View on screencast.com »Amazon Link

The paperback book costs $10.40 on Amazon.  This required printing of the books, transportation from China to an Amazon warehouse, For the sake of this comparison, let’s assume this cost Penguin $5.00. Even if Amazon payed them $7.00, this would only leave a profit of $2.00 for penguin assuming no royalty is paid to the author.

The eBook is on sale for $12.99. I’m assuming eBook conversion from the authors word processing file or the press ready file took 8 hours the cost was negligible for the conversion.

H.P. Lovecraft has been dead for 80 years. The rights are very sketchy. Wikipedia has an entire section on it and I’m sure furtherer research would bear similar conclusions. I’m assuming that little if any royalties are paid to anybody for his works.

My conclusion is the Penguin Books is either incompetent or greedy. I’m going to err on the side of greedy since I’m sure it takes some intelligence to run a publishing firm.

Additionally, some additional search brought me to the following alternative copies of the book.

• $1.99
• free
• free

Nukey Brown Ale from Northern Brewer. This is yet another thing I spent years talking about and finally accomplishing. The next eight weeks can’t pass quickly enough.

I’ve used about 1/2 of this book so far. It hangs out in my back pocket all the time and has held up remarkably for the past 2 months. I have other notebooks, but this is my INBOX, shopping list, conference calls, etc book.

I could never do that to my beautiful http://fieldnotesbrand.com/ravens-wing/set. I need to find something really special for them.

For as many years as outlook has been around, it has had a behavior that bothers me. The basics of this are that when you reply to a message that you sent, it creates a new email to you, not to the person you sent it to.

This seems like the expected behavior, but usually you are doing this to clarify something you wrote or to update the status on the email. The standard solution is to use Reply All which does get the email to the desired recipient, but this has the added annoyance that the email then winds up in your Inbox.

Gmail gets it right. Click reply on a message and it only includes the recipient, (or recipients), and does not include you.

I’ve decided that I’m sick of it. This should be a pretty simple fix. I have not experimented with the object/event model for Outlook, but I should be able to trap the new email creation on a reply and ensure that the initial recipients are in the To field for the new reply.

I hope to study and experiment with the Visual Studio Tools for Office on Saturday afternoon and create a plugin on Sunday. During next week, I will test myself and with others and hopefully package and release by Friday.

Project will be hosted at: http://ouitools.codeplex.com/

On my third try for Ginger Ale (it seems my recipe is more Ale than Beer) I made some more changes.

* I doubled the ginger
* I used a citrus juicer
* I used champagne yeast

This resulted in a much more carbonated beverage. It really shared some taste characteristics with champagne. I still think the lemon overpowers the ginger. The sugar is about perfect at 3/4 cup, but it still precipitates out more than I would like.

Next attempt will be a radical departure. Simple syrup, extracting ginger with heat, a touch of clove or anise all will be tried.

I’ve been experimenting with some programming in Applesoft Basic for the past 6+ months.  I have bounced between my Apple //c+ with a Guimauve 2ooo VGA adapter.  This has been a great way to use the Apple when I’m near a monitor or need to use a projector.

But when I’m on my laptop, I use AppleWin, an Apple 2 emulator for Windows.  It is pretty full featured and does a very good job.  Unfortunately it does have a small drawback.

My laptop’s native resolution is 1920 X 1080.  This makes the default AppleWin window size of 622 x 427 very small and hard to read, especially as my eyes get worse every year.

I decided to dig into the source code, and see how easy it would be do double the size of the virtual window.  After a few days of relearning C and rediscovering Windows GUI programming, I was able to produce a binary that does just that.  The viewport is now 1120 x 768, up from 560 x 384.

I took a few shortcuts, so there are a couple of caveats to mention.

• There is no choice whether to double or not, it just doubles
• I did not convert all the magic numbers in the code to variables or constants
• I removed the optimized progressive refresh, and replaced with a full emulated screen one (already in the code but disabled due to some glimmering)
• I cheated and make a helper function that translates the BilBlt GDI calls into a StretchBlt call.
• I have not experimented with SetStretchBltMode to produces the best quality image

I plan on continuing my work on this and creating a proper patch to submit to the project.  I would like to make the double size selectable from config screen, remove all the magic numbers and investigate reimplementing the progressive update logic.

Enough of the technical details, if you want to test this out, the zip below contains:

• ApplewinDouble.exe which you can place in your Applewin directory and run with the same config
• ApplewinDoubleSize.patch which is a source code patch to the AppleWin source code

Before the download, just a quick video sample of the results.

 

Download (Code & binary released under the GPL 2.0 to comply with AppleWin license)

 

 

The results of my Ginger Beer fermentation were mixed. I made a quick
video to share with the results with the world.

Do you have 20 minutes and some simple supplies?

You can make Ginger Beer.

Give that these are all 100Ω resistors, if you measure on the two furthest points on the cube what is the equivalent resistance?

And the answer…