Kindle Resources

For all my Kindle-packin' friends, here are a few tips and resources I found useful.

Free Books

There are a couple of very Kindle-friendly free ebook services. In general, books in either the Kindle (.azw) or MobiPocket (.mobi) format are directly compatible. You can copy them via USB or download via the web browser without any further conversion, and also email them to your Kindle via the @kindle.com gateway.

These are the most Kindle-friendly services:

• FeedBooks.com not only provides Kindle-formatted books, but it has a cleverly designed downloadable Guide you can browse for books to download. In other words, it's basically like their own Kindle Store.
• ManyBooks.net - you can use this from your PC and copy books to your Kindle via the USB cable, or use the Kindle's web browser with http://mnybks.net to download them directly.

Ebooks in other formats, like plain text (.txt), HTML, Word (.doc), and PDF can all be mailed through the @kindle.com service for conversion. YMMV. The rumor is that you can also email a ZIP file of documents and the service will convert each one in the file.

This article has a long list of free book sources, including -- to my surprise -- the Amazon Kindle Store itself. And you can search for free books at eBookSearchr. That logo is positively riddled with 2.0.

Saving Money on Books Through Behavioral Modification

This one might be obvious, but the way I've made my Kindle pay for itself is through better-qualified purchases. I never just buy a Kindle book from Amazon. Instead, I send myself the free sample and read in judgment.

Those $2-$10 mistakes really add up, so having the ability to instantaneously grab 10-20 pages of a book I'm considering removes any motivation for the impulse buying that used to cost me so much.

I also tended to order books in batches before, fearing an empty queue. With the Kindle I only have to order when I need something.

Converting PDFs

I've never been charged for converting PDFs via the email service that downloads to your Kindle, so until you see that happen, don't bother using the "free" alternative that requires you manually copy to your kindle. In other words, just mail 'em to @kindle.com.

Not all PDFs will convert well. And, in my opinion, not all sorts of documents work well in the Kindle form factor. Technical books aren't ideal, for example, nor are a lot of LaTeXy papers formatted as 2 column or graphics-rich PDFs.

The Stanza software for Mac (and MobiPocket Creator for PC) will also allow you to perform some format conversions. This is only recommended for books you desperately need to have. It's too tedious for me.

Reading Blogs

Only suckers pay for blog subscriptions. Check out KindleFeeder instead. It'll send you a Kindle ebook containing the articles from your favorite RSS feeds on whatever schedule you want.

I find that getting them daily is kind of annoying because these are treated as individual books in the Kindle Home screen, rather than a single periodical with multiple issues. But once a week gives me a good balance.

If you're concerned with the Terms of Service or just don't like the KindleFeeder experience, you can use a web-based reader like BlogLines. The Kindle web browser is basically an exercise in "I can" rather than "I will ever have the patience to" for me, but if I had no other options, it's there.

Audiobooks

I have loaded several audiobooks on my Kindle but never successfully made it through one. I don't think I'm an audiobook kind of guy. Now that the Kindle 2 can read any text aloud in its soothing WOPR and Girl WOPR voices, Audiobooks may be of less interest. And Amazon's boneheaded requirement that you run the Windows Audible software to "bless" the Kindle is too much friction for me.

I do occasionally use the MP3 music playback feature, and thank Amazon's designers for putting the headphone port on top this time. Copying files to the Kindle feels like the dark, pre-iTunes days. Maybe something like DoubleTwist will help.

Utilities

When searching on the Kindle 1, you could use some special prefixes to redirect your search into specific sources.

@help, @web, @wiki or @wikipedia, @store, and @time

Hitting enter at the Home screen will bring up a search window. Of course, with the Kindle 2 you can just push the 5-way nubbin to the right and select from those choices.

Regressions vs. Kindle 1

It appears that a lot of the useful Alt-* shortcuts have disappeared. Thank god that Minesweeper (Alt-Shift-M) is still there.

Alt-T no longer displays the time, but the time is shown at the top of the screen if you press the Menu button.

Wishes

I wish the Kindle had a feature to turn the wireless connection off after N minutes of data inactivity, and then to poll periodically. Forcing me to manually manage power consumption is just ridiculous for a device this smart. And if I'm going to be forced to manage power that way, I prefer the physical wireless switch rather than the menu item.

I think I'm going to miss the Kindle 1's strange F-117 stealth angles and the scroll wheel + gutter.

Other Resources

• Scripting.com reader comments with a few good tips
• iReaderReview Top 25 Kindle Hacks - this is a great article from one of several good ebook related blogs I never have the time to read. It just seems too meta to read about reading.
• Yet more Kindle 1 era hacks.
• Kindle section of the MobileRead Wiki; contains some interesting info and hacks.
• The Kindle Cookbook site, which is basically a teaser / Table of Contents for the $3.99 Kindle book. Kindle 1 era.

Feeling extry Smart Today

So I booked a flight for Friday and showed up on Saturday. I'm a free spirit. Who among you is without sin?

One day of Austin missed. Hopefully Chris and Serena can make do with my better half today and find some more time to hang during the week.

I have changed towns under my own steam exactly once, when I came to Atlanta in 1991. How does one go about the kicking of tires in just a few days? Anywhere new would be good in some ways, but I am slowly learning the frying pan / fire equation and would like to avoid that mistake again.

Most of my friends seem to make much better life decisions than I do. Maybe I can crowdsource this sort of decision.


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1 minute to midnight

I think I missed my daily posting window.  There's only one chance, and it's just crazy enough to work.

Look behind you!

NO CARRIER

Name my Consulting Company

And win a kewpie doll:

There Goes My Perfect Record

Two days of ideal laziness, and then today I had to ruin it by doing some consulting on a potential new venture.   I guess there's some extenuating value in the fact that I did it for free.

It's amusing and, who knows, possibly profitable to dabble like this.  But the idea of jumping into a full-time gig anytime soon just makes my heart thud.  I must be strong.

Jerry-Rigged RAID Array is the Mind Killer

I do not love this RAID array any longer.  If I were not on a new frugal kick, I would be Drobo-ing all my data as we speak.

I replaced the failed SATA drive with a previously failed SATA drive that I had forgotten to mark as such.  SMART, god bless its little digital heart, warned me that the drive was about to go critical, so I found the originally intended drive and swapped that in.  Now it's all over but the waiting.  Waiting for the rebuild, and waiting for the inevitable failure of the other WD drive in 3-6 months.

The array is now 3/4 Seagate, after all the other WD drives failed.  No more WD for me, no matter how good the sale. 

Now I just need to build a sound-proof enclosure for these twin banshee machines (RAID tower and server tower) and I'll be set.

md3 : active raid5 sda1[4] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[3]
      1465151808 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [_UUU]
      [>....................]  recovery =  3.1% (15227260/488383936) finish=273.2min speed=28863K/sec
      bitmap: 2/233 pages [8KB], 1024KB chunk

I wish I could connect an Apple RAID box to the AppleTV, and run Samba on it.  That's all I really need.

First Day of Sabbatical

Today is the first day of the rest of my savings.

As I have much more free time now, I'll be channeling more of my mad jailhouse ravings into this blog.  Twitter has been fun, but it's too narrow a pipe and I would lose all my followers without an overflow pond like this.

I'm going to try for a post every day, or at least every "workday".  A man needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning, after all.

Today's assignment: let it all sink in.  Eat some ice cream, watch some TV, keep adding to the sabbatical to-do list that will never get done.  It's a process.

Hat tip to all my gainfully employed friends.  Strong fundamentals of our economy, watch the farm while I'm gone.