Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Nooking

Technically, my Nook Color is not an e-reader but a small-format laptop configured to facilitate e-reading. But I find it most useful as a portable computer to take with me on trips to monitor e-mail and do occasional necessary web surfing. It's damnably difficult to type on, but it functions, and it's a lot smaller than a full-sized laptop, which I wouldn't find much easier to use.

One curious property its web browser has is that any web page it visits which is a document file as opposed to an HTML web page - a PDF or .doc file - is downloaded and saved in a folder. Every once in a while I plug the Nook into my desktop computer, so that I can see the file directories which are otherwise unavailable, and clean out that folder.

You know what the most common type of file is that it contains? Restaurant menus. Restaurant web sites often keep their menus as PDFs, and tracking down information on restaurants is one of my most frequent uses of the Nook's web browser on a trip.

This time it also contained a PDF of the DOMA decision, which I downloaded via a newspaper web site when it was released during my last trip. That was something I was definitely curious to read.

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