John August

Geek Alert

The Kindle is not good for screenplays

Follow Up, Formatting, Geek Alert, News

Many friends and readers have written to ask, so I thought I’d bump this note out of the comment thread. The new Kindle is terrific for books. But it doesn’t yet handle formatted text like screenplays well at all.

This is a sample of Go, converted from pdf:

kindle screen

(I’ve gotten roughly the same results when sending it in Word format.)

Are you an unemployed coder? A wanna-be web entrepreneur? Are you Nima?

Consider this a call to adventure. I’m envisioning a web service to which you could submit (or email) a screenplay pdf (or text file) and have it sent to your Kindle, nicely formatted. Charge a nickel for it, or just do it for free until Amazon buys you out.

Answer Finder

Geek Alert, Meta, QandA, Scrippets

I’ve had some version of this site up and running [since 2003](http://web.archive.org/web/20030921223943/http://johnaugust.com/), when I became frustrated with how difficult it was to search through previous columns I’d written for IMDb. ((Remarkably, they’re still running these, even though it’s been years since I’ve written a new one.))

Unlike most blogs, ((I’m using “blog” in the 2009 sense of a series of short posts arranged chronologically, newest first. That is: a blog is a blog because of the way it’s formatted, not because of the content per se. It’s easy to forget that the term blog originally referred to weblogs, or online personal journals.)) many of the 1,000+ posts on this site are still highly relevant today. They’re answers to reader-submitted questions, and most of the questions haven’t changed. It’s often difficult to find these older entries, however, and the chronological blog format doesn’t help. I’ve struggled to find ways to make it easier to dig around.

The category archives at the bottom of (almost) every page are a start. Clicking on [Education](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/qanda/education), for example, will take you to a listing of all the articles in that category, along with brand-new summaries — most of them written by Matt.

Another option is what I’m calling [Answer Finder](http://johnaugust.com/answers), which takes all the screenwriting-related entries and groups them together in a much more browsable interface. It’s an experiment, and your feedback is certainly appreciated. Two caveats:

* There are known issues with Internet Explorer. In particular, the category box appears too far down the page. It’s a problem with IE’s box model, and if someone wants to grab the CSS and fix it, knock yourself out.

* Some of the older entries have weird formatting, particularly with [scrippets](http://scrippets.org), because the specs have changed over the years. One by one, we’ll be going through old posts and fixing them. But if you see something wonky, feel free to note the URL in the comments to this post.

geek alertFor the truly curious, here’s how Answer Finder works. (You’re welcome to look at the source, of course.)

1. Getting both categories and posts out of WordPress is more difficult than you’d think, which is why I’m happy to have found the plugin [WP Categories and Posts](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-categories-and-posts/).

2. I hacked the plugin to make it generate DIVs for each category. ((When I say “hack,” I really mean it. It works because it works, not because I really understand it. PHP makes baby Jesus cry.))

3. With a [custom page template](http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages) (an under-appreciated WordPress feature), I used jQuery to hide the DIVs, bind the category menu and place a session cookie to help you come back to the same place when navigating away. ((jQuery, by the way, is awesome. It lets a barely-programmer like me leverage a lot of CSS knowledge. And I have new respect for JavaScript, which is more Pythonic than I was anticipating. Given the speed boosts in the new Safari and Google Chrome, I’m looking forward to seeing what ambitious ideas will be coming down the pipe in 2009.))

Let me know how the new page is working, or not working, over the next week. You may see periodic downtime or wonkiness while things get sorted out.

The new Kindle is pretty solid

Geek Alert, Rave


After playing around with it for an hour, I’m pretty happy with the Kindle 2. I was a satisfied user of the original model, and most of the changes are for the better. So if you’re thinking about getting one — and live in the U.S. — I vote yes.

The good:

* It’s light and tight. It feels like an Apple product. (The original iPod nano, to be specific.)

* The screen is faster. It’s not exactly snappy, but it’s fast enough that you can actually map the UI to it. That let the designers get rid of the roller bar.

* Text-to-speech is decent for non-fiction. It has no sense of dialogue, so it’s hard to hear two characters talking. But it would be great for reading a magazine article aloud while driving to work.

* Quite smartly, Amazon automatically links it to your account, so you don’t have to do anything to access books from your previous Kindle.

The bad:

* It’s so thin and smooth that I feel like I’m going to drop it. It doesn’t ship with a case/cover, but adding one will help a lot. (I just ordered the standard one.)

* Although it was prone to accidental bumping, I was a fan of the giant “Next Page” button. In the Kindle 2, your thumb has to hit it dead-on.

* The little joystick is only okay. Nudging it around, you’re never quite sure how much pressure to apply.

There’s definitely room for improvement, but I can certainly recommend it to all the folks who were fence-sitting. Having access to so many books simultaneously — and adding new ones at a whim — is a game-changer.

For example, I was at the San Antonio airport waiting for a flight home, when I finally decided I needed to read Twilight. It was $19.99 at the airport bookstore, or $6.04 on Kindle. In less than sixty seconds, I was reading it. ((My non-review: I can see why Twilight is so successful. Caitlin Flanagan’s analysis is spot-on.)) I’ve done a lot more of this spur-of-the-moment buying since having a Kindle, and read things I probably wouldn’t have otherwise. ((And on the flip side, getting the first chapter free has helped me not buy a few books I otherwise might have.))

The Kindle 2 runs $359, and is in stock. If you order through this link
, they’ll kick a few dollars my way.

Snopes plugin

Geek Alert, Hive Mind

Whenever a family member forwards an email with a warning about an urgent peril to my health, I immediately visit [Snopes.com](http://snopes.com) to confirm my suspicion that it’s a hoax. I then copy a link to the article and send it back, with a gently-worded request to please check Snopes before sending out similar emails.

Today’s threat (phenylpropanolamine) seemed designed to work around this firewall. It began thusly:

> DRUG RECALL – VERY SERIOUS – CONFIRMED BY SNOPES.COM & FDA — tina
> ————————————————————————–
> All drugs containing PHENYLPROPANOLAMINE are being recalled.

Why, if it’s confirmed by Snopes, then it can’t be a hoax! But the [actual page on Snopes](http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/ppa.asp) says otherwise.

Dear developers, please answer my simple plea: a Snopes plugin for email.

It can take myriad forms, from server-side filtering ( “We think this is a hoax”) to a simple button or link ( “Check Snopes”). But it would save so much time and grief.