Mine arrived today, with the leather cover. First take, I love the high-resolution front-lit screen, and the redraw is fast enough to make the touchscreen navigation workable, if still a bit pokey. My custom PDF Japanese novels look great, and page-turning performance is excellent.

It’s a bit sluggish at handling PDFs with lots of line graphics (like the JNTO tourist guides), but better than my old 3rd-gen, and the multitouch gestures work reasonably well for zooming and navigating large images, and quite well for zooming in on text.

The front-lighting is almost perfect, only becoming irregular at the very bottom of the screen, which in ordinary use is simply the status line. However, if you switch to landscape, with the default margins it can intrude into the text a bit, so a slight negative.

The wireless setup fails to correctly handle WPA2 Enterprise EAP-TTLS/PAP; it lets me set everything correctly, but my Radius logs show it still trying to use EAP-MD5. Minor nuisance, since I didn’t buy the 3G version, but I can work around it.

The worst thing I can say about it right now is that they shipped a crappy USB cable that kept losing the connection while I had it plugged into my computer. Visually it’s identical to the cable from my older Kindle, but that one fits fine, and this one is flaky.

Oh, and they added an onscreen Japanese keyboard. I’ll have to play with that later, but it seems to work.

[Updates]

The leather smartcover feels nice in the hand, and does the auto-on/off trick the kids are so fond of today.

However, attempting to queue up a bunch of my books for download made Kindle go boom:

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So, I guess what happens in Aincrad, stays in Aincrad.

An amusingly trollish article at Sankaku Complex suggests that the end of the first arc in Sword Art Online has angered all the folks who thought they were watching a different story. Yes, it’s true, they didn’t meticulously document the leveling grind, the steady attrition of the player base, or the ruthless boss fights, and we’re all better off for it. As Kirito said, 「他人のやってるＲＰＧを傍らから眺めるほどつまらない事はない」, “there’s nothing more boring than watching someone else play an RPG”.

In related news, desperate Democrats are imagining an Eighties-movie training montage set to the theme from Fame in which Barry the underdog overcomes all the weaknesses that got his ass kicked up between his ears in the first debate. Unfortunately for them, the real soundtrack may end up being Scandal’s Goodbye To You or Johnny Hates Jazz’ Shattered Dreams.

I’ve had a hard time finding an upgrade for my Engineer’s primary weapon:

In the break room just now, someone was trying out the facial-recognition security feature on his new phone. So we took a picture of his face on another phone, and held it up to the camera.

It let us in.

Jamie Zawinski reports, but graciously allows the offenders to escape unnamed.

Adobe has released an Open Source coding font, appropriately named Source Code Pro. I tried it out, and while it’s mostly nice, a side-by-side comparison of the fixed-width fonts on my machine reconfirmed that the also-free Anonymous Pro still beats them all.

Of course, if you don’t write Perl, you might not need expressions like “$K[$i%@K]” to look good, but I still can’t be comfortable with any font where “00” looks like it’s staring at you…

And my test sample, if you’re interested, consisted of Andale Mono, Anonymous Pro, Consolas, Courier, Inconsolata, Monaco, Osaka, and Lucida Sans Typewriter.

Got a package from Amazon today, that wasn’t the one I expected this week. And wasn’t something I ordered. It had a standard receipt, with no hint of who bought it for me, or why. Equinox present, perhaps?

It’s the classic Basic Machines and How They Work, by the Naval Education and Training Program Development Center. Good stuff, so thanks to whoever.

The one I’m waiting for? 8 feet of birch veneer edging, of which I need approximately one-third of an inch.

“No time to write, must get back to playing.”