ve got only two more books to read in the Wheel of Time series. And I’m almost caught up to The Wheel Weaves podcast. If I do catch up, I’m not sure what I’ll want to do about that. It would be cool to follow along with the podcast in real time, but, on the other hand, they only read a chapter or two per week, so if I kept current with them, I’d slow myself down a lot. I could take a break and read a few non-WOT books until they’re sufficiently ahead of me. Or I could keep reading at my current pace and let myself get past them. Well, I’m not sure which way I’m going to go yet. Maybe I should take a break and read some comics for the next week or two.

TiVo & YouTube TV

There’s been some talk on Reddit over the last week about Optimum discontinuing CableCARD support. I returned my CableCARD to Optimum in March, and switched to YouTube TV, so this doesn’t affect me. (And I’m not sure if Optimum has really discontinued all CableCARD support, or if this is just support for a specific type of card in a specific service area. You know how these things go on Reddit…)

My yearly TiVo service would normally be renewing this month; I canceled it in August, so I should be good there. But I still haven’t wiped and recycled my TiVo yet. I need to do that… There were a few things on there I wanted to watch, and I did watch some of them, but there’s a point where I’ll need to just give up and admit that I’m not going to go back and watch those last few Svengoolie movies. (Though it’s Halloween this month, so maybe now is a good time to do that…)

Anyway, I guess I’m keeping YouTube TV at least through football season. I’m getting my money’s worth out of it right now, between the NFL and the MLB playoffs.

 

Systems Thinking

Our scrum master at work suggested this week that we look into design thinking and systems thinking. I guess there’s some application of both to scrum, though I haven’t done much work on it yet, so I don’t really know what that is. But I like researching stuff and wasting time on the internet, so I did some reading and found some resources. I’ve found two books on design thinking and two books on systems thinking that are often recommended.

For design thinking:

For systems thinking:

Full disclosure: I got these recommendations from an AI chatbot. But, in looking into them, they do all seem to be popular choices. (And they’re all real books, and not hallucinations, which is more than I can say for the list I got out of a chatbot when I asked it to recommend some books I could give to a friend for his 65th birthday last week. But I digress.)

I also looked at some LinkedIn Learning videos to try to figure out some basics. My initial takeaway is that I’m not really interested in reading about design thinking right now. I might come back to it later, but systems thinking makes more sense to me at present.

So I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of the two systems thinking books above. I started reading Thinking in Systems today. It might actually be a good book. (Too early to tell, but I’m optimistic.) The author passed away some time ago, but there’s a good website devoted to her work here.

Of course, I’m still in the middle of The Gathering Storm. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The series is really ramping up here, with only two more books to go. So I’m going to try and go back and forth between the two books and see how that goes, but I’m probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wheel of Time rather than the Systems Thinking stuff.

Raindrop and the Wheel of Time

Following up on my previous post, I guess I’m sticking with Raindrop.io as my new bookmarking service of choice. At this point, I’ve done so much cleanup work in Raindrop that if I wanted to go back, I’d have to clean out my Pinboard account and import the stuff from Raindrop back into Pinboard.

The main bit of pointless cleanup work I’ve been doing is working through my unread bookmarks in Pinboard. Since the unread status didn’t import to Raindrop, I’ve been going through the 1000 or so unread links in Pinboard and deciding what to do with them. I detailed my process on that in the previous post. I think I’m about halfway through the backlog of unread bookmarks.

I have bookmarks in my collection back to 2001, so I’ve been assuming that that’s when I started using a bookmark service, but I see now that Delicious wasn’t founded until 2003, so I’m not sure where those 2001 and 2002 bookmarks came from. Maybe those were just browser bookmarks. (But I also have a bunch of bookmarks dated 1/1/1970, which I assume were the initial browser bookmarks I started with.) Well, anyway, I’ve been doing this for a long time, which makes the 20,000+ total seem less insane. (Maybe about 1000 per year? So around 2.75 per day average? That’s not too crazy for a working programmer, right?)

On a different topic, I finished reading Knife of Dreams yesterday. This is the last of the solo Robert Jordan WOT books, so it feels like I’ve hit a milestone here. All that remains are the three that were co-written by Brandon Sanderson. I started KoD in mid-July, so it took a little over a month to read, which keeps me on pace to maybe finish the series by the end of this year.

I was listening to the Wheel Weaves podcast this morning for the final chapter of the book, and they started it out by reading this letter that Jordan had written to Locus Magazine back in 2006, when he was diagnosed with amyloidosis. Quite a sobering letter. This part really got to me:

I sat down and figured out how long it would take me to write all of the books I currently have in mind, without adding anything new and without trying [to] rush anything. The figure I came up with was thirty years. Now, I’m fifty-seven, so anyone my age hoping for another thirty years is asking for a fair bit, but I don’t care. That is my minimum goal. I am going to finish those books, all of them, and that is that.

This came after a few sentences talking about how long he probably had left: four years. He actually passed away in 2007, so he only had about a year left at that point. But I think his attitude and his goals were admirable.

Coincidentally, I’m 57 now too. I don’t have any immediate health problems, but stuff like this really makes you think about what you’re doing with your life. For me, I don’t have a big pile of books that I want to write. (Or, in my case, maybe a big pile of computer programs.) I do have a “to be read” pile of books and comics (both physical and electronic) that would take me about 30 years to get through, so maybe I should make that my life’s goal. (I’m not going to die until I’ve finally read all 100 Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four issues! And Don Quixote!) Anyway, I seem to be at the point in my life where I’m taking things day by day, setting small goals, and just trying to be a decent person, I guess.

Rambling and Links

I’ve been meaning to write a post here for awhile, but just haven’t gotten around to it. (And I feel like I’ve probably started more than one post with that sentence already, but hey, I’m going to repeat myself occasionally here. I’ve been doing this on and off for 20+ years…)

The plan for today is pretty simple: Watching the Wimbledon men’s final at 9, going over to the farmers market around 10, then checking out the Somerville street fair (now called the “Somerville Market” for some reason) at some point after lunch. It’s too hot to do much else.

I’m not exactly thriving in the heat wave we’ve been dealing with over the last few weeks. I guess it’s not technically all one big heat wave, but it feels like one. I guess it’s a new one kicking off today, really. Either way, I’m too old for this.

I just finished reading New Spring, the Wheel of Time prequel novel, and I want to start reading Knife of Dreams today. I think I’m on-track to finish WoT this year, maybe. I’m pretty sure the prologue for KoD is a typically long WoT prologue, so it may take me a while just to get through that. (The WoT podcast I listen to takes 3 episodes to cover the prologue, so I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a lot.)

There are a few things I’ve seen on the internet recently that I thought I should mention here, so in no particular order, and with no particular relation to each other:

  1. I’ve been reading Jonathan Clements’ Humble Dollar blog on and off for several years, though I haven’t looked at it recently. Apparently Clements has cancer and likely less than a year to live. He’s only a few years older than me, so that’s… sobering.
  2. Here’s a behind-the-scenes article about the folks who change the light bulbs at the Met. (OK, there’s more to it than just changing light bulbs, but it’s still mostly about light bulbs.) This is the kind of thing I really like getting some insight into. I haven’t been back to the Met in a long time. And, honestly, I may never make it back; I just get sick too easily these days, so it’s always a risk, dealing with public transit and the crowds in NYC.
  3. I’m pretty sure I had at least one other thing to mention here, but now I can’t remember what it was, and I’m too tired to figure it out. So never mind!

 

Heat Wave

We’re in the middle of a heat wave here in New Jersey. And I haven’t been doing well with it. I started feeling bad Wednesday night, then had to call in sick on Thursday. I already had Friday off for Juneteenth; if I didn’t, I would have had to take another sick day. It’s Saturday now, and I’m feeling a little better, but honestly, just doing my laundry has pretty much exhausted me.

I had my groceries delivered from Whole Foods today. It’s been a while since I’ve done that. (I think the last time was in March.) I definitely wouldn’t have had the energy to go over to ShopRite today. (Well, I probably could have managed it, if I had to, but I’m better off resting, I think.) I didn’t leave the apartment at all Thursday or Friday. I might try to venture out briefly today, maybe to get a croissant from the bakery or something like that.

I’ve been thinking about why I’m sick and whether or not I could have made any different choices on Wednesday that could have prevented this. We had an IT Town Hall meeting on Wednesday at work. It was a 90-minute in-person all-hands meeting. I wore a mask, but there were likely a lot of germs going around. Then, later, we had an “ice cream social.” That was outside; they got a couple of ice cream trucks to set up on the patio. I got in line for that, but it was so hot I gave up and went back in. Someone had left a birthday cake in the break room, so I had a slice of leftover cake instead. So now I’m wondering if I picked up the cold from the town hall meeting, the ice cream thing, of if the leftover birthday cake did it. And I’m wondering how much the heat had to do with it.

Honestly, I’m wondering if I can do large (or relatively large) in-person stuff at all anymore now. And/or if I should avoid any kind of shared/leftover food that might have germs on it. I guess it’s good that I gave up on NYCC this year. Garden State Comic Fest is happening today in Morristown. I’d been thinking about going to that. It’s much smaller than NYCC, so I was thinking that I could probably survive it. But I’m definitely too sick for it.

Meanwhile, at work next week, I’ve got continuing fallout from the big project that went into production a couple of weeks ago. I think I’m managing that well. We also have an “agile transformation” project going on. We had an in-person training class on that on Thursday that I missed. And we’ll have two more in-person classes next week. I’m hoping I can make it into the office, and get through those in one piece. But I’m worried about it. Of course, I probably know more about agile and scrum and all that stuff than the people who are running the classes. But I need to show up and engage and figure out whatever hoops the new management wants us to jump through.

To refresh my memory on Agile, I started reading Clean Agile by Robert Martin last week. It’s not bad, so far. I read Clean Code a couple of years ago, so I’m familiar with Uncle Bob’s writing style and his various quirks. His style probably isn’t for everyone, but I’m OK with it. I’m curious to see how far we really go with agile at work this time. There was a big push for scrum a few years back, and we never really did it right. It’s easy to be cynical about this stuff. I hope we “do it right” this time, or at least close enough to right to be useful rather than just an additional layer of meetings and paperwork, but we’ll see.

I also started reading a fairly random book by John Maxwell recently. There was a push at work a while back to learn and embrace the Maxwell leadership style. This was back when I was still a manager. I haven’t heard much about it lately, but then again, I’m not a manager anymore. I noticed this book in my Kindle library, and decided to give it a try. I acquired it in 2009. apparently. It must have been a freebie. I have no memory of buying it, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing I would have spent money on. It’s a self-help book on achieving your dreams, which is definitely not something I’m worried about right now. I’m just hoping to make it through the day, one day at a time, at this point in my life. But the book is interesting enough, in the sense that it’s giving me some insight into a mindset that isn’t my own.

I guess I’m taking a break from the Wheel of Time right now. I finished Crossroads of Twilight about a week ago. I think I’m going to try to read New Spring next. It’s a prequel novel, and was published after Crossroads of Twilight, so it’s next up, if I’m reading in “publication order.” It’s also a lot shorter than most of the main WoT books, so that’s nice.

Well, I guess that’s enough rambling for now. It should get up to 97 later, so I should probably give up on getting anything else done today. Time for a nap, maybe.

priorities, part two

OK, a quick follow-up to this morning’s post:

  1. I watched nearly all of the Roland-Garros men’s final. It was fun! Spoiler: Alcaraz won.
  2. I took a break from tennis at 10 AM to walk over to the Somerville farmers market, and bought a bunch of stuff, so that was cool.
  3. And I got myself into the NYCC ticket queue at 10 AM too. When I came back from the farmers market, I was still in the queue. I didn’t get out of the queue until noon. At that point, all ticket types were still available. I briefly considered buying a four-day pass, but then I saw how much it would cost: $250. (And that’s before whatever taxes & fees they add on.) I could afford it, I guess, but since I was on the fence about going at all, the price kinda pushed me over the edge into “nope” territory.
  4. And, at some point, I realized that I also wanted to watch the Phillies/Mets game from London today. That was set to start at 10 AM, and I thought about maybe switching back & forth between tennis and baseball, but honestly the tennis was good enough to keep my attention, so I stuck with that. I thought about watching the baseball game later, from my DVR, but I’ve already seen the headline to this article, so I know the outcome, which makes me a little less enthusiastic about watching it.
  5. And I usually like to make some progress with the Wheel of Time on Sundays, so I should take some time this afternoon and do that. So that’s likely what I’ll be doing for the next hour or two.

So, for anybody, who wanted to know more than anyone needs to know about what I’m doing with my Sunday, you’re all set now.

Memorial Day

I have a habit of writing posts on Memorial Day. Here are some past posts: 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020. This year, the Tour of Somerville prep started at 5 AM, with contractors setting up the metal fencing on Main Street, which of course woke me up. At some point between 5 and 5:30, we had a quick little storm, which dumped a bunch of rain outside. But it stopped by the time I got out of bed, at 5:40. Things are looking OK right now, around 9 AM, but there could be more thunderstorms in the afternoon, which would probably mean that the main race would have to be cancelled.

Coffee & Sleep

I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. I think that was mostly due to allergies and the change in weather. (It was very hot most of the week.) I’ve been compensating for that by drinking probably way too much coffee. So, for the weekend, I decided to go cold turkey.

Well, that didn’t last long! I had decaf on Saturday morning, then felt crappy all day. Not all of that was due to caffeine withdrawal, but some of it certainly was. So I had a Coke Zero at some point in the afternoon. And for Sunday and Monday, I’ve decided to have about half my usual weekend morning coffee. I usually have a full Moka pot, which means two scoops of ground coffee and enough water for two mugs full. Which might not sound like a lot, but the Moka pot produces something like espresso strength coffee. So, basically, I’m cutting back from around six shots of espresso to three shots. That’s working out OK. I’ve also cut out afternoon coffee, so I haven’t gotten cold brew from either of my usual coffee spots at all this weekend. And I’m sleeping a little better.

Pain & Finance

I also had some pain in my right hand that had been building through the week. So, in addition to going cold turkey on caffeine, I was going to avoid computer keyboards and mice, to the extent that I could. I really didn’t touch a computer on Saturday. On Sunday, I spent a good bit of time on my PC going through some financial stuff, and today, I’m writing this blog post, but probably won’t do much more. The pain has been gradually going away.

On that financial stuff yesterday: I moved a bit more money over to my new Marcus account, and opened a couple of CDs. So now I have some money making 4.6% in the savings account, a 12-month CD making 5% and an 18-month CD making 4.6% APY. So that should allow me to hedge my bets a little, if rates go up or down over the next year or two. Of course, all of that is pending until the banks open up again tomorrow, so I’ll have to check it again tomorrow or later in the week and make sure everything went where it was supposed to.

TV & Sports

I just hit the three-month mark on my YouTube TV subscription, so I had to make a decision on whether or not I was going to keep it going, past the $10 off promo rate, and into the regular pricing. I almost decided to cancel it, but changed my mind at the last minute.

Right now, I’m watching some coverage of Roland Garros on T2. I’ve found that watching tennis is very relaxing for me. YouTube TV includes T2 in their base package, but not Tennis Channel. I hadn’t really looked into this before, but I guess T2 is basically the overflow channel for Tennis Channel. So the bigger matches are on the main channel, and a bunch of “lesser” matches are on T2. I can get Tennis Channel with the Sports Plus add-on for YouTube TV, which costs an extra $11 per month. But I’m not going to do that. I’m mostly watching tennis as background noise, so it doesn’t matter if I’m watching an “important” match or not. And there’s going to be some Roland-Garros coverage on NBC later today, so I can watch that too. (And if I still had Peacock, they’ve also got Roland-Garros coverage. TV has gotten so confusing and fragmented.)

Kobo & The Wheel of Time

I’m well into Crossroads of Twilight on my Kobo now. I’m finding it to be a little better than the Kindle for most things, but not substantially. So, I really didn’t need the Kobo, but I don’t regret buying it. I want to get back to it and read a couple more chapters today, if I can.

And, with that, I should probably stop writing. My hands are starting to hurt again. (Getting old sucks.)

Kobo, Pocket, Instapaper, and some Wheel of Time thoughts

I finished reading Winter’s Heart yesterday, the ninth Wheel of Time book. I do want to start the next one, Crossroads of Twilight, soon, but before I do, I want to catch up with the last couple of episodes of The Wheel Weaves podcast. A lot happens in the last few chapters of Winter’s Heart, and I feel like I need someone to walk me through it so I can understand it a bit better.

I haven’t been actively reading Sylas K Barrett’s “Reading The Wheel of Time” series over at reactor.com, but I noticed that I’m now further along in the series than him, since his latest article is on chapter 25 of Winter’s Heart. The Wheel Weaves, on the other hand, is currently on book 12, so I have a while to go before I catch up with them.

Anyway, I thought I’d take a break from book-reading today and experiment with reading some short fiction and newspaper/magazine articles on my Kobo, via Pocket. Overall, I think I’ve decided that I like the experience of using Pocket on Kobo, but there are a few caveats.

I started this process by taking a couple of New York Times articles, saving them to Pocket, then reading them on the Kobo. That worked out fine. Then, I thought I’d see if I could take a few things I’d saved in Instapaper and read those in Pocket. The first thing I discovered is that Pocket seems to have two modes of saving articles: for some articles, it saves a readable view of the article in Pocket, and for others, it just saves a bookmark. For the latter type, those don’t sync down to the Kobo. Pocket calls these two modes “article view” and “view original” apparently.

One idea that I had for saving Instapaper articles to Pocket was to just hit the Pocket button on the webpage for Instapaper’s readable version of the article. But that just triggered the bookmarking mode for Pocket, and didn’t save the readable version. So that was useless. And I found that, for a few things I’d saved in Instapaper, either the original article had disappeared from the web, or the original article could also not be saved to Pocket except as a bookmark. That was an interesting experiment, and I think it convinced me that Instapaper is still superior to Pocket as a general read-it-later service, since I don’t think I’ve ever found anything that Instapaper refused to save to its own database. Pocket definitely works for the New York Times and the New Yorker, but it’s only about 50/50 on other pages I’ve tried.

So, anyway, having saved a few things to Pocket, I did some reading on the Kobo. I found that the experience was pretty good, with a few caveats. The biggest issue is that I realized that you can’t highlight Pocket articles on the Kobo. That’s maybe not a big thing really, but it is something I’d like to be able to do.

It’s occurred to me that, for longer articles, I could save the Instapaper version to an .epub file, then transfer that over to the Kobo via Calibre (or Google Drive). There’s a point where I’m jumping through too many hoops just to read a short story though. I may spend some more time messing around, but not right now.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about using the Kobo to read the next WoT book. I’ve already copied it from my Amazon account, into Calibre, then over to Kobo. (The WoT books are sold without DRM, so I don’t need Calibre to remove DRM, just to convert them to EPUB.) On Kobo, I’d lose the X-Ray feature that the Kindle has, which sometimes comes in useful with WoT, given the large cast of characters. But X-Ray is often useless, and I’ve taken to looking up characters in the WoT Compendium app on my phone instead.

I’m not sure if I spent more time today actually reading, vs. playing around with Instapaper, Pocket, Calibre, etc., but I did have a relatively pleasant morning, so I guess that’s good either way.

thoughts on the Kobo Libra Colour

I got my Kobo Libra Colour in the mail on Friday, and started setting it up and playing around with it over the weekend. I didn’t get to play with it as much as I would have liked though, since I was sick and didn’t have much energy. Still, I wanted to write up some initial thoughts.

Overall, I like the device. But I’m not sure if it’s good enough to pull me away from my Kindle and the Amazon Kindle ecosystem. I think I’ll probably keep using my Kindle as my primary E-Reader, and maybe use the Kobo as a secondary device for certain kinds of books and documents. I’m really not sure how it’ll settle out.

To get into the specifics, let’s start with the obvious stuff that makes it different from the Kindle. First, color: The color screen is nice, though obviously it doesn’t compare to, say, an iPad. It’s nice to see book covers in color, but it’s not necessary and it doesn’t add much value, really.

I thought the color screen might make the device usable for reading comics, but my experiments with that aren’t encouraging. The device is too small for normal-size American comics to look good on it. It’s about the right size for manga, but I didn’t have much luck with that. I had a couple of DRM-free manga volumes that I thought I’d try, but they didn’t work well. I might try that again with different files, but I’m not in a rush to do that.

The second main feature would be the stylus. You can use the stylus to take notes, with the built-in notebook app, or to highlight passages in books and mark them up. I tried the notebook app, and I don’t think I’m going to get much use out of it. I think I’ve gotten to the point where using a pen just isn’t that comfortable for me anymore, whether it’s a “real” pen and paper, or a stylus and tablet. And I think both the device size and the texture of the screen make using the stylus a bit harder than using a regular pen and paper, for me. I did get a little kick out of how much it reminded me of my old Newton though!

I haven’t tried a Kindle Scribe, so I can’t compare it to that. I’ve occasionally thought about getting a Scribe, and that’s still in the back of my mind as a possibility, but I’d say I’m a little less enthusiastic about trying it now.

The stylus cost $70, so I should probably return it, but I’m probably going to hang onto it. Maybe I’ll find a good use case for it at some point.

So I think I’ve figured out that the two main features that set it apart from my Kindle Paperwhite aren’t compelling enough to get me to switch away from the Kindle.

There are a bunch of other interesting features on the device that aren’t specific to the Libra Colour, but to Kobo in general, and I think some of those are quite interesting and maybe useful. I’ve had a chance to set up a few of those and try them out, so I’ll go through some of them here.

  1. Google Drive and Dropbox integration: I set up the Google Drive integration. (I assume the Dropbox support is similar.) This feature let’s you take books from your cloud storage account, and copy them down to the device from there. So it’s mostly just another way of getting books onto the device. It works well, though copying books over USB is more convenient for me, really.
  2. OverDrive integration: This is a really nice feature. OverDrive is integrated right into the device OS, so you can borrow library books directly from the device. Mind you, it’s not really difficult to borrow books via the OverDrive web site and send them to my Kindle, but this does make it a little easier. When I mentioned above that I might find myself using the Kobo as a secondary device for certain use cases, this it the one I’m most likely to use it for, I think: borrowing and reading library books.
  3. Pocket integration: This is interesting. I’d prefer Instapaper integration, since that’s my read-it-later service of choice, but I do have a free Pocket account, so maybe I’ll try it out and see how it works. The Kobo might be a better device than my iPad for reading, say, a long New Yorker article. (It is possible to send articles to the Kindle with Instapaper, but it’s a bit of a hack.)

So that’s it for the oddball features. The most important thing, of course, is how well it works as a reading device. I’ve only done a little bit of reading on it so far. I copied the Wheel of Time book that I’m currently reading over to it, and read part of a chapter. It worked well. I could increase the font size to something that worked for me. The display is bright enough, clear enough, and easy on the eyes. I’m not sure that it’s better than the Kindle, but it might be.

There are a couple of things that I have on the Kindle that I will probably miss (to some extent) on the Kobo. The first would be Goodreads integration. That’s not really a big deal, but it’s nice. The second would be the X-Ray feature on the Kindle. That’s really a hit-or-miss feature, but when it works, it’s nice. Especially on the Wheel of Time books, it’s nice to be able to use it to look up a character name. It is really hit-or-miss though. I often find myself going to an external reference. (I’ve been getting a lot of use out of the WoT Compendium iOS app lately.)

One more topic I should really cover is how it works with Calibre. I haven’t spent enough time on that yet though. I’ve made sure that Calibre recognizes it and lets me copy books down, but nothing more than that. I may come back to that in a later blog post.

So overall, this thing was an unnecessary expenditure, and I probably won’t get much use out of it. I don’t know, though. I get so much use out of the Kindle that it makes sense to try an alternative and see how it works for me. And my vision is so screwed up at this point that it’s worth experimenting to find the device that works best for me and my old broken eyes.