Cool Reading

cool reading
I never thought I'd say it, but I'm starting to prefer epubs to books. Why? Because epubs are extremely portable, so small that I can carry hundreds of them in my pocket, and now intensely readable even on a cellphone. Pdfs are horrible on a phone (too big in too many ways) but epubs seem to me to be the future of publishing (in exciting avenues of ways). As an author and reader I'm ready to roll with the new wave.

Firefox 4 ppa

Firefox 4 ppa



I've been using the Firefox 4 beta for a while now and like it a lot--it's fast and a great improvement on Fox 3xxx although I won't say it's better than Chromium. It's now out of beta, so if you want to add the ppa to your system, fire up a terminal and type in the following:
   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get install firefox ubufox

and you'll be in business.
  
  

Does contemporary r&b promote racist stereotypes?

Does contemporary r&b promote racist stereotypes?

Quote:

'… a single, menacing question surrounds public articulations of Black sexual desire: How, given the ways that racism and racist oppression manifest in sexual violation, can Black people speak of the erotic? What many [ ] authors and editors repeatedly foreground is the undeniable relationship between the erotic and racist oppression. This connection does not mean that one must take pleasure from acts of racist and sexual abuse, but that Black erotica is concerned with and shaped by Black peoples’ memories, experiences, and narratives of racism. Because sexual violence historically has been a key mode through which bodies are racially marked and subjugated, then the realms of sexual intimacy, bodily pleasure, and love are important places where the struggles over recognition and affirmation

emerge .' Felice Blake , University of California, Santa Barbara , in From Margin to Centerfold: The (Mis)Recognition of Pleasure and Danger in Contemporary Black Erotic Fiction , page 3

Reflection:

Does the portrayed connection between sex and violence prevalent throughout contemporary hip-hop, rap, and even much r'n'b derive from a history of racism, and is this connection actually encoded into the core myth of the Middle Passage? Or, to express it differently, is historical racism so much a part of African-American models of identity that it has shaped what is seen as 'normal' black sexuality?

Reading books on a cellphone

Have you ever tried reading a pdf book on a cellphone? It's truly an off-putting and frustrating experience: you are always trying to adjust the size of the text, scrolling from side-to-side and so on. Yet I have persisted; one of the things I want to do is read books on a cellphone-- there are often situations when I am waiting for someone or something or even when I'm so into a book that I 'can't put it down'.

Well, one of my cellphones is an android phone and, although pdf's are still a pain, I have discovered epub files and some really cool readers for them (one is even called Cool Reader). The problem is that most books are in pdf format. Enter Calibre, a linux program that does a good job of converting from pdf to epub format! I downloaded and installed Calibre via synaptic and have been converting my pdf books and reading them comfortably on my phone since then. Pretty cool.

Peppermint-One Jan 2011 respin is the biz!

Yes, this post is slightly late... well, I was actually looking for a torrent of the latest Peppermint Ice respin (March 2011) but couldn't find one, so I tried the latest Peppermint-One edition instead. I was happily surprised.

My preference for Ice over One was simply related to the underlying browser-base of each of the distros; the Mozilla-Prism combo of One was often slow and unwieldy because Firefox had itself become bloated. So I preferred Peppermint Ice since it was built on a Chromium-Ice combination. Now, ironically, I find that Chromium has begun to show signs of bloat, and that the new Peppermint-One uses the sleeker and much faster Firefox 4.0 (Beta 9).

In other words, get your copy of Peppermint-One's 01042011 iso, burn it to disc, and install it today! You won't be disappointed. It's fast, efficient, and a real pleasure to use, even with limited RAM. Well done to the Peppermint team.