How to be a Scrivener
As readers might appreciate I have been writing in some form or other for many years. This includes two-and-abit novels the first of which I am in the process of final editing and until recently I was using Microsoft Word. In the world of self-publishing and preparing for Amazon’s Mobi or for everyone else’s ePub, Word is not the right tool. My recommendation is Scrivener which is available for Mac or Windows. This appears to be the ultimate tool for the writer, be they fiction, non-fiction, researcher or blogger. The application is inexpensive even for a lifetime licence that covers everyone in your household. It handles everything you will need to prepare what you are writing for publishing apart from your own creativity. My only criticism is the lack of a version for Android but hopefully that will come. You can get a 30-day free trial from www.literatureandlatte.com and there is a lot of free training materials available.
My father had a problem with Windows 10 recently where it would boot but not display a Desktop. Ctrl-alt-delete brought up a menu to reboot, log out etc. but that was it. Windows 10 does not have the functionality, unless you turn it back on, to boot up in safe mode. One trick I discovered is to log out, click on the shutdown icon then hold the shift key and select restart. After a reboot the Windows 10 resolution centre is shown where you can try some of the options like a boot into safe mode or a repair. In my dad’s case we had to go back to a restore point after which everything seemed so work.
Aphotography buff recently told me about the camera in the new Huawei P9. This is a dual lens camera where one of the lenses shoots in black and white allowing the phone to combine the images to provide some benefits, particularly in low light. The reviewers over at DPWorld found that it was close to the top-end units such as the Samsung S7 but not quite there yet. As expected it did well in low light but had some issues in full daylight. Since this is the first model with the new combination of technologies I expect to see further improvements in future models. For example, I am waiting with interest to see what the Mate 9 models brings this year. The P9 is a 5.2-inch, 1080p-screen camera with the top model having 4GB RAM with 64GB storage, a microSD slot, decent battery and uses the HiSilicon Kirin 955 chipset. The camera is a dual lens 12MP with an 8MP front facing for the selfies. At the time of writing the high-end model cost about US$600 (21,000 baht) on eBay.
Still on Huawei, their new Honor 8 is a slim, good-looking $400 phone that also comes with two 12MP cameras and an 8MP front facing one (sound familiar?) It has a fingerprint sensor, a 5.2-inch 1920 by 1080 screen and an 8 core CPU with 4G of RAM with a 3000mAh battery. The base model comes with 32GB of storage with the $100-more model 64GB. The Apple-like EMUI 4.1 skin sits on top of Android 6. It has 4G, Bluetooth 4.2, dual Wi-Fi support, NFC, and supports a microSD card or two SIM cards. For the price this has to be a one of the better alternatives to a top-end smartphone, for this week at least.
North Koreans will be rejoicing to hear that they have a version of Netflix in the works. For the elite few that have any network access they will be able to get five channels with carefully controlled content. Branding is a bit of an issue as the name of the new service is Manbang.
Did anyone else see the five-story blue screen of death at the Central Festival Pattaya Beach recently as reported, with a picture by Blake Sibbitt. A record maybe?.
In some potentially bad news for the regular computer users, version three of the pwntools exploit writing toolkit has been released. This version includes a bag of new Android exploit functionality and a number of other new modules. In reality the toolkit has been developed for security penetration testing and some of the hacker competitions. Regular hackers like it because it makes things easier for them. We will need to wait and see if anything makes it into the wider world as a result.
Finally, for this week Google’s problems with their cloud on Aug 11 has been traced to a periodic maintenance update designed to load balance their traffic. So far so sensible but at the same time another update was being performed on the traffic routers being used to move the data. This triggered a rolling restart of the traffic routers. In layman’s terms they did two updates at the same time that clashed with each other. Oops.