Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Books

Ender’s Game

The Ender’s Game movie launched this weekend. I’m excited to see it (probably at home after it comes out on disc) so I can’t tell you if the movie is any good or not. But the book? The book is fantastic. This is probably my favorite book of all time. There’s always the debate about whether you should read the book or watch the movie first. Both have their merits and I’ve done both. There’s no argument for this one though. You really need to read the book first. Why? Well I can’t tell you for the same reason you shouldn’t watch the movie first. I guess the only case where you should ever watch the movie first is if you have absolutely zero intention of ever reading the book.

If you enjoy the book, the next three books in the series form a trilogy and are good. I think there are 9 or 10 total books in the series and I feel like they kind of dwindle as you go. But if you’re reading by book 7 or 8, you’re probably so engrossed in Ender’s universe that you don’t care too much.

benmartens November 1, 2013 Books

Kindle Paperwhite 2 Review

I finally pulled the trigger on a Kindle upgrade (wifi with special offers version.) I finally realized that I’ve used a Kindle for at least 30 minutes a day pretty much every day for the last 4 years, so I would probably get some use out of a new one. Going from the second generation Kindle to the second gen Kindle Paperwhite was a massive leap. Some of the changes have been around for a long time, but here’s a list of things that I’ve noticed and enjoyed about the device design:

  • Backlight – The backlight is great, especially since most of my reading happens in bed after Tyla falls asleep. It’s better than a tablet or a computer because the text you’re reading is still physically there but now there is light around it to let you see what you’re reading. The light is completely adjustable, but if it ends up causing eye strain, I can still drop back to the old method of a book light.
  • Contrast ratio – Even without the backlight turned on to make the background whiter, the text is a lot darker and the background is a lot lighter.
  • Speed – Changing screens, opening books, opening menus, and flipping pages is all significantly faster than before.
  • Touch screen – I thought I would hate this but it actually works pretty well because the Kindle is so much quicker. The only downside is that to turn a page your thumb has to cross over onto the screen instead of just staying on the side where you’re holding the book. If I could design my perfect device, I’d probably drop the physical keyboard but keep the physical page turn buttons.
  • Battery life – This one isn’t really fair since the battery on my old Kindle had been through a lot of power cycles, but Amazon claims this new one will go two months between charges even with the backlight on!

The physical device changes are great, but the software changes are incredible! The first devices were about replicating the experience of a paper book, but now they’re taking advantage of their platform and doing things that books could never do.

  • Wikipedia – Not only can I get dictionary definitions for words, but I can also look things up on Wikipedia. And both of those show up in a flyout instead of changing to an entirely different screen.
  • Vocabulary builder – Anytime you look up a word, it goes into the Vocabulary Builder app. You can go back and quick yourself to see if you’re actually learning anything. Words can be removed once you decide you’ve mastered them.
  • XRay – This feature probably would have convinced me to keep reading Game of Thrones. You can highlight a character in the book and then quickly see everywhere in the book that they appear, seeing passages where they are mentioned to remind you who they are.
  • Pages/Locations – Even after four years, I never got the hang of locations. Having 300 locations left to the end of a chapter doesn’t really register, but now I can finally switch to page numbers. The numbers correspond to a printed copy of the book so you might not actually increment the page number when you flip the page on your ebook. But still, if I have 8 pages left, I know roughly what that means.
  • Scan forward/backward – You can quickly bring up an overlay and flip ahead or backwards without actually changing your place in the book. It’s a nice way to navigate to quickly answer something you forgot or to find the next good stopping point.
  • Minutes remaining – I saved my favorite feature for last. Based on how quickly you’ve been reading, it predicts how many minutes you have left until you hit the end of a chapter! This feature alone is almost worth the price of a new device.

All in all, I’m thrilled with the new Paperwhite. Other e-readers have come and gone, but Amazon has a winner on their hands.

benmartens October 24, 2013 Books, Gadgets

Scorecasting Review

If you enjoy sports and statistics, there’s a book you need to read and it’s called Scorecasting. The tagline for the book is “The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won” and that’s a pretty good description. I tell people it’s like Mythbusters for sports colloquialisms. Does defense really win championships? Does home field advantage exist and if so, what causes it? Are the Cubs really cursed? When should you punt? They go into very rigorous detail to answer each question. That rigor can create for a bit of slow reading in a couple spots, but overall, it’s a winner!

benmartens August 22, 2013 Books

Books

I’m usually left with way more books that I want to read than I have time to read, so keeping track of them all can be a hassle. After trying a variety of methods, I’ve landed on GoodReads and it seems like a pretty good tool. There are apps for all phone platforms which is important so you can save a book when you’re on the go and it integrates with Facebook to quickly find friends who are also using the site. That being said, it doesn’t look like many of you are using it. If you’re looking for a site to help you keep track of your reading list and also suggest books that you might like, check it out and add me as a friend! Or if you have a better system, I’d love to hear about that too.

benmartens June 7, 2013 Books

King County Library Rocks

We live in a high tech county. Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all have offices here and those are just a few of the names you’d recognize. It apparently trickles down into our library system. The more I look at the library, the more amazed I am!

A couple years ago, they enabled Kindle ebook checkouts. I’ve been a heavy user of that and it has worked fantastically well. We were also able to drop our Consumer Reports website subscription because the library gives us that for free. Tonight I was contemplating subscribing to a magazine when I decided to browse through the library. It turns out that they offer free access to a bunch of magazines through Zinio! (Zinio is an online digital magazine distributor.) Tyla is sitting on the couch laughing at me because I’m so excited about this.

The moral of the story is that if you haven’t been to your library in a while, be sure to check out what services they offer. You might be surprised!

P.S. The magazine I was looking for is called Family Handyman. I was given a couple free issues of the magazine and was very impressed. They’re full of great quick tips and project plans. Every issue I read gave me some good ideas. I’m pretty excited to get it for free through the library. I also signed up to receive Skiing, Popular Science, and Mental Floss. Who knows if I’ll have time to read them all, but who cares, it’s free!

P.P.S. “Free” in the context of this post of course means “you’re already paying for it with your taxes so you might as well make use of it.”

benmartens May 22, 2013 Books

Kingkiller Chronicles

Looking for a book to read? I just finished the first book of the Kingkiller Chronicles and immediately started on the second one. It’s something like a cross between Harry Potter for adults, but that isn’t really fair to either series. Patrick Rothfuss is the author and he has spent a decade polishing these books and it really shows. The world is extremely intricate, but it’s not overwhelming. The story is engaging, but it’s easy to follow along. If you’re at all interested in the fantasy genre, check this out. And if fantasy isn’t your thing, don’t be put off by the sterotypes around the genre. While there is magic in the book, it’s used as a tool in the story, not as a main focus that keeps getting beat to death.

Leo Laporte interviewed the author on a recent episode of Triangulation. It gives a nice background into Patrick’s thought process behind the books. At the end they apparently start talking about the book, but they warn of major spoilers so I’m going to listen to that after I finish the second book. Hopefully it won’t be too much longer until book three launches because I know I’ll be itching to continue the story after I finish book two!

benmartens May 17, 2013 Books

Trap Shooting

I picked up a copy of Breaking Clays: Target, Tactics, Tips and Techniques by Chris Batha in hopes that it would help with my trap shooting. The first half of the book is an introduction to shotgun sports while the second half covers the various sports and doesn’t spend a lot of time specifically on trap. I did get a few good tips though which are shown below:

  • When you miss, it has little to do with the ballistics of the shotgun – choke and cartridges give you inches where you miss in feet. A miss is more often caused by a breakdown in the fundamentals.
  • If you can keep the muzzles on the line throughout the shot, you limit your misses to in front or behind. You instantly achieve a fifty per cent reduction in missing. You also gain a significant second benefit. As a competitor, if you miss, you need to know the fault or the cause and understand the correction. If you can stay on the line, it becomes easier to recognise the fault. You miss either in front or behind, now you can analyse the cause and apply the correction. You can improve the odds even more. You can make sure that if you do miss, it is in front of the target.
  • Raise your eyebrows just before you call for the target. This simple action gives you a twenty per cent increase in light-gathering vision.
  • Clay target shooting is different from other sports in that there is little physical activity to relieve stress build-up which increases incrementally as scores increase.
  • The inability to suppress left brain activity is what leads to ‘choking’.
  • My approach is, they are all one-bird competitions. You should take each target one at time. See the target – break the target. Concentrate on each shot as an independent and all-important target and forget about everything else…especially your score!
  • There is no such person as The Natural. I will allow that there are a few participants in any walk of life who can learn a motor skill quicker than the average person. But there is still a ceiling to their progress – they just reach it quicker. The learning curve of any activity is never a straight line; it consists of peaks and troughs and very often long plateaus of little progress.

The book also taught me where the term “trap shooting” comes from. It started in England when they would place a bird on the ground and cover it with a box. You would move the box, pick up your gun, and shoot the fleeing bird. When people got too good at that, they attached a string to the box and moved farther back. When the sport came to America there was a shortage of pigeons and doves so they switched to the clays instead. In the 1920s, England made it illegal to use live birds in trap shooting.

benmartens March 21, 2013 Books, Sports

Book Quotes

One of the best features of the Kindle is the ability to highlight passages and then retrieve them on your computer later. Here are some of the passages I’ve highlighted in the last few months:

  • ATLANTIS by Bob Mayer
    More missions meant they were better at what they did, not less afraid.
  • The Time Machine by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
    I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.
  • The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
    Nitwit ideas are for emergencies. You use them when you’ve got nothing else to try. If they work, they go in the Book. Otherwise you follow the Book, which is largely a collection of nitwit ideas that worked."

I’d say Mote in God’s Eye is the best of the books I’ve read recently. I’ve been very impressed with two of the Jerry Pournelle books I’ve read. The other is Lucifer’s Hammer. If you’re at all interested by the synopsis of the books, give them a shot and you probably won’t be disappointed.

benmartens March 20, 2013 Books