Lately I have been using my 2008 Asus EEE netbook quite a bit and when I noticed this, I decided to look for an upgrade. I knew that netbooks had been largely supplanted, first by tablets and later by Chromebooks, but what I had not realised is that they have disappeared completely from the market … Read More

In the 2000s I was a volunteer for Distributed Proofreaders, an organisation that produces e-books for Project Gutenberg using a process that breaks up the work in manageable steps. At the time I was looking into ways of creating a mobile scanning station that I could use to travel to libraries and rare book collections … Read More

Tonight the stores close at 2200 hrs, it is now 2112 hrs, I am working through a stack of old books to determine their copyright status, and I still have a dozen or so to go. Suddenly, I am stopped. Quick, I need a word to describe the phenomenon that certain parties want ever longer … Read More

I just loooooove Queen’s Day. Don’t ask me to self-analyse why, there are probably some deep-hidden anxieties that show themselves through me rooting through other people’s garbage, and I just don’t want to know. (In my defense: Parson’s Pleasure.) Shown in this photo is the stuff I bought. Bought is the wrong word. Acquired. To … Read More

Did I say ‘up’? I meant ‘open’. Bought a couple of candidates for everybody’s favourite free e-book repository. It turns out the two of them had never been read. I know this because the pages were still stuck together, and I had to cut them open with a pocket knife. One was from 1880, the … Read More

Today the counter for public domain e-books at Distributed Proofreaders says: “20,000 titles preserved for the world!” At the top of the Recently Completed Titles list is Niederländische Volkslieder by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, though I don’t know if that is the official #20,000. Project Gutenberg expects to post its 30,000th English language ebook somewhere during … Read More

Yesterday Queen’s Day. Grunt. Comics: Tangy & Laverdure, De verdwenen DC-8 De Blauwbloezen, De roos van Bantry Books for the scanner: Herman en Dorothea, Wolfgang von Goethe De doorluchte vatenspoelster, Cervantes Over toneel, Frans Mijnssen Books for the Branko: Momo, Michael Ende Prodwitt’s Guide to Writing Fotografie, Frans Naeff Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis Paddeltje, de … Read More

This posting in Dutch, as it wouldn’t work in English on so many levels. Enfin! eindelijk kom je klaar. Je eindigt altijd met min of meer klaar te komen per auto. Met vuile handen zit je weer aan je stuur, hijgend en zweetend nog van ’t zwoegen, en met bezorgd gezicht staar je naar de … Read More

Taking, then, the actual existence of werwolves to be an established fact, it is, of course, just as impossible to state their origin as it is to state the origin of any other extraordinary form of creation. Every religious creed, every Occult sect, advances its own respective views—and has a perfect right to do so, … Read More

Although my posting frequency here never has been a thing to brag about much, lately it has dropped below the “once a week” that I unconsciously saw as a minimum. This is not because of the dreaded blogging fatigue, but because I’ve joined a couple of other blogs—which I must have written about once or … Read More