Hooptedoodle #140 - Donkey Award - Barclaycard

Not really another rant, just something which has cropped up which seems daft enough to warrant a Donkey Award. I’ll keep it short and to the point. I shall avoid mentioning the fact that the explosion of unsecured, unrepayable personal debt which caused so much damage to Western economies leading up to 2008 (and which hurt everyone, not just those who had those debts) was largely promoted by the credit card companies, who somehow seem to have escaped the public outrage and recrimination which has hit the banks (for example). I am all in favour of public outrage, and I have never understood how they were missed, though of course I am not going to mention it.

Some years ago I was one of a number of people who were scammed by having credit card details cloned by a tweaked card-reading device. I now know exactly where and when it happened. The perpetrators were, I understand, a Sri Lankan revolutionary organization who had managed to gain a presence in the franchise for Shell petrol stations in the UK. However it was done, I suddenly found that I had purchased a surprising number of one-way flights to Singapore, as a customer of Dragon Airlines. My credit card company’s fraud people were very good, and my loss was refunded and my card was changed, all very quickly. I was lucky. Since then, of course, chip and PIN technology has become much more sophisticated, and we like to think that electronic shopping is more secure than it was, but one lasting result of the Dragon Airlines episode is that I maintain a small Mastercard account alongside my main Visa one, and this Mastercard is intended just for transactions on the Internet, or via the telephone to merchants I do not know. It specifically has a small credit limit, to minimise the damage if there is a security failure.

Did any passengers buy their own tickets…?

This was identified as a good idea in post-Dragon discussions with the card suppliers themselves. It is disappointing, therefore, that they keep writing to me to tell me that they are going to do me the big favour of increasing this small security limit. Presumably I am not getting into enough debt.

This week I got such a letter, telling me that my credit limit on the Mastercard will be automatically increased from £500 to £2000 at the end of July. It also tells me, of course, how I may go about telling them not to do this, but this is now the fifth time we have gone through this rigmarole, and I don’t appreciate it.

I phoned the supplied 0800 number this morning, and spoke to a very nice, helpful chap in India. After we had discussed my wish to keep the headroom on the Mastercard low, and the reasons for this, he cancelled the increase, and (for the fifth time now) assured me that my account is now coded so that I will not get automatic increases in the future. We’ll see, but that's OK so far. He also explained that it might take up to 8 weeks for these changes to take effect on the system, which, of course would take us well past the end of July.

BONG!! This is the 12-month waiting-list for the pre-natal clinic all over again. I believe we have managed to sort it out, and it’s not my Indian friend’s fault anyway, but you can bet that I will be checking my Mastercard account online around the end of July.

Be very afraid - you have not yet seen hacks & viruses

Before we ended our conversation, I was asked would I like to obtain the new smartphone app to enable instant Mastercard shopping (so that I will not be a source of embarrassment to my friends by not having it).

No – I don’t want it. Thanks. If they have a long think about it, they might just come up with some reasons why. Too much enthusiasm, not enough common sense.

Hooptedoodle #130 – Technology Advances at Chateau Foy

I live in a very rural spot of South East Scotland, as I have mentioned here previously. We are not isolated in the sense that Canadians or Australians would recognise the term, but we are some miles from the nearest village (pubs, shops, post office) and we have so few neighbours that our immediate area is always well down any priority lists for infrastructure improvement. The nearest piped gas supply stops about 4 miles away, our broadband speed is so slow that it even surprises the local engineers, our electricity arrives via overhead cables, which run some miles across the farm fields and through gaps cut in the woods, and there is no mobile phone service here. By the standards of mainland Britain, this is a backwater.

The location suits us, and there are obviously a number of considerable advantages in living out here, but it is the last two of these small technical matters that this morning’s Blethering Sunday hooptedoodle will focus upon.

Rural charm

Subject 1 – Up the Pole

The oldest part of our house was originally a dairyman’s cottage, and was built around 1960. The area which is now our side garden (which, confusingly, is where the front door is) was originally the “drying green” for the little hamlet of farm cottages. We have a hefty wooden pole in the middle of the side lawn, which brings the electric power to the house. The garden has had new boundaries and been landscaped over the years, but I see no reason to suppose that the pole has ever been replaced since 1960.

It is part of the character of the place, and in Provence or somewhere it would seem quite charming to have overhead power cables, but our pole is not a source of pleasure in that way. Since a large neighbouring tree was removed a few years ago, the pole now dominates the garden, and it is not without some dangers. Kites are a very bad idea, water sprayers and hosepipes have to be kept out of the hands of children (in case they fry themselves), and there are numerous local stories of tree surgeons and roofers being killed by discharges arcing from these old cables. We cannot use a pressure spray to take moss off the roof, for example, for fear that the spray makes the God of the Pole angry, and he literally strikes us down. Thus all roof cleaning and repair has to be done with a lot of hand scraping and rather hushed conversation – to be on the safe side.

The ancient pole itself is rotting – on a summer afternoon, if there is no wind, you can hear the wasps munching away at it, deep in the cracks. Our chums at Scottish Power have occasionally come and looked at it, and promised that it will be replaced, but mostly their visits have been notable for fresh applications of very unsightly barbed wire – on the pole and on its anchor-stay – to frustrate our obvious enthusiasm to shin up the 20 feet or so and place a wet finger on the wires, to see what happens. Each time they go away, I take the law into my own hands and remove the barbed wire – if I wish to electrocute myself, I have no desire to hurt myself on the wire on the way up, and I certainly don't want to look at the stuff on a regular basis.

When the pole was last inspected in 2012, the young fellow from Scottish Power said it would be replaced very soon. I asked him was there any chance of the new pole being re-sited in the lane outside our garden, which would give a straighter run for the cabling, would move the wires to a new location, away from our front steps (so the pigeons could no longer sit in a row and defecate on visitors), and would improve the safety of the place quite a bit and the appearance very considerably. The SP man peered at me from beneath his yellow hardhat with the sort of nervous look which is correctly used when dealing with dangerous lunatics (I believe it is part of their training), and mumbled something about regulations and cable spans and planning permission – then he left.

They have returned. A much older man arrived last month, announced that the replacement of the pole was imminent, and – with hardly any prompting from us – suggested that it would be much better to place the new pole outside in the lane (exactly where we wanted it) and, provided the farmer didn’t object, they would be back to carry out the work in April.

Well, the days are accomplished. The pole has been installed. The cables have not been attached yet, but we are booked for a day without electricity on Wednesday, when the cables will be replaced with modern ones. This is such an unexpected stroke of good fortune that we are still expecting something to go wrong, but the pole is here, and it’s standing up, and I can’t see SP wasting their time and money to change it again. All being well, our hated pole will be gone by next weekend. The only people who will not be pleased are the family of sparrows who are living in an illegal nesting box (above the barbed wire line) on the pole itself, but there must always be a little collateral damage.

Good – we’ll give this a very large tick. The sparrows will have more babies in future years.

All right - no laughter, please...

Subject 2 – The Dreaded Smart-Phone

I have a very ancient mobile phone – it is so old, in fact, that the sales assistant in Phones4U burst out laughing when he saw it yesterday. I was not embarrassed – I was quite proud of it. I should have done something about my mobile years ago, but I hardly use it, and I am currently paying my network supplier some £18 a month for something which gives me hardly any benefit at all. How stupid is that?

As mentioned earlier, my home is a dead spot on the mobile networks – no service at all. When I was running my little publishing business, and travelling around a bit, I used my mobile a lot, and could not have managed without it. Without that context, my phone is now an expensive nuisance for most of the time. It is useful when I go away, or out in the car, but I only really need to make the occasional call and send the odd text – I have been known to take photos, but rarely.

The rest of the world, of course, cannot understand this. Despite my requests that they should not use my mobile number, friends and businesses constantly make calls which I do not receive. Courier deliveries and internet banking security procedures now do not work properly if you do not have a working mobile. Service engineers for utilities and domestic hardware will request a mobile number, so they can text and tell us when they are likely to arrive. If you do not have a working mobile, pal, you are not a citizen.

There is a whiff of comedy when I drive away from home, up the lane and off the farm. There is a sound like a genteel fire alarm, which is the accumulated urgent text messages from the last couple of days chiming through as I head towards the real world. By the time I get to the public road – maybe a mile away – the display shows a handsome network service, ready to meet all my demands. The thing which really niggles is that I am paying £18 per month for this joke, and it is all my own fault, since I have not done anything about it before now.

The network provider keeps urging me to upgrade my phone, which hardly seems worthwhile if I don’t use it. Thus my wife and all the sensible people have moved on, and bought modern phones, while I still live in a bygone age. A friend of mine visited recently, and – of course – his mobile didn’t work, but he has an app installed on his iPhone which enables him to register with my house wi-fi, and he could then receive and make calls through the internet quite satisfactorily.

Aha.

The rest of the world almost certainly is aware of all this and uses it every day, but it had eluded me until now. Yesterday I travelled to Edinburgh (on the train, with a loaf of bread and my old phone in a knotted handkerchief, on a stick over my shoulder) and went to talk to the nice people in the phone shops. Goodness, what a lot of them there are…

I had to get someone to talk me out of this loop – don’t want a smartphone since no service at home and not worth the expense, but only way to get a decent service at home is with a smartphone. I think I now have a way ahead. I can change my contract so that the monthly allowances are so much better I can hardly believe it, and they will provide me with a posh new phone so that I can use them, and the monthly payment will go down to three-quarters of what it is now. If I provide my own phone it will be even cheaper – about half. It all hinges on whether the mobile actually works at my house under this new arrangement. The sales guy at EE (I am an Orange customer) reckons it will, but then he has the faith, which I do not.

They have offered to lend me a SIM card for a fortnight so I can try it out. Seems sensible.

So I am approaching a big decision point – if it works, I will join the ranks of the detestable smartphone users, and my life will change forever (aaargh!); if it doesn’t, I shall probably hang on to my existing museum-exhibit and switch to a cheap, pay-as-you-go arrangement which suits my minimal usage.

I had a trial play with my wife’s iPhone yesterday – it seems very good – I quite fancy that. The only hang-ups I have are

(1) the cost of the phone

(2) the fact that it offers a vast array of features, games, music, ridiculous apps and so on that I am not the slightest bit interested in

(3) I have to rise above my virulent dislike of smartphones, and the very serious damage they have done to education, literacy, the workings of society and a number of other trifling areas

Yesterday I sat on the train into Edinburgh and it was almost silent. Nobody speaks, so as you would notice. Everyone is texting, so presumably they must have some friends somewhere else – unless, of course they were texting the person in the next seat. The other day, I sat in a coffee bar in a bookshop in Haddington, reading, when three ladies arrived at the next table – greeted each other warmly, ordered coffee and cakes, and then got out their iPhones and ignored each other for the next 20 minutes. Terrific – I don’t want to get like that – even a bit. The fact that I have no mates might help out a lot here.

How can we have such an overkill of communications technology, when hardly anyone has anything worthwhile to say? How can we have such an overprovision of phone apps which we do not really need and which waste more time than anyone can sensibly afford? How can anyone ever get any peace, or have a worthwhile idea, if they spend their lives with their heads jammed up their backsides?

Don’t tell me how busy you are if you spend a quarter of your day gawping at crap online, or sending non-messages to your pals. If you choose to do it, then no problem, but it is a choice – you are not really busy. Get a life. And do not answer your phone or check your texts while you are speaking to me, or I shall throw the thing into the nearest pond.

LOL

ECW Movement Rates and a Renaissance Joke

My early games with my ECW miniatures rules based on Commands and Colors have shown a common theme – a tendency for the cavalry to race around the place, wiping each other out, while the foot are pretty static in the centre – slow to get into action and ponderous once they get there.

This may well be an authentic representation of what 17^th Century warfare was like, but I have been giving some thought to making the foot a little more mobile – nothing outrageous, but a little more – how do you say? – oomph when deploying. For my next couple of games I propose to allow foot to fire only if they stand still, to move 1 hex and still have the capability to initiate a melee combat, or to move 2 hexes with no option to carry out any combat. This double move is not allowed to bring them nearer than 2 hexes (musket range) of any enemy, and must not compromise any terrain rules, so they may not make a 2-hex move if they are within 2 hexes of the enemy, and must stop when they get to 2 hexes from the enemy. I am doing some consistency checking to see how this sits with the terrain rules and the Command Cards.

This change may, of course, distort the entire game, but in principle it seems reasonable, so I propose to give it a trial.

Subject 2 – on my September trip to Bavaria and Austria, I saw the remarkable Glockenturmautomat in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, in Vienna. This astonishing clockwork device was made in Augsburg in 1580. We did not get to see it working when we were there (it’s much too precious for that), but I have subsequently found a little film about it on YouTube (of course). It is an odd piece of whimsy – a tower with bell-ringers working away while some merrymakers are boozing on the balcony. The film shows that, in close up, the weathering of the drinkers makes them look a bit sinister, but it is a terrific piece of workmanship.

If you like a touch of Rabelais in your humour, watch to the end…

[Because Blogger's video linking tool isn't working properly, please click here]

Hooptedoodle #108 - Unusual Glimpse of Canadian Wildlife

Someone sent me this, and it cheered me up a bit yesterday. If you've seen it before, and anyone who has had any exposure to Canadian TV will have, then here it is again.

Hooptedoodle #105 - The Automaton Which Writes

You may have seen this before - I hadn't. This slightly scary clip about an 18th Century clockwork figurine which can do handwriting has excited and troubled me in equal measure. Robots are fun but a bit disturbing anyway, and I keep finding myself wondering how such a device might get on with the cross belts on a regiment of Spanish fusiliers.

Löttorp

Pardon?

Those familiar with Swedish geography will know that this is a place in Borgholm, while IKEA regulars may know that it is also the name of a very small, simple digital clock, suitable for kitchens, kids’ bedrooms or for use as a travel alarm.

We bought one – I think it might have been about £3 – and then we left it in its box for a while, we were so underwhelmed by the thing. Eventually, in a slack moment, I unpacked it, put in a battery and checked it out.

Useful, inexpensive little gizmo for my wargames

Hey! – what a find. As it happens, I have occasional need of a timer for Commands & Colors games, not because I wish to introduce an element of stress into them but because one of the great attractions of C&C is that it can be relied upon to finish in a couple of hours, but I have one or two occasional visiting players who like to have a lengthy think while they work out how to play their cards, and sometimes the games become overlong and lose a little as a result – rapid play is one of the strengths of the C&C system, after all. It has occurred to me that setting a gentle time limit for choosing and playing a Command Card – maybe 3 minutes – would keep us all focused and keep things moving along without hassling anyone.

So for this reason I’ve been keeping an eye open for secondhand chess clocks – haven’t found one, and to be honest I don’t think a chess clock is what is needed – too formal, and too fiddly.

Well, the little IKEA clock solves the problem very nicely. It is a cunning design – as you rotate it and sit it on the different sides, it switches to 4 separate functions – clock, thermometer, alarm clock and countdown timer (putting the hourglass symbol at the top switches in the timer). The way this works is ideal. If you set the countdown timer to your regulation 3 minutes (or whatever), then every time you turn the device so that the hourglass is uppermost it starts to countdown from the 3 minutes. If you invert it, it switches back to the clock function, and next time you turn it over to the hourglass the timer will start counting down from the full 3 minutes again. Magic – it’s simple, non-threatening and no sort of extra hassle to use – when you’ve played your card, turn the clock over. Easy.

You can even keep an eye on the temperature in the wargames room. What more could you want?

I hasten to add that I am sure that similar devices can be bought (I am not a complete IKEA enthusiast) from other stores, but this one is a little winner – great. Ours is green, by the way, but – as you see – you can get any colour you want. 

Hooptedoodle #86 – The World Is Getting Faster

This is not a rant. I state this right here, up front, so that I can refer back to it if I forget.

A gentleman on the radio this morning was waxing positive about how technology has speeded everything up, and how much better our lives are as a result. He may be correct. If he was on the radio, then it’s bound to be true, isn’t it?

I have expressed concerns here before about the risks to mental health and society if the entire population has too much information, most of it distorted by marketing and vested interests, too little imagination and judgement to make use of that information, and a compulsion to multitask between trivial, inconsequential, purely transactional exchanges. That was beginning to sound a bit rantish, so I’ll stop that paragraph.

The world according to my desktop is not getting faster. It is continuing to slow down. As I have mentioned before, I live out in the countryside, and my broadband is slow. This means that most of the cyber world is now specifically designed not to work properly for people like me. The charming little lady illustrated here is someone I see a great deal of. Since my internet provider is BT (British Telecom), and since they are sort of poor relations within the Yahoo edifice, I am unable to open any page in my email service until I have been provided with an advert for an American charity – they even have 800 toll-free numbers, which of course are meaningless outside the US. I can’t switch this feature off, and the ads take on average about 22.46 seconds a time to retrieve from some remote server. Every single mail item, every index page – everything – has to wait for an ad which I’ve seen before and is of no relevance. You can see that would begin to grate after a while.

As I type my mail, the browser is constantly jamming the buffer, trying to check what I am saying, so that it can target advertising at me which is relevant to what I’m writing about. I constantly have to retype bits where it got stuck, or where it dropped characters while it was distracted. I’ve started using WordPad to type my bigger mails, and pasting them into the browser – I hope the text interpreter gets very serious indigestion as a result of not being able to chew its food properly.

As I type anything into the input field for a search engine, the poor thing has a brave attempt to predict what I’m going to type, but always gets it wrong, since the time taken to realise that I am typing in the search field and call HQ results in its losing the 2^nd to 5^th characters – so its predictions are not worth the effort. Not helpful.

Well, I’m fighting back. We realised that, despite everything, my wife’s new laptop works much faster than my desktop does when it’s online, so we deduce that more modern designs cope better with all this friction and superfluous junk. I shall buy a new desktop machine next week, and set about the (estimated) 3 month project of transferring software and documents from the old one. I shall, however, keep the old computer – it is still of a high spec, although it is coming up for 7 years old now, and the processor and video components are fast and efficient, if left to themselves and not constantly interrupted.

I intend to strip back the old machine – remove Internet access, take off the virus checker – XP will no longer be supported very soon so a static OS should be OK. I shall remove everything I don’t need to be on it. Goodbye Google Toolbar. Goodbye RealPlayer. Goodbye DropBox. Goodbye Spotify. I shall use it for typing, and utility jobs like writing CDs, graphic and photographic work and desktop publishing. When I need to move files between the machines, I shall use USB memory sticks. The computers will share a printer, but it will be hard-wired so that there is no need for WiFi.

I can sense the beginnings of a smile playing around the corners of my mouth. With luck, my future sightings of the little Unicef girl will be instantaneous, since my new computer will be designed to cope with her as part of the mail service.

The broadband will still be slow, though.

Maybe it won’t work any better.

Hmmm. 

More on Scans of Old Books

The ghost in the machine

I was taken to task by a few people yesterday for implying that anyone could be dissatisfied with the Google Books and Gutenberg work to digitise old books. Surely, it was argued, we can hardly complain - it is wonderful that someone should take it upon themselves to provide such a resource.

I wouldn't argue with that. My only gripe is that it would be nice if the quality of the job was always up to the worthiness of the intention. I imagine the scanning work being carried out by underpaid but overqualified inmates of a big library somewhere. Whoever does it, then God bless them, but a bit of inspection and quality control after the event would offer so much extra value. The picture at the top of this post is an excerpt from Google Books' pdf version of Les Allemands sous les Aigles Francaises - Tome 1 - Le Regiment de Francfort by Lt Colonel Sauzey. It is good that the anonymous backroom staff should occasionally get a bit of visibility, and also good to note that Google obviously encourage the practice of safe librarianism.

In addition, I wish to make some quick - and largely uneducated - observations about the products of a company or companies known variously as Nabu, Biblio and other things, whose mission in life is to make rare old books available in print once more, by exactly this same scanning process. Some of these books are print-on-demand products. I would describe them as approximate facsimiles. I have nothing at all to say about the copyright implications, nor on the apparent furore arising from the public thus having access to works which otherwise exist only in American libraries or private collections. I think I have two specimens of Nabu's output. They are alarmingly slipshod, and the books are not especially cheap.

Strange that the translator of Foy's work knew HTML?

For example, I have the 2-volume English translation of Maximilien Foy's (that's me!) History of the War in the Peninsula, under Napoleon. It has misprints on the covers, no less. One volume failed to get a title on the spine, the front cover of the other is illustrated here - you will note that the main title includes the expression "&NBSP", which is, of course, the HTML code signifying a "non-breaking space" to an Internet browser type program. Classy, eh? A real attention to quality - a real pride in the mission - old books reproduced with care and love for the benefit of future generations.

These books also have a surprising number of missing pages - presumably the operator sneezed, or ended his shift, at these points. Fortunately I have a complete pdf-file version of the same books, so have been able to fill the gaps in my own copies by including printouts of the required pages. Something seems not quite right, though, and I am not comforted by Nabu's published policy statement, part of which says:

This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc that were either part of the original artefact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Cobblers. Are there any grown-ups at home?

I thank Nabu for their good wishes, and note that they are also committed to saving on production costs by not bothering over much with normally accepted ideas on quality assurance.

Not recommended.

e-Readers - What to Do?

I own a Sony PRS-505 e-Reader. I’ve had it a few years now. Originally I was really very pleased with it, and I have used it a lot, but gradually it is becoming just another electronic white elephant. It lies about the house, and on the rare occasions I wish to use it the battery is invariably flat. I don’t mean to be unkind to it, but if I stop using something it usually has some significance, if I can just work out what it is. Something like “voting with my feet”.

Much of my disappointment with the Sony machine is a result of the e-book market not moving in the direction that was predicted when I bought it. I bought it because my main interest is in being able to read free downloadable pdf format books – mostly 19^th Century memoirs and histories. I have a great many of these, mostly obtained from Google Books or Project Gutenberg. Much of the specification of what I need my e-reader to do is built around things I need and things which I do not like and am not interested in.

* I do not wish to be glued into a single supplier (such as Amazon) – they do not offer the books I am looking for.

* I require scanned pdf’s to be readable – one problem with my current machine is that the pdf’s have to be especially clear to display at all. Another is that the display size is not adjustable for pdf’s, and the simple task of turning the page requires the entire book image to be reformatted or reflowed, which takes about 20 seconds.

* I cannot use epub books for the material I study. It’s a nice idea, but the automatic character-recognition software used to construct these things at Google is mostly a joke. Being American, it has little patience with strange, foreign concepts such as accented characters, or with 19^th Century fonts, and it also attempts to interpret squashed insects and footnotes – to very strange effect.

* I am a dinosaur. I do not wish to share my books with all my friends by installing them in a cloud or similar, I do not wish to browse my collection by Genre or Playlist, unless the management software is really intuitive and helpful. I like drag and drop and organised hierarchies of folders, and I wish my portable device to be USB compatible, and to be recognised as a detachable storage device by my computer when I plug it in.

* I do not care for iTunes or RealPlayer – mostly the software for these is banned from our house. Also Creative’s software products – I have a nice little Creative Zen mp3 player, which is almost ruined by the moronic management software. These things, apart from being a pest to use, will usually try to install a whole pile of stuff you don’t want, and make themselves the default for every kind of file you use. Creative even re-installs itself after you remove it...

* More positive – my wife has a Kindle and loves it. She uses it properly, and downloads actual Kindle books, and it is great. It will pay for itself all over again this year when we go away on holiday. We do not know how to install pdf’s on it, and somehow it would feel wrong to have to ask Amazon if it’s all right to download a book which has nothing to do with them. The newer Kindles look even better, though I do not wish to have one which thinks it might be a tablet. I need to find out how easy/possible it is to install my dirty old French memoirs on a Kindle, without passing through my Amazon account and without straining my poor brain, which is almost full.

* There are books available from Sony’s own eBook store, but they are expensive, not very interesting, and the range and scope seems to be much less than was expected a few years ago. Not a promising source.

* For a little while, it seemed to me that tablets might be the future of reading books on screen. The drag and drop and file management arrangements look about right, screen clarity is excellent – I really thought that tablets might blow the Kindle (etc) market out of the water, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. The trade-off between portability and readability is tricky, and a decent tablet is potentially a bit large, a bit fragile and definitely a bit expensive to shove in your pocket just so you can read a book on the train.

* Of course, I have a friend who tells me that he always has some books installed on his iPhone. Only in his more relaxed moments will he admit that he finds them very difficult to read, and therefore doesn’t use this facility. Bong! [i-Idiot alert]

* It is very unlikely that G4 will ever make it this far out into the forest...

* This morning I watched a couple of YouTube reviews on using Kindle with pdf’s, and they were quite frank about the fact that a 9-inch tablet or a Sony reader (not the one I’ve got, I guess) are a much better option, because of slow refresh and memory issues.

Dirty old French book - no wonder they say I'll go blind

I think some kind of vague idea of what I would like is taking shape. Ideally, I would like to find some miraculous way to make my existing PRS-505 into all the things I hoped it would be. Failing that, I really like the format and clarity of the new Kindles – particularly the PaperWhite, but have not yet read anything that assures me that I will be able to shift pdf’s of Marmont’s Memoires and Sarrazin’s history of the Peninsular War from my desktop computer to the device, and be able to read them comfortably if/when they get there.

Given a Kindle, I’m sure I could also occasionally find something available in Kindle format which I was interested in, and buy it for download in the approved manner. Despite my traditional anti-Apple (for example) posturing, I have a fairly open mind about what sort of device I need, though the cost and practicality have to make sense. Some of the received wisdom online appears to suggest that what I really want for this role is a cheap 9-inch tablet – Nexus? Could this just be the next white elephant? Hmmm.

If anyone can understand what I’m on about here and can offer a little advice (preferably based on actual experience rather than statements of faith from the Apple Chapel, for example), I shall really be very grateful.

Embarrassingly so, perhaps.