Foreign Perspectives

It sounds like a daft question if you’ve got one but isn’t quite so daft if you don’t so I thought a potted guide would be in order.

Although in theory there are loads of them out there, in the UK for practical purposes there are basically two makes with a total of four models.

The Sony ones let you read PDFs and a number of other formats of which epub is the main one that they use. They have two ways of enlarging the text though the pocket edition only does the first one. The first way is through enlarging the text but not the images with the pocket edition offering effectively six sizes (three portrait, three landscape) and the touch edition ten (five portrait, five landscape) ie the six of the pocket plus four larger sizes. How this works with PDFs varies depending on how the PDF was prepared but generally you find that the photographs appear but diagrams generally don’t. The second way is a zoom facility only available on the touch edition which lets you magnify the PDF image. This would be perfect but doesn’t let you move to the next page so you’ve to unzoom the image, move to the next page and zoom it up if you want to do that. In practical terms I use the font enlargement method nearly all the time and it’s rare that I use the PDF zoom facility. You can add notes and highlighting on the touch edition which sounds useful but is very hard on the batteries and in practice I’ve never really used that facility. The pocket edition has a 5″ screen, the touch a 6″ one; it makes quite a difference to the reading with the larger screen but you get used to the smaller one and for some reason I find it easier to get through the reading with less words on the page but that might just be me. Price-wise it’s aroud £140 for the pocket edition, around £220 for the touch version.

I gather that the Amazon versions offer similar facilities using Kindle format as default but they also handle PDFs. Big plus points are that they are a lot cheaper (£109 for the basic 6″ version) and that you can buy books direct from Amazon obviously (with the Sonys you buy on your computer and transfer the books to the reader later). On the book buying front, prices are generally around the hard book price level although there are thousands of free ones (eg www.gutenberg.org has over 30,000). There’s also the Kindle DX which is around £250 and gives you a 10″ screen. They both come with a little keyboard for note-taking though as I say I’ve never really used the facility on the Sony so this isn’t a deciding point.

To transfer documents (which can include your own documents in Word and PDF form) you connect the device to your computer where it comes up as another disk drive; just drag and drop from there. In principle you can also use the supplied software (or Calibre which is free and better) but drag and drop works fine. With the Kindle you can email PDFs to your Kindle (but they charge you for that) or buy using the one-click facility. Both can charge up via the USB link but it’s much faster to plug them into the mains (you need to get a Sony PSP charger [about £20] to do that, the cheap Kindle comes with the charger).

One thing to watch is that effectively all the readers are black and white. Colour is available but at around £800 so in reality it’s probably best to wait a couple of years for that. Most of the time you don’t miss that but, depending on what you read, there are times when colour would be really handy. Due to limitations of the technology you can’t run videos. Page turning usually takes a fraction of a second but can be longer on complex pages. It’s difficult to define “complex” in this context as it depends on how the authors have prepared the page so you couldn’t tell by simply looking at a page in a book if it were “complex”.

The other major limitation if you’re buying books is that there is currently no second hand market. Basically you pay close to the full hardback price and can get nothing back if you’ve finished with a book you’ve bought.

If I were starting again I’d go for the cheap Kindle basically because it’s the cheapest.

However, do you really need one of these things? Certainly if you’re only reading the odd paperback the answer is probably not as not only are you looking at hardback prices, you also need to part with at least £109 to begin with. However, if you’re one of those people who need a few dozen paperbacks on holiday it’s a different matter as it is if you have access to a large library of PDFs like many students.

The results are in a couple of days early as these things usually are.

A year ago I’d have laughed at anyone who’d have said I’d be going down the biology route to my science degree but it turned out that the human biology course was both fascinating and much more doable than I’d ever expected it to be. Fascinating in terms of all aspects of the course really as pretty much all of it was new to me. That newness was something I’d have expected to make the course somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for me to do but in practice, whilst it was certainly hard going at the start, the fascination drove me on.

For a variety of reasons I’m embarking on my first “proper” biology course next February and, going by the extracts of the course texts that I’ve seen already, it looks like it will be a similar mix of fascinating and difficult. I’ll see how that mix pans out by Christmas next year when the results are in.

Disappointingly we’ve been the only parents who’ve been there during the football coaching sessions this week but we’ve been well rewarded with a week long series of excellent football skills by everyone from the 6 year olds through to the 10 year olds taking part.

Our little guy has really taken to the game and managed to clock up 6 goals in one of the matches and he’s been picking up various prizes during the week with at least three trophies to be picked up this afternoon including both individual and team wins. Unfortunately, his big brother doesn’t seem to have accumulated quite so many so there’s a bit of disappointment in store when they start comparing trophy counts. We’re not sure how many are coming their way as there were just an amazing number of opportunities to pick things up during the course of the week and there’s a final tournament this morning before the prize giving in the afternoon.

The weather has been almost perfect for the week so far with just the right mix of cloud and sun so that nobody collapsed with heatstroke nor were we freezing. Supposedly it’s going to be pouring today so they’re relocating to the gym.

I finally got around to making a start on the ECA this morning and, surprisingly, have all three of the short questions finished.

I say surprisingly because when I first looked at them as I was travelling home from the course they looked more like long questions than short ones. I’ll not say a whole lot about them as the second two groups haven’t seen them yet but they’re basically variants of questions that have already been asked during the three themes of the course which I guess is as you’d expect. I only needed to look up one thing in the theme briefing notes which, hopefully, goes to show that I was paying attention during the week.

Next up is the write-up of the experiment. In principle that’s fairly easy but they’ve individual word counts for each section of the write-up which makes it harder. Some of those seem very tight too eg the maximum of 10 words for the title.

All being well, I’m hoping to get a complete first draft of everything tomorrow which is pretty good and will take away my excuse for putting off the astronomy assignment.

We’ve had a Decathlon card since our time living in France but since we’re into our second year back here we’ve obviously not used it for a while. Almost two years in fact.

Anyway, Belfast happens to be one of the first places that Decathlon has opened a UK store so we thought we’d pop in. It’s very much a French Decathlon that happens to be in Belfast with seemingly all the same products and even the very same trollies which, of course, can’t be used as they need a euro in them rather than a pound. Even the prices seem much the same which makes it one of the more expensive stores around unless you pick something up on one of their 60%+ off opening offers.

Amazingly it’s even French to the point of being able to use my French Decathlon card which is a level of internationalisation that’s very, very rarely seen which is quite a surprise. The website isn’t 100% in English yet but I managed to change the address of the card to here which is also something that’s rarely considered when a company goes international.