Tech


After lusting over the Sony Libre 7 years, ago and doing nothing about it, I finally got an e-book reader. When Amazon released the $79 Kindle 4 in September, I decided it was finally time to get on this bandwagon (and let me give you a spoiler: it’s the place to be). In short, I love it. I checked out Things Fall Apart from the DC Library (using my computer) and the book wireless showed up on my Kindle immediately.

I read this book faster than I have read most books lately, and not just because it would have disappeared from my Kindle in a few weeks.  It’s no problem to hold the book in one hand, and to turn pages you barely have to move a muscle, other than one little tiny one in your thumb. I know flipping a paper page is not very difficult, but trust me, it is a worthwhile improvement. It is easy to completely immerse yourself in a book and read for hours on end.  I’m not surprised Kindle book sales on Amazon have surpassed paper book sales; this thing makes you want to read.

It’s no iPad; you won’t be watching movies, checking Twitter, or listening to podcasts. You won’t even be reading full color magazines. I didn’t pay the meager $20 more for the Kindle Touch; if I want to enter text I use that little 5-way button at the bottom to hunt and peck around an on-screen keyboard, like in a video game. But all of that is just fine with me. I got this thing to read. It does an impeccable job at that.

I had a fun couple weeks at home, and flew back early Monday morning for my regular 10am meeting. It turned out to be a small meeting. Bonus points for me, I guess. Now I’m back to work, trying to write a paper for the International Symposium on Convective Heat and Mass Transfer in Sustainable Energy (my abstract got accepted) and pull together my last bit of real work, part 2 of my experiment.

I was reading Apple’s proxy statement this afternoon. I hold stock, and I have a few resolutions to vote on. Anyways, Steve Jobs takes essentially nothing from the company. I knew about his famous $1 salary, but he seems to decline every other benefit. He has over 5 million shares of AAPL, but hasn’t cashed any in since he came back to the company. Maybe Disney pays his bills. Coolest thing I learned from reading the proxy? Every Director (including Al Gore & Eric Schmidt) is entitled to one of each new product introduced by Apple. Makes sense. It’s no wonder Al Gore sports all sorts of fancy stuff Mac gear in an Inconvenient Truth.

A couple weeks ago I bought a 16gb first-gen iPod touch, with the price drops that the release of the latest generation brought. It's great to be able to once again carry all my music, podcasts, and videos with me. But I find that, while I usually have my Touch with me, I rarely have a pair of headphones.

Mail, Safari, and iCal are the applications I use most. It is simply a very mobile computer for me. The Touch replaces my Macbook in a lot of situations, and is much more convenient. Mail and Safari work just like their desktop counterparts, and I have my Google Calendar set to sync with iCal. Wifi is prevalent enough that I can get connected in most situations, other than the airport.

Secondary apps include Google Maps, TwitterFon, Exposure, Weather, Stocks, Cowabunga, and Wurdle. It's not all work!

I didn't notice anything really exciting in the new iPhone; 3G was previously guaranteed by Jobs and AT&T, and GPS was widely expected, and everyone already knew about the App Store. The $199 price is nice, and a pretty dramatic cut.

My thoughts: the fact that you must sign a new 2 year contract, combined with the increased monthly cost for data (AT&T press release) makes it a no-go for me. Maybe I could justify being forced to get a data plan with the reduced price, but $120 more per year for that data plan is too much for something I really want to avoid. I have no desire to be connected at all times. It's probably a Macbook and free iPod touch for me later this summer.

Check this out:

My Blizzard Games

Blizzard, the fantastic game developer of such truly amazing timesinks as Starcraft, Diablo, and Warcraft, yesterday added digital downloads to their store. Great, you say, look who finally gets with the times. But here’s the little tidbit Blizzard adds: you can add your cd key of a currently owned game to your account, then you can download that game willy nilly.

I went through my collection and added my games. A couple notes:

  • adding Starcraft alone gets you the Starcraft Anthology. All you suckers who bought Brood War be damned, had you just waited a decade you could have gotten it for free.

  • Warcraft II doesn’t work
  • Downloads are OS independent

The last bit is the best. I only had Windows versions of Diablo II and Starcraft, from back in the day before Blizzard started simultaneous Mac/PC releases. I added my pc only cd keys, and now I can download the Mac version. Perfect. Dangerous, but perfect.

A Macbook Air with the specs of a Macbook Pro would be perfect for me. Integrated graphics are fine. I can do without an optical drive. But I want a real mobile CPU, like the 2.4ghz one in the lowend Macbook Pro. And I want a real harddrive, like the 200gb one in the Macbook Pro. Is that so much to ask?

Bottom line: I tried out the Macbook Air at an Apple Store, and it was slow. The 1.8ghz Macbook Air with a solid state hard drive was fine. But the base model was slo-oh. It was painful and disappointing.

Alright, it’s time to go public. I kept it quite for awhile, because I don’t want the whole world to know how disloyal I am. I want to build myself a Hackintosh. I’ve wanted an excuse to build another computer for awhile, and I finally found it. It can be a Mac. The goal is to have a desktop that is always on (or that I can turn on remotely) to act as a media center, file hub, and web server of sorts. If it works out well, I might even use it to edit photos in aperture.

I will put the guts in a tiny little cube case that can fit on my bookshelf. I will do the installation without any hacking, using a dvd image I creatively acquire off of the dark corners of the internet. I’m fairly committed to this; right now I’m just waiting for intel to release a new processor.

This is the list of what I plan to get:
2.2ghz Core 2 Duo
2gb Ram
250gb Hard drive
Geforce 7300GT video card
DVD Burner
[Newegg]

Steve Jobs on the Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

While I unfortunately agree that people don’t read enough, I have a more optimistic take. I see Amazon’s Kindle, and the excitement that followed it’s release, as something to invigorate reading. It has the potential to make reading “cool” again, to bring books into the modern age. I think the Kindle will grow the market for readers, rather than fail in a market too small.

via the New York Times

I shouldn’t hurt my reputation as a good college student, rampantly stealing software at any opportunity, but here goes. This is the software I bought in 2007:

Adobe CS 3
Ascent
FlickrExport
and I guess Taxcut, though that’s not very exciting

It’s not that expansive of a list, but a lot of the software I use on a regular basis is freeware or open source, or came with my computer.

Is it finally here? Has someone finally put together a compelling replacement to the paperback?
I’ve been intrigued by ebooks for awhile, and I think the Amazon Kindle might finally be it.

It’s got what every ebook has, e-ink, so it doesn’t need a backlight, and thus you don’t have to stare into a flashlight while you read Great Expectations. The compelling features that make the Kindle better are these two: bringing the hardware and content together, and making it easy to get new content.

The thing has free, always-on wireless. You subscribe to the New York Times, you wake up in the morning, and it’s there on your Kindle, ready to go. You’re waiting for a plane and realize you really should read Harry Potter, just to, you know, fit in. You buy it there, and get it on your Kindle in 60 seconds.

Amazon Kindle
NYT

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