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Bob K.

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Level 1 Contributor

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About Me

My passion is researching and telling stories. Classically trained* as a journalist, I help people share important moments in their lives through biography and memoir. I am currently writing the war years story of a Pacific War combat veteran. Research for this project required travel to Japan. *Classical training teaches you to research and write with an attitude of fairness, consciously working to keep yourself and your opinions out of the process.

How I Can Help

I spend a lot time on the web doing my job so get around a bit. I understand the core technologies of the web. While certainly no expert at HTML and CSS—and definitely not a designer—I hand code villagehiker.com.

Interests

marriage, family, people, biblical Jesus, Apple Inc., Subaru (Fuji Heavy Industries), much more…

4 Reviews by Bob

  • Google Books

2/19/14

This website publishes complete out-of-copyright books and selected pages from those in copyright.

Because I do a lot of historical research, I am very grateful for Google scanning and publishing books out of copyright. However there are several gotchas you need to know if doing a lot of research here.

Google publishes the books as 1-bit scanned PDFs, or so some online support people say. The site also creates epub and text versions of the books. The OCRing for the epubs and text is very poor quality, so I never use epub or text. You can download the epubs and PDFs. You can read the text online.

I work on a Mac and use Skim to take notes in the downloaded PDFs. When you save the PDFs with notes, they grow in size by at least eight multiples because Skim converts them to 8-bit or larger PDFs. Preview on the Mac does the same. PDFPenPro leaves them as 1-bit. But I prefer the note taking capabilities of Skim.

Google also scans books still in copyright and publishes select pages on the site. Some of the copyrighted books—plus some commercial reprints of old books out of copyright—have no online pages available.

You can buy books from this Google site. You can purchase printed copies of the books out of copyright. You can also purchase print or epub or—in some cases—both versions of the copyrighted and commercial reprint books.

The online viewing of books is okay, but sometimes a little sluggish and sometimes very sluggish.

Overall, this is very good site for doing historical research because you get the uninterpreted words of the original authors. I was really pleasantly surprised to find copies of some old books written in the 17th and 18th centuries and before.

  • DuckDuckGo

2/18/14

As a professional writer sometimes using the Internet for research, I find duckduckgo produces the most harmonious search outcome. You get a variety of results. There is no spinning of findings according to your past searches. If you enter an ambiguous term, it lists multiple definitions for your selection before completing its work. It is fast. It is definitely supportedbut not consumedby advertising. This is a preliminary review, but so far it earns *****.

  • Japan National Tourism Organization

2/18/14

This is one of the official websites of the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO). This site covers tourism destinations in all parts of Japan, including out of the way places far from the major cities. As a Japanese government website, it is non-commercial. In includes details about places to go and things to do, including transportation. It also provides general information about western style and Japanese style accommodations. In the interests of commercial neutrality, it offers little or no specifics about individual businesses. Some of the best parts of the site for newcomers offer suggested itineraries and trip planning assistance. There is also a very interesting illustrated section on Japanese culture, describing things you may see and experience, including the many festivals of Japan. Because the site is very large you need to spend some time here learning how to navigate. We always use the JNTO site to help plan a trip, then do region-specific and community-specific web searches to find accommodations.

  • MacRumors

2/18/14

Macrumors publishes news and speculations about current and future Apple activities. These include product news, summaries of reviews, high-level staff changes, patent awards, law suits and all sorts of rumors. While it does original research, the site also summarizes news published by other sources, giving them credit. While it sometimes tries to evaluate the veracity of rumors, some of its speculative pieces need better vetting before publishing. If you love or hate Apple, this is a cool blog to visit regularly.

Bob Has Earned 17 Votes

Bob K.'s review of Japan National Tourism Organization earned a Very Helpful vote

Bob K.'s review of Google Books earned a Very Helpful vote

Bob K.'s review of MacRumors earned a Very Helpful vote

Bob K.'s review of DuckDuckGo earned 14 Very Helpful votes

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