Read books on the Nintendo DS

Nintendo and Harper Collins are working on an e-book reader cartridge for the Nintendo DS. And they're using the free Project Gutenberg books to do it.

There are several things to be excited about here:

- The Nintendo DS is a neat gadget, and every time I look at my son's, I want it to be able to do more than just play games.

- This project involved dropping a simple reader app and 100 free classics onto a cartridge. That's a great idea that gets around the lack of ways to copy info onto the DS.

- It sparks a related idea: there are systems you can buy to write your own DS content. I believe there's a cartridge you can buy that takes a rewritable memory card. It would not be hard to write a reader app for text files; so a homebrew project like this would be doable, and that would make the DS into a pocket reader for any files on a SD-like card. That would be useful.

However, it's probably not enough to get me to shell out money for a system like that. My impression is that I'd be spending about $100 to get going on homebrewing DS stuff. Which my son would love, but I recognize that I'm unlikely to find the time to write much in the way of games. Maybe I should be thinking about this and some other applications for it. I can certainly find the time to adapt someone's text reader, maybe add a few other readers, to make a more general file-viewing application. Heck, I want that on my phone.

150 rides replaced this year

I've been too busy to find time to crow about it, but on Thursday I reached my year's goal of replacing 150 commutes by working at home or riding my bike. 

I usually just say 150 bike rides, but I count days worked at home, because I want to do more of that and don't want to create a disincentive there. But there were less than ten of those. It's mostly bike riding. :) 

You might ask me what I attribute my success to. And I would tell you that's there's one thing, more than any other, that you can do to make it possible to keep after the biking thing, day after day, rain or shine. And that thing is, live 2.4 miles from work.

Yes sir, if you can just manage to live only 2.4 miles from work, then I can tell you from personal experience, that you can stick with a serious biking program. :) 

Frankly, I'm so close, I'm not sure there are any health benefits to speak of to this program. I can get to work in 20 minutes. I have to really hoof it to break a sweat anymore. :) 

Nonetheless, I'm darn happy with this year's biking. That's a big proportion of my workdays. Next year I expect to do even more. I'd kind of like to go down to one car, but it's hard to be able to cope with family situations and not have another car available. It's worth thinking about though. My car is in pretty sad shape. :) 

Fred 1 and Fred 2

More detailed pics of my recent sculpey monsters. Fred 1 is the smaller, lighter-green of the pair.

Sculpey monsters...group shots

I worked up a bunch of monsters in sculpey for a craft show, and here are the group shots of them.

Wargame scenery

Photos of some wargame scenery pieces I made a while back.