Which book do you plan to read.

bakul said:
Do you guys prefer paper based books or read them on a computer? And what about technical papers and articles? I prefer reading paper based books but have completely switched to reading articles on the computer. Still, I do collect pdfs of books that I may want to read or refer to.
Click to expand...

I have packrat problems and hate paper books now. I even re-bought books I have on paper as Kindle books.

In addition I get older and some details might be hard to see without the ability to zoom in.
 
cracauer@ said:
In addition I get older and some details might be hard to see without the ability to zoom in.
Click to expand...
People used to keep a magnifying glass around for that. Now you can get nice flat fresnel lenses with dimmable builtin LED so that you can read in the dark! Also handy for reading restaurant menus.

A few months ago I bought a used book for a few dollars: "Grammars for Programming Languages" by Cleaveland and Uzgalis. Not going to read it cover to cover but it has a very nice description of Van Wijngaarden's 2 level grammars. The book came from a university library. It has that "date due" page at the end that shows it was checked out 6 times since Oct 1986, the last time in 1998! You lose all that "metadata" in electronic copies!
 
ProphetOfDoom said:
Probably the least highbrow book featured so far but I live in a small town with one small bookshop and this was the only book they had on Chinese. I can introduce myself in Mandarin now, if I'm allowed a few moments to think. :D
Click to expand...
FreeBSD is one of the best operating systems to learn languages on, because the audio stack produces more detailed sound than the standard sound produced by Linux and Windows. In Duolingo and other learning apps I notice this difference. On Clear Linux I understand the words much less well. I am currently learning Japanese but there is an important tip I would like to give you that also applies to Chinese. When I was still using FreeBSD 12 I randomly installed a lot of fonts that I liked, but not specific fonts for Japanese. The Japanese characters in the browser worked, but what I noticed after using GhostBSD for a while is that the Japanese characters in the browser looked quite different, they were much blacker and also more bold. The difference was immediately apparent. After that I installed FreeBSD 13.1 and what I noticed was that the Chinese and Japanese characters didn't appear. I saw a kind of hash instead of the characters. Then I did some research and installed the following two packages:

FreshPorts -- chinese/CJKUnifonts: CJKUnifonts TrueType Font is a combine of Arphic Ming and Kai fonts

These fonts are chinese Unicode fonts which include the following charsets: - Big5 - GB2312-80 - HKSCS-2004 - ISO8859-1,2,3,4,7,9,10,13,14,15 - Bopomofo Extended for Minnan and Hakka, Minnan (Unicode 5.0) and their MBE variants. Partly support is implemented for: CNS 11643 GBK GB18030...
www.freshports.org www.freshports.org

FreshPorts -- japanese/alias-fonts: Meta-port which setups Japanese fonts

This alias-fonts port makes fonts.alias for various size Japanese fonts.
www.freshports.org www.freshports.org
As you now know I've had three different fonts for Chinese and Japanese characters.
This font is clearly my favorite. It's a pretty font, like calligraphy.
 
I started reading this a long time ago, then I put it on the shelf and haven't picked it up it quite some time. I only have like 100 pages left. I plan to finish it sometime soon. Great book, highly recommended.
www.goodreads.com

The Stand

Stephen King's apocalyptic vision of a world blasted by plague and tangled in an elemental struggle between good and evil remains as rive...
www.goodreads.com
 
bakul said:
Do you guys prefer paper based books or read them on a computer?
Click to expand...
I bought a used Prius for making long road trips. There was no original owner's manual so I had to download it from the internet. If I want to figure out some things, I have to read about it and go outside to try it. Then go back and forth till I figure it out.

I could put it on my phone but the text and images are too small. I can zoom in/out but lose all the text and have to swipe around to see everything.

Long live paper!
 
drhowarddrfine said:
bakul Why?
Click to expand...
Paper with acid will crumble in short time. It is cheap to make, but ask any librarian about it what it means for books. Historians will face a blank spot in the time where this took off and many books or documents will then be dust.
 
Just a silly joke as acid-free paper "lives long"! Though your Prius will die long before then. Squirrels just *love* to chew on Prius wiring & brake line!
 
Screenshot_20230119-144937_Chrome~2.jpg

Technically I've already read this several times but it's still on my reading list.
"Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog!" :eek::rude:
 
Screenshot_20230123-033922_Chrome.jpg

I know this is diverging into "books I wish I hadn't read" rather than "books I hope I will read"... but yeah, I was hoping this would provide some degree of existential horror... not too much, just enough to be keenly aware that yes, I exist, and oh, its all a bit troubling isn't it? Nothing. Giant hyper-intelligent lumps of squidblubber prove to be unfriendly. Survivors spend the rest of their lives muttering to themselves. Lol.
 
Screenshot_20230227_182509_Chrome.jpg

I intend to read this at some stage because I want to get into the very lucrative and technically interesting field of synths and effects. I doubt I'll actually physically build any of the pedals -- thats not what interests me -- but knowing  how they're built will still most likely be useful. I have another book on DSP but it's literally the hardest book I've ever had the misfortune to read and I've so far had about three abortive attempts to read it.
 
ProphetOfDoom said:
View attachment 15702
This is the offending DSP book. I think it's given me PTSD.
Click to expand...
This one is good but it's a 1000 pager...

Applied Digital Signal Processing: Theory and Practice: Manolakis, Dimitris G., Ingle, Vinay K.: 9780521110020: Amazon.com: Books

Applied Digital Signal Processing: Theory and Practice [Manolakis, Dimitris G., Ingle, Vinay K.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Applied Digital Signal Processing: Theory and Practice
www.amazon.com
 
Screenshot_20230305_062411_Chrome.jpg

I just bought this as it was the least intimidating-looking DSP book I could find on Amazon. Unfortunately it assumes Matlab ownership/knowledge. Is it easy to translate Matlab into C as one goes along?
The other DSP book (Understanding Digital Signal Processing) I mentioned was just so awful. The author kept presenting horrifying equations then saying things like "not to worry!" as if that would assist the reader in some way. At one point he spent three dense pages proving that squaring the samples of a waveform adds harmonics. The problem with explanations like that is you don't know until you've fully understood it that you never needed to understand it in the first place, because it was obvious.
Anyway I have some hope for this new book.
 
bakul said:
Do you guys prefer paper based books or read them on a computer? And what about technical papers and articles? I prefer reading paper based books but have completely switched to reading articles on the computer. Still, I do collect pdfs of books that I may want to read or refer to.
Click to expand...
I am old fashioned and I am reading just paper books - from my childhood and continue still.
On computer I am readin just help, "man"..
 
I had a glance through the "Hack Audio" book and it looks okay. No superfluous proofs that 1+1=2. Lots of algorithms laid out quite clearly, reverb, compressor etc. In keeping with it being comprehensible to mortals though, it doesn't appear to explain the Fast Fourier Transform. Which is something I was really hoping for as I've literally never seen a good explanation of it.
 
ProphetOfDoom said:
I've literally never seen a good explanation of it
Click to expand...
Have a look to the attached file, is a good explanation (quite brief, but it gives you the idea without the mathematical development).
 

Attachments

  • Practical guide to radio-frequency analysis and design_10.pdf
    289.6 KB · Views: 87
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top