In the last post I basically covered my first thoughts and how it handled various types of media. But there is more to the device. There is the odd case, wireless connectivity, the promised Wikipedia access, experimental web browser, and the curiosity about what this thing really is.
Odd case
The case that comes with the device has certainly had it's fair share of detractors. At first I didn't like it. The way the Kindle sits in it isn't very exacting. It would seem like it would fall out easily, and apparently some people have had malfunctions or a loose fitting where it just doesn't work at all. On mine it just doesn't sit square, but is about 2° askew. I forced myself to use it a bit more, and it does let me hold the Kindle more like a book, and protects it a bit when carrying it around. However with the cover it's much harder to type on the keyboard. Hopefully Crumpler, Case Logic, and/or Body Glove will fill the need with a neoprene sleeve that I'll end up loving. As free gadget cases that come with gadgets go, it's on par with what you'd expect, so I don't know why people are complaining.
Wireless Connectivity
The Kindle uses "Whispernet" which is some kind of resale of Sprint data without a long term contract or monthly fee. Amazon pays for the bandwidth by including that as part of the price of books, magazines, and blogs. The access is about what I'd expect. Sprint is supposed to have a good network, and it certainly seems to have better coverage than my T-Mobile phone. The wireless has a hard switch in the back so you can conserve battery and use it on planes. Certainly no complaints here, this is where the Kindle shines above all other e-readers.
Wikipedia
I guess it is there, the search quickly allows you to pull up your search phrase on Wikipedia, an I can read the resulting pages, but I wouldn't herald the experience. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Click the link and see for yourself what it looks like where you are, and then witness what it looks like on the Kindle:
  
Clearly this wasn't considered as a priority feature by the Amazon.com team, or they are having issues with the Wikipedia people, or don't want to spend time reflowing/reformatting Wikipedia content. Perhaps it will get straightened out, perhaps not. The information is still there, and I still didn't pay a dime for the wireless connectivity.
Web Browser
Yes it has a web browser. Yes it works even though I'm not paying for access. However, no color, rudimentary javascript at best, small screen size, no resizing options, some pages just don't work (like Google Reader). What I'd love to be able to do is use this as my blog reader, but since the aforementioned Google Reader doesn't work, and the mobile Google Reader is horrible, my only hope would be to switch back to bloglines, and I'm not entertaining that idea. Google did do a Wii Opera Browser version of the Google Reader, which likely has 1 user, so perhaps they'll roll out a Kindle version. And where is this access coming from? IP Chicken knows:
What is this thing anyway?
So, as with most new gadgets, the question in the Linux community is: "How do we get Linux to install on this thing?". Why people want to install Linux on every device known to man, I don't know, but in this case it's already there:
I fuzzed out a few of the numbers, just in case they were identifying in some way that would be bad to me. But hey, how did I get all of these screen shots and the extra info? Hacker Igorsk knows how. He also has a guide on how to get non-Amazon.com Mobipocket DRMed e-books on to your device. Not sure if Amazon.com has issues with that, but apparently they are somewhat cool with hacking the device. Want even more details on what this thing is? Igorsk has part 1 and part 2 of his reversing the device, plus Mahalo has a page set up.
Yes, Jerry, I've purchased yet another gadget. This one is the new e-reader from Amazon.com, dubbed the Kindle. The kindle arrives packed in a box that looks like a book, which I find a bit ironic. I unpacked mine and proceeded to charge it as directed by the sticker on the front screen. It comes with a USB cable and a charge cord that is a standard 2 plug transformer with an itty-bitty round plug that plugs into the bottom of the Kindle. Then I looked for where to plug in my SD card, and determined that it was under the battery cover, so I waited.
Two agonizing hours later the battery was fully charged. I popped open the back and slipped in my SD card which I had preloaded with tons of test materials that I had created with the Mobipocket Creator. After all I want to put this device to the test, right? Mobipocket Creator can convert HTML, Word, Text, and PDF documents into a "Mobipocket" file that the Kindle (and other Mobipocket readers) can display. In the process of creating a few files, some for testing and some for eventual reading, I also installed the reader on my Laptop and on my PDA and neither proved to be a reading experience I would entertain on a regular basis. The PDA was nice that it's my phone and always with me so it's not something extra to carry, but it's not a very enjoyable read. So how did my conversions fair?
Religious Text
One of the most exciting things to me about my Kindle is the ability to get religious texts, for free, in a very portable, easily searchable interface. While the basic Qur'an comes in many sizes, and isn't much of a portability issue, it is not the only text that guides Muslims. There are a series of compendiums of stories about the Prophet (peace and blessings of God be upon him) called hadith that are deemed authentic through a scientific approach and documentation of the chain of transmission. The most famous of these collections was compiled by Imam Bukhari in the year 870 or so and contains 7275 hadith and a collection compiled by Muslim Ibn al-Hajjaj in the year 875 or so and contains 9000+ hadith. Just those two alone can fill volumes, or part of an SD card in your Kindle... Do I need the ability to carry these around where I choose? Probably not, but I like the idea. I found a PDF of the Qur'an online, downloaded it and converted it. And then found the basic hadith collections in HTML that someone had spidered off of the USC MSA website.
Public Domain Book
Since I had just recently watched the SciFi mini-series Tin Man I decided a read of the original Oz might be in good order, so I went looking for the texts in online libraries. The major online repositories of free reading stuff seems to be the Gutenberg Project, iBilio, and perhaps Open Library. Gutenberg had the Oz series so I downloaded it in HTML. The books were easy to find, and although Mobipocket wasn't an available option, the conversion went pretty quick and rather painless. The resulting text is easy to read and hopefully I'll get around to it soon (as now that I have a portable library, there are many publications vying for my attention).
Graphic Novel
I love NBC's Heroes. The story is very compelling and I'd love to get more of it, NBC has kindly published some extra graphic novels online with story details above and beyond what we see on TV. To read them means to sit in front of the laptop for a few hours, which I do enough of already, so I figured get them over to the Kindle for a more comfortable read. Each is a PDF, which Mobipocket Creator claims to convert. Here's where we start to see some issues, not unexpected, but unfortunate. While text easily flows from one size to another, images do not. The images lacking color on the Kindle didn't pose as much of a problem as the tiny text in the images that you need to read (since that is the story...) Guess I'll be reading those on my laptop.
White Paper
As a technical resource the Kindle should be a great help. If I can get my tech library on it, it's available to me even if I'm working in the middle of the woods. I was troubleshooting some IP issues with Vista and grabbed a white paper from Microsoft about the Configuring and Deploying IPv6 on Windows Vista. Wow, this one was tricky. I guess I could have just left it the mess that Mobipocket Creator made, but I can't blame them. What the program does is have Word save out an HTML version of the document and then it does an import of an HTML document. Anyone who works on the web knows that Word does a crap-happy job of saving out to HTML, and Office 2007 is no exception. It rolls it's own unique version of HTML, that most other programs can't quite make heads or tails of. So I fired up my trusty vim and hacked it up until I was happy. The result is quite legible, but the effort means that I won't be doing a lot of Word docs.
Readily Available Document
Some documents aren't in the public domain, but are readily available for free in a format that could be pulled into the Kindle. One such example is Hacknot which Joe Grossberg made a comment about a while back, so I pulled it in and plopped it on my SD card. They've made it available on PDF in two sizes, can't remember which I picked since I wasn't going to print it anyway, just blend it up with Mobipocket. It was a totally painless process which I'm looking forward to reading the results.
Tech Specs
Being that I am a programmer/developer/coder/hack by trade I sometimes have to write tech specs. Even though I have two screens, during coding the real estate on my screens is limited so having an external copy is nice. And since I'd like to leave the world in a better state than when I got here, I don't like killing trees for that luxury (though I do resort to arboricide if need be). Wouldn't it be great if I could just pop the specs on the Kindle? Well in this case no. My tech specs were more like a series of screen caps and and ERD with little supporting text, none of which wanted to be exported out of Word to HTML, and once I coaxed them out, they were not legible enough to do me any good.
Text File
Well it says that it can do text files, who am I to argue. I'm on my third time through Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction, so it's time to crack out a playing guide to help decode the skill points, since I'm not a pre-teen with years of free time on my hands. I am impressed here, it parses out the text as it imports to help with removing line ending hyphens and to figure out if there are headings or section numbers or what have you.
Amazon.com Kindle Books - Preloaded
Excited as I was, I ordered a half dozen items for my Kindle before it was even shipped, and by the time I was playing around with it, post charge, they were all there, delivered to me via Whispernet:
So far I've read the Murderer and that's it. Since I've already read the two Larry Niven stories in the past, as well as Neuromancer, I'm likely saving them for a long wait in an airport or doctors office when I'm bouncing off the ADD walls. So far, so good.
Amazon.com Kindle Books and Magazines
Once it arrived I found a few more items that sparked my interest, though interestingly most I found via Amazon.com and not from the storefront on the Kindle device itself:
All painless whichever method I chose to get it to my device, all look good (though The Nation is a bit dry). All-in-all a very pleasant experience.
Music
Yes music. Apparently the Kindle includes a speaker for audio book playback, and has a not-so-hidden experimental feature to play back that music via the speaker or headphones. I picked up a digital copy of Led Zeppelin's Mothership and loaded it up on the Kindle (I also burned a copy for the car). Audiophiles will not be impressed, but it was good enough for the likes of me. Playback interface and play options are vastly lacking, but this isn't meant to be an iPod.
Conclusion
Since receiving the Kindle a scant 36 hours ago I have read more literature of one type or another than in the 36 weeks previous. The Kindle makes it convenient for me to read when I get the chance, and provides me a better reading experience than bulky books, magazine, newspapers, and even a computer screen. I think my Kindle and I will get on nicely.
homestarrunner.com's Strong Bad and the Environment:
[ Lappy 486 ]
Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non addictive, gender neutral, celebration of the Northern hemisphere’s winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or the choice to not practice secular or religious traditions at all…and a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contribution to society have helped made our country great (not to imply that our country is necessarily greater than any other), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, choice of computer platform or sexual orientation of the wishee.
By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration of the original greeting. It implies no promise from the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others, and it is void where prohibited by law and it is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
This wish is expected to perform as expected within the usual application of good tiding for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish a sole discretion of the wisher.
[ Anon ]
Props to my Dad, spelling corrected from his email forward from British to American...
I saw a Blu Ray demonstration while I was there as well and it was friggin' awesome. I'm half tempted to buy a PS3 just for the Blu Ray capabilities. And judging by the selection of Blu Ray discs versus HD DVDs, I can honestly say that I think Sony will win this battle. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
[ :: Dueling Analogs :: It's the Thought That Counts ]
I'm in agreement, but not sure I'd qualify it as a "win". At this point the Wii is already a win, the only way that will turn back is if Nintendo drops not just the ball, but 100s of balls, and no more quality games come out on the Wii. That would sink Nintendo like Atari in the 70's. Since the gaming population seems to have grown big time, I'm not sure if we can't have 2 or 3 or even 4 winners. XBox is very popular, especially with networked first person shooter gamers, though the PC is still popular in that category. The PC could sustain itself with World of Warcraft alone. And the PS3 will have the games, and has the Hi Def video, and will eventually return to Sony what they've put into it and more. So I'd recommend to pierski, go ahead and pick up a Ratchet & Clank PS3 machine, is a cheap BluRay player and can play Ratchet & Clank great games too.
Update: Duh. Win BluRay vs. HD DVD... Yeah, I hope Sony wins now, since I dropped a few bucks on a Ratchet & Clank machine PS3.
FusionDebug 2.0.1 is the latest release of one of the most anticipated and essential add-on's for ColdFusion™. FusionDebug 2.0.1 sets new debugging standards in terms of performance, ease of use and integration for todays CF developer.
[ FusionDebug - ColdFusion Debugger | Home ]
Anyone still using ColdFusion? We're thinking about sticking with it and upgrading to ColdFusion 8. My biggest concern is the IDE, I just love VisualStudio and now I'm spoiled.
I know I'm not the only one wondering what the * is for after the Playstation Network's tag line above, but did everyone else have "* Fun not guaranteed and price may change whenever we want" run through their mind?
As recent as ten years ago, these old men made their ice cream from scratch, hand-churning the stuff and peppering the "everything"... with chopped-up bits of atap chee (palm fruit), the chewy "flesh from the young seeds of the mangrove plant Nypa fruticans" that had been soaked in rose syrup. These days, the ice cream is likely to be supplied by commercial ice cream makers Wall's, Magnolia, or King's. If the food gods are smiling on you though, you may just chance upon a vendor who still adds chopped-up bits of atap chee to his "everything." Go ahead and ask, "Uncle, is there atap chee in there?"
[ Serious Eats ]
I don't care much for my ice cream in wonder bread (although that's Yaty's serving suggestion of choice), but I can't get enough Palm Fruit (aka Palm Nut aka Atap Chee [Singapore] aka Kaong [Philippines] aka Buah Atap [Indonesia]) and drenched in rose syrup? Yum-o! Apparently this is a significant ingredient in some people's Halo-Halo [Philippines] which reminds me a ton of Bingsoo [Korea] and even a bit of Es Buah [Indonesia].
The TVersity Media Server lets you manage your Internet and home media and create your personalized lineup of channels, or as we call it your Personal Entertainment Guide (PEG). It then serves this media to a multitude of networked devices in the home or on the go, overcoming their inherent limitations by doing all the necessary conversions on the fly, and thus making your media available anywhere, anytime and on any device.
[ TVersity Frequently Asked Questions ]
Looks like my new PS3 can find this puppy automagically, and then via the magic of Remote Play from the PSP I have partial Sling Box functionality for no additional cost. Sweet. I think I could even figure out how to use TiVo ToGo to port my TiVo programs into the Media Server...
A month after the new Rockville City Council took office, a new majority voted 3-2 on Monday to adopt a weekly refuse collection schedule and scrap the twice-weekly pickups maintained by their predecessors. «snip»
Marcuccio, who participated in the pilot program, echoed other residents’ objections to weekly service. The trash in her weekly receptacle "stinks to high heaven" in the summertime, she said during the council meeting.
"Just to go to once a week is not lowering the price," she added. "I hope people understand that. It’s simply lowering the rate the price will rise."
The change in frequency is projected by staff to save the city more than $600,000 in fiscal year 2009 and more than $850,000 the following budget cycle. Those savings reflect personnel and equipment efficiencies, but do not mean the $32.70 monthly rate is going to decline.
[ Rockville trash vote overturned ]
Since this appeared to be one of the largest factors in the recent election, the message seems to be heard loud and clear. What I find disappointing is Marcuccio's lack of understanding of the complete issue. It's not all about the money. Reduced numbers of trash collections should encourage all of us to think twice about what we throw away, how we throw it away, and how we can improve our waste management. Personally I have been happy as a lark with the Rockville paper recycling. At first I assumed it was like many places and all I could recycle was newspapers, but I read the recycling page more carefully and what constitutes "Mixed Paper":
- Cardboard/cardboard boxes (Corrugated cardboard)
- Magazines, catalogs, telephone book, computer paper, paperback books, unwanted mail
- Newspapers (including inserts)
- Paper (computer and office and other clean and dry paper)
This now includes enough paper materials that I have about 2 bags every 3 weeks of stuff that would usually just get land-filled. Sure I would prefer to keep my fees down, but more importantly I would like to keep Rockville's land fills empty. Oh, and remember Rockville, recycling is mandatory not optional.
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