I stuck with it, but recently (and for the second time) an update completely blew away my database. Last time this happened I figured out a way to recover it, but now that amarok uses mysqle I don't know how to recover from the loss and so far no one has been able to provide me with a method that actually works. Goodbye, amarok; life is too short to deal with stuff like this.

Apparently the greatest concentration of fracking sites in the US (possibly the world) is in south-western Weld County in Colorado. Which is where I live. From my house I can see perhaps a dozen of these drilling sites. It's always seemed bizarre to me that it's even legal to push chemicals into the ground under and around my house -- but apparently it is, because around here very few people own the mineral rights associated with the ground on which their house stands.

But then, it's also illegal for me to capture rainwater, which seems at least equally strange.

Blatant self-vertisement. Try mine: http://www.sff.net/people/N7DR or http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001HD36FU. You will not find the kind of errors you mention. I work very, very hard on the content of my books and the formating for the hard-copy versions (I use plain TeX). The weak point is formatting for the e-book versions. I hate the lack of control. It's still better than most of the others I've seen, but it's far from the perfection I seek in other aspects of my creations.

The huge problem is how to distinguish oneself from the dross that, as you say, fills the self-published universe. I haven't got that figured out at all.

Right. I did exactly this with at least one ring image from Voyager 1's encounter with Saturn, and that was in 1980 (although I think I didn't get around to writing the code and actually de-blurring the image for two or three years after it was taken). I believe we used a VAX 11/730 to perform the computations.

FYI, Voyager pictures were 800x800 pixels, taken in monochrome with a filter applied in front of the camera. I don't recall whether this particular picture was a single image or a colour image taken with three filters. If the latter then there would have been an interesting twist: the three images would have been taken 48 seconds apart, so the spacecraft would have moved detectably from one colour to the next, so some semi-clever stuff would have been necessary to deblur three individual images and then merge them. But I honestly don't remember after all this time whether we had to do that.

I beg to disagree with that advice. It seems to me that any "desktop" that causes the menu on which you are about to click to disappear because some notification has suddenly appeared elsewhere on the screen is fundamentally broken. Ditto any desktop where a single blocked desktop-eye-candy-thingy can cause the entire desktop to grind to halt.

There are certainly some pieces of KDE that are quite nice. But I really wonder about such fundamental and obvious design flaws that have persisted through to version 4.6. Or maybe I'm the only person who gets annoyed when I click on a menu that suddenly isn't there, or I have to wait for a widget thingy to time out before responsiveness returns to the entire desktop.

Yep. The sonic screwdriver was initially introduced because it was deemed silly to have the Doctor confounded by simple locks. Essentially its job was to allow the real plot to proceed when the Doctor was confined to a locked room or was in some similar mundane situation.

As such, it was not unreasonable.

Now, though, it has evolved into an extremely annoying gadget that seems to short-circuit the plot rather than further it. Is there nothing that the current incarnation of this device can't do? Frankly, I wish he'd just lose it somewhere.

Of course, now we also have magical mobile phones. Those should all be destroyed by the sonic screwdriver before the Doctor loses it.

Good idea. It made me think, "Why do I ever browse anything that doesn't support https?" Then I realised that I was browsing slashdot on an insecure connection. So I typed "https://slashdot.org" in the address bar... I'lll let you try that for yourself.

Rather to my surprise, the last decade has seen a marked deterioration in the number and quality of professional designers and typographers used by most publishing houses (both large and small). I some time ago came to the conclusion that someone with skills in TeX (and, probably more importantly, an understanding of the minutiæ of typesetting) can do a much better job than most publishing houses these days.

That is not to say that publishers don't provide other useful services (principally editing and marketing).

I write novels. What could be better than that? Seriously.

I beg to differ. It requires thinking hard enough about solving the problem so that you don't spend long nights staring blankly at mind-muddling objective languages.

Nope. I don't use IMAP, and, as I say in a comment further down, it was hideously slow until I turned off indexing after several days.

Must be a YMMV thing. After four days of waiting for 30 seconds or more at a time just to do simple things [and even longer just to exit the program; the OS kept inviting me to kill the program since it didn't actually close sufficiently quickly -- every time I exited; that got real old real quickly], I turned off all the indexing. I kept hoping that it would finally finish indexing, but there was no indication here that it was ever going to do so. It seemed (here... again, YMMV) that simply receiving a new e-mail into a folder would cause the entire folder to be reindexed. When one has more than ten thousand e-mails in a folder, that brings even a powerful machine to its knees.

Actually, if you're sensible, you'll first read the contract that Amazon requires you to sign. You may or may not decide after doing that that giving up substantial rights is worth seeing the material appear on a particular company's platform. Different authors have reached different conclusions on the matter.

Anent Amazon and the Kindle in particular, you may want to read: http://www.sfwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/Amazon_digital_publication_distribution_agreement_annotated_v3_080329.pdf.

FWIW I live in Colorado.

Most responders seem to assume some sort of VHF but, as a few people point out, that's not really a great idea because there are big gaps in repeater coverage in the mountains.

However, 5W (or less) on HF CW would be ample for emergency communications, and you wouldn't have to worry about whether there's a repeater nearby. There are lots of designs for lightweight QRP (i.e., low power) single-frequency (or limited-frequency) rigs that would be suitable. I'd probably go for one that transmitted on 40m, just because there's more CW activity there, so you're more likely to be heard quickly than on, say, 80m.

I don't hike in the mountains, but if I did I would definitely carry such a rig with me. It only needs to save your life once.

Or possibly they have read the contract that Amazon requires them to agree to in order to put content on their devices, and decided that giving all the rights to Amazon is not something that they want to do (I exaggerate, but not by a whole lot; basically the publisher gives up essentially all control of the presentation and distribution). Perhaps they are careful rather than daft.