vivdunstan

Very recently I replaced my rapidly dying old Kindle Paperwhite 4 with the latest model. And a few days on I thought I'd post some quick thoughts.

On plus the new one (Kindle Paperwhite 6) is much much more responsive for page turns. This makes a huge difference to me since I read with a gigantic font for disability/neurological illness reasons. So have to turn pages much more than most folk for the same amount of text. In the old model there was a noticeable delay each time. Now it feels almost instant. Which I'm very happy with.

It was also remarkably easy to set up, using my iPod touch (like an iPhone, but without any phoning) to send by Bluetooth my Kindle login details and wifi network. Which sounds a bit risky as I write this, but worked ... And then I just had to tweak the font size, screen layout and brightness to my preferences, and I was done.

On the downside the new Kindle Paperwhite uses a different transfer protocol (MTP) which is not Mac friendly. So if connecting it up via USB there are extra hurdles to get eg a screenshot off. Which I do rarely. But still. It also affects side loading ebooks onto it by cable, though you can also upload them via web and email.

Also the Kindle Paperwhite 6 is a little bit bigger than my previous Kindle Paperwhite 4. It's not too big for me to handle, but felt a little unfamiliar at first.

I really like the plant-based cover I got, the official Amazon version. It's not fully plant-based, but much more so than the standard cover. I picked it partly for that reason, but also because it got better reviews for softness and no sharp edges than the main alternatives.

Big relief I don't have a yellow band at the bottom of my screen. This has been a problem for many latest Paperwhite owners as well as the new Kindle Colorsoft model. I am mightily relieved.

After battling to hear and understand the whispered Sea Devil dialogue in a Big Finish audio yesterday a friend kindly suggested that I try an auto transcription service. I've just been trying MacWhisper, which I can run locally on my Mac, no uploading the audio, which I wouldn't be happy with for copyright reasons. And it's done surprisingly well. The large AI audio model (available with a one-off pro purchase) copes best of all. But even the free small model was pretty impressive. Couldn't catch all the Sea Devil dialogue, but still did way better than me. I've now tried it with me blethering at it, and then also transcribing the audio for my 11 minutes talk about my gggg-granddad, Dandie Dinmont Terrier breeder Francis Somner. I'm really impressed with how it managed that last test, the large audio model especially. It even coped with many of the Scottish place names and counties, albeit not all. Definitely a higher level of accuracy than Apple's own internal dictation facility. So yup, I think I will find it useful. Though it was essential that it run locally on my Mac. And for once I am really grateful that I have an extremely whizzy Mac processor wise. Because I really needed it here!

P.S. I never had a script for this talk. I just burbled my way through it, using the PowerPoint slides as my prompts. It is remarkably free of ums and ahs!

Double checking that my family reconstitution code still runs ok on my MacOS upgraded Mac. The only Python program I have ever written. 233 lines of Python code (upgraded a while back to Python 3) to reconstitute families from baptism and marriage indexes from Scottish parish registers. After figuring out the families it outputs all the resulting family groups in GEDCOM format to load into an external lineage linked genealogy database. Still gobsmacked the code basically worked first time 😜

Looking at downloading MacOS 15 (Sequoia) - quite an upgrade from my MacOS 12 (Monterey). And boggling at just how many hours it would have taken to download the nearly 15GB update file on our home broadband before we upgraded to part fibre recently, and downloads increased tenfold ...

Delighted to be working on some accordion music arranging, for the first time in far, far too long. This time a rarely heard tune from Guys and Dolls - skipped in the movie. Agog at the chord progressions as I figure them out. Never seen anything like them before. Arranging in Notion on my MacBook Pro with a MIDI USB controller keyboard.

This afternoon I was photocopying a small number of pages from a borrowed library book using a rather old DSLR camera. That Panasonic LUMIX camera still has double the number of megapixels of my final generation iPod touch, and more than most mobile phones today. And given that this was a pretty dense text book it was easier to just use this camera. Which was already charged and available and ready to hand. I can copy over the pictures quickly using my laptop which has a SD card slot, and have tweaked them and turned them into a PDF to add to my research folder for the relevant academic journal paper I'm working on. If I was photographing in an archive extremely dense old handwriting I would also use my old DSLR.