John Miedema

With every passing year, I get more interested in food! I’m interested in the politics, the economics, and very much more interested in the cooking and eating of healthy, tasty food. This past year, I went vegetarian, started exercising regularly, and lost 45 lbs! Because I am travelling for work, I need to a way to share my recipes between home and work locations, so I decided to start posting them online. They don’t belong in this blog, so I started another one just for recipes. It’s just a place …

Check out the painfully true comic by the Brads, “Why DRM doesn’t work” or “How to Download an Audio Book from the Cleveland Public Library“. At Step 17 the character gives up on the Overdrive file and switches to Bit Torrent. In 2007, I wrote a small series on my evaluation of audio books, and in the third post I experienced the same problem with Overdrive and found a workaround. A number of people have since commented on the post, saying that it also resolved the problem for them. The …

During Small Press Month last year I read and reviewed Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife. The book has been shortlisted for the Canada Also Reads 2010 contest by the National Post, and I have placed my vote for Zipp’s book. Have a look at the shortlist and place your vote!

I have only just started tweeting on a semi-regular basis. It has taken me awhile to get used to such a noisy technology. But if you have been following my tweets, you may have picked up on a tweeted only story (till now): my fascination with a very non-noisy, clean, elegant technology, the fixed gear bike. It has been something of an obsession since I first saw one in a bike shop about three months ago. I had never seen one before. For newbies like me, a fixie is a …

Robert Darnton was the Director of the Harvard University Library during two important events, the Google Book Search project and the university’s open access movement. In The Case for Books, Darnton provides a perspective on the interplay of private and public interests in libraries.
Google Books involves the digitization of public domain and out-of-print books to form the world’s largest digital library. This project entails scanning the works of research libraries, and Harvard was an initial partner. Darton approves of making books more accessible through digitization, but he is concerned that …

In this sixth post in my Kindle “shakedown” series, I find that the Kindle shakes and falls when it comes to note-taking.
Reading my first book on the Kindle, I was satisfied with the way it let me highlight text. The functions for entering and editing notes were also acceptable. One immediate limitation I found was that notes must be linked to a particular location in the text. When I wanted to jot down a general note, I improvised by creating a general notes section at the beginning of the text. …

You’re free to read, right? On the web, in Canada? Maybe China has a great firewall, but Canada? How many of you work behind a firewall that does not let you access web mail and other web content? We let that slide because, well, we are employees who should follow company policies. Would you feel the same if your employer did not let you read personal letters or certain books during your lunch hour?
What can you do about it? One idea. The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based …

What I’m Reading

The Brief History Of The Dead; Kevin Brockmeier

Also Reading

Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction; Tom Raabe