Kindle 3 Battery Replacement

Twelve years ago I replaced the damaged screen of my 2010-era Kindle 3. I don’t use it frequently, but every so often I dig it out. A few weeks ago I brought it on a weekend trip, and the normally-inexhaustible battery ran down over the course of a few days. So, I replaced it.

For a device with a rechargeable battery, fourteen years – with many long periods of dormancy — is a pretty good battery lifespan. Of course, it is utterly ridiculous for a book to run out of batteries at all, but that’s a separate discussion.

As others have noted, iFixIt’s guide for this battery replacement starts with a poorly-phrased step that advises you to begin prying the cover off at single most vulnerable point. So if you happen to find this post while preparing to replace your Kindle Keyboard battery, read past the first few lines of the guide before you start shoving your spudger into the seam.

Posted on Sunday, April 21st, 2024.

Gormenghast Vocabuloot #2

I’m not quite halfway through Titus Groan, the first installment of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. It’s a peculiar book which merits a separate effort to describe. Briefly: the vibes are certainly gothic, but it isn’t edgy or grimdark; in fact, the characters and scenarios are really quite kooky. It reminds me of The Phantom Tollbooth or especially Roald Dahl’s work. What pulls me along is not necessarily the plot but the wry humor lurking in the locution of so many sentences.

Speaking of word choice: I admit I’m a fan of esoteric vocabulary. Here be more of the treasure I’ve picked up from Peake so far:

• Welkin: the sky or the heavens above.
• Cruet: a stoppered bottle for oil or vinegar (I knew the thing but not the name).
• Marl: a crumbly soil rich with calcium carbonate, traditional used to neutralize acidic soil for agriculture.
• Byre: a stable, barn, or “cow house”.
• Infanta: daughter of a monarch.
• Mantilla: lacy formal head scarf.
• Hake: fish.
• Lapsury:  one of Peake’s many portmanteaus; the lap of luxury.
• Fustian: a pretentious style of speech.
• Fructify: to bear fruit or become fruitful.
• Dropsical: swollen with fluid; inflicted with dropsy (edema).
• Pellucid: transparent.
• Abactinal: pertaining to the end opposite the mouth.
• [C]apparisoned: clothed?
• Interlarded: interspersed or interlaced.
• Calumny: defamation or deceptive description.

Posted on Friday, April 5th, 2024.

jimdevona.art update

I updated my art portfolio site so that it, too, is now running WordPress, which will make it easier to update and organize: jimdevona.art

Posted on Thursday, April 4th, 2024.

A Miscellany of New Words

I continue to assiduously note new words I encounter, not unlike a wee gnome giddily gathering charms from the floor of a wizard’s workshop. New spells for my sachet of incantations!

From the NYT:

• Zhuzh [up]: to spice up, figuratively; to add some extra oomph to something. A spoiler for the NYT mini crossword from March 13, 2024. For a full story about the word, see this Times article from a few years prior.
• Uxorious: Doting to the point of subservience in marital matters. From another NYT article.

From chapters by various authors in Field Notes on Science and Nature, edited by Michael Canfield:

• Taphonomy: the study of the process of decay and fossilization, or that process itself.
• Chador: a garment; used figuratively, as I recall, to describe something similarly veiled.
• Gentes; plural of gens: a clan or group of related individuals; specially, a subset of a [brood] parasite population that associates with a particular host.

From Orbital, by Samantha Harvey:

• Birling: logrolling. Here, the similarly centered motion of rotating planets and orbiting bodies.
• Scarper: to flee or escape.
• Tranche: a portion or slice (perhaps specifically financial).

Miscellaneous:

• Feculent: foul. From Jamie Ford’s Esperanto in A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams.
• Mojibake: gibberish that appears when text is rendered with the wrong character encoding. Learned the term while attempting to diagnose a misbehaving web browser.

Posted on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2024.

Mr. Rogers Portrait Print

My printmaking effort for March is this portrait of Fred Rogers. The Patreon supporter edition will go in the mail next week.

Posted on Saturday, March 30th, 2024.

Flaco Prints

My patron print for February 2024 is this Eurasian Eagle-Owl, loosely inspired by the story of Flaco. I’m catching up on art projects: the patron edition of these “February” prints just went in the mail yesterday, but as usual, there are a couple extras floating around ready to go to any new members. (Also available in sticker form.)

Posted on Sunday, March 10th, 2024.

New Word Alert – Gormenghast #1

First, two cultural terms:

• Pagris: turbans, specifically those used in India
• Sawm: fasting, as one of the five pillars of Islam

A printmaking term:

• Quoin: an expanding device used to lock letterpress type in place. (Also a masonry term for cornerstones or keystones.)

Last but not least, a big batch of words from the beginning of Titus Groan, book one of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I’ve had the omnibus for some time but just started reading it. It’s delightfully strange and surprisingly funny — and definitely rife with unfamiliar vocabulary.

• Cantonment: a military base or barracks.
• Recrudescent: like an outbreak, or reopening of wounds.
• Propinquintel or propinquity: proximity, especially as it pertains to relationships; kinship.
• Calid: hot! Hace calor.
• Rissole: a breaded delicacy.
• Pullulation: sprouting or proliferating; in context, teeming.
• Hayrick: aka a haystack.
• Spilth: that which hath been spilled.
• Rabous: new word alert, or not-a-word alert? Possibly a typo for rufous (or, less likely, raucous).

Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2024.

Newly Queued – Short Story Collections

Here are three short story collections I recently picked up:

1. The Fantasy Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, from the local Friends of the Library book shop.
2. Collected Stories Vol. 1, by Richard Matheson, from a thrift store
3. A People’s Future of the United States, edited by Victor LaValle & John Joseph Adams, from Autumn Leaves Books.

Posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2024.

Tiger Cat Mats

You can now get my tiger print from last year printed as a “pet mat” from Redbubble. I’m not sure what it looks like in reality (the image about is an automatic product composition generated by Redbubble), but the option amuses me so I enabled the product in my sticker store.

Posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2024.

New Word Alert

Some new-to-me words from some recent reads:

• Burin, an engraving tool. From Art Spiegelman’s introduction to the beautiful boxed set of Lynd Ward woodcut novels.

• The casuarina and manchineel, invasive and native trees, respectively, to the Caribbean. Via Broken From the Colony, by Ada M. Patterson.
• Paling, a spiky fencepost or a fence comprised of them, such as a palisade. Same source as above.
• Cathect, to invest with emotion. Same source.

• Comity, a state of harmonious interaction, especially of a polity. From John Clute’s SFE entry on the late Terry Bisson.
• Apothegm (or apophthegm), an aphorism. From Clute’s definition of equipoise in genre.
• Vade mecum, Latin for a guidebook or other everyday carry item. From the entry on China Miéville.

• Etiolate, to become pale from lack of light. Via The Bad Graft by Karen Russell in BASFF 2015.

Posted on Saturday, January 13th, 2024.