Twitter

I'm feeling very happy to have this catch up week, as I was starting to fall behind a bit, and still have several cool things to investigate.

I set up my twitter account last week and so far have been pleasantly suprised.  I never really saw the point before, but now I think I'm starting to get it.  I haven't tweeted anything myself yet, but it's interesting to read what other people think about things that are happening in the world.  I've been following a few famous people, and have been suprised by how different some of them seem in twitter land to how they come across in other media.  Some talk more rubbish than I expected them to! But it makes them seem a bit more human, which is good.

Hen by StevenW. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic  (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Badger

I made the most of last week's task by spending much time looking for a picture of a nice badger on flickr.  This picture was taken by Tatterdemalion!, and I have been able to add it under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence.

I have enjoyed learning about Creative Commons this week, and feel that it can only be a good thing to attempt to protect people's rights over their creative works, while at the same time providing a means for others to use pictures without a lurking fear of being caught infringing copyright.  Many people don't seem to worry about it too much, but it used to worry me so much that I would simply go without using images at all rather than use one I wasn't completely sure was legal. But I wonder what happens if you do get caught?  What would happen if I got caught using someone's image on this blog that they didn't want used?  

Like For Your I.A.s Only, I noticed that lots of people on Flickr were using the most restrictive form of the CC licence, but I didn't think that even this was too restrictive really.  I suppose I might find it annoying if I wanted to use an image for a commercial purpose, but I kind of feel if you are going to do that, its best to use your own images anyway!  I had used flickr before a tiny bit, but will definitely use it a lot more now that I know how to do a search only within Creative Commons licensed content.

A tiny Kindle update (I hope I'm not becoming obssesive): Kindle has behaved pretty well this week and there have been no more tantrums.  I'm currently trying to work out how to download audio books, as there are lots of free ones available on Project Gutenberg.  You can actually get Kindle to read any book out to you (if the book has the right permissions and such), but the voice it uses is very robotic and I find myself listening out for the robot's odd pronunciations and pauses in strange places, rather than listening to the actual content.

The things of this week

I've managed to finish the things for this week, but only to the bare minimum at the moment.  I think I will need to spend some more time playing with them next week to understand the full potential, especially with Google Reader.  However, I enjoyed finding gadgets to put onto igoogle and ended up with rather a crowded page!  My favourite so far is 'Children's book of the day'.  It's just nice, and I like children's books.  I don't know how to add a screen shot to this blog to show it though?

I'm not sure how I feel about google reader and rss feeds: this is the part I need to look at more closely next week.  For some reason, I have never really taken to rss feeds; I quite like trawling through my favourite websites to find new things. However, from reading other people's blogs, it look like I have been missing out on a useful tool, so I will devote some more time to it and explore.

A quick update on the Kindle:  everything was going smoothly until Wednesday.  I was enchanted with being able to carry around lots of books without ruining my bag (I've lost several bags to carrying books around that were too heavy for them to cope with).  However, on Wednesday evening I was coming towards the end of a book, when disaster struck and the silly kindle froze!  I spent about 15 frustrating minutes trying everything I could think of to unfreeze it.  Eventually, instead of throwing it on the ground and stamping on it (as it deserved), I looked up the Amazon troubleshooting page and managed to solve the problem.  Apparently I had pressed some buttons too quickly and this had confused the kindle.  My print books never get confused when I turn pages too quickly.  Anyway, I have forgiven the kindle for this transgression, but I feel more wary of it than I did before.  If I go on holiday with the kindle, I think I will have to take at least one print book as well, just to be on the safe side.

Starting to blog

This is the very first blog I have ever written, partly because I've never found anything particularly compelling to write about before, and partly because I didn't know how.  So far, the experience of setting up the blog has gone smoothly and has been more simple than I thought (although I suspect there must be some sort of pitfalls I haven't noticed yet).  I may attempt to make the design more individual at some point, though at the moment I have no idea how to do this.  I'm hoping (optimistically/naively?) it will be intuitive.  At the moment I have kept everything as simple as possible, using default settings and such, until I feel at bit more confident about how the whole thing works.

In the meantime (on a non blog related topic), I have just ordered an Amazon Kindle and am interested to find out how much it will alter my reading habits.  I'm quite excited about it, at the same time as feeling treacherous and as if I have betrayed the good old printed book.  Even before it's arrived, I've been downloading books, and have become quite preoccupied with trying to think of books I want to read that will be available for free.  At the moment, I only want to download free books, as I feel a bit dubious about the permanence of an ebook.  I'd be dreadfully upset if my whole expensive personal library disappeared one day!  (This is probably an unjustified fear.)  My theory is that I will still read paper books most of the time (because I like them), but will use my kindle when I am travelling about.  I found a nice quotation which I think illustrates some of the advantages of a paper book over an ebook:

 
"A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us, that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins"  ~Charles Lamb, Last Essays of Elia, 1833

I hesitated slightly about the legality of including this quotation, but as the author died more than 70 years ago, I think it should be ok.

http://www.cla.co.uk/copyright_information/copyright_information/