Reviews – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Virtual Reality

Inspired by the apparantly untrue tale that eBay was invented to let founder Pierre Omidyar’s then fiancée trade Pez dispensers, one of the first things I used the site for was to track down a beloved toy from my youth: the View-Master. And despite how the world and technology had changed in the intervening *cough* couple of years *cough*, it was still a bit magical to look at those 3D images again.

Roll on another *cough* couple of years *cough* (it’s very dusty in here, isn’t it?), and View-Master has arrived in the 21st century with a virtual reality (VR) compatible version of their iconic viewer – complete with a little clicky lever on the side for interaction/navigation. 🙂 You’ll need an iPhone/Android phone and apps to do anything with it: it’s pretty much a plastic version of Google Cardboard, but has springs and latches and a wriststrap to keep your phone that little bit more protected (though they do call out that the View-Master is not designed to be a protective case).

Doc tools: Overleaf

I’ve been working a lot with LaTeX this year. On my laptop, my preferred toolset is WinEdt and MikTeX, but I’m intrigued by the more portable looking solution of Overleaf.

Overleaf is a web-based LaTeX editor that allows you to store and edit your content in the cloud. You can sign up for a free account if you won’t be using it much, or a monthly subscription to add more projects plus a few extra features.

The site has a good catalog of existing templates you can choose from to start a document, article, presentation, CV, or whatever. They even provide an interactive tutorial to get you up to speed if you’re not too familiar with LaTeX. More advanced users can upload whatever custom/specialised templates and resources they need.

The split-view, web-based editor shows your editable markup on the left hand side, and a dynamic preview of the results on the right hand side. As I’m writing this, there’s a beta RichText view of the sources which shows a bit of a mashup of WYSIWYG and source content depending on which document I’m looking at – I guess it renders what it can parse sufficiently and leaves the rest in its raw format.

The free plan has a limited number of files per project (60), and an overall space limit of 1GB, but you can have as many projects as you like within those constraints, and get almost all the bells and whistles. Also, as seems to be a trend with many cloud-based services, they offer bonus space and features in return for social media interactions, inviting friends, and the like.

If you’re looking for a collaborative/cloud-based solution for your LaTeX project, you’ve little to lose by taking Overleaf for a test drive.

The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller

I loved this book. Saller, senior manuscript editor at the University of Chicago Press and editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A, has assembled a wealth of useful information and observation based on her experiences. Each chapter starts with a Q and ends with the corresponding A. The main body of the chapter is made up of musings, advice, rules and anecdotes relevant to the theme. And it’s peppered with recommendations of other texts, websites and tools that the author has found useful. It’s beautifully written, and a good humoured, gentle, easy read. Continue reading “The Subversive Copy Editor by Carol Fisher Saller”

Book Review: Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji; No Starch Press

My latest selection for review from the O’Reilly Review Program is Learn to Program with Scratch by Majed Marji.

I picked this because my eldest has started to mess around with Scratch and I didn’t really know anything about it myself, so I wanted to get up to speed to be able to answer his questions.

The introduction says the book is targetted at readers from middle school and up: Wikipedia tells me that in the US this is age 11/12. It would definitely be beyond my 8yo to read this himself, and despite the kid-friendly looking cover, I found it challenging myself in places, despite being no spring chicken! 🙂

Things I liked:

As promised on the cover, it’s visual. There are lots of illustrations to help you identify GUI elements and to get an idea of what you’re aiming to achieve through the use of certain functions and tools.
It includes lots of short examples – “if you use these blocks, then this will happen, for example…”.
It includes “Try it out” sections suggesting how you might tweak the current task/project to get a different result, giving scope to experiment and learn more.
There are problems at the end of each chapter, so you can check you’ve really absorbed and undestood what was covered.
Lots of example files are available to download, so you can save yourself some work on initial setup and get straight to the trying things out if you prefer.

Things I didn’t like:

I found the longer examples/projects difficult to follow at times – possibly because they were mainly described in a series of paragraphs, rather than neat numbered steps or highlighted bullet points. This may be entirely down to my personal learning style, though, so your mileage may vary. It’s also possible that since I worked from the ebook edition rather than print, any formatting restraints imposed by that medium may have affected readability.
Sometimes, you’re told which palette certain blocks come from, other times you aren’t. I guess it’s a “first mention” thing, but since a number of the palettes are similarly coloured, and my memory isn’t what it once was, I could’ve done with a bit more help in the later examples.
I wasn’t keen on labelled images where you had to follow the trail from (1) to (2) to (3) to understand what was happening. Again, this one can probably be put down to learning style preferences.

There is useful information in there, but I think I’d’ve been happier using this book as a reference/refresher or source of ideas if I’d already learned the basics elsewhere – I didn’t find it ideal as my introduction to Scratch.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Lego Ideas Research Institute

Lego Ideas is a nifty project that allows folks to submit their visions for Lego products, then the public gets to vote, and the most popular ideas get official kits! There are some really nice ideas in the running at present – I’m hankering for the London Natural History Museum myself.

Dave recently surprised me (plus a number of other sciencey women in his circles) with the Research Institute kit which includes a paleontologist, an astronomer and a chemist – all female characters. I got stuck into my kit straight away and loved the builds – they’re all small (built on a 6×6 base plate), but have some nifty design characteristics: the constructions of the dinosaur fossil and the telescope are particularly fun. Continue reading “Lego Ideas Research Institute”