Amazon Kindle 2 - First Impressions

Why did I buy it? Well I found some ebooks that are hard to get in paper form. I also don't know anyone who's bought one, but I like to stay ahead of the curve (I spent £200 on a DVD writer in 2001 for this reason) - this Kindle cost £193 (plus £7 postage).

First off, mine came with a US power adapter wall wart. But I live in the UK where it's a different plug. But the Kindle comes with a USB cable which means you can charge it from a computer or laptop's USB port (approx. 3 hours a week needed to charge).

The screen is fantastic, and as much fun as reading a paper book. It's not as big a screen as a paperback, but it's sufficient. PDFs look pretty good at 600x800. The best way to describe the screen technology (called eInk) is it's like light grey paper but with sharp black text. You can read it in dim light, or in sunlight (where it looks white), but this is the clearest screen of ANY device I've used, even clearer than some ancient browning paperbacks. I could even describe the eInk screen as being like a newspaper page - same colour paper (light grey), same black text.

Finally, the formats. It supports only PDF and TXT natively (it appears as a drive in Windows and you copy files onto this drive or delete them). If you want to read an RTF or DOC on it, convert to TXT first. Or you can do the silly 'Send doc to Amazon to convert to PDF'. Or get a PDF printer driver for Windows (these are available for free now). [Additional] If you rename a HTML file to filename.HTML.TXT it will show it as a plaintext file and do HTML conversion automatically!

Oh, and content... You can buy a PDF, or use the Kindle store, or use pirated books (uploaded to Kindle in TXT format), but pirated books tend to have a lot of typos. But I think this is the problem: I tried to buy The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett, for $7.47 - a price I was comfortable with - and it just said 'Not available to UK buyers'. A prominent UK author and I can't buy his books? I have to get a illicit copy?

The verdict? Well worth the money, and I love not having to flip the book on its side when reading in bed. In fact, it's so much like a book, that when I've finished a page, sometimes I try to turn the page! A button to advance is something you have to get used to after 25 years of reading.

Postscript: I read somewhere that the Kindle 2's battery can't be replaced easily - there's no panel for it. But you CAN replace it... If you buy a Kindle 2 battery off Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk (just search for 'kindle 2 battery'), then here's an install guide (it's easy): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymli5IbOtSo - the tool in this video can be bought at http://www.ifixit.com/Tools/iPod-Opening-Tools/IF145-000 - you get 2 of them, but only need 1 to open the Kindle.

Postscript: I've been exploring the non-USA web access facilities, and here's what I found:

*Most of the web is out of bounds.

*If you want to buy a book from the Kindle store from the menu, you can - it loads it over the whispernet (regardless of if you have a mobile phone account).

*Amazon.com is out of bounds.

*If you go to http://en.wikipedia.org/ in the web browser (Settings -> Experimental -> Basic Web) then you can look at any Wikipedia page. It's basically like a hitchhiker's guide with Wikipedia, if not actually the entire web. Not bad for free though! It goes over 3G by the way, and thus is global in scope.

*That's it unless you're in the USA.

Mini versus Micro

In the 80's, I heard about mainframes, microcomputers and minicomputers. For some reason, I thought a minicomputer would be small, but someone showed me a minicomputer in the 90's, and it was the size of a fridge.

It took me another 10 years to learn that a MICRO computer is smaller than a MINI computer, just as a MINI computer is smaller than a MAINFRAME.

Ah well, at least I eventually learned the right terminology!

Apollo 15-17: Pub Crawl on the Moon

I recently rented a DVD called 'Apollo 15-17 - Mountains of the Moon'. It was my first viewing of Apollo (Moon landing) footage.

But after a few minutes, I was aghast. The astronauts were basically clowning around and cracking jokes. $40 billion for this? I know it had to be entertaining, otherwise nobody would watch, but this took the biscuit.

Okay, so they get drunk, crash the rover, play golf in the moon dust, and basically talk and act like drunkards going on a vast interplanetary pub crawl. I wouldn't have been surprised to see them leaving traffic cones in a crater.

Oh for shame, Apollo 15-17. An automated rover should never seem more dignified than mankind's best.

Origin of the Word 'Bleh'

I have an email search program which essentially lets me search all over 120,000 emails in a few seconds. Anyway, I remember using the word 'bleh' when nobody else did. So I did an email search to find the earliest use of the word. I found it in an email from April 14th 1998, but I didn't use the word, it was an American friend in Florida called Jonathan Harp (who was helping us write movie reviews) who mentioned it in a review.

So there are 3 possibilities... (1)Is Jonathan invented it, I used it, and people copied me. (2)Is Jonathan didn't invent it, I used it, and people copied me. (3)Jonathan invented or didn't invent it, and people copied HIM.

Either way, it's nice to think I popularized a word.

Be Careful What You Design

At high school, I typed in a BBC B program on the Acorn Archimedes (BBC B = old 8 bit PC, Archimedes = old 32 bit PC), and it let you draw lines and circles, and zoom in and out infinitely. Wireframe graphics.

Me and my friend made a little world in it, and if you zoomed in in a certain place, it said "If you can read this, F*** off". Then we got the maths teacher to look at it.

It was our bad luck that he chose the exact choices and I turned red when he read "If you can read this, F*** off". But he took it in good humour.

The lesson? Don't make assumptions about what choices people make on a computer.

Webserver on the Moon

If our civilization collapses, and we lose all our data, we'll need a way to get all that data that got blown up or erased.

What to do?

Simple! Send a rocket to the Moon with a phat laptop and a few Terabytes of space. Then, make it so you can send voice or data requests over a radio link from Earth, and then if a future civilization rediscovers the concept of radio, they can get all that data.

It'll be *safe* on the Moon. Google webservers on the moon are where it's at!

Belkin F5D7010 And laptop batteries

I found out that my F57D010 card (7xxx series) plugged into my laptop's PCMCIA socket, shuts off whenever I switch to running off battery.

The solution? Simple...

Get a 5xxx series F57D010 card and it works great. This is I assume, because it uses less power. The 7xxx uses more power than a laptop battery can provide.

An older version using less power? Criminal...