Irreal

Microsoft is closing its ebook store. Who cares? The people who have bought books from them care because they will no longer be able to read their books. Microsoft, to its credit is offering to refund the purchase price but why not just keep the authentication server running? How much could it cost?

The author of the linked article paints a dire picture of where all this is leading. It’s a bit overwrought but it’s worth examining the current practice and whether it makes sense. The legal fiction is, “We’re just selling you a license to read the book, not the book itself. We can revoke that license at our will.” Except that hardly anyone thinks like that when they’re buying an ebook.

I’ve written many times about my ongoing efforts to be completely paperless. Part of that is buying ebooks rather than physical books. I really love books and appreciate all the arguments about how they feel and smell but, really, ebooks are just so much more convenient in almost every way that “real” books just don’t make much sense anymore. That, of course, puts me at odds with another of my deeply held “digital tenets:” Keep all important data in an open format.

My guess is that even the hidebound publishing industry will come to see that DRM is against their own interests and give up on it as the music industry has. Whether that happens before Amazon finishes eating their lunch is still an open question.

In any event, the closing of the Microsoft book store should serve as a warning to us all: let someone lock up your data and you could lose it at their whim.

Over at Gizmodo, Patrick Howell O’Neill belabors—what seems to me to be—the obvious. He posits that RSS is a much better way to keep up on what’s going on than Twitter. Wen I read that, my immediate reaction was, “Well, Duh!” Twitter, he says, is mostly a toxic tsunami of half-baked hot takes, propaganda, hostility, and outright hate. That characterization is probably more apt for feeds concerned with social issues and politics than those dealing with tech but I think the conclusion holds in both cases: RSS is better.

Although I do check some technical feeds or hashtags on the Twitter website, I use those as pointers to longer more thoughtful posts or articles. I’ve never understood why anyone would think you can say something useful in under 280 characters. I’ve seen more than one blogger quit Twitter and say that it felt like getting off drugs.

On the other hand, I’ve depended on RSS for years to point me to interesting articles that I can write about or otherwise enjoy. These days, I use the outstanding elfeed to do all this from within Emacs.

Lots of folks love Twitter, of course, but at least for my purposes, RSS is a much better solution. A Tweet is a good way to discover that the latest version of Emacs, say, has been released but if you want thoughtful analysis a blog or technical article is a much better bet.

A month ago, Mike Zamansky posted that he’d just replaced his two 27 inch monitors with a new 43 inch 4K monitor. I commented that every time I saw a post like his, I had an urge to run out and buy my own huge monitor because I would be sure it would make me a bazillion times more efficient. Sadly, I never do because I like working on my 13 inch laptop on my couch.

I was reminded of all this when I saw a post discussing the productivity gains that could be achieved with more screen real estate: either two monitors or an ultrawide monitor like the one Zamansky got. The post was interesting not so much for the experiment that the author performed—I didn’t find that particularly compelling—but for the two studies that they quoted.

More screen real estate won’t magically make you a bazillion times more productive, of course, but it can give you a significant increase of about 20 to 30 percent depending on the particulars of the monitors. It used to be that large monitors were pretty expensive but these days you can get one very reasonably. The studies quoted in the post suggest that it’s a worthwhile expense. Maybe you can even convince your boss.

If you like this sort of thing, Ali Abdaal has a video on his new(ish) 35 inch curved monitor.