(formerly)tangentmind.org

Hopefully, if you know me, you know of the wonderful gutenberg project, wherein public domain books are converted to ebooks, by volunteers, and distributed freely online. They also have a number of audio books. There are also a few other projects creating free human-read audio books which can be found through the audio book part of the gutenberg website.

However, many of the the books are in text format, which is fine and universal and all, but not always particularly readable. Recently I have learned of something called kerning, which is basically the distance between words. Proper kerning would have every part of a letter in a word an equal distance apart. Most web text and text files do not have kerning, which means that the letters are exactly the same distance apart. Typically, in easily readable text with kerning, some letters might be physically closer together, because the kerning would allow the text to overlap, whereas with no kerning the letters could not overlap.

There are better explanations with examples online. I only have a cursory understanding, as I do with many things. Magazines and newspapers use kerning, which is one reason why printed works are often easier to read. It's not always(but, sometimes, definitely is) the computers screens fault.

My point is, I found a website with many of the gutenberg texts in different formats. I believe the pdfs, and possibly some other formats have kerning. The site is manybooks.net. There are also some nifty formats for some people such as formats for psp, pda, ipod etc. It might also be possible to simply copy the text from a text file into a word processor document to get kerning or to open the txt file with some programs to get kerning. I'm not sure. Pretty sure notepad can't do it, however. As I said, I have a cursory understand of these things. Manybooks.net is still nice, however you look at it though.

Ok on to games.
I played through Dragon Quest Heroes Rocket Slime recently and it is a pretty good game. It is not particularly long and there are a lot of things you can do that only will really benefit you if you play multiplayer battles. Furthermore if you want to start the game from the beginning, you have to delete your save, because there is only one saved game allowable. Restarting the game also means you lose any of the multiplayer benefits.

I played through Trace Memory. I really like this game. It is a nice example of a good modern day adventure game on the DS. A few of the challenges are not really obvious at first however. If all else fails, I say try blowing on it. I think there might be a challenge where you have to look at the reflection of the top screen in the bottom screen of the DS or something too. I did not get this, and I think it would be impossible with a DS with certain protective screens available. I missed a number of things in Trace Memory, so I will have to play it again to find them. Once you go into the lab, you can't go back. Would have been nice to know. Also, very short. Could beat it in like 4 hours if you really wanted to.

I'm still playing through Doom 3. I've probably been playing it over a year off and on. I enjoy it, I just don't always like to play it, like before I should go to bed. I will probably beat it soon.

Advent Rising is decent. It has a pretty good story. The graphics and performance are kind of hit and miss. Sometimes great and sometimes not so much. The first person view is kind of worthless most of the time. In third person view you can dodge and maneuver, but not so much in first person view. Dying is incredibly easy a lot of the time. You have no control over saves. The game automatically saves at checkpoints and beginnings of levels. Levels are restarted however, if you quit. The AI is also sometimes stupid. The baddies seem to just kind of spawn out of nowhere sometimes. Sometimes it is better just to push through and ignore the baddies if they're not going to kill you. The bosses have particular ways you have to beat them that are not necessarily obvious and you can die a lot of times figuring them out. Better to just look it up online probably. Save the frustration. There are also some bugs. Not too many serious ones, but I did have the game crash a few times and I fell through the ground once. It's pretty short to play through, which could be a pro or con depending on how you look at it. Con if you expected more. The special powers are fun to play with. If you can get past the frustrating parts, it's pretty good a lot of the time.

Enjoy my lack of editing.

Peace out,
Stewart

Labels: books, games