"The Martian", Chapters 6-21.

Nice day on the beach yesterday, so I read a lot. Several new characters as we switch POV back to Earth. Some more Science, some joy as communications are established, plans are hatched, foreign intrigues are schemed, and CNN reports. And the inevitable mistakes are made. But so far our plucky hero, who now has a last name as well as a first, is still alive and really getting tired of disco.

"The Martian", Chapters 3-5.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, we do science. All with the goal of surviving until some sort of rescue. There's botany, as the Martian (whom we learn is named Mark) figures out how to grow food, and chemistry, as Mark figures out how to water the plants he's growing. A few harrowing moments as we remember he's living in a closed system.

Preview of chapter 6: a new character shows up!

"The Martian", Chapters 1-2.

I've read the first two chapters now, in which our so far unnamed protagonist finds himself stuck on Mars without a way to get home. No spoiler alert because that's really pretty much what the book's about - you knew that, right?

In the beginning Weir is mostly focused on giving us the background about the Mars program, plus some technical details about the equipment he has available. Then there's some info about what he needs to survive - food, water, air, shelter, etc. That's pretty much the story of the first two chapters. Onward!

Blogging "The Martian".

I got an email from Blogging for Books asking if I wanted to receive free books. Of course I said yes! The only catch is that I have to review them. So what I plan to do is to review the books they send me right here on my blog. Inspired a bit by David Plotz's Blogging the Bible, I'm going to blog as I read.

The first book is The Martian by Andy Weir. I'm starting tonight. 

On Waste.

Reading the New York Times "Room for Debate" on the fate of bookstores, I was struck by this comment by Naveen Srivatsav:

Consider the fuel consumption alone behind the production of paper, the printing of books and the transporting of these books to bookstores worldwide. If the cloud infrastructures we're building and the digital screens we're inventing can alleviate the need for paper, that alone is reason enough to cease and desist.

I realize that a lot has been written about the carbon footprint of cloud computing, but this direct statement in the context of the publishing industry makes me wonder if the single-sourcing of carbon footprint alone makes it worthwhile changing media from physical to virtual.

Let me be more clear about that question.

I'm sure there have been numerous studies of the relative carbon footprints of printed vs electronic books (like this paper, with some interesting [ab]use of the English language) but what I'm interested in here is the benefit of moving your carbon footprint from a multitude of sources down to a single source (i.e., electric generation to power everything in the cloud). I tend to believe that a single source of waste is better than multiple sources, since it's easier to eliminate waste from a single, well-known source than it is to track down and optimize multiple, smaller sources.

As Srivatsav states, there are a number of different places in the production and delivery of books that each introduce their own waste: paper production, printing, binding, shipping, heating and air conditioning physical bookstores. Each of those steps potentially has its own unique externalities (paper pulp, ink disposal, binding glues, exhaust from delivery trucks, etc.). In the cloud, we have massive data centers, increasingly powered by renewable energy sources. And where they are not green, they can more easily be made green because of consolidation.

Or maybe we should all just change our fonts?

More Evernote.

I recently wrote about my new note-taking scheme. Today, I want to give a progress report and add some details about additional ways I'm now using Evernote to supplement my brain.

A while ago I started using ifttt to automate some tasks that would otherwise take too many steps to bother with. For example, I use it to track updates to certain websites (via their RSS feeds) and automatically save new articles to Pocket (I also use Pocket to save articles for later reading from Feedly, Twitter, and Facebook, among other tools. Sometimes I use Yahoo! Pipes as an intermediate step to filter a feed by a certain keyword or author, or to do other more complex operations that ifttt can't do by itself).

Ifttt has a number of channels that I am using to create new notes in Evernote. For example, I can call up ifttt on my phone and record a message, which will be posted as an audio file to Evernote, as well as being run through a text-to-speech processor. (I'm not quite sure whose text-to-speech processor is being used for this. If you know, please fill me in!)

For another example, I have started trying a new trick to automatically create notes related to any travel that I take. I take my RSS activity feed from TripIt, filter it through a Yahoo! Pipe to only show those entries that indicate I am leaving on a trip, and then have ifttt create a new note for me to enter any notes I may want to take about the trip. I've just set this up so I don't know how well it will work yet, but I'm enthusiastic about the possibility of automating yet another aspect of my life.

What kind of automation tricks are you using? Let me know!

Evernote + Moleskine.

I'm sure this is not a new thing, but I tend to be a bit of a late adopter of things that cost money. However, since my boss gave me one of these fancy Evernote Smart Notebooks for Christmas, I'm going to give it a try.

My current workflow for taking notes is a bit kludgy. I am very fond of taking handwritten notes (typically with my Levenger True Writer fountain pen on a No. 18 Rhodia pad), but I want to make sure my notes are available to me whether I'm in the office, in my home office. or traveling. So I gather up my notes every week or so and run them through my scanner, name the files with the date of the notes on that page, then put the scanned files in my Google Drive. Works well enough, I suppose, but this process means that if I want to search for something specific I have to remember more or less when I wrote that note, then look in the notes for that date.

At some point I had experimented with putting those scanned notes into Evernote, but the results were far from perfect, as the attached scans appeared as linked documents, not embedded into the note itself. (I see now that that has changed, so the scanned pages appear in the body of the note itself. I think I will be transferring those scans into Evernote now.)

In addition, I sometimes use Evernote to take notes on the fly or to save some notes that someone has emailed to me. So that adds a second place to look for notes (or really a third place, for those notes that I forget to copy from email).

So here's the new thing: with the Evernote Smart Notebook, I can jot my notes as always, in a specially designed Moleskine notebook with a special grid pattern. Then I can use my smartphone to take a picture of each page, and it will not only automatically create a note in Evernote, it will do an OCR scan of the page so that I can search it from within Evernote on any device. It also has some neat tagging functionality using these little stickers that come with the notebook. It comes with a 3 month premium Evernote subscription - note sure what the benefit of that will be for me.

I think I'll try this thing out for a bit and see how it improves my note taking process.

Update:
It seems that the OCR feature is not specific to the special notebook; it works on any PNG, GIF, or JPG document, as well as any PDF that contains mostly bitmaps. That's handy! But it does make me question whether the notebook is worth it? The only thing it seems to add is the tagging - which, by the way, is limited to a set of six customizable tags, there is no ability to write a tag on the document that gets scanned.