Weekly Journal 67 - Delta and E-readers

Delta

I was looking at some alternate CLI diff tools, and stumbled upon delta. delta is a diff viewer with support for syntax highlighting. It integrates directly into git and makes for a much nicer experience than the default options for viewing diffs. It is cross-platform and fairly easy to configure.

E-readers

I did some research on e-reader devices and apps this week. I am becoming more and more frustrated with the mobile device market. Today, mobile devices are mostly a dreadful tangle of proprietary software and digital rights management (DRM) garbage. I have always wanted to try out an e-ink device like the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite, but I have no interest in being forced to purchase content from a single vendor with no option to sideload books that I’ve purchased elsewhere. I am also interested in the ability to make notes and annotations to my e-books while I am reading, but I have no interest in having my notes locked inside a proprietary app or being forced to pay for a cloud service in order to export my notes.

The alternative is to use a tablet with an e-reader app. While there are some open source reader apps out there, ultimately they have been disappointing. I will continue to look at both devices and apps, but I may be buying paper books again in the near future.

I also went through my O’Reilly reading queue to make sure I captured a list of the books I had planned on reading. The O’Reilly app makes this exercise very difficult. So much so that I feel like it might a dark pattern and is being done intentionally to make it more difficult to migrate away from the app and subscription service. So far my research has left me disappointed and frustrated.