Two Kindle Notes - Converting PDF and USB Charging

While I may write something more about how awesome I'm finding the Kindle to be, here are two quick notes:

1. You can use Mobipocket Reader to convert files of different types (including PDF and RSS feeds) and send them to your Kindle - this allows you to use your Kindle like a regular eBook reader. If Amazon had included something like this, I think there would be a lot less complaining about Amazon owning the experience. The daft thing is, Amazon owns Mobipocket.

2. While the charging light goes on when a USB cable is plugged in, it doesn't appear to actually charge the Kindle - in a few short hours of testing, the battery meter continued to go down normally (and the charging light doesn't go on when the Kindle is off). The Kindle's DC port takes 5V 2A (compared to USB's 5V 200-500ma), so it's possible that a USB > DC tip could work.

Kindle NowNow

So I got myself a Kindle (given that I only read books once, the negatives don't really bother me, and the browser lets you read blogs without paying). One of the first things I did was ask the built in 'NowNow' service about whether the Kindle would support PDF, and got back the following highly-bitchy answer:

"Not directly, you need to convert the files

Unfortunately, none of us answering your questions has ever seen or used a Kindle. We're not Kindle customer service representatives and we don't have any special information about how to use one or any of its features. NowNow never even bothered to tell us that we'd be answering questions from Kindle users. So unfortunately, I don't think you're going to find much help here with your problem. Your best bet is to try to contact Amazon's customer service (which is not us) and maybe someone there will know more about it:

[...]

Sorry I can't help. I checked through the user guide and I saw nothing about disabling the buttons. I tried, but I'm sorry they haven't given us a way to answer this type of question.

Good luck!!"

(This is not to pick on NowNow - the rest of the answers provided were great, and pointed me in the direction of a PDF to .mobi converter).

Apple Wireless Keyboard and PCs

So I love the new Apple Wireless Keyboard, however, you should be aware that it's a pretty crappy PC keyboard - as the fn key doesn't work (at least not in Vista or XP), you don't have access to pgup, pgdown, insert and (most importantly) forward-delete, which makes deleting files pretty hard.

You can use SharpKeys to rebind some existing keys, but it's not a perfect solution.

I bought the wireless keyboard as I wanted to reduce the distance between my mouse and my keyboard - ideally I'd like the new wired Apple Keyboard (which I also own) but without the numpad area.

Unfortunately for you

Despite currently being the top result in searches for his horribly-misspelled name, I am not the person all you inbound searchers are looking for.

Blogger needs a "this really doesn't need to appear in my feed" button.

Lumus Optical Update

TFOT has a hands-on look (with video) at the Lumus Optical glasses, which promise low-profile see-through AR. This is the first new information on the Lumus HMD since their website surfaced sometime last year.

[Posting because I've only so-far seen this article in appear in my keyword alerts]

The iPhone Halo Effect

Despite its pretty limited featureset, I love my iPhone - it is typical Apple - do a very small range of things, but do them really well .. so well that people actually use the feature and think you invented it. After realizing this, drooling over OmniGroup apps, reading about font-smoothing choices, and after setting Vista back to Classic mode, I began to again look at OSX as a platform choice. So with Parallels and Nicholas' subtle evangelism pushing me over the edge, for the third time I'm giving the whole Apple thing another go with a new MacBook.

Maybe I'll be more accepting of the OS because I'll attribute failures to Apple "not focusing on it" rather than "being stupid" as I had before. I'm also not writing much code anymore, so my use should be pretty different to the previous attempts.

It's time for ranting, regardless - I still don't like the window management as I use apps with large numbers of palettes (Photoshop). In MS' world, an application controls a big window with an ugly grey background that contains all smaller windows and palettes/panels - this neatly separates different applications, and lets you define regions of the screen to be dedicated to a single application, which works well with large monitors. Apple's approach is like having the same thing but being stuck with a maximized transparent main window, making your windows all kind of blend together in confusing ways (especially since palettes of unfocused applications are hidden, meaning that a refocus can cause windows all over the screen to appear and disappear.

I'm also getting bitten by the different focus models - In MS' world, application focus doesn't really matter if you're a heavy mouse user, since clicks always 'carry though' to the application, even if it isn't in focus, in Apple's world, your first click on an unfocused application only focuses it - this forces you to keep track of what application is in focus, since a click you do to focus an app may end up doing something if the app is actually in focus, or vice versa. It doesn't help that the visual distinction between focused and unfocused windows is even more subtle than Vista's.

Lauren gave me a week before I give up, though I think that was wishful thinking since 'someone' has a G4 Powerbook that is suffering from a distinct case of "I wish I was Glen's nice fast MacBook that will have no owner when he gives up on it".

iPhone

I was prepared to hate it - the lack of fringe-essential features had me in purchase-decision oscillations all night, but after lining up from 10am, spending all day baking in the California sun and finally being blasted out into the media frenzy outside of the Palo Alto Apple store, I can say that I really do like this phone.

The crowd of media and onlookers outside the Palo Alto Apple store (Steve Jobs is just out of frame on the left, he was surrounded by young children, like some kind of crazy angel)

It's not as powerful as WinMo, and it's a hideously limited platform (being forced to use iTunes sucks, the lack of dial-up networking still makes me cry and not being able to select/cut/copy/paste is infuriating), but it's still a happily compelling experience. For example, I didn't expect to pay any attention to the YouTube features, but then ended up spending most of today watching bizarrely entertaining videos of pets and ninjas.

Bring on the software updates and fixes, and for the hardware, I'll be first in line for iPhone 2.

Font Smoothing Technologies

On the heels of the discovery that Safari for PC uses OSX-style font-smoothing, Spolsky has the most concise writeup of the various font-smoothing techs and why users of one system get used to it and end up hating the other system.

It will be interesting to see if this affects SafariPC adoption at all.

Uncaffeinated - The Long Run

Two months ago, I posted about how my experiment in giving up caffeine wasn't producing results. Now, after about four months without daily caffeine, it's time to revise that opinion and to consider the experiment a success.

After two or three months of caffeine-recovery-induced sleeping ten hours a night, I now sleep about seven and a half hours a weeknight and about nine on weekends which is about what I was doing before I stopped the caffeine. Falling asleep is much easier, and I rarely have the same hideous insomnia that I used to. I also now eat toast and beans (black) or toast with avocado and smoked salmon for breakfast, which seems to do all the things they say a good breakfast should, despite my years of skepticism. I'm a lot more productive at work, and can focus far more on single tasks than I used to be able to. Unfortunately, like being happy and not depressed, I think being well-rested makes me a little less crazy-creative in favor of being more methodological :\

Like my pretend environmentalism through not driving because I can't be bothered getting a California drivers' license, I think what helped most with the schedule changes was laziness - I had started riding my beloved bike to work, but then told myself that if I got up early, I wouldn't have to ride (using traffic as an excuse). Because of this, I now leave home around two to three hours earlier - today I got to work at 7:15am, and it's great.

I've put on a little weight in the months since I said goodbye to caffeine, but I think that also has a lot to do with the union of eating Google food and eating dinner with Lauren (previously I had stopped eating anything substantial for dinner). I figure if I get back on Traineo I should be able to trim that off relatively quickly - a decent set of scales, traineo's graphing and knowing that someone was watching was enough to let me drop 12 pounds in a few months last year.

Like when I quit smoking, I still allow myself the occasional caffeinated drink, usually coffee with Lauren at Caffe del Doge; as mentioned previously, I'm so bad at noticing correlations between what I do and how I feel that I never really get physiologically addicted to anything, so I'm not worried about relapse (and part of the reason I gave up was so that I could get the effect when I needed it).

Two-Thirds

I've just finished reading The Tipping Point, Blink and Freakonomics, books that form such a tight PopSci triad that an amazon search for the title of either of the first two returns all three in the top three results, and I also finally got around to watching Bowling for Columbine. While I didn't really spend much time on these (they're all pretty light, and can be consumed in a week), I feel that like Guns, Germs and Steel and The Corporation before them, they all should've finished about two-thirds of the way in.

These otherwise-highly-recommended books and films all reach a climax (that is, they get to the fricking point) about halfway through and then peter out with ever-more-boring examples and views of the data that are so detailed that you are left feeling dirty after having just been exposed to the blinding light of the authors' raw "but I spent so long working on this bit that I just *have* to include it" cries and screams.

This problem is exacerbated in the first three books, which finish about two-thirds of the way through the printed pages to make way for lengthy authors' afterwords (stupid second-editions!), so you're reading along thinking that you're just in a lull and about to get good in the remaining giant wedge of paper, and all of a sudden you realize that you're ten pages into supplementary material and that the fun got up and left hours ago.

It's all rather like watching The Matrix Trilogy.

Carbonite Saves My Balls, or: Battle of the Ugly Software

I've been using Carbonite for a while, and just recently it paid for itself. After all my Photoshop CS3 hassles, I finally gave in and reformatted and reinstalled, making sure to copy all my important stuff to a local networked drive .. or so I thought. You see, I'm rather absent minded, and when I went to copy my stuff over, I deleted what was there first .. .. and then got distracted and read a book instead (damn you, Malcom Gladwell, you popsci cad!). Of course, I forgot that I'd forgotten all this, and then went ahead and formatted my drive and reinstalled Vista.

Carbonite's here-are-your-balls-back process (AKA 'restoration') is remarkably easy, though it's also disgustingly slow (on a 6mbit line its only restored 6GB out of 40 in the past 27 hours), and the client's horrible UI hasn't made things better - there's no way to re-prioritize the restoration once its begun, and it sucks having to wait for 35GB of photos to restore before it gives me back my oh-so-important documents.

So while this is a validation of the whole online backup deal, it's actually pushing me further towards Carbonite's competitor Mozy, which has a web interface to your files, a properly-designed client, and no bandwidth caps .. although its website looks like it was built using a stock template with cheap iStockPhoto images. Blech.

PS Because it's so Taiwanese-hardware-manufacturer-client-software-style ugly, there's no screenshots of the client available on Carbonite's website, so here's what you're missing out on:

Excanvas Update RC1

If you use excanvas, there's an update in the pipeline that rolls up the past year of changes and fixes. Get the details on the google-excanvas group.

Where I Have Been

Google MyMaps view of the places I have lived, worked and studied.

Photoshop CS3 and hating on beta users

[Post exists because I can't find much information about this anywhere outside of Adobe]

"Adobe Photoshop CS3 cannot be installed because it conflicts with: Adobe Photoshop CS3"

It turns out that if you had the Photoshop CS3 Beta installed, the release version doesn't play nice. Various knowledgebase articles just say "uninstall the beta first", which makes sense and is easily done. However, further down the page, it's "you must deactivate the beta before you uninstall it". By the time you've gotten this far, you've already uninstalled it, and your system is now in this hideous state where CS3 can't be installed. There's a KB article listing out the directories and zillion registry entries you can manually remove to make it work, but unfortunately, after an afternoon of digging around trying to find keys like ' HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\38E97B37B094D0640B6DC2B737893052', it still doesn't actually work. Adobe says they'll have a cleanup script for Windows available 'soon', though I've heard that the warez community has already released one, which has to hurt given that this problem was caused by the copy protection system.

Nothing like spending $650 on a company's flagship product only to be told that it will work 'soon' all because of some pain-in-the-butt activation system; even Vista was better than this. I feel sorry for the engineer or team whose fault this was, and it's easily imaginable that their QA processes could've missed this. I guess this is the punishment for forgetting what 'Beta' really means.

On the other hand, the direct-download purchase from Adobe.com was super easy, and didn't require local installation of some 'Adobe download manager', so bonus points for that (though having to pay extra for a PDF manual seems a bit off).

[Update: the CS3Clean for Windows is now available. Let's hope it works]

[Update2: Nope. @!#!@$!%@!@!#@!]

[Update3, May 1]: After spending a week getting no useful answers from Adobe support, I ended up reformatting and reinstalling Vista. What a great experience.

ActionButton

When I used to review games, it wasn't uncommon for my "50% is average!" scores to get bumped up by the editors, especially if the game in question was a heavily-hyped popular production with a large existing fanbase. This filled me with a smattering of almond-flavoured cynicism regarding game reviews, which is why it's so nice to find ActionButton, a site best described as "game reviews for gaming snobs". While they still seem to be finding their voice, their reviews of Twilight Princess, God of War 2, GTA:LCS, and DEFCON all deliciously run contrary to popular opinion, and are the reviews that I most agree with.

They're not curmudgeonly trolls, either - they have glowing reviews of Gears of War, Balloon Fight and Mount and Blade.

Excanvas in the wild

Though it has gone too long without the update love it needs, excanvas turns out to be actually useful. Here's a small sample of the more interesting uses:

• Yahoo! Pipes
• PlotKit
• Emprise JS Charts
• Doodlesketch
• GeoWeb

Gapminder

I generally don't like anything, but this was a great video, interesting from the start - the Gapminder Talk at TED.

"See" how the world is changing.

Visual imagery can tell stories and truths which would be very hard to capture and communicate otherwise

Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden since 1998, uses beautiful animated charts and minimalistic diagrams to explain the world we live in. Poverty, money and health can be seen at once shaping or being shaped by world events, technology and the passing of time.

Or if you prefer, there's an hour-long one from when they did a tech talk at Google. Not as snappy, though.

And once you're done, use the tool yourself.

Giving Up Caffiene

About six years ago, I woke up one morning, realized that I didn't have any cigarettes left, and decided that it was easier to quit than to go buy more, so I did. It was remarkably easy.

About a month or so ago, I decided that caffeine wasn't having any positive effect on me, and all I was doing was fighting off withdrawals, so in the interests of removing my caffeine tolerance so that it could be useful to me in future, I decided to stop drinking it, and I did (with a one-week "OH MY GOD NOT THE HEADACHES" weening period of one can a day).

However, what they tell you about these things is rubbish. Quitting smoking didn't make me feel healthier and more spritely and give me my sense of smell back - it just made me feel like eating all the time. Quitting caffeine didn't make me feel vigorous and calm - I now just sleep for nine and a half hours a night.

This public service announcement bought to you by the man who took fifteen years to see a correlation between eating spicy food and getting stomach cramps six hours later. So you should probably ignore it.

Explorer Breadcrumbs

Explorer Breadcrumbs does for Windows Explorer what I wanted Crumbler to do. It's a shame I suck and great that other people rock in my place.

The Braying of Angels

Robert Hodgin does it again.

Nvidia raid (nvraid) bluescreen after install

After getting my new E6600, MSIP6N and 8800GTS and freshly installing XP on my RAID array (which was a debacle requiring finding a floppy disc and a drive to hold the RAID drivers for the XP installer), XP decided to bluescreen on every reboot. Turns out that SP2 has its own RAID drivers which sort of get smooshed together with the Nvidia ones, causing all manner of insufferable badness. These instructions saved the day, and gave me a nice easy-to-install-for-once XP CD.

How-the-heck-is-anyone-supposed-to-figure-that-out stuff like this is still not enough to make me stop putting my PC together, bit-by-carefully-chosen-bit.

This post exists for people trying to find the answer to the same problem.

A Non-Awful Time With Dell Tech Support

I was having a problem with my monitor, and it seemed like I was doomed to follow in this guy's footsteps. Yet shockingly I only had to wait 10 minutes to speak to a human, he only ran me through the same questions and procedures twice, only denied that there was a problem once and only bounced me to one other person, who then actually read the case history, only asked me one repeat question and only required one item of photographic proof before deciding to ship me a replacement (with a convenient box to send my monitor back in).

... It's kind of sad that I came away from that thinking "well, that was surprisingly easy" (perhaps because I had dealt with Bank of America support the previous day, where the people at the branch tell you to go home and use their phone support system, even when the problem is that their records for you are so broken that you can't use the phone support system).

Instant Publishing

Part of the reason I post so little is that much of the stuff that I would want to communicate to my peers, I now put in my GTalk status message and let people read it there, since they're more likely to read that than this. It was easier in the days before popular link aggregation - I could just post a link to some crazy robot thing and add some useless thought and that would be enough to maintain the blogging flow. Now I assume that people have read those things elsewhere, and that's the end of that avenue of communication.

The other problem is that I spend a long time thinking and reading about the things I feel like posting, and when I'm done with that, the subject feels too obvious and trite, and so a post about it would be like saying "I am assuming that the people who read this don't know this obvious thing".

See, now I don't even feel like posting this. I mean, DUUH, WHY ELSE WOULDN'T I POST?

Dear People Using Challenge/Response Spam Prevention

Stop it, you're making the internet worse.

Getting all your "please authenticate your message" spam makes me cross. I'm going to have to start clicking on all the authentication links I'm sent.

Belizean Photos

The Belize Photos are up! Hooray!

PS I was in Belize.