books and music

I found something interesting on a peer to peer network today. No, it was not the source code to Windows. Searching for a recently released song, the first match had the song title, but then noted that it was actually a stump speech of one of the US's democratic presidential candidates. (I forget which one.) I didn't download it.

On a vagely related tangent, this talk gets a lot of things right about ebooks, IMHO. I have read books mostly on my laptop starting with my month in Honduras last year, when having a full library with me in the middle of nowhere was great. I'm currently 31% through Quicksilver, which has been a relatively slow slog so far.

My advice to anyone who has tried and failed to read entire books on the computer is to dedicate an entire virtual desktop to it, and don't use a GUI program with possibly distracting stuff. Especially don't use a GUI web browser. Go for the simplest interface you can. Make sure the screen is not too wide or set appopriate margins so your eye can scan entire lines easily. Since my laptop has a wide screen, I use w3m in a full height, half-width xterm.

The only thing I am missing is a good way to bookmark my place in w3m on the rare occasions when I restart X.