Archive for the 'Books' category

With the repeated announcement of (minor) incidents with the security of the original PDF reader from Adobe, I wondered what could be a good replacement. Obviously, it seems important to stay around free or low prices (Adobe Acrobat: Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic: free, Pro: $299), but is it possible to beat the Adobe product to read PDF files?

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

CollegeDegree.com lists 100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access.

Knowledge is always free.

Summer: m.noun /ˈsʌmə(ɹ)/ (plural summers) Long period of time that millions of English-seaking people choose to replace watching silly TV reality shows by reading silly thick paper printed words selected first for their total lack of requirement of brain participation during the operation known as reading.

Let’s contribute to the improvement of knowledge and culture in the Human race: This year, let’s read English novels of the highest quality. They may come from the old United Kingdom or from the newly liberated colonies of North America. Quality is always here.

The 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

Here is the beginning of the list. Which ones did you actually read?

1. (1922) Ulysses James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5. (1932) Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22 Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
11. (1947) Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
12. (1903) The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler
13. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
14. (1934) I, Claudius Robert Graves
15. (1927) To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
16. (1925) An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
17. (1940) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
18. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
19. (1952) Invisible Man Ralph Ellison

Cooking recipes were the excuse for millions of Internet users (Ed: maybe not millions) to write down the advice of their grand-mothers, quite often with a desperating lack of inspiration. But I just found a couple of nice web sites that could be checked as much for their recipes as for the pictures [1] or the videos going along with them.

• Habeas Brulée is superbly written with elegant recipes and generally great photos.
• Rouxbe proposes recipes also very generous but presented in video.

Rhubarb Soup with Olive Cookie

It depends on the cook, but if you have real difficulties with your own cooking style, you may find an excuse. Next time you fail, just say “Oh! I was trying one of jamesoff.net random recipes“. JamesOff is a systems engineer in the South West of England who created a Random Recipe Generator. Merely reload the page to get another recipe.

I found a few funny, interesting, or surprising glasses or vases that I wanted to share with you.

The first ones are coming with a request to drink responsibly:

A Cognac glass (Rikke Hagen)

(more…)

Awesomely superb, “The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala” is an illustrated book (download in PDF) by James Bateman that you can find in Botanicus.org wbe site of the Missouri Botanical Gardens.

SitePoint is giving away (for a limited time only) an excellent e-book about PhotoShop. It’s well worth the effort to donwload the PDF file.

SitePoint sensational Photoshop book is now FREE to Download!

I do not often present character fonts, but this one is definitely nicer than usual with its elegant 3D effect of folded white paper.

Source: DaniellaSpinat.com.

I found this funny little piece of SciFi/security litterature. I’m sure you’ll like it.

The man blurred into existence behind the dense shrubs, and checked a small device he took from his pocket. Since time and date seemed correct, he straightened his sports coat and stepped from behind the bushes.

[...]

Source: Ironic Sans.

We do not often see the sceenplay of a movie we like. Maybe it’s fortunate because they are hardly exhilarating except when they come from Alfred Hitchcock (the man was a maniac of detailed preparation) or when they describe all about animation movies.

The Wall, the Alan Parker movie created with the eponymous music album from Pink Floyd stays a monument of moving images. But, now, you can look at the pages of Roger Waters and Gerald Scarfe, the original screenplay (in PDF).

For those who did not notice, a disproportionately large majority of the titles to Woody Allen movies are written in one and only one font: Windsor.

Apparently, this comes from a conversation with Ed Benguiat, famous American typographer, where Allen wanted to know what a good typeface was.

Source: KitBlog.

With VozMe, it’s easy to have your computer read a text. In English (but also in Spanish and in Italian), you will get an MP3 file with your text read by the slightly-metallic voice of your computer.

One of the greatest minds and authors of the 20th Century just died. Arthur C. Clarke was very well known for some of his highly acclaimed books (think about 2001: A Space Odyssey and the collaboration with Stanley Kubrik on the movie with the same name). Some of them were only known to Science Fiction fans (Rendez-vous with Rama, The Fountains of Paradise, for example).

But Sir Arthur C. Clarke was also the author of significant steps for science like the observation that geostationary satellites would be the practical solution to many telecommunication issues. I can vividly remember my reading of Interplanetary Flight; an introduction to astronautics, where in 1950 he stated very clearly concepts like the multi-stage rocket or the geostationary satellite and why they should be prefered to other technical solutions.

The old man (born on 16 December 1917) was living in Sri Lanka where he appreciated the leisure of all-year-long scuba diving.

Science Fiction can no longer be the same after he left us.

Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90 from respiratory complications linked to the post-polio syndrome that forced him into a wheelchair for his last years.