So I finally lost it and bought a Kindle. Sure I have blogged against Amazon’s stupid policies in the past, and the Kindle seems the nexus of such. But on the other hand, I did want an e-reader that doesn’t suck, and nowadays it’s indeed hard to find electronics/internet companies not behaving like assholes in some ways. It’s easy to choose some lesser evil over Apple (I also bought an Android phone recently, and intend to post some remarks soon), but in the e-reader landscape the choice seems between the proprietary and good, the (little more) open and expensive, and the cheap and utter rubbish. So I did order a Kindle 3, and I’m keeping backups just to be on the safe side.

Why the Kindle is the best device ever: the screen. It’s exactly like paper. After a while, you forget you’re holding electronics. It’s paper, even if a bit on the glossy side (but no worse than the stuff many magazines are printed on). It’s crisp, it’s easy on the eyes, it’s magical. Of course, it’s so much like paper you’ll need a light, but it’s okay: because it’s like paper. So good, I find myself turning it on and off and on and off again just to look at the gorgeous random ‘screensaver prints’ that come up when you turn it off. The refresh-only-on-demand paperlike screen also comes with another benefit: battery life. I charged the thing once when I got it two weeks ago, have been using it every day, and the battery indicator is only down one notch. Amazon claims one-fucking month of battery life, and they seem to be telling the truth. The Kindle also has decent WiFi connectivity (I didn’t go for the 3G version, and even though Amazon provides free 3G Internet worldwide, the browsing experience is so bad I don’t regret it — more on that later), which enables me to get stuff on the Kindle over the Internet. I’m already used to an automated daily Instapaper digest — the morning newspaper for the 21st century, and I doubt I’ll ever run out of stuff to read. The Kindle also comes preloaded with two dictionaries, and I love the nice touch of being able to navigate to any word in a text and having a definition pop up. Truly useful. And best of all, it all comes in a light package: the device along with the (by the way overpriced) cover weights less than an A5 Moleskine.

Why the Kindle is a piece of crap and deserves market death: The screen is too damn small. They say the Kindle is the size of a paperback, and they are right. But paperbacks don’t have oversized bezels and keyboards. In fact, the reading area is pocket-book sized. But still, there’s the larger Kindle DX, so I guess this one’s on me. The Kindle opens PDFs, but unless you format them for the small screen you’ll be scrolling a lot and zooming in a lot or reading really teeny tiny type. Perhaps the DX PDF experience is better, but then again, the PDF reader is so slow Adobe Reader in a malware-infested Pentium III feels zippy by comparison. Ditto for the Web browser. Even though it’s Webkit-based and capable of rendering modern websites pretty accurately, it’s an usability nightmare. And to make it worse, even though one wouldn’t actually expect tabbed browsing on a Kindle, a target=”_blank” link is all it takes to hit a brick wall, with a dreaded error message to the effect of “The Kindle browser doesn’t support opening multiple windows”; with no way to open the link in the same window. Amazon may have even put the browser under an ‘experimental’ menu (despite the fact many regular Kindle functions will automatically open the browser), and they may be worried about the cost of the whole “free worldwide 3G Internet” thing, but do they need to punish users connected via their home WiFi networks?

The Kindle is so full of ergonomical nonsense it’s ridiculous. The browser may be the worst of it, but usability WTFs are a Kindle staple. The menus and the navigation feel like an afterthought, as irritating as a MS-DOS productivity interface. The keyboard manages to be too big and small at the same time, and the relegation of numbers to the ‘symbol’ menu really made my day when I had to enter passwords, the ironic thing being cellphone QWERTY keyboards a quarter of the size are endlessly more pleasant to use. Not to mention the awkward position of the Menu, Home and Back buttons; and the way the D-pad is not only bad but seems placed wherever the designers found a place it would fit.

However, 95% of the time, you’ll be looking at the gorgeous-but-small paperlike screen, and using the big and rather well placed (in comparison with the ergonomical bankruptcy of the rest) page-flip buttons. And that’s what counts. If you look at the Kindle as electronics, it’s an infuriating piece of shit. But if you look at it as a reading medium, it’s quite swell. I’ve been taking mine with me every day.

Nearly ten years ago I got a Fuji MX-2700 as a birthday present. Despite its 2.3 megapixels and its fixed zoom lens it was as expensive back then as a decent laptop computer or a lower-midrange DSLR are now, not even accounting for inflation. Basically it was the most expensive present someone ever gave me, so I really made the most of it — the lackluster electrical appliance was my camera of choice for the next five years, despite my affairs with analog Yashicas and Nikons bought on eBay. Late 2005 I finally decided to give the Fuji a rest from being utterly crap, as in the meantime I was starting to get fed up with getting beter results from a BenQ toy camera that didn’t even have a viewfinder. So I got a somewhat better BenQ (how I love thy cheap electronics) for about 100 euros, and a couple years later, while at Fnac browsing a crate of items that have previously been on display at the store (therefore likely to have been abused by overeager button-pushers), got one of the worst and ugliest cameras Canon ever made for 50 euros, so I could go and hack it.

So anyway, last week I finally decided I should buy a proper digital camera. I can’t afford a good DSLR (say, a 5D Mark II?), and if I’m buying a DSLR nothing less than a fullframe sensor makes sense — anything less is a camera for wearing on weekends, impressing the clueless hipsters in the downtown cafés while making a fool of yourself in front of anyone who actually knows his optics (the people you really intended to impress). But I digress: If I can’t buy a fullframe sensor, at least I should do myself a favor and buy a lighter, smaller camera, so I thank my friend Ivo for pointing me the kind of small point-and-shoot camera a real photographer would buy: the Panasonic LX-3. Nevermind this camera is the Leica D-Lux 4 minus the logo and 300 euros. He had me sold with the f2.0 lens.

An in fact the camera feels like Quality. It has the size it should have for its abilities, unlike the junk SLRs you can get for the same price. And the way the lens is so well thought out sets it apart, a symptom of why the LX-3 is great: it can’t zoom past 60mm (35mm equiv.), but in a camera this small and (relatively) cheap, why would you want a tele (and the inherent loss of aperture, bigger body)? Are you a chromatic aberration nut? Good thinking by the Panasonic engineers there.

In a nutshell, the Panasonic is a good solid photographers’ camera. And I only wonder why are there so many crappy point-and-shoots being sold by the same 330 or so euros. Oh, because those come in pink. But nevermind those: the LX-3 is definitely highly recommended.

A couple of nights ago I was bored, so I went to watch the new Star Trek out of morbid curiosity. I really dislike the original TV series because of its plots’ reliance in either stupid deus ex machinas or in having William Shatner always punching and kicking his way out of trouble, even if the opponent is some alien with godlike powers (Shatner therefore being a zillion times more badass than Chuck Norris, it seems). And I also dislike the work of J.J. Abrams, responsible for the success of TV series such as Lost or Alias in which all logic and coherence gets thrown out of a window, and also Cloverfield, which was entertaining (you wanted a giant monster destroying a city and you got it) but ultimately sabotaged by the worst monster creature design in history. So I was quite immune to all high and fanboyish expectations most film websites presented in the last few weeks, and it can’t be said I went to watch Star Trek with my hopes up and therefore came back disappointed, even though part of me hoped for a Batman-like reboot with an emphasis on the verisimilitude of things.

Unlike all the reviews I’ve been reading, I found Star Trek a mediocre movie — especially for people like me who enjoy hard science fiction. I’ll be plain and careless, so don’t read further if you don’t wish to read total spoilers.

If you read my review of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, you know what I hate: parallel universes. Parallel universes are cheating. It’s more than a deus ex machina, it’s an everything ex machina. But you know what else I hate? Time travel. Specially the kind of time travel that spawns alternative universes. Of course, you may say Star Trek storylines are full of that kind of thing, so why am I bitching? The answer, is that in this film I felt the whole time-travel premise exists because the producers wouldn’t allow a full revision of the Trek pantheon, therefore to appease the fanboy wackos who don’t understand movies and TV series are works of fiction, the screenwriters came up with a preposterous plot in which the original Kirk/Spock canon exists, but then Spock traveled to the past, spawning a parallel universe in which there is new-Kirk and new-Spock. I shudder to think someone earned millions by coming up with such an idea, which seems like some MadTV spoof. Trek Back to the Future?

The whole premise is bad enough. I really disliked what I’ve seen as an attempt at copying from Star Wars — the antagonist’s ship which is a Death Star with tentacles that also destroys planets. The main bad guy, Nero, is no Darth Vader. There’s a self-conscious attempt at making pop history, but there’s no great charisma to be found anywhere in this movie, something the first two Star Wars movies had, and even the original Star Trek TV series (which was charismatic in a B-movie kind of way).

Being Star Trek, there are things that never change: Kirk, Sulu and some secondary cast member go try to disable the Death Star’s Bad Ship’s cannon, who dies? The action scenes are your typical sci-fi fare: messy space battles, lots of running around and jumping on crazy platforms to fetch some object, Kirk having fistfights in the notoriously unsafe architecture of the future. Michael Bay is the king of explosions and his films are lame entertainment, but the guy somehow coreographs crazy-paced action scenes that are quite readable. J.J. Abrams does not. Some of the visuals are compelling though, and the comic relief moments are probably the best thing in the movie.

So far, my description is pretty much of an average movie. The problem about Star Trek is that it has plenty of cringe-worthy moments in which I felt utterly embarrassed to be watching. The film starts badly: the story of how Kirk was born in an escape pod while is father sent his ship kamikaze in order to save him and his mother had one of the cheesiest directions I’ve seen since the final moments of Michael Bay’s (who else) Armageddon. But the most embarrassing thing of all happens at the films midpoint: Kirk is expelled from the Enterprise and his shuttle crash lands in a snowy planet. While looking around he is chased by some Cloverfield monster alien into a cave, and is saved in the very last minute by the Spock-from-the-future-in-another-universe, played by none other than Leonard Nimoy. If I was alone in the theatre I would’ve screamed “Foda-se!” (“what the fuck!”) out loud. The episode is stupefying beyond belief, but then brace yourself for a long exposition from future-Spock about supernovas and black holes and their potential for time travel, ending in thoughts about friendship and the assurance current-universe-Spock, an arrogant asshole who kicked Kirk off ship, is actually a good kid. It made me feel blushed and a bad taste on my mouth. Argh!

Two out of five.

Most film critics loved Star Trek. Go figure.