London Holiday

Kristin and I are in the UK for the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton.  The convention starts tomorrow, and in the meantime, we've been in London doing the tourist thing.  Being who we are, this has meant not Big Ben and the Tower of London, but the Science Museum, the Classics wing of the British Museum, and Verulamium near St. Albans.

We're staying in a hotel room which is very modern, but rather small:

Kristin on her phone in the hotel room

The very narrow bathroom

All the lights in the hotel room appear to be LEDs, from the ceiling lights, to the stars overhead, and the blue highlights and the television accents:

Blue highlights and star-studded ceiling

The television has a nice glow behind it.

And, of course, there's a collection of inputs for the television, in case you want to show something through HDMI, VGA, RCA, or any other connection.

Connections for the television.  I'm using the USB to charge my phone.

I'm afraid that I didn't take any pictures at the Science Museum, which is too bad.  There was a fairly nice exhibit on steam power, with a huge, working steam engine.  I'm sure all the steampunk writers at World Fantasy would enjoy it.

Kristin and I were focused on the Roman exhibits at the British Museum.  I have more pictures than is practical of that part, but here are a few:

Cooking utensils in the ancient world

A body chain, one of the few examples of this Classical type of jewelry

Weapons!

The Portland Vase

I took a lot more pictures, of a lot of different things, mostly for reference in my writings.

We also went to Verulamium, which was one of the big Roman towns in the early years of Britain's induction to the Empire.  They had a pretty nice museum as well.  Much smaller than the British Museum, and very kid friendly with a lot of annoying multimedia presentation, but there were some interesting items, including the reconstruction of a number of rooms to try to show daily life:

Preparing food in a "middle class" kitchen

A door latch--I've been trying to figure out how exactly it worked

A hearth for preparing food

There are also a few excavation sites nearby:

Part of Verulamium's wall

What's left of the theater

A mosaic floor with a hypocaust--an underground heating system

Today, we went to see St. Paul's Cathedral.  They wouldn't let us take pictures inside, but we were able to take some outside:

The front of St. Paul's, distorted since I was using the panorama mode of my phone.

The dome

A picture from the top of the dome,  looking down on the towers in the first picture.  It required climbing a lot of stairs. 

That's all for now.  Tomorrow, we're heading for Brighton and the World Fantasy Convention.

T-shirts

For our anniversary in May, Kristin and I designed matching T-shirts.

They are now available for sale, in an array of styles and colors.

I won't ruin the joke by explaining it, but I will give a hint.

LED bulbs

I've recently been buying LED lightbulbs to replace the various bulbs we usually use around here. For a while, my wife was buying CFL bulbs, but she got tired of them, not so much for the quality of the light, but for the fact that their odd shapes and sizes kept them from fitting where she wanted them. So she's been buying the energy-efficient incandescents instead. These use a small amount of halogen (usually flourine or bromine) inside the bulbs, resulting in a chemical reaction which redeposits the tungsten evaporated by the bulb onto the filament, which allows the bulb to be operated at a higher temperature, where it has better efficiency. Most of which I learned from the Wikipedia entry.

The halogen incandescents are only very slightly more efficient than regular incandescents, though, and the GE ones, at least, are also dimmer than the bulbs they're supposed to replace. The 60 W replacements consume 43 W to produce 750 lumens rather than the standard 800 lumens, while the 100 W replacements consume 72 W to produce 1490 lumens rather than the standard 1600 lumens. Meanwhile, I can buy LED light bulbs that consume 9.5 W and produce 850 lumens, or 19 W and produce 1680 lumens. In math terms, they consume a quarter of the power and produce about 15% more light than the energy efficient incandescents.

I've long believed that LEDs were probably the light bulb of the future. They're more efficient than incandescents or CFLs, and last longer--twenty years, by standard measurements (which, unfortunately, don't actually involve waiting twenty years and seeing if they still work).

The problem is that LEDs cost commensurately more. I can buy decent quality 60 W equivalent LED bulbs for $10-20 apiece, or spend $2.50 for an energy efficient incandescent. And as for 100 W bulbs--not that long ago, you couldn't buy 100 W equivalent LED bulbs at any price. That's changed, but they're still expensive: $50 or more usually, though I have found a few available for $30 apiece. 100 W energy efficient incandescents? About $2.50 each for those too. Sure, the LEDs also have a 20 year lifespan, compared to the one year of the incandescents, but then again, LED prices are coming down pretty quickly, so buying incandescents this year and buying LEDs a year from now would probably save money in hardware costs. Not, though, when combined with electricity costs. So my compromise is to replace the bulbs we use the most--kitchen, living room, bedroom, with LEDs, and leave the rest for a little while.

LEDs in the living room's candelabra

One of the problems I've run into doing that is that a lot of pre-existing light fixtures in our apartment use the candelabra bulbs, and finding LEDs for those is more difficult--escpecially since it takes a lot more of them to fill the light fixture (6, in the case of the two we have in the living room and dining room), and they're about the same price as 60 W bulbs. Fortunately, I have found a fairly cheap option from Feit--a three bulb pack for $21. These actually work pretty well. They have a slightly higher color temperature at 3000 K (which means they're slightly more white than the yellowish incandescents), but they are close enough for us. We get 300 lumen for 4.8 Watts out of them. I have noticed that they turn on a bit slower--most of them seem to take half-a-second to come to life after flicking on the switch, which is usually something you see in CFLs, not LEDs. And one of the sockets won't work for any of the Feit LEDs for some reason--I had to use a LED from another company (one of the ones costing $10-20). But it works. And it seems to be just as bright as the fixture in the dining room, where I'm still using all (non high efficiency) incandescents.

The incandescents in the dining room.

In the kitchen, we have a five light fixture which takes normal sized 60 W bulbs. Two of them have CFLs which my wife put in a while ago, and since they seem to be working well, I haven't bothered replacing them. The rest I've replaced with LEDs, all from the Cree 60 W replacements. These have the right size, even if they're a bit oddly shaped.

The one on the left is the old style Cree 60 W, while the one on the right is the Cree TW 60 W.

I've tried both the older Cree bulb, and the Cree TW, which is supposed to have better color. I think the color of the TW bulb is a bit better, but as it's also more expensive ($18.50 vs. $12.50), and it also consumes more power (13.5 W vs 9.5 W). I think that the older bulb is a better purchase. It can be found at Home Depot, in packs of 6 (or less, for a slightly higher price), though it looks like that may not last for much longer.

I have yet to buy any 100 W bulbs. I bought a 75 W bulb from Sylvania at Amazon, but at $38 it was pretty expensive. Still, it works pretty well, and it appears to be brighter than the 100 W equivalent CFL which it replaced. That may simply be because the light is less omnidirectional, and while it produces only 1100 lumen, more of it is in the direction I want, while the 1600 lumen CFL sends more light up and to the sides.  Or it could just be that I didn't wait long enough for the CFL to reach full brightness--but if it takes more than a couple of seconds, that's an advantage for the LEDs.

100 W equivalent LEDs are mostly above $50, but at $30 apiece, this set of two seems more reasonable. I'm a little bit reluctant to buy them before I see some more reviews. They seem different from the usual orange Philips LEDs, and I'd like to know why. I've also spent a good bit on LEDs recently, and these, while cheaper, are still expensive. They're also larger bulbs, matching the large size A21 bulb, rather than the usual A19. There are places where they can fit, but they're too big for a lot of our fixtures.

I think I'll wait a month or so before buying any more LEDs, and then I'll probably buy more of the Feit candelabra bulbs, the Cree 60 W bulb, and the Philips 100 W bulbs.

Update (10/13/2013): I was clearing out my pictures on Google+, and accidentally deleted the pictures I had here.  I've replaced most of them, but I've changed the text so it's not as dependent.

New card

So I've created a new writing/blogging business card, just in time for the World Fantasy Convention:

New business card.

The picture is one I took when Kristin and I visited Italy for our honeymoon.  That's the Second Temple of Hera at Paestum. I felt it appropriate for my frequently Roman-themed stories.

The reason for the new card is that I also had a new role to advertise, that of a book reviewer at Black Gate. Since I'm reviewing self-published books, I thought it might be good if my card had that information to hand out.

Co-writing

On and off, my wife and I have talked about co-writing a story. We're both published writers, but we have noticeably different strengths and weaknesses. It seems like a co-written story might be able to combine our strengths and cover our weaknesses. And hopefully not the other way around. One problem I'm running into is figuring out how. How do two authors write a story together? I have a few ideas, but nothing's really seemed like it's the right way. Then again, there may not be a right way.

Here are the ideas:

1. Alternating revisions. What if just one person wrote the first draft, and the next person revised it? "How's that different than editing?" you ask. Complete creative freedom. The reviser isn't limited to line edits. They can make whatever changes they see fit. Deleting scenes, writing new ones, changing the entire course of the story. Of course, at that point, the story is returned to the first author, and he's free to make whatever changes he wants. At some point the two authors are going to have to negotiate, but at least at the beginning they're free to do whatever they want.

2. Alternating writing.  A lot of writing groups have done the exercise where the first person writes a paragraph, then hands it to the next person, who reads the first paragraph and then writes the next one. If you've done it, you've probably seen how quickly the exercise goes off the rails. Someone will write something the next person finds absurd, and soon everything up to that point becomes a dream or a daydream. So first, you probably shouldn't do it by paragraph. It would work better if you do it by scene. You also have to set some ground rules.  Like what type of story it should be,  no retconning without permission, that sort of thing. In theory it could work.

3. Joint Outlining. I have a feeling that this is the most common way of co-writing.  Two people sit down and come up with a story: the characters, the plot, the setting, etc. And then once it's planned out, they split up the work between them. This is probably the most effective way to do it.

4. Backseat writing. You literally write it together. One person looks over the other's shoulder as they type into the computer. I've done that, usually for work, and it's really slow and not much fun. It generally means debating word choice for every little thing. I can imagine that many projects will require some of this, but I can't imagine writing a whole story this way.

Any other ideas?

New review

I've just posted my latest review at Black Gate.  This month I review Thomas Alexander's Mistress of the Dancing Bones.

The War Against the Squirrels

My wife has been fighting the most wily and dangerous enemy of her gardening career.  She woke up with a cold on Monday morning, feeling sick and coughing. But that was a minor nuisance compared to the calamity that struck later in the day.  The squirrels had gotten into her raised bed and destroyed much of it, including most of the recently planted seeds and some of the younger plants. Kristin had been using Cayenne pepper flakes to keep the squirrels out, but apparently one of them has developed a taste for it.  She threw the closest thing at hand at it (my cell phone charger) when she saw it in her garden, but by then the damage had been done.

The damage from day two of the great squirrel war. The red is from the now ineffective Cayenne pepper.

Since then, she and the squirrels have been dueling.  She's been trying something different every day, inspired by the dark secrets found in the murky depths of the Internet, or possibly just in her cold-drug-addled brain.  She's tried throwing rocks, she's tried shooting foam discs, she's tried garlic and chicken wire and most recently, ghosts.

Spooky ghosts to frighten squirrels

She's determined to drive the squirrels away, though I worry that she'll make them so accustomed to the spicy, garlicky food and spooky ambiance that they'll never eat at a bland, regular garden again.

Update (10/5/2013): One more photo:

Ghosts from above!

Review of World's End

A week ago, Kristin and I went to the movies and saw World's End. It was an entertaining movie.  Kristin sold it to me as "A bunch of friends go on a pub crawl, and killer robots show up."  I'd warn about spoilers here, but I doubt many folks will go to this movie expecting a comedy about a pub crawl.  But just in case, there will be more spoilers below.

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Of course, even with Kristin's spoiler, it wasn't what I expected.  The movie's primarily about a guy named Gary King.  On the day he graduated high school, he and his friends went on a pub crawl through all 12 pubs in the town where they grew up.  They only made it through nine, and Gary's been stuck ever since.  All his friends grew up, got jobs, had families, but while he left the town, Gary never really grew up.  He doesn't have any job that we've seen, no family, and really nothing in his life.  Then he hits on the idea of finishing the crawl, and making it through all 12 pubs this time, as if that will let him restart his life, this time correctly.

So he dragoons his friends into joining his quest, mostly by lying, and sets out to visit his hometown.  But things have changed.  People aren't the way they used to be, and a sort of sameness has infected the pubs. If you're thinking, "oh, everyone must have been replaced by robots," then you've read as much sci fi as I have. But where the description fails is the killer part.  The robots--don't call them that, as they're offended by the term--don't see themselves as invaders.  Rather, they're here to bring humanity into the galactic civilization by changing them for the better.  Yes, this sometimes means replacing people by transferring their minds, with small improvements, into robot artificial bodies, but by using these replacements to improve society as a whole, the vast majority of people should simply adapt to the new society.  This premise, that the robots would prefer not to replace them, justifies the fact that Gary King and his friends continue their pub crawl, pretending to fit in, rather than just making a run for it.  That, and Gary's crazy.  Of course, it doesn't take long for that to break down, and soon the friends are running for their lives (though Gary keeps insisting, against everyone's better judgement, that they run in the direction of the next pub in the crawl).  For a plan to replace only a small fraction of the population, it sure seems like everyone's a robot.

One of the things I found most remarkable was how proficient at fighting everyone was.  Gary King and his friends plowed through dozens of robots with some impressive moves, especially considering that they were all roaring drunk at the time. Or maybe that was why their moves were so impressive.

Ultimately, Kristin, at least, felt that the ending didn't work.  It felt inconsistent with the tone of the rest of the story.  Personally, I didn't think that.  I thought that if you were going to call the movie World's End, you had to go apocalyptic by the finale.

Fire

This picture was taken about 5 pm on Tuesday from my office.

Smoke from a fire at the airport

The fire was apparently a fuel fire at the airport, according to the local news:

Crews quickly contained a two-alarm fire that was burning at a Logan Airport fuel farm Tuesday afternoon. Black smoke could be seen for miles from the fire on Prescott St. near the economy parking lot.

[. . .]

The fire was in one of 12 underground fuel pumps and started at 5:00pm.

The news article says that the fire was "quickly contained", and the picture I took just a few minutes after the first one, at 5:04pm, confirms it:

The fire is gone and the smoke is beginning to dissipate.

Fortunately, no one was hurt, and as far as anyone can tell, it was an accident. It was a little alarming seeing that out my window, though.

Review is up

My latest review for Black Gate is online.  This time I review Milton Davis's Woman of the Woods.

The gesture keyboard

This is more of a comment on Android than on my phone in particular, but I'm starting to get the hang of the gesture keyboard that Android uses. It's much faster than the hunt-and-peck method I'm used to. Still, I've seen people much more practiced than I use it, so I know I have a ways to go. That said, I am getting better at it. And it's surprisingly forgiving if you make a mistake, and need to change your direction in the middle of a stroke. Or even if you're not quite on target with your strokes. Give me a little more practice, and maybe I'll try writing a novel with it. I've already used it for a couple of flash fiction stories.

It's also gotten me to start holding the phone in portrait mode when I type. With my iPhone, I always used my phone held in landscape whenever I needed to type something, so that I could use both thumbs without needing to reach across the keyboard. With the gesture keyboard, it's actually easier to hold in portrait, since that makes the keyboard, and thus my gestures, smaller. My new phone also has a bigger screen than my iPhone, so the keys are big enough when held in portrait, and the gesture keyboard is forgiving enough, that I don't need to make the keyboard larger by holding it in landscape.  I haven't quite gotten the hang of doing the gestures one-handed with just my thumb, though. I can type that way, though it's more of a stretch with the larger screen, but it's hard to do the gestures.

Now all I need is Scrivener for Android, and I'll be set.

Moto X First Impressions

I mentioned about two weeks ago that I was considering buying a new smartphone.  Well, I went ahead and bought one the Friday a week ago.  I got the Moto X, which I mentioned as being the one I was most interested in.  The process was not entirely painless.  While the MotoMaker website was online, at that point, you couldn't just buy a phone from the website.  You first had to go to an AT&T store and purchase one of the scratch cards that gave you access to the website.  That took over an hour, since the AT&T employees didn't know how to do the order. It's not really the employees' fault, since they simply hadn't been trained on how to do it, but it was still frustrating for all involved.

But I finally got the card, and was able to get online and order the phone.  I really didn't want the customization option because I wanted a special color combination.  All I was really after was an extra 16 GB of storage, which is what I got.  As for colors, I just got a basic woven black, with metallic red trim. Then I placed my order and waited.  The website said that it would take 12 days to arrive rather than the four that Motorola has been promising in their press releases, but I guess they really meant four days, because the phone arrived on Wednesday, and I've been playing with it ever since.

What surprised me at first was how small the phone was.  I had seen the specs, so I knew its dimensions, but that's different from actually holding it in your hand.  I expected it to at least be bigger than my iPhone 4S, which is two years old, and has the dimensions of a three year old phone.  And it is bigger, but I've been carrying my iPhone in a Mophie Juice Pack Case, which makes it bigger. Big enough that the Moto X and the iPhone in its case were the exact same length and width, except that the Moto X was much thinner. In fact, it feels small and light compared to what I've been carrying around.  But it also has a 4.7" screen, as opposed to the 3.5" on the 4S.  So it's smaller in size, but has a bigger screen at the same time.

It doesn't have a longer battery life, but that's mainly because my 4S had the extra battery in its case.  I'm fairly certain that the 4S by itself doesn't last as long as the Moto X, which seems capable of running all day without recharging, from 7 am to 11 pm, although by 11 pm it's below 15% battery and on battery saver mode.   I use my phone pretty extensively during the day, though it's mostly for web browsing and checking e-mail and reading e-books, not for the real battery hogs, like video or games.

The screen's a large and beautiful AMOLED.  The difference in size is very noticeable.  I'm not so sure about the color and contrast, which are supposed to be really good on an AMOLED, but that may just be because I'm not enough of a screen connoisseur to be able to tell the difference without looking at them side by side.  Though certainly, Apple's been no slouch when it comes to high-resolution screens for their phones.  I do like that the Moto X takes advantage of the AMOLED screen to do low power, on screen notifications.  I'm getting used to just glancing at my phone and being able to tell whether there's anything I need to deal with, without having to press any buttons or unlock it.

Since this is my first Android phone, a lot of the differences I'm noticing are the differences between Android and iOS, and not specific for the Moto X.  For example, I miss having a number on the icons to tell me how many email messages or voicemail messages I've received, and having a list of all my e-mails in my notifications.  But I'm definitely enjoying the ability to control where my icons go, choosing which ones I want to be my favorites, and putting widgets on my home screens to keep me up to date without having to fire up a program.  Right now I have a widget for weather and time (which is huge, as shown in the screenshot, but I wanted to show the hourly prediction as well as the current weather), one which shows my Google Now cards (at least the first couple), and a work one to keep track of the time I spend on projects (this one is more limited than I would like, as it can stop, start, pause, and select projects, but it fires up the app whenever I stop a task to try to make me enter comments, even when I don't have any I want to record).

The Moto X comes with touchless control, which is voice control without the need to press any buttons.  I've found it pretty effective at activating when it's supposed to, but it chokes at my lock screen, and doesn't always recover after I've entered the lock--it sometimes keeps asking me to retry the voice entry, but if I press the retry button, it fails to give me enough time to do so. This would probably work better with no lock at all, or with a trusted Bluetooth device, which would cause it to unlock whenever it was paired with the trusted device.  I'd sort of like a smartwatch, but it may be another generation before they're actually useful.  $150 is kind of expensive for something that just keeps my Moto X unlocked when I'm nearby.

The phone came with a Skip, which is an NFC device that unlocks the phone.  I haven't really tried doing the voice thing with the Skip--I'm not sure whether it would work better or not, but I probably ought to give it a try.  I don't really find voice control that useful--I almost never used it on the iPhone, even though it Siri was a major selling point of the 4S.  However, I've found Google's voice recognition pretty good, especially when using it to dictate by pressing the microphone icon on the keyboard.  I'm just not sure how to use the voice control to do the things I'd really like to do with it.  Like get it to text my wife using Google Hangouts rather than Messenger, or play an audio book in Audibles.  I'm not sure whether that functionality will be built into it any time soon.

I am really enjoying the Swype keyboard (actually, I'm not sure whether it's officially Swype, the settings just call it gesture entry). If you're not familiar with it, this is an interface that lets you enter words with a gesture, sliding (or swiping) your finger along the touchscreen from letter to letter in order to complete words. This is much quicker than the hunt-and-peck typing I usually use on a cellphone screen.  I can type on a keyboard, but I really don't think about where the actual letters are located.  It's more a matter of knowing how to move my fingers for certain letter combinations (in fact, I'm not entirely certain that I type letter-by-letter so much as word-by-word, so that  I know how to move my fingers in order to get them to produce certain words). In any case, there's still a good bit of hunting to do on phone keyboard, and I have to actually seek out the letters.  The Swype interface is a lot faster though, and I occasionally find myself not recalling where a letter is in the middle of a word, since I simply don't have the same muscle memory as I do while typing.  I may develop it with practice, though, so I'm trying to do that.  The problem is that it hurts my wrist when I do it for any length of time, but hopefully that, too, will improve with practice.

So, overall, I'm enjoying both the Moto X and Android, though it's a bit difficult sometimes to tell which I'm actually enjoying.  But as long as the complete package is good, I suppose that's what I'm after.

The Taste of Rue

It's no secret that Kristin and I occasionally like to cook Ancient Roman food. Well, more accurately, Kristin likes to cook it, and I like to eat it (and support her habit).  We've also complained occasionally that it's hard to get certain ingredients. But Kristin has been growing both rue and pennyroyal this year (two of the hard to get, slightly poisonous Roman herbs), and she wanted to try at least one of them out.  So she took a recipe from Apicius and made it.

When I say Apicius, I'm talking about the ancient cookbook extant in the late Imperial period of Ancient Rome--not a modern cookbook which adapts the recipe, but a straight translation.  This is the first time we've done this--we've used adaptations of ancient recipes before, like Sally Grainger's or Ilaria Gozzini Giacosa's. Since the recipes are provided sans proportions, or much in the way of cooking instructions, it takes a skilled cook to translate the vague recipes into an actual meal prepared in a modern kitchen.  This time, Kristin was the one doing the cooking, using her best estimation of the amounts.  And since one of them was mildly poisonous, she was careful not to use too much (about a teaspoon).

Kristin will probably discuss the exact recipe on her blog. It was hardly a straight rue sauce: there was cumin, fennel seed, fish sauce, lovage, etc.  I liked it--it was certainly unique.  Rue is bitter, with hidden accents, but I'm not sure how to separate out the taste of rue from that of other herbs.  I think we should definitely try that sauce again, both with rue and with a substitue (we've used dandelion leaves before), and see how much of a difference it makes.

Update (8/31/2013): Kristin has written her own post on this subject, with the actual recipe she used.

Time for a Technology Upgrade

I've reached the point where all of my electronic devices are reaching their expiration date.  My Dell Inspiron 1120 laptop's three years old, and my iPhone 4S smartphone is two years old.  Even my watch, a Timex Expedition, is beginning to show its age, and the analog watch hands keep losing time. So it's time to start upgrading my technology, which I've begun to do.

The first thing I bought was a new laptop.  My old laptop was tiny, with an 11 inch screen, and I wanted something a little bit bigger.  The problem, though, was that a "little" bigger was hard to find, as everyone seems to prefer tablets and convertibles in the 11-12" range.  I was trying not to spend too much on the laptop--less than a $1,000 if I could manage it.  One option was the Lenovo Thinkpad X230, which at 12.5" was about the right size, and the price was only around $773.  The problem was that the nearly $800 bought a highly stripped down version, without a lot of the options I would need ( camera, faster processor, more memory, Microsoft Office), not to mention a lot of the options I would want (Adobe Acrobat, Bluetooth, Solid State Drive).  By the time I had a configuration I was happy with, I was up around $1,200.  So I went to Dell, where I could get a cheaper, inexpensive laptop.  Which is what I found, for only $800.  I had to pay a little extra to get Windows 7 instead of Windows 8, which I'm avoiding like a plague, but I was able to get all the need options, and most of the want options, for two-thirds the price.  Except . . . it was much bigger.  The mid-size ones, in the 12"-14" range, either weren't available with Windows 7, didn't have all the options I wanted, or only offered those options at a considerable premium.  So I ended up buying the Inspiron 15R.  It's not a bad computer, by any means, but it's bigger than I anticipated.  I had known that it was a 15.5" screen, but it's one thing to know that, it's another to carry it around. That said, it's really not much heavier than my last computer, and while it's probably too large to use comfortably on a plane, it's fine for what I use it for--mainly work and writing.  So I'm getting used to it, though I'm thinking that I should be more willing to pay a premium for a smaller computer next time.

Now that I have a laptop, the question is what phone should I upgrade to.  I'm on AT&T, so that limits the available phones some.  As I complained the last time I blogged about phones, smartphone manufacturers seem to think that bigger is better, and all the top-tier phones seem to have 4.7-5" screens. Fortunately, this year is the year of the Mini.  HTC, Motorola, Samsung, and maybe even Apple are introducing stripped down versions of their flagship phones, with smaller screens and lower specs and a lower price.  So there's the HTC One Mini, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, the Motorola Droid Mini, and the rumored Apple iPhone 5C.  Of these, the HTC One Mini is beating the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini in reviews, while the Droid Mini and iPhone 5C aren't out yet.  And, as of now, AT&T doesn't seem to have plans to carry any of them (except perhaps the iPhone).  That's not necessarily a deal-breaker, but I would prefer to stick with the same carrier, not least because my wife doesn't like the idea of changing.

So that leaves the following possibilities:

• Samsung Galaxy S4 - The current king-of-the-hill, with the largest screen (5" AMOLED 1920x1080), expandable memory, a great camera, and a fast quad-core Snapdragon S600 processor. But I consider the first to be a turn-off.  One of my co-workers has the phone, and though he has slightly larger hands than I do, he still finds it difficult to use it one-handed. He also finds the battery life too short.
• HTC One - The camera's not quite as good, and the memory isn't expandable (though it comes with twice as much to start), and the 1.7 GHz quad-core processor is slightly slower than the S4's 1.9 GHz, but the HTC One's pretty much a match for the Samsung Galaxy S4.  The screen is slightly smaller at 4.7" and has the same resolution, which I consider a plus, but it's an LCD, where I prefer an AMOLED.  Besides, HTC provides the Android Home and Back buttons external to the screen, so the touch interface really isn't any smaller.  [Update (8/25/2013): I realized later that the S4 also has external capacitive buttons, so it's still the king of the oversized touch interface.] And the reviews indicate that the battery life isn't any longer.
• Apple iPhone 5S - The most likely name for the new Apple phone, but nothing has been announced or shown yet, so all we have are rumors and leaks.  The phone's probably about the same dimensions as the iPhone 5, which means that the screen's the same 4", with an external Home button.  It should be much more manageable one handed than the others.  Not much is known about whether the resolution is improved (it was 1136x640), or whether the technology is improved.  The processor's probably better than last year's A6 (which was a 1.3 GHz dual core), and the battery life is supposed to be better (the original iPhone 5's was pretty bad).
• Motorola Moto X - At first glance, the specs for this phone are not impressive when compared to the S4 or One.  It has a dual-core, rather than quad-core, processor, and it has non-expandable 16 GB of memory, and a 1280x720 4.7" AMOLED screen.  Yet, this is still my top choice, for a number of reasons. I don't expect the lower resolution to make much difference--I really don't need the same resolution at 5" that my 40" television has.  And I'm not sure how effectively Android uses two processors, much less four, so I don't expect the pure horsepower to make that much difference day-to-day. Plus, there are a couple of things that really stand out about the Moto X. First, it's smaller. The handset's height and width are significantly smaller than the S4 and the One, and much more comfortable to use one-handed. It's width is smaller than the two of them by about .1-.2", and it's shorter by about .3". (The overall touch interface is smaller too, since it doesn't have external buttons like the HTC One, and it has a smaller screen than the S4.)  It's still bigger than the iPhone 5, about a quarter inch in height and width, but it has a much larger screen.  It also has less bloatware than HTC One or the Galaxy S4, not having the skin that they do, so it's almost a pure Android experience. There are just a few extras, and they sound pretty good--context awareness, always-on speech activation, and taking advantage of the AMOLED to do low power notifications whenever you want them.  And, perhaps most importantly, the Moto X has better battery life than the HTC One or Galaxy S4.  It's possible that Apple will come out with something great this year, or that the HTC One Mini will become available on AT&T, but barring either of those, I'll most likely get a Moto X for both my wife and myself.

So now that I've decided on what smartphone I'll probably get, the next question is what watch to get.  I think I'd like to get a smart watch this year.  What's a smart watch?  Well, it's a watch that interfaces with your phone, sending notifications to your wrist, and depending on the watch, allowing you to view them, read your e-mail, and possibly control your phone to some extent.  I thought it sounded silly at first, until I started looking into it.  I'm not sure whether any of the current and upcoming crop of smart watches really appeals to me, but I am seriously considering them.

• Pebble - This was one of the most successful Kickstarters ever.  The watch it produced looks pretty nice, but I don't think it's quite right for me.  It's monochrome, it has buttons rather than a touchscreen, and it's pretty limited in the type of notifications it can receive and how you can interact with them.  That said, $150 isn't that different from the price of a nice watch.
• Sony Smartwatch 2 - Sony's on its third generation of Smartwatch.  Unfortunately, the first two generations were dismal failures, both technologically and commercially.  The new one sounds pretty good, and maybe it will be a success.  It uses a transflective LCD, like old-style digital watches, so it should be clearly readable without backlighting (even in sunlight)  which should help with battery life, and allow it to display a watchface at all times (something the last Smartwatch couldn't do).  It also has a color display (for which it probably does need backlighting), for interacting with the phone.  Overall, this probably has the best combination of features and style for me, but it remains to be seen whether the implementation will be better than Sony's last couple of tries.
• Samsung Galaxy Gear - Right now there are only rumors about this one, but it sure looks like overkill to me.  The early rumors described a screen that wraps around your wrist, and when unwound, is basically a narrow and tall smartphone, but it looks like Samsung's not ready for that yet. It does sound like it is supposed to operate without the smartphone, on WiFi or cellphone networks. This looks more like a replacement for a phone, than a companion for one.
• Apple iWatch - Right now, there's only rumors that this even exists.  Much less when it will come out.  But we'll see if Apple announces something new when the new iPhones and iPads come out.

So, from what I know so far, the Smartwatch 2 looks like it will probably be the best, but I'll have to wait and see what comes of it and the other possible announcements.

Update (8/19/2013): It looks like I spoke too soon. Apparently, AT&T will be carrying the HTC One Mini. With that on the table, I think I'll need to get into a store and see how each phone feels in my hand.

The Humor of Calculon 2.0

When I first saw this, I thought this was the funniest thing I'd ever seen:



I literally had to pause it so I could catch my breath.  It's hard to explain why, and it's nowhere near as funny on re-watch, but some things just strike you the right way.  You should watch it before I talk about it.

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It's obvious why it's funny.  The professor's insistence that this is science while performing what is clearly a ritual of dark magic is the apotheosis of humorous juxtaposition.  But what made it so ROFLMAO funny for me probably has a lot to do with my background.  My job title is Computer Scientist (though, at the end of the day, I'm more of an Electrical Engineer).  And I know that a lot of what I do looks like a black art.  It's not always easy for me to explain how I get a computer working or a piece of code running.  From the outside, it can look like meaningless rituals that perform magic.  And in that context, this was an over-the-top, power of the robot devil version of that, and that's what made it so funny for me.

Black Gate Review of Sorrel in Scarlet

My latest review for Black Gate is now online.  This month, I review Peter Vialls's Sorrel in Scarlet. Here's a small taste:

Sorrel in Scarlet is an old-fashioned sword and sorcery tale (with just a little bit of early industrial technology), which put me in mind of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter series, not least because of the abundance of red and the scantiness of clothing. But there’s also the obvious parallel of the heroes finding themselves lost in a strange land and coming to the rescue of the people there. I do think this book comes across favorably in the comparison, since the heroine, Sorrel, is less superhuman than Captain Carter, and thus her adventures are more believable.

13th Age RPG

I recently pre-ordered the 13th Age RPG, and I've had a chance to look through the rules and come away with some thoughts.

In the same way that Pathfinder is D&D 3.75, you could say that 13th Age is D&D 4.75. It builds on many of the ideas of 4E, and tries to improve them. At the same time, it simplifies a lot of the mechanics, moving the complexity away from the optimal choice of feat and items to the storytelling. This could be either fun or frustrating, depending on the GM and players.

Roleplaying

A lot of the storytelling is built right into the character mechanics. For example, each player receives three or more relationship dice. These are assigned to positive, negative, or conflicted relationships with the thirteen icons. The icons represent the most powerful NPCs in the game world, and can be heroic, ambiguous, or villainous. The relationship dice can be used a number of ways. They're rolled at the beginning of a session to determine which icons (or more often, which icon's organization) will be influencing the session, or they may be rolled as a result of an encounter with an icon's organization.

In addition to icon relationships, storytelling may have mechanical effects. Some class abilities depend on the player telling a good story, and leaves it to the GM to judge whether they get a bonus. It's also up to the player to convince the GM that his background applies when the situation calls for it.

Characters

Anyone who's played 4E will notice similarities, and some differences. Each player gets a certain number of recoveries (healing surges, though you're supposed to roll for the amount of healing), an AC, physical and mental defenses, HP equal to three times a base plus their con modifier, and a feat. There are bonuses to stats based on both race and class (each of which can apply to one of two stats).

Instead of skills characters get backgrounds. A background is more a description of a profession than a skill: something like court jester, temple initiate, or cat burglar. Each character starts with 8 points to spend on backgrounds, with a maximum of 5 in any one background. You add those points to any skill checks which are relevant to a background. The DM usually picks the attribute to use (for instance, is it a dexterity or intelligence check?), and the player makes the case for which background is relevant.

Each of the classes also gets 3 talents, and most of them get powers.

Talents generally customize your characters, by giving a permanent bonus or allowing you to do new things (substitute Wis for Cha in all your class abilities, for instance). But they can also give you what are effectively powers.

Powers are a lot like 4E powers. They are usually at-will, recharge, or daily. Recharge powers are similar to encounter powers in 4E, but when you take a quick rest, you have to roll to see if you recover them or not. You are usually free to choose as many powers of each type as you want, up to your limit, so it's not like 4E where you have a certain number of at will, encounter, and daily powers at each level. The classes are different in the type of powers they receive. All fighter powers (maneuvers) are at will, and they take the form of flexible attacks, where you roll your die first, and then decide which maneuver to use based on what conditions the natural roll gives (some maneuvers trigger on odd rolls, some on even, some on hits, some on misses, some at 11+ or 16+). Rogue powers are all at-will, but sometimes require momentum (that you've hit an enemy and haven't been hit by one since).

Barbarians, rangers, and paladins are considered simpler classes to play, since they don't have any powers, just talents (though the number of talents they get increase by level, unlike other classes). While clerics, sorcerers, bards, and wizards are more complex to play, since their powers are spells, and are often recharge or dailies (bards also get songs, which are sustainable spells with finishing effects, and battle cries, which are flexible attacks).

Feats are usually tied to talents or powers, increasing their effects. This can be challenging when spells, which can be changed each day, have associated feats. The rules encourage the GM to be flexible in letting players reassign feats, but leave it up to him to decide. All spells can be increased in level, filling a higher spell slot for more powerful effect. Generally, you only get spell slots at two or three levels, losing lower level spell slots, so you need to trade for the higher level versions of spells if you want to keep them.

There are only ten levels, but there's a significant advance with each one, each level giving you a feat, +1 to defenses, attack, and ability/background rolls, and another weapon die (so your basic attack does level x d6-d10). Levels are divided into tiers, with adventurer (1-4), champion (5-7), and epic (8-10).

In addition, after each session you get an incremental advancement, receiving part of your gains for the next level now.

Combat

Combat in 13th Age is considerably more abstract than in 4E. Enemies are either nearby (in which case you can reach them in a move action) or far away (you have to move to become nearby first). However, it is possible for some creatures to be behind others, in which case, the ones in front, as long as they aren't already engaged in melee, can intercept you if you try to attack the ones behind. The biggest constraint on movement is that you need to engage someone in order to hit them with a melee attack. You can't move after that without first disengaging (which requires a roll) or taking an opportunity attack. Since you have to move in order to engage, you can't attack someone else without disengaging. Of course, more than one enemy can engage you, so you can still be engaged with multiple foes at a time. Some classes have ways to disengage. For example, the fighter can intercept even when he's engaged, disengaging from his current enemies, and the rogue has numerous abilities that let him disengage.

But probably the most significant addition to combat is the escalation die. Every round after the first, the DM increments the escalation die, starting at 1 and increasing each round until it reaches the maximum of 6. Certain powers key off the escalation die (wizards' cyclic spells aren't expended when the die's even, for example). But the main effect is that the PCs add the escalation die to their attack rolls. Only the most dangerous monsters do the same. This gives the PCs a significant advantage as the fight wears on, but they have to earn it. The DM is cautioned not to advance the die if the PCs are hanging back rather than engaging the enemy.

Conclusion

I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, just to read through the rules. It looks like there are a lot of interesting ideas here, some of which sound really fun, and some of which I have my doubts about. But at this point, I'm eager to try playing it, and that's as high a praise as I can give so far.

Workbench

I spent most of last night assembling the workbench shown on the left.  It took more time that I expected, but otherwise it went quite smoothly.  The directions clear, all the pieces were clearly labeled with stickers showing part number and which direction they should be oriented, the screws were in little labeled plastic bags, each hole was properly threaded, and, unlike a lot of furniture I've assembled, all the pieces fit together smoothly like they were supposed to. The instructions said that it takes two people to assemble, but I found I only needed my wife's help twice: when we flipped it over after attaching the legs, and when we moved it to its permanent location.  Some tasks, such as putting up the pegboards and hanging the lamp, were harder for one person to do, but not impossible. In the end, the only problem was that it was two screws short.  There weren't quite as many #41 screws as there were supposed to be.  There was a small bag with one extra of every screw, bolt, and washer, but that still left me without one screw.  I was able to assemble it anyway, leaving out a screw where I thought it least mattered, but that bothered me, so picked a few screws up at the hardware store the next day and fastened in the last screw.  This is what it looks like assembled:

New workbench

I got this particular workbench, the Seville Classics UltraHD Lighted Workbench, because it was highly rated on Amazon, despite the fact that UltraHD sounds like something you'd call a smartphone. More importantly, it had everything I was looking for: a work surface, drawers, a pegboard, and a shelf.  It also came with a power strip and a flourescent light, both useful for where I set it up in my basement, which is lacking in both lighting and power outlets.


I also got a stool, so I'd have somewhere to sit while working at the bench.  The stool is also from Seville, though it lacks the fancy smartphone name.

Black Gate post

My latest Black Gate post is online.  No review this month, but I do talk about reviewing.  I'll let you decide whether that's a cop out or an improvement.

Fund drive for The Midnight Diner

Coach's Midnight Diner was one of the first places to publish one of my stories.  At the time, it was a yearly anthology of Christian genre fiction.  The Office of Second Chances was published in the second volume, and remains one of my favorite stories.

The Midnight Diner is now looking to become a regularly published paying market, and to that end, is raising money. In their own words:

The Midnight Diner is a hardboiled genre anthology with a Christian slant. No restrictions on God, no restrictions on reality. Didactic preachy works are dismissed unceremoniously; we’re looking for high quality works that are uncompromising in craft, content, and quality. Since 2007, The Diner has been released as an annual, print anthology. For the time being, the first three volumes can be found here, here and here. However, like any good creation, we’re going through changes. Evolving, as it were.

At the beginning of next year, the Diner will move to a quarterly, online format. For a nominal fee, subscribers will have access to exclusive poetry, nonfiction, short fiction and art, as well as an original serial novella. Each year’s content will also be released early the following year as a print and digital anthology. We are also switching over to a paying publication, as opposed to the prior Editor’s Choice Award model.

I look forward to seeing the new format, and would encourage anyone interested in seeing this sort of fiction flourish to take part in the fund drive.