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Books

shag — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:16:19 +0000

While the future of reading may belong to eReaders…

may — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 22:47:44 +0000

the future of books belongs to popups! I just got 2 of them in the mail today and they are FUN.

The one below is called One Red Dot, by David Carter. It’s one of a series of books for kids featuring his fanciful paper sculptures, but I think adults will like it too. In spite of the fact that I love my iPad and do most of my recreational reading on it now, there’s something magical about opening a book and having a 3 dimensional creature or landscape pop up.

He also wrote another great book I got a while ago called The Elements of Popup which shows you how various popup mechanisms work. It’s awesome. You can even download the popup patterns from his website.

The other book that came in the mail is Trail by David Pelham which is lovely and delicate…but not really for kids.

The all white landscapes in this one remind me of an inspiring video I recently saw called The Ice Book – a miniature theatre performance projected behind a pop-up-book stage set.

Lastly, did you know that most popup books are still assembled by hand? (usually in China) It’s true…they are labor intensive and apparently too intricate for machines to deal with.

Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life

may — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 22:14:25 +0000

I recently picked up this book at Green Apple earlier this week and it’s so beautiful I can’t stop looking at it! Some of you may have grown up seeing his illustrations in books like the The Golden Book of Biology. This compilation was assembled by Todd Oldham and is the most comprehensive book on Charley Harper right now. It’s GIGANTIC. You will not be able to fit it in your backpack or on your lap. Green Apple has one more boxed copy left for $49. This is an amazing deal given that this version of the book is $200 elsewhere and $125 on Amazon (hooray for Green Apple!) GO GET IT!! (If you don’t I will… although, if it happens to be gone, you can still get a smaller more manageable version of the book for a more manageable price).

Also, I haven’t really looked at this yet but apparently there is an iPad / iPhone game for kids based on illustrations by Charley Harper called Peekaboo Forest!

Zeitoun

may — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 01:16:12 +0000

I just finished reading Zeitoun, an account of Hurricane Katrina and the disastrous events experienced by Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant living in New Orleans and his American born wife Kathy.

The story is told from Zeitoun’s and Kathy’s perspective but written by Dave Eggers. When I first started the book, I have to admit I was a little skeptical because it’s written like a novel but is supposed to be a non-fiction account of this family’s experience. A part of me is always a little skeptical when I read anything that’s ghost-written or told through someone else, so I found myself questioning the dialog, the level of introspection, the details that seemed beyond the scope of memory. How could Eggers have known the exact words that were said on any particular day? The exact details of what something looked like? But accuracy to the letter isn’t the point of the book and once I accepted that and Eggers’ style of telling the story, I allowed myself to suspend disbelief and was drawn in.

The story that unfolds is gripping…and will make you very very angry…and depressed about our government. I won’t go into details about what happened – I didn’t know where the story would lead and I think that’s what made it so horrifying. At the same time it was heartwarming and inspiring to read about the family. I definitely recommend it.

Proofs of a Conspiracy

rajbot — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:53:44 +0000

Boing Boing has an excellent post on the Birth of the Illuminati, which traces the Illuminati conspiracy theory back to a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, published in 1797.

Here is a scan of Proofs of a Conspiracy, scanned from the John Adams Library by the Internet Archive:

The Literary Platform

may — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:03:01 +0000

The Literary Platform is a new blog “dedicated to showcasing projects experimenting with literature and technology.” Ever since I got an iPad I’ve been using it read webcomics that I used to read on my computer. Web comics are much more fun when lounging on the couch. I can’t wait for more interesting graphic novels to be available!

Signing Amazon Web Services API Requests in Python

rajbot — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:33:09 +0000

I wanted to ping the “Amazon Product Advertising API” which now requires an HMAC signature, and the pyAWS library doesn’t sign requests and is no longer maintained. Here is some Python code to create a signed request:

# pyAWS no longer works with the AWS signed request requirement
# Sign an AWS REST request using the method described here
# http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSECommerceService/latest/DG/index.html?RequestAuthenticationArticle.html
#_______________________________________________________________________________
def getSignedUrl(accessKey, secretKey, params):
 
    #Step 0: add accessKey, Service, Timestamp, and Version to params
    params['AWSAccessKeyId'] = accessKey
    params['Service']        = 'AWSECommerceService'
 
    #Amazon adds hundredths of a second to the timestamp (always .000), so we do too.
    #(see http://associates-amazon.s3.amazonaws.com/signed-requests/helper/index.html)
    params['Timestamp']      = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.000Z", time.gmtime())
    params['Version']        = '2009-03-31'
 
    #Step 1a: sort params
    paramsList = params.items()
    paramsList.sort()
 
    #Step 1b-d: create canonicalizedQueryString
    # This code comes from http://blog.umlungu.co.uk/blog/2009/jul/12/pyaws-adding-request-authentication/
    # and the resulting discussion
    canonicalizedQueryString = '&'.join(['%s=%s' % (k,urllib.quote(str(v))) for (k,v) in paramsList if v])
 
    #Step 2: create string to sign
    host          = 'ecs.amazonaws.com'
    requestUri    = '/onca/xml'
    stringToSign  = 'GET\n'
    stringToSign += host +'\n'
    stringToSign += requestUri+'\n'
    stringToSign += canonicalizedQueryString.encode('utf-8')
 
    #Step 3: create HMAC
    digest = hmac.new(secretKey, stringToSign, hashlib.sha256).digest()
 
    #Step 4: base64 the hmac
    sig = base64.b64encode(digest)
 
    #Step 5: append signature to query
    url  = 'http://' + host + requestUri + '?'
    url += canonicalizedQueryString + "&Signature=" + urllib.quote(sig)
 
    return url

Look what Zara got me!

rajbot — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:27:47 +0000

E-reader Taste Test

rajbot — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:03:32 +0000

We’ve tried a bunch, but have yet to find one that is actually tasty.

Also, I started a new blog about the Archive.

Invasion of the Book Scanners

rajbot — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:25:28 +0000

We’re on a roll scanning books, and are always running out of space for book scanners. I arrived at HQ today and found five book scanners that can been set up in the conference room over the weekend!