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Snowboard iPod Tip

December 15th, 2010

Heading out to the mountain to catch some fresh powder?  Is it really cold?  Are you going to be listening to some tunes on your iPod while on the slopes?  Have I got a tip for you!

I found myself in this very scenario, about an hour into some seriously fun snowboarding, jamming out, when my fully-charged Shuffle told me it was low on battery.  When I got down to the lift I took the little bugger out and it was freezing cold, even though it was inside my coat.  My ski buddy wanted to go back to the car to get something, so when we did I got a hand warmer and put it in the interior coat pocket with my iPod.  Problem solved!

Devices like the iPod have batteries that don’t like extreme cold, and when its 9 outside they don’t like it.  The warmth the hand warmer added to the device got the battery back into its normal operational temperature range.

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Posted in Life, Tech

Kindle Commercials

March 31st, 2010

I have been a big fan of the Kindle since my wife gave me one about a year ago. Its an incredible little device that I use on a daily basis. The electronic ink display is easy to read and easy on the eyes. The Kindle supports enough file formats that I don’t have to buy all my eBooks through Amazon. The Amazon store also has a number of cheap and free books that are quite good. All in all I am very happy with my Kindle experience.

Demand for the Kindle has been very high and at times Amazon has had trouble keeping the wonderful little device in stock. Well, apparently they don’t have those supply troubles any longer and are ramping up to battle the iPad. Here are a couple of Kindle commercials that are now airing:

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Posted in Tech

Volt Test Drive

March 30th, 2010

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Posted in Tech

Thought on iPad

January 28th, 2010

The much anticipated Apple iPad (or Mac’s iPad as it is being called int teh interwebs) debuted yesterday.  And it was a flop.  Apple could have built a great e-reader.  They could have built an incredible tablet.  Instead, they just released a really big iPhone and patted themselves on their collective backs.  Here are a few things that the iPad is sorely lacking if you want to use it for reading:

  1. No electronic ink.  Until you have spent some time with e-ink, you will never understand how much nicer it is than an LCD screen.  Here is a quick example.  Read a page of text off your computer monitor.  Then read a page of text out of a big, hardcover book.  How much nicer is reading that text out of the book?  There isn’t the eye strain associated with a computer monitor, the letters are crisp and clear, and you can see the book in sunlight.  This is the difference now between the iPad and the Kindle.  I doubt we will see many iPads on the beach.
  2. No known ability to load books from outside the iTunes store.  Will this allow you to download free books from Google?  Or can you load books from USB?  I have plenty of books I have obtained outside the Kindle store sitting on my Kindle.  There is no hint that this will be available on the iPad, or if it is if it will be anything close to easy.

Now, if they decided instead to make a great tablet PC, here are a few things they are missing:

  1. No web cam.  Seriously, you built an ultra-portable and don’t think people are going to use the webcam on it?
  2. No Flash or Silverlight support in the web browser or elsewhere.  This has the same crippled browsing as the iPhone.
  3. Not a “real” OS.  OK, I realize this is a stripped-down version of OS X.  But I cannot load my own programs or other programs from the internet on this.  It cannot MULTITASK.  This computer is severely limited compared to my cheap-as-dirt Asus Netbook.  Which has all those things I just mentioned, and does them pretty well.

This picture pretty much sums it up for me:

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Posted in Tech, Uncategorized

Firefox 3.6 Released

January 21st, 2010

I just installed Firefox 3.6., which was released today.  There are some new features which include:

  • Personas – A new type of theming,
  • Stability improvements,
  • Performance improvements,
  • Open video and audio based on HTML 5.

I can only comment on two of these.  I could not get any selected persona to work.  I believe my current theme is conflicting with this new feature.  I don’t really care as this isn’t something that really improves the Firefox experience, IMO.  However, I have seen a significant memory gain.  Before I upgraded I had three tabs open, running at 277 MB.  After reinstall with the same three tabs I had 77 MB, which shot up to and stayed at around 150 MB after some page changes, etc.  I would say that that is a significant improvement.  Better memory usage by Firefox means my whole system runs faster because I have more RAM free.  I almost always have Firefox open since my primary job responsibility is developing applications that run in a web browser (Silverlight, ASP.Net).  At home Firefox is my browser of choice.  It is more features and has a bigger plugin ecosystem than Chrome, and is much more secure and must faster than IE.

I recommend downloading Firefox 3.6 today.

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Posted in Tech

Kindle Firmware Update Report

December 2nd, 2009

I updated my Kindle 2 last night with the recently released 2.3.2 firmware update. It came with a couple of nice things. There are a couple of new screen savers. I also like the new viewing modes. One can now choose to read normal, side-way (holding left or right), or you can actually read it upside down.

Now to the bad part, which is the part I was looking forward to the most: PDF support. Kindle PDF support pre-2.3.2 firmware consisted of one emailing yourkindleaddress@free.kindle.com with a PDF, and it would email an AZW file back. The file was then placed on the Kindle. It works well, but is a little tedious. The new firmware supports native PDF rendering, which means you can place a PDF directly on the device and it will display. This is where the support ends. I placed a PDF on the device. It was unreadable. The text was tiny.

Amazon has not implemented two critical features of Adobe’s PDF reader: zoom and text flow. On the Kindle, you cannot zoom in on the PDF nor can you change the text size. Text flow is also not enabled. Pages are shown in their native size, which on the Kindle is small.

I cannot believe Amazon is calling this PDF with a straight face. Come on Amazon! I love you guys. You always treat me right. When you mess up an order you always fix it immediately. Don’t mess with me now. If you don’t have PDF support ready yet, then don’t release it. Software is hard to write and even harder when you are dealing with a device with limited processor like the Kindle. We will all understand if you need to wait.

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Posted in Tech

Kindle for PC

November 10th, 2009

I love my Kindle.  But I don’t always have it with me.  Enter Kindle for PC, a program that will display Kindle books on your, um, PC.   Its now available on Amazon.com for free.

Kindle For PC

Kindle For PC

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Posted in Tech

Google Wave Authors

October 27th, 2009

CNN is running a story about the two guys most responsible for Google Wave.  These are the brothers that built Google Maps.  If you haven’t seen Google Wave, here is a rather long video that goes into some detail:

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Posted in Programming, Tech

Gyrowheel Replaces Training Wheels

October 4th, 2009

How cool is this: using the gyroscopic effect to replace training wheels?!  Seriously, we all learn about this in Physics so why hasn’t it been in use for years?  Apparently no one thought about it, or thought to build and market it until now.  A company called Gyrobike will be selling the Gyrowheel front wheel replacement for around $100.

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Posted in Tech

More Microsoft Courier Information

September 29th, 2009

This time Engadget has some information on the new Microsoft Courier Booklet device, as does ZDNet.  ZDNet seems to think it will run on Windows 7, on Microsoft hardware.  Very interesting indeed.

I wrote a short blurb on this a few days back.

Gizmodo pic of Courier

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Posted in Tech