Rest in Peace Stanza

Back in 2009, when the Kindle was only a year and a half old, Amazon bought Stanza. At the time, Stanza was probably the most popular (speculation) and certainly the most usable (opinion) ereader app for iOS devices, like the iPhone. I speculate and post these opinions because at the time I was reading almost exclusively with this app on my iPhone and was amazed at how do-able it was to read on my phone and had done lots of research on picking the app. There were lots of other people using this app and it is no surprise that Amazon thought it a good idea to acquire this company.

Fast forward to October of 2011 and Amazon has finally let the Stanza app die. What does this mean? As of iOS5, Stanza no longer functions as a stable application due to the lack of updates from Amazon. With no announcements from Amazon about updating this app for iOS5, and quite frankly no incentive with its own Kindle app now purring along happily on iOS, I feel safe saying this app is essentially dead.

It is a shame that the Stanza app has died because there was a huge following of users who appreciated it for a number of stand-out features that none of the other ereader apps feature. For me personally, the most appreciated core feature was the ease of adding books without wires or syncing from the vast catalog of Project Gutenberg, as well as accessing other pre-loaded stores and the ability to add other custom sources for books. In addition to this core feature set, Stanza also had the ability to sync to your own collection of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of books easily through a relationship with Calibre, an ebook management software for your computer. Finally there was the vast and very flexible set of features that allowed a user to tailor the reading experience to their exact preferences, including fonts, sizes, margin sizes, between line AND between section/paragraph spacing, black on white or white on black schemes, the ability to lock rotation from within the app, and best of all, the ability to quickly adjust screen brightness using a simple vertical swipe.

It was clear from the very beginning that Stanza wasn't designed by a company looking to bolster sales of books from their own ecosystem, but rather by people who loved to read books FOR people who loved to read books. Clearly Amazon saw the level of detail and care that had been put into this app and were happy to get their hands on it. Whether the intention was to someday incorporate all of this power and flexibility into their own kindle devices and apps, or whether it was simply to get rid of the competition is anyone's guess. I know I have my own theory.

In the meantime, I’m auditioning replacement apps that will give me back the core feature set of being able to access large quantities of public domain books with the added benefit of being easy to use. The apps I have tried with limited success have been Bluefire and Megareader with the nod going to Bluefire so far. While I intend to review at least my final selection at a later date, it does seem relevant to comment on both with regards to how they stack up against Stanza.

Bluefire is the best contender for a Stanza replacement that I've found. Up front Bluefire is free, as was Stanza. With Bluefire there is a set list of book sources and doesn’t seem to be anyway to amend this list. While Project Gutenberg is absent, it does have Feedbooks which has a pretty good selection of public domain books. As a compromise, Bluefire does support loading books through iTunes file transfer, which means that public domain books not on Feedbooks can be downloaded on your computer and then loaded into Bluefire through iTunes. I’m not thrilled with this compromise, but it is a good starting point. The second biggest concern for me is the ability to read a book in a way that is intuitive and non-invasive. Bluefire really shines here. Although the options in Bluefire are more limited and prepackaged, there is nothing missing that will really cause me to suffer in terms of enjoying book reading. One standout highlight I would list is the book mark and annotation feature in Blufire. Book marking and annotation are joined into one feature that seems to work really well. You can jump to any of your book marks or annotations, they preview very nicely, and the annotation is highlighted on the screen.

Megareader is very easy for me to review. It costs $1.99 and allows you to access Project Gutenberg perfectly, however once you get the book downloaded to Megareader, you may not want to read it. The criticism is a bit harsh, but honestly, I would only ever use this app to read books that I simply can’t get in Bluefire through Feedbooks. The settings within Megareader are limited and most critically it has no bookmark or annotation system. It compromises with a simple “last place” memory that will open the book back to the last place you read. However, if you want to jump back to another chapter and then come back to where you just where, be prepared for lots of page flipping to search for your spot. The lack of any sort of book mark or annotation is incredibly disappointing from an otherwise promising app, especially one that costs.

Assuming Amazon has abandoned Stanza development as it seems, the options are currently limited. One would hope that either the ecosystem level players add the option to access public domain catalogs like Project Gutenberg to their repetoir, or independent developers pick up the torch and keep running the race. Time will tell and in the meantime I’ll continue to look for the best compromise.

Winter Reflections

As the days of February slowly approach and the temperature timidly toys with warming up, experimenting with an occasional day in the 40s, I was reflecting this morning on Winter as a season. I wanted to share the following.

Christmas will forever be, for me, the crowning jewel of this whitest of seasons. As a child growing up I experienced winters in the mid-west and in the south. With a father in the military my childhood was spent moving from to different houses and environments every four years. One constant though was my grandparents’ house. Every year our Christmas tradition was to travel back to my mom’s parent's house for a Christmas eve celebration that brought together large portions of a large family. In a not-over-large house, there would be my immediate family, Grandma and Grandpa, handfuls of aunts and uncles, dozens of cousins, and plenty of food.

We were never cold with that many bodies piled together in one house, and there was never a shortage of food. My Grandma would prepare food days ahead of time, and towards the end of our tradition at that house people would bring over dishes potluck style to spare her the preparation time. Relatives would come back from far and near. We would be able to catch up regardless of how many times we had or had not seen each other since last Christmas.

After the Christmas eve family dinner, many of us would carpool to my Grandparent’s church where they would proudly fill several pews with their returned family. After Christmas inspired sermons, many carols, and a candle lit “O Holy Night” we would end with “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and sometimes my grandfather would let me ring the Church bell at Midnight to announce Christmas was here.

And so, growing up my idea of winter came to focus around family gathered together, food shared, warmth, and community. Looking back now and seeing what Christmas has historically meant, I read other's stories and realize that mine are in the company of those privileged few who have family to join with, who have homes to gather in, and who have food to put on the table. I see now that not everyone has those things, and how lucky I was to have this experience. Come time to recount what I’m grateful for, winter makes it easy not to take things for granted.

Winter is a time of contrasts. While it is frozen outside, we can be thankful for the simplicity of a warm room. While the fields are barren, we can be thankful for the simplicity of an orange, or a slice of warm bread. While the parks and sidewalks are sparcely peopled, we can be thankful for our community of family and friends.

I've been reading a lot of MacDonald lately and I think I just read my favorite of his books, so far. I wrote a review of "At the Back of the North Wind" in a hurry tonight after finishing it today...

At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am so delighted to have found this book amongst the treasures of project Guteberg. Thank goodness for public domain books and ebook readers! With the low price of admission, I find myself reading more and more books that I might not have otherwise taken the time to look up, or might not have remembered when I got to a library.

Once I started reading this book I couldn't put it down. However, as opposed to most books that pull you through solely with plot, I found myself going back and re-reading passages to think about the things MacDonald was saying. To me, this was the best MacDonald book that I've yet read. As with Sir Gibbie the main character is a boy who seems almost too good for this world. However, far from seeming a prig, this innocent ends up bringing the best out of all those around him. Without giving too much away, I'll just say that the imagery, the story, and the very feel of the book will now be one of my definitions of mythopoea. I can see how these MacDonald books would have so strongly influenced Tolkien and Lewis in their future literary works.

So many of the conversations between North Wind and young Diamond are underlined that I have a hard time picking my favorite part of the book. However, I think one of my favorite conversations may have been between these two characters when Diamond is asking North Wind whether she is real or just a dream. I feel that this must have in some way influenced Lewis in his ideas presented in his essay Weight of Glory, and in his idea for Aslan.

Although the end of the book is something that I suspected earlier on in the book, it did not lose any of its impact for this suspicion. To me this was wonderful proof that if a book has true substance behind it, then a suspected end does not ruin the overall story but in fact adds to it due to the sense of realism. Maybe this realism is a good refute to those who dismiss fantasy as escapist?

View all my reviews

Equipping a Home Kitchen

When I got married 3 years ago I found myself considering what things we wanted or needed to get to equip a “new” kitchen. My wife had most things needed, and I brought a few with me, but much of the equipment was hand-me-down or cheaply bought. Hand-me-downs CAN be great, but some things, like cheap knives and a few thin pots were clearly going to have to be replaced. I did a fair amount of research and thinking about what I would really use before registering. Since then, we’ve picked up a few additional things, but by and large we continue along with the items we had before marriage and the few key things we registered for.

I wanted to put this experience down in words in case it can help anyone else considering a new knife or pan, or maybe looking to equip their whole kitchen. There’s a lot to tackle and I’m not trying to write a book here, so I’ll try to be concise and organized. I’ll talk about materials and quality, pans, pots, cutlery, and a few odds and ends.

Materials and Quality:

As a general statement, if you have the money and the time to clean them get copper and be done with it. Copper is the best cookery metal for distributing heat and it looks fantastic to boot. If you don’t want to spend the money, or the cleaning time on copper your best bet is a combination of stainless steel and non-stick pans. Non-stick can’t go in the dishwasher usually, and even with the best care you’ll likely still end up replacing them eventually. Stainless steel is often dishwasher safe, and if something is really stuck on you can take some steel wool or other abrasive cleaner to it. Stainless steel is the definite winner when it comes to searing food and developing good color, just remember to use a bit of oil/butter and get the pan good and hot before putting your meat/vegetable in and then don’t move it around until it’s seared on one side.

One downsides to stainless steel is that, unlike copper, it is not great at distributing heat. Aluminum is pretty good though. My recommendation for the ultimate in strong, good searing, better than average heat distribution is to get a pan that combines aluminum and stainless steel. Sometimes this is called, “tri-ply” in that they have distinct layers of aluminum and stainless. I have the Calphalon pan which has stainless steel on the top and bottom layers, which gives it the ability to sear well and work on induction stoves, but has a layer of aluminum inside which helps with heat distribution. I love this pan. It feels good in my hand, cooks well, and when used right is actually pretty easy to clean.

In choosing WHICH stainless steel or non-stick to get, I decided to go middle of the road. I felt it was important to get dishes that were well constructed and wouldn’t have to be thrown away because the handle was getting lose/falling off. I opted for cookware that all had solid metal handles and good solid rivets. Getting solid metal handles also meant I could transfer something from the stove top to the oven…just make sure the pan/pot is listed as being oven safe. Personally, I wouldn’t spend more than $50 on a pan or pot. I’d scour the internet and T.J. Max, but would not spend

Pans:

In general, if it has a single long handle it’s a pan, even if it’s deep. A deep pan may be called a sauce pan. Skillet is another word for pan. For my cooking habits I chose the following sizes. A 10” stainless steel for general searing/frying. A 10” non-stick for omelets and other general cooking tasks. A 12” non-stick for general cooking of larger quantities. That was it. The stainless steel I got is oven safe, so I can sear something on the stove top and then transfer to the oven to slowly cook it with indirect heat.

Pots:

We already had several larger stock pots so the only item I added was a good sturdy bottom sauce pan. I’ll list it under “Pots” because most of the time I use it like a pot, boiling water or making small batches of soup. This is a 4 quart stainless steel sauce pan with a thick steel and copper bottom. For this, I ended up getting a KitchenAid that has stainless steel on the inside, and a composite bottom that has a layer of copper and a layer of stainless steel. It give the pan a good thick/solid bottom that distributes heat very evenly, which is something important especially if you’re heating something “delicate” like milk that you’re trying not to scorch. Also, the handle of this sauce pan is stainless steel with a silicone rubber grip. This means that, I can put it in a warm/hot oven to keep it warm or finish cooking something without worrying about the plastic handle melting. I have found that because the silicone is only on top and bottom, that if I have been boiling something for any amount of time the SIDE of the handle can be uncomfortably hot so I bought a removable silicone handle “hot pad” to use with this as well as taking hot skillets out of the oven.

Cutlery:

It sounds counter intuitive, but the sharper the knife, the safer it is. The idea behind this is that, a dull knife requires more cutting pressure/force than a sharp knife. Having to push harder with a dull knife means you’re more likely to slip and cut yourself. So, which knives are best for you? Unfortunately this one is very personal. Some people only want one or two knives, some want a whole set. Some want every knife serrated, some despise serrated knives. My suggestion is to pick up AT LEAST, an 8” Chef’s knife and a smaller pairing knife. Both of these should be non-serrated in my opinion. The other minimum requirement should be a sharpening steel. If you are uncomfortable using this, ask someone at the store (if it’s a kitchen store) or watch a video on youtube. The sharpening steel will NOT put a new edge on your blade, it WILL help keep the very thin cutting surface aligned and working well. Ideally you would use the steel every time or every few times you use the knife. If you are looking to get a set, the most important blades, in my opinion, are the ones that come standard with most sets anyway. I frequently use: 8” chef’s knife/santoku, pairing knife, serrated bread knife, sharpening steel, and kitchen scissors/shears. I do use the carving knife several times a year and am very glad I have it when I need it. I was fortunate enough to end up receiving a J.A. Henckels knife set for a wedding present and it’s probably one of the most used gifts in the kitchen.

Dutch Oven:

Once you get past the kitchen essentials, there are endless doodads and “others” you can consider. One of my personal favorites is the Dutch Oven. I think of it as sort of a non-powered crock pot. The best thing, in my opinion, about a dutch oven, is starting a roast or other item on the stove top by searing it and developing wonderful color/flavor and then transferring it to the oven, lid on, to continue cooking slowly and letting the item cook slowly with low heat to get tender and juicy. I chose an enameled cast iron dutch oven. The great thing about this piece of cookware is that it should pretty much last forever. You can spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a dutch oven with someone like Le Cruset, but I found a good one at target for $49.99. One thing to look for here is a lid that really sits securely around the entire perimeter of the “pot”.

Accessories:

If equipping a kitchen from scratch, I’d recommend getting a combination of wooden, plastic, and metal spatulas and spoons. I use plastic on my non-stick, and wood//metal on my stainless steel. I like the wooden for spoons because they work great scrapping the “frond” off the bottom of a stainless steel pan when making a pan sauce or gravy. I like the stainless steel for spatulas to use with steel pans, and I like the plastic spatulas/spoons for use with the non-stick so I don’t scratch.

In addition to spoons and spatulas, you’ll want some trivets or cooling racks to set hot pans/pots/trays on when you need to put them somewhere to cool or to bring them to the table. We have both trivets and racks. Sometimes, like brunch parties, we’re using all of them, so you can’t really have enough of these.

Hot pads are essential, particularly taking things in and out of the oven. I really like the silicone ones we got. We have two kinds, the flat square kind that also work as a trivet in a pinch, and the folded “finger glove” kind that work really well for taking things out of the oven. Also, as mentioned above I got one that is shaped like a tube or sleeve that is designed specifically to slide over the handle of a pot, that makes removing skillets that have been transferred to the oven to finish, much easier.

Mixing Bowls: get ones that you like. That’s about it. Make sure you get a variety of sizes and enough that you can mix multiple things up, and use some as salad bowls. Some people like to keep one by their cooking area as a “trash bowl” so they don’t have to keep running to the trashcan if it’s inconvenient. No reason to get a specific trash bowl, really any big bowl will do.

Photography Workflow, such as it is...

Other than for iPhone pictures (which come straight off the phone and get emailed to flickr directly), my workflow is pretty much the same for all of my pictures. When I get home I load the pictures onto my hard drive and import them into Lightroom, the photo management/editing software I use most.

From there I cull through the many photos I took (over 1,000 photos in one week for this vacation, similar for Italy). I "stack" similar pictures so that I only see the best one from that group when I'm flipping through casually. Then once I only have the best of what I've taken showing, I look through and find what pictures interest me, even a little. I give those a minimum rating of 2 stars. Then I filter to only the 2 star photos and start looking for the pictures that really stand out. Those get 3 stars and then I edit most of the 3 star pictures. Out of 100 pictures I might have 20 or 30 that I think are really worth anything, this is partially because I end up shooting the same thing 4 or 5 times usually, to make sure I have an exposure and, if it's people, expressions that I'm happy with. Then out of those 20 or 30 pictures There might be 5 or 10 that are real keepers. Those 5 or 10, out of 100, are the ones that I edit first and post to Flickr.

Typically, my "editing" in Lightroom is pretty simple. I adjust the color a bit. Typically I tweak the exposure using the various sliders to get a picture where the light areas are just short of clipping, and there are some areas in the photo that have a true black area in them, and then use the fill light and contrast to punch up any dull or dim areas. Then I go through and play with the vibrance/saturation until the picture has the right effect. The last thing that I typically do is to adjust noise reduction and sharpening. The kit lens I have (the 18-55mm) is not the sharpest in the world, plus I really need to do a better job of keeping it clean for the crispest possible photos. Other things I might occasionally do include removing spots from the photo if there was something on the lens or something small in the scene, like trash or something, that would be easy to remove, and I sometimes crop the picture to focus on something in the picture or adjust the framing if I was in a hurry when I took the photo. I'd rather just take the photo properly the first time though that crop, that way I still have the most pixels possible left.

I have my camera set to save in RAW format only. The very last step of the workflow, for the "chosen" photos, is to export them to jpeg and upload those jpegs to Flickr. Typical workflow for, say 100 photos, takes about 10 minutes to sort, maybe 30 minutes to edit, and about 15 minutes to upload and title in Flickr. So all told about 1 hour, average. This time may be more or less depending on how many good photos really came from the outing. On average though I'm happy if 1 in 10 is decent and 1 in 20 is really good.

Things I'm not doing right now that I REALLY should be doing include: automatic backup to a second hard drive in case something happens to the first. This is probably the BIGGEST thing that I'm NOT doing that I really NEED to be doing. Other than that, I'm not exporting everything to JPEG, which I could be doing to let Amon have a more manageable photo library that she can use in iPhoto, and I'm not using a camera/lens profile within Lightroom to help optimize my photos.

Something else that I don't really consider part of my "workflow" since i just started doing it with the photos from this West Coast vacation photos, and it's really more of an "effect" is HDR. For this I've only done the most basic HDR workflow. I imported the photos into Lightroom as described above. From there I can pick and compare a few photos that have been taken specifically with HDR in mind. When I'm out shooting, if there is a scene with VERY high contrast, like a dim room with windows in it or a forest with bright sunlight breaking through, then I will use a tripod to lock the camera down, and shoot several exposures. Ideally I will take an "average" shot and then a photo exposed for the shadows, and a photo exposed for the bright areas. Then once those pictures are in Lightroom I identify which ones I'm going to use and start up Photoshop. Within Photoshop I use the automate->merge to HDR option and select the files I've noted. I use Photoshop to merge the photos and decide how much contrast/exposure the final photo will have using the information from all the individual photos. This photo is then imported BACK into Lightroom where I do the final tweaking that I would do on any other photo, export to JPG, and upload to Flickr like normal.

Test 2 w/ imbed

Map w/ imbed?
<iframe width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"
marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?ui=maps&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;hq=&amp;hnear=11912+Centerhill+St,+Silver+Spring,+Montgomery,+Maryland+20902&amp;ll=39.0583,-77.072525&amp;spn=0.005832,0.013754&amp;z=16&amp;output=embed
"></iframe><br /><small><a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?ui=maps&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;hq=&amp;hnear=11912+Centerhill+St,+Silver+Spring,+Montgomery,+Maryland+20902&amp;ll=39.0583,-77.072525&amp;spn=0.005832,0.013754&amp;z=16&amp;source=embed
" style="color:#0000FF;text-align:left">View Larger Map</a></small>

*Sent from a mobile device

Maps Test iPhone

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=http://mapbookapp.com/maps?rn=4279243910362233

Route Link from PC

Experiment with google maps and mapbook iphone app.

This route is a bus ride I took yesterday:

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Daylight Long Exposure

Variation on a Theme III: Waterfall
Originally uploaded by mikeygibran

The Idea

While a long exposure at night can result in fantasy scenes with light trails and skies lit up like day by streetlights, a long exposure during daylight will typically result in so much light that the image is completely washed out. I have been experimenting with using a very dark filter to block enough light out to leave the shutter open for minutes at a time and still achieved good exposure.

Setup-at-a-Glance
Camera: dslr - Nikon d40
Lens: kit zoom - Nikon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
Filters: ND filter - B+W neutral density filter, 10 stop
Mount: tripod - Manfrotto Modo Max

Behind the shot
This photo is from Great Falls park in Maryland. It’s another attempt at daylight long exposure. The amount of light from the sun is overwhelming to a long exposure shot. You may be able to set the aperture way down, say f/20-32 depending on your lens, but even then having the shutter open for minutes at a time will still result in frames that are solid white. That is unless you put something in front of the lens to block lots of light – enter the neutral density filter. The filter looks a bit like the glass in a welding helmet, very dark. It blocks light equally across the visible spectrum, meaning it doesn’t color the image or that it is “neutral”, hence the name.

By using this type of filter, you can achieve the same results using long exposure shots during the daytime that you would get a night. There are lots of possibilities including turning water into a fantasy land mass of clouds, to getting the same sorts of trails from vehicles that you would at night, but with different types of detail since you pick up the entire vehicle, not just the lights, to blurring crowds of people. Another nice trick with long exposure shots in the daytime is that you can use them to make people disappear, literally.

If you are trying to photograph a building, and there are not many people walking by, but you just still can’t seem to get a frame devoid of people, use a long exposure shot. The building will be in the frame, not moving, the whole time, while any given walking person will only be in a specific spot for a brief time, at most a few seconds. Once you expose the photo, say for 120 seconds, the contribution to the image from that one person being there for 1 second, maybe 2, is minimal, and they disappear! Note that this won’t work with people standing around, or with huge crowds of people because you need to be able to see any given part of the building for substantially longer that the amount of time when there are people in front of it. It sort of “averages” out the people.

Process
So far I have found the best way to set these photos up, with my camera, is with a three step process: align the shot, add the filter, then set exposure. I align the camera and lens in automatic focus mode to get the exact image zoom, camera positioning, and focus I want while there is still enough light coming through the lens. Also, keeping the camera in autofocus mode prevents the focus ring from turning while you put the filter on. After setting up the frame and focusing, the filter goes on and the camera can then be put into manual focus mode. By putting the camera back into manual focus mode the camera will stay on the focus you've just set and not hunt for focus when you press the shutter release. If you leave the camera in autofocus with the filter on, it will most likely not have enough light coming through the lens to get proper focus and will just keeping searching. The last step is to use trial and error to dial in on the desired exposure setting, best done with manually setting the aperture and shutter until the desired image is achieved. You can tweak the balance between the aperture and shutter to get the best combination of depth of field and motion blur for the image you are trying to achieve.