Until recently I was manually compiling references for my I, Reader series on a static web page. I should have known better and used an online reference tool.

Tablet + data plan + VOIPware (with local number) = Free mobile phone

1. You have an Android or iPad tablet

I don't change my home passwords often enough. At work, expiration policies force me to change my passwords every ninety days. It's annoying. I finally memorize my password. My fingers have learned to fly over the password keys without thinking. That's part of the problem, of course. Mindlessness leads to breaches. A cracked password stays open for the cracker too. Changing passwords is just one of the good maintenance requirements of modern life.

WordPress is a very fine writing and publishing platform but it was developed for blogging and the heyday of blogging is over. I still adore the WordPress platform and so do many other writers. Most of these people are writing long-form. All the "micro-bloggers" have migrated to Twitter. There are also poets who can make good literary use of short post-length spaces and this opinion piece does not apply to them. Put simply, long-form writers are moving in the direction of a book. A blogging platform is not the best choice.

Okay, I think I have a reasonable method for allowing comments again in my Drupal sites. I wanted to allow any comment after a user was approved for the first comment, like WordPress, but could not find the right module or configuration. I then tried a variety of methods including Mollum but spam kept getting through. My site is currently a combination of WordPress and Drupal sites. For the Lab, a Drupal site, I did the following:

I released an Android app for I, Reader. Here are some field notes.

This blog series describes an open book architecture that allows people to easily collect, display and share their books on their own website or computer, independent of any centralized service. The data can come from existing repositories but in the end it is stored locally for a user's own purposes. The series has introduced a Radical P2P (RP2P) approach, using torrents to define book data sources and build book files. It is "radical" because unlike traditional P2P it shares files without introducing a new data standard.

Trust the Cloud? Free yourself of networking and hardware worries, seductive. Some feel very strongly against the Cloud. I think it may be the solution for some problems but remember that a single point of control is also a single point of failure. Big services like Amazon do go down, sometimes for days. Also, data under someone else's control is subject to ... their control. Do you know how your data is being used? 

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing is a distributed application architecture that splits work between peers. The most familiar application of P2P is for sharing music and movies. The use of P2P with book records is a new application of the technology. While a book record could legally include the full text of public domain books, the present focus is on book metadata: the title, author, classifications, book reviews and social data that people avidly share on the web as part of their book reading practices.

The book is on fire, so we are told. In 2007 Amazon released its e-reader, the Kindle, its brand suggesting a gentle flame by which to read. In 2010 we reached a tipping point with e-readers as sales of e-books soared. Last week Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, a tablet. With its low price, enthusiasts are predicting a hit. Is the book really on fire? The metaphor is too easy, a cliché, but is it accurate? Things are changing fast. Digital technology has revolutionized publishing. The big book stores are closing. Libraries are now popular data access centres.