The potential solution is the Adam, by Notion Ink. It’s an Android tablet with a Pixel Qi display and (significantly for my quest) both USB and HDMI ports. That means I can carry my library on a portable drive (meaning there’s basically no upper limit to file size: I can store them as ISOs) and plug the thing into a big screen if such is available (our cheapo movie-watching screen at home via an HDMI-to-DVI plug, for instance, unless I mean DVI-to-HDMI).

There are some downsides. The most significant is that Notion Ink reeks of nerdery. Not that I don’t fit the demographic, but my experience with the iLiad by iRex has made me cautious of these bleeding-edge hacker products. The iLiad was a device built on cutting-edge hardware, with open software intended to attract hacking, all put together by a small company. The exact same description fits the Adam. In the case of the iLiad, this led to various problems:

• The cutting-edge hardware quickly got overtaken by new developments (driven by larger companies with larger R&D budgets, one assumes);
• The cutting-edge hardware also required custom software support, which meant that almost no standard software could be easily ported to the device (this will be less of a problem with the Adam, because the display technology is more standard, although not entirely);
• Because of a small but devoted user community of hackers, the company themselves didn’t need to polish their software to gleaming perfection: they made clunky but working solutions, which the users either put up with or hacked around;
• Similarly, the physical design of the device had all sorts of minor issues that a larger company with more time (and money) for design cycles would have eliminated; again the hacker-ish ethos of much of the user base means that there wasn’t any strong pressure to improve on these problems;
• The company went out of business in 2010; you can’t get iLiad components any more, and lots of the connectors (being somewhat prototypy) were decidedly non-standard.

The end result was a product that was at the same time incredibly exciting and incredibly frustrating. You could spend hours messing about with hacked versions of the OS and basic utilities — and I did. (If you were hardcore, of course, you contributed to these projects. I wasn’t hardcore.) At the same time, you had to spend hours installing hacked versions of the utilities if you wanted a usable device; or when you found the latest Cool Thing (“a web browser!”) that would work if you just installed someone’s hacked connection manager, which however didn’t include someone else’s additions to the connection manager so you had to compile a merged version yourself, etc etc. All wonderful fun, but also taking an incredible amount of time.

And now, the battery of my iLiad no longer holds a charge; the AC cable, though, only works if you prop it up at the right angle (said angle being inconsistent with comfortable reading). Since the company went bust, the proprietory cloud-based content management stuff presumably doesn’t work any more, so you need the cable hub which (again) needs careful positioning to make it work. And so on and so on: the first-generation hardware design has meant that the device hasn’t really survived the death of its support company.

Which brings me to Notion Ink. They’re a small independent company, competing with the iPad and the increasing number of increasingly slick Android tablets on the market: going up against giants like Apple and Samsung. They’re writing custom software to make things go, which doesn’t always run smoothly: as long as the company is in business you’ll get support, but if they go under then you’re on your own.

As for my original needs, there’s one sticking point: I’m still not aware of any ISO player for Android. (Daroon Player reportedly plays unconverted DVD folders, which is probably close enough, but I haven’t put it to the test.)

And then there’s one more problem. The Adam is a tablet. I already have an Android tablet (the Samsung Galaxy Tab, ridiculously overpriced and bought in a moment of foolishness: I use it every day, and it doesn’t need replacing). I’m going to buy an iPad (lured by various apps only available on iOS), although possibly secondhand. It’s hard to justify the idea of owning three of these things…

Firstly, the phrase “dick in vinegar” occurs several times in Chris Stewart’s Driving Over Lemons,¹ where I presume it’s a direct translation from Spanish. (I have vague recollections of “I shit in your milk” coming up in conversation with a Spanish friend at some point, and of course they have all sorts of repurposed Catholic imagery. Apparently French does too.)

The second oddity comes from Greek talkshow radio: an irate woman discussing politics let fly with “γαμώ το κέρατο μου” (gamo to kerato mou), literally meaning “fuck my horn”. “Horn” here is of course the horn an animal, not a car, has — the horns a cuckold grows, and just possibly the horn of Mary Davis of Saughall.

Finally, I can’t (or won’t) resist adding an expletive of my own, which I find has a particularly satisfying rhythm for expressing frustration. I have no idea where I picked it up, nor what it means — Google considers it a spelling error, but we know better — and I gift it freely and without reservation for your use: fucksnakes. You’re welcome.

Notes:

1. Both my mother and Marijn recommended this; when two such different tastes triangulate the same book, I know there’s something worth checking out. Indeed, it’s lovely, and inspiring –in an idealistic and utopian fashion– for our Greeceward plans.

The first tip expands on Mat’s “Vidiian Technique”: using ejecta to push a mote that’s too big to absorb into an even bigger mote, thus cutting it down to size. My addition here is patience: use the bare minimum force necessary to get the thing moving (most likely a single push). When it gets small enough and you plow into it, it will start shrinking from your side; if this happens quickly enough, the shrinkage will make it lose contact with the larger mote that was absorbing it on the other side, so you’re no longer competing with Big Daddy for dinner.

The other tips are about orbital mechanics, and they come from reading science fiction.¹ The good news is, they’re not restricted to Osmos: if you ever find yourself in freefall orbit, they’ll come in handy in real life!²

The first thing you have to get straight is the connection between your orbit and the speed you travel at. Any motes on exactly the same orbit will move with exactly the same speed. That means if your path-projection stays glued to some particular mote, you’ll never catch it. You can catch up on motes “above” you (farther from the “sun”), and ones “below” you will catch up on you (but so long as the orbits stay fairly circular, “catching up” doesn’t mean you’ll touch, just that at some point you’ll have the same angular position).

To understand how your speed depends on the size of your orbit you need to note the difference between angular speed (measured by how long it takes you to make one complete revolution around the “sun”: shorter means faster, in “rounds per second”) and speed simpliciter (measured by how long it takes to cover a fixed distance, e.g. in km/h). A high speed gives you a large orbit, which (counterintuitively) means a lower angular speed (by going faster you make a wider circle, which takes longer to complete one revolution around the “sun”).

So how do you catch up on that juicy mote sitting exactly in your orbit, tantalisingly close ahead of you? Not by jetting yourself towards it: speeding up will move you into a higher orbit, and you’ll see your target creep away from you (although you’re moving faster than you were, your angular speed has decreased so the angle between you and your target is widening).³ Instead, you expel mass towards your target: you jet directly away from it. That drops you into a lower orbit, which lets you close the angular gap; when you’re directly below your target, or perhaps a little ahead, speed up again (in the direction of your orbit) to raise your orbit to meet it.

Likewise, to catch a mote in your orbit but behind you, you speed up (jetting yourself away from it). This pushes you into a higher orbit, which is slower (in angular terms): your target catches up on your angular position, and when the time comes you slow yourself again to drop down on it from above.

The other thing to note about orbital mechanics is that they don’t work in circles but in ellipses. When you slow down you don’t, in fact, drop into a lower circular orbit. Your orbit from any point x will pass again through x (barring interruptions on the way — and only on single-attractor levels!), but if you slow down at x (starting from a circular orbit) then you’ll reach your lowest point directly across from x, on the opposite side of the “sun”. Such cometary orbits (elongated ellipses) are risky if they cut through the (roughly circular) orbits of larger motes (if your orbital periods don’t match, there’s a good chance that after some number of revolutions you’ll collide). Luckily, returning yourself to a roughly circular orbit is easy: when you reach the lowest point of your orbit, slow down again by the same amount you used to first deform your original orbit. Similarly, going to a larger circular orbit requires speeding up twice: first transforming your circle to an ellipse, then at the ellipse’s largest point (opposite your first jet) you speed up again, transforming the ellipse back to a circle. With your orbital prediction path turned on it’s very easy to see whether you’ve got this right or not.

You can use these orbital mechanics to devious effect. If the only remaining mote is bigger than you and close to the sun, you haven’t necessarily lost yet. Use your ejecta to slow it down, and it will fall into lower and lower orbits. (For best effect, time your missiles to catch it at the high point of its orbit: a change in speed has its most extreme effects at the orbital position opposite to where the change occurs, so to make its low end lower you hit it at its high end.) With a bit of care (don’t forget that these missiles change your orbit too!) you can send it to die in the sun, leaving you the winner by default.

In conclusion, as I have argued above, you should play Osmos because it’s educational. If you ever drift away from the station during an EVA, it might even save your life.

Notes:

1. Possibly Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, although I wouldn’t swear to it — they might just be an amalgamation of a infodumps from a whole host of bad sf novels and shorts.
2. Although things are much more complicated in three dimensions: you have to deal not just with speed but with velocity –speed plus direction– since objects orbiting in different planes can quickly spread apart or –catastrophically– come together as their orbital planes diverge and converge.
3. This is like overtaking on a corner: you have more distance to cover, so you have to drive faster just to keep level. Only here the road is all corner, and as you go faster they handicap you by moving you to the outer lanes.

Said caveats and disclaimers being:

• At no point was this a professional undertaking. We don’t know what we’re doing, although we’re having fun finding out.
• The folks attending the workshop had to pick up two entirely unfamiliar scales and one quite unfamiliar rhythmic structure over the course of about five hours, during which they also learned four songs.
• These folks were playing from sheet music notated for an unfamiliar tonal system, which they had to translate on-the-fly to what they are used to.
• We cocked up: we didn’t play them the originals. So they know the songs from our renditions, and (mainly) from the sheet music.

Given all of which, I’m proud of what they (and we) accomplished. Here it is.

Some thoughts about what worked, didn’t work, etc:

• Four pieces in two modes worked pretty well for a one-day workshop. I think we got through two pieces in the morning and two more in the afternoon; we also attempted a fifth piece late in the day, but that didn’t go as well as the first four. If we tried again to fit five into a single day, the fifth should be carefully picked to revive flagging energy and definitely shouldn’t introduce new complexities (rhythms, modes, etc).
• I was amazed at how easily people picked up the melodies, playing from sheet music. We are used to playing by ear, which usually makes learning a song a slower process because you have to remember it entirely. Sheet music parts (and people who can play to them) rock!
• The book we used, Smirneika and Pireotika Rembetika by Evgenios Voulgaris & Vasilis Vantarakis, also rocks. But…
• … it is notated for makam theory (a Turkish-based tonality involving four kinds of accidentals, none of which is quite the Western sharp/flat); I think it would have been helpful to write out the parts in simple sharps/flats, although people coped very well.
• Another disadvantage to this book for a workshop is that the transcriptions are extremely faithful to the original recordings; they include all the fills, ornaments, etc that the performer put around the melody. A simple transcription of the main melody, with ornaments and fills indicated separately or left out entirely, would have been better I think.
• Final disadvantage of Voulgaris/Vantarakis: no guitar chords. We didn’t actually think to plan for guitarists at the workshop, and the pieces were chosen for their melodies; that, combined with my indifferent guitar skills, left poor Jim making it up as he went along (very competently I must say), and playing an awful lot of Cm chords.
• We made one colossal error: we didn’t play them the original recordings. Between that and the sheet music (and the fact that of course nobody in New Zealand could sing the lyrics), some of the parts end up sounding a bit wooden because there’s not enough phrasing: they don’t know what’s melody and what’s not, and they don’t really have any model to work from to find out.
• Listening to the recordings makes it horribly clear how much I, in particular, speed up when playing. While not a workshop problem per se, this is definitely something I need to work on.
• To finish with something positive: as well as making it possible for people to pick up the pieces, the photocopied sheet music we gave out let them take something away from the workshop, which I think was appreciated. All in all, a decided victory for paper-and-ink.

If we ever do this again (and I hope we do!) I think we’ll start with rewritten versions of the Voulgaris/Vantarakis transcriptions; perhaps one with only the main melody and one with ornaments, or perhaps with the ornaments written in smaller. We’ll choose pieces with some guitar potential, and I’ll figure out, and perhaps notate, some guitar parts with more interest than “5 1/2 bars Cm, 1/2 a bar G, back to Cm, repeat” — the older recordings often have quite startling choices of chord and beautiful bass parts. We’ll also make a point of playing the original recordings as we introduce each piece.

Still I reckon we did a pretty good job for first-timers. And again, huge thanks to my mother for suggesting the idea and organising it, to the folks who showed up and shared the music, to Graeme and Zoë who made recordings, and to Jessica who gave us a beautiful venue for our New Years Eve concert.

You don’t have to do fancy algorithmic guessing at my interests: there are plenty of artists I enjoy but who I don’t follow obsessively. This is for the few that I want to preorder; for the achingly slow release of new books in a series; for beloved books coming back into print; for the band that doesn’t exist any more but that occasionally gets back together to produce a live album with some old offcuts thrown in.

On a related note: The biggest problem with recommendation systems like Amazon’s and eMusic’s is that they only see what Amazon or eMusic have sold you. They work better the more you centralise your purchasing, which fits Amazon’s interests perfectly but is not something I’m very comfortable with. LibraryThing, on the other hand, has recommendations based on what I own (regardless of where it came from); they’re generally spot-on, which means they don’t generally tell me anything I didn’t know. Unfortunately, this kind of data-mining (based on comparisons with what other people own) can’t anticipate that you will enjoy a new release by a favourite author: it has to wait for other people to start owning it to see whether people with similar tastes have it more often than people with dissimilar tastes.

(LibraryThing also has the UnSuggester, which uses similar statistics but looks for books that occur less frequently than expected in similar libraries. Looking at titles it seems to be pretty good: Shopaholic Ties the Knot (a sequel to Confessions of a Shopaholic) sounds rather ghastly, as does The Purpose-Driven Church: Growth without compromising your message & mission. On the other hand I am part of a presumably rather small potential market for Herman Cappelen’s Insensitive Semantics, and Systematic Theology sounds like the kind of theology I would be reading if I were reading theology. Given the amount of sf and fantasy I read, it’s plain amusing to see Eragon in that list.)

I come from New Zealand, a country that was named after the Dutch province of Zeeland. “Zeeland” literally means “sea country”, a not particularly original title for either the Dutch coastal area or the islands in the south of the Pacific. A dull placename warmed over, but it gets worse.

New Zealand is made up of two main islands, which have names suggesting they were invented by a teenager briefly inspired by Tolkien’s world-building but who became distracted before finishing the roughing-out stage of mapmaking. (Perhaps our would-be cartographer was named Stewart: the next largest island is Stewart Island, which always gets forgotten when discussing New Zealand geography — except, presumably, by the 400-odd people who live there.) The big two are the North Island and the South Island (correct usage includes the article): names which one imagines were pencilled in at some point early in New Zealand’s European history and which inexplicably were not replaced before general use went over them in ink.

Even more inexplicably, there are perfectly good Maori alternatives for these names, which could have replaced these awkward relics decades ago but somehow never have. The South Island is Te Wai Pounamu which means “the water(s) of greenstone” (somewhat oddly, since greenstone is not geologically associated with water; apparently the name descends from the more sensible Te Wāhi Pounamu, meaning the place of greenstone). The North Island is Te Ika-a-Māui, Maui’s fish,¹ from a legend that relates how the folk hero Maui fished up the island (all 113,729 square kilometres of it) using a hook made of his grandmother’s jawbone and baited with blood from his own nose. These names are conscientiously included in official publications, since New Zealand is nominally bilingual, but for everyday matters we’re stuck with “up North” and “down South”.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there. The West Coast (of the South Island) is famous for its stormy weather and high rainfall and boasts a town called Westport; you may have seen the East Coast (this time of the North Island, and including East Cape) in the film Whale Rider. Westland is a West Coast district (confusingly Westport is not in Westland, although it is on the West Coast), while Southland is both an “administrative region” (like the West Coast) and a district within that region (like Westland).² There is even a World Heritage Area known as South Westland.

Of the European placenames in New Zealand that you can’t navigate by, the vast majority are reheated servings of Britain. Wellington the capital is named for Wellington the general, Nelson city for Admiral Nelson, and so on. Showing slightly more originality, Dunedin (where I studied for my first degree) is the Scots Gaelic for Edinburgh (I suspect both to mean Edin-town, but thankfully “Edin” doesn’t seem to be a compass direction or a military gentleman). After this promising beginning, though, they folded, lifting enormous numbers of streetnames wholesale from the Scottish capital: George Street and Great King Street, Princes Street, Royal Terrace, Duke Street, and on down the feudal hierarchy (of limited relevance in our far-off colony, but all the more preciously commemorated for that fact); I’ve lived on Elm Row and Dundas Street, and finding the latter in Edinburgh on Google maps turns up (among many other familiar names) the agreeable juxtaposition of Cumberland and Northumberland as well.

The peninsula protecting Dunedin’s harbour is known as “The Peninsula”.

Part of the problem in New Zealand is of course colonisation. Pakeha (non-Maori) arrived awfully recently in New Zealand, and set about making themselves feel at home by ignoring the natives and naming everything after what they held dear (admirals and generals, the royal family, and points of the compass; this might tell you something about British imperial character). It’s hardly fair to expect some colonial governor, who has to be good at administration and at convincing the local Maori to sell their land for a pittance, on top of all that to have a poetic soul as well. But places with a slightly thicker crust of history accumulate meaningful names. Maori placenames refer to ways the land was used, to legends and stories, to significant events, and to geological features (they probably include a few royal names as well, although none as prosaic as “George”). English placenames in England, too, carry historical information (“salt found here”) but that gets lost when they’re translated to the other side of the world.

Other parts of the globe suffer from precisely the opposite problem: too much overlaid history, leading to a chaos of placenames whose meanings, and even original languages, become lost. My Christmas stocking this year, in New Zealand, included John Man’s biography of Genghis Khan,³ which I read on the plane trip back to Amsterdam. One striking feature of this fascinating history is how many different civilisations, speaking different languages, get a mention once you are looking at a large enough area and a thousand of years of history rather than a scanty few hundred. So you get: “The people of Xi Xia referred to themselves as the Mi. [...] The Chinese called them the Dangxian, while in Mongol they became Tangut (Dang plus a Mongolian -ut plural). The Tanguts of Xi Xia: that’s how they are known today.”⁴

And inspired by the multilingual multi-plural reduplication of “Tanguts”, I’ll finish with a lovely bit of nonsense from Steven Brust’s The Phoenix Guards:⁵

The Serioli, who departed the area to avoid any of the unfortunate incidents that war can produce, left only the name for the place, which was “Ben”, meaning “ford” in their language. The Easterners called the place “Ben Ford”, or, in the Eastern tongue, “Ben gazlo”.

After ten years of fierce battle, the Imperial Army won a great victory on the spot, driving the Easterners well back into the mountains. The Dragonlords who had found the place, then, began calling it “Bengazlo Ford.” The Dragons, wishing to waste as little time on speech as possible, shortened this to Benglo Ford, or, in the tongue of the Dragon, which was still in use at the time, “Benglo ara.” Eventually, over the course of the millenia, the tongue of the Dragon fell out of use, and the Northwestern⁶ language gained preeminence, which rendered the location Bengloara Ford, which was eventually shorted to Bengloarafurd. The river crossing became the Bengloarafurd Ford, which name it held until after the Interregnum when the river was dredged and the Bengloarafurd Bridge was built.

Notes:

1. The placenames have macrons because I’m conscientiously copy-pasting them from Wikipedia to make sure of the spelling, but I don’t have easy access to macrons by typing. If the names indeed enter common currency I’m sure they will erode away fairly quickly anyway.
2. No, I don’t know this stuff by heart. Blame Wikipedia.
3. My sister just got married to a Mongolian man, so the family has developed quite an interest in the area.
4. The story of the survival of the 13th-century Secret History of the Mongols is equally multilingual. It was recorded by Ming officials in Chinese characters (which make a very imperfect match to the Mongolian original; Man gives the analogy of writing Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in nonsense French, beginning Tu bille orne hôte tu bille), and retranslated back into Mongolian beginning only in the late 19th century: “tricky if you are working from fourteenth-century Chinese to restore thirteenth-century Mongol, neither of which anyone knows how to pronounce”.
5. The stuffy style is deliberate, and one of the joys of the book — however unlikely that may appear from this short extract.
6. Brust, too, sometimes makes overly heavy use of the compass in his worldbuilding.

As I said, we had a lovely time. We caught up with friends with babies (thanks Tim & Sharon and Ian & Katie for letting us get clucky with your wee ones); we caught up with family (hordes of Pembertons, my sister and her new husband back from Mongolia); we ran a rembetiko workshop, played at the Takaka market and gave a house concert (huge thanks to Hennie, Pat, and Joachim for the music and the encouragement and for letting us in on the market gig, to the workshop folks for your enthusiasm, and to Jessica for the opportunity and the marvelous venue for our wee concert); Olga made flax weavings and I made a mess of some gorse with the scrubcutter; we met Paul and Jenny’s pet pukeko and I helped put a roof on Paul’s chookshed-to-be; I got a scenic flight over Golden Bay and bits of Kahurangi National Park and even took control of the plane for what felt a very long five minutes (thanks Ian!).

There is documentary evidence of lots of this, which will probably trickle online at some point (Olga has an album up already). Especially we have promises to keep regarding the rembetiko: original recordings to send to people and videos of the workshop and concert to tidy up and put somewhere visible. Luckily, we’re waking up at between 2 and 4 every morning, so we have lots of extra hours in the day to do it. Yay?

Time to buy a house.

Once I spent most of the day waiting on platforms, after some perfect-storm-like sequence of feedback effects interrupted not just the service I had a ticket for but also the fallback service we were advised to take instead, and then even the unscheduled service arranged specifically for the victims of the outage.

Another time, more pleasantly, I had an unscheduled wait of a couple of hours in Cologne: just long enough for an old friend to take the subway into town and have a beer with me.

Recently I visited the same friend for a weekend; predictably, something went wrong on the way home. This time it was only a communications breakdown, but one I found particularly amusing: the various automated systems announcing the timetables completely failed to cope with a planned change to the schedule.

The ticket I paid for was Cologne to Amsterdam, but my seat reservation was only valid to Utrecht; the reservation system, at any rate, knew that on the day I was travelling the international service to Amsterdam would end instead at Utrecht, and the last half-hour of the trip would have to be made on local trains.

In Cologne, an automated voice helpfully announced in three languages: “The ICE service to Utrecht leaving platform 5 at 17:32 will not stop in Utrecht.” (We’ll carry on until we fall off the edge of the world?) The board on platform 5 announced an ICE service to Amsterdam, and warned that it would not be stopping in Utrecht. (Not to the edge of the world then. I wonder what my seat reservation to Utrecht is worth if we don’t stop there?) On the train, around the time I would have expected to arrive in Utrecht (or not to arrive there, under the circumstances) the wee lighted displays said we were approaching Arnhem. (I wondered how far from Arnhem to Amsterdam and what time I would be getting home.) Then we pulled in to Utrecht: right on time, as predicted on my ticket, but somewhat befuddled.