Just FYI, this is only the additional “live books” thing.
The actual books are all there as normal downloads.
I’ve bought a few of these bundles but could never get into reading the science or tech books on my small laptop. And they are useless on a phone. They might be best on a big desktop monitor, especially in portrait orientation. I have an easier time with narrative ebooks. History, fiction, etc.
Some of the books in the bundle do look good.
Same. If I am reading for please, I am reading the book sequentially and love the convenience of ebooks. If I am reading a reference or text book, I like being able to quickly flip between (physical) pages and skim previous chapters for a section I want to reread.
I’ve bought a few of these bundles but could never get into reading the science or tech books on my small laptop.
I know the feeling. eInk finally solved that for me.
If you’re in the market for an e-Ink device that’s not locked down, I’m a fan of the Boox series. I don’t trust their proprietary services, but they work great stand-alone with a home NAS.
I might get an inkplate 10 (same size as Boox) but really want something bigger, like 14 inch or more, to read arxiv.org PDFs.
There’s a 13.3" boox that’s pretty decent. I have the older max 3, and I’m waiting for them to get a color version that size to replace it.
Thanks I didn’t know about that. Interesting though pretty expensive and runs android 11 (I’d prefer to stay all FOSS). A convertible laptop is another idea, e.g. thinkpad yoga. Also would want easily replaceable battery which the inkplate has. The Boox sounds more like a giant smartphone, is that reasonable? This type of device should be nearly BIFL imho. 13.3" inkplate would be great.
Ehhh, if I haven’t had to learn it yet, I’m probably good.
Never say never! I worked on the original Dead Space (2008). There’s a minigame in chapter 4 where you have to defend the ship’s hull from incoming asteroids by shooting them with a cannon. On completion of the challenge, there’s some explanation as to why the cannon’s auto-targetting system is back online and you can leave the minigame and the cannon automatically continues shooting asteroids as you wander off. While I was rummaging around the code for this, I stumbled across a quadratic formula implementation. On closer inspection I discovered that some smart cookie had actually implemented the cannon’s auto-targetting system for real! It actually tracked each asteroid’s velocity and speed and aimed ahead of the target to hit it with its slow-moving projectiles. I just assumed the whole thing would be playing a canned animation faking the cannon shooting at the asteroids. My hat goes off to the programmer that decided to solve that problem - it’s one of the very few times I’ve ever seen the quadratic formula used in gamedev!
The hard math is figuring out the path (because small imprecision in the guessed location of the object over time can pretty easily cause meaningful errors. If you control the engine and know the real vectors, projecting their path out isn’t super complicated.
But I’m all for the idea that knowing a variety of math allows you to solve a lot more problems.
