I’ve had it for about a month now and have read three books on it. It is a wonderful ebook reader because of the epaper technology. I am on a computer for 8-13 hours a day. Reading on the Kindle does not affect my eyes and can easily be read anywhere. Battery life is excellent but overrated. I don’t get a month out of a charge even with wifi disabled but is does last for weeks. No complaints there.

I have been lucky enough to find sufficient books to read for free. I have only bought one book and it was on sale for $1.99. Sue finds a lot of free ebooks through dealnews and I grab all of them. They are only free for a shirt time and space is not a concern. I sort them out when it comes time to read something new.

The biggest source of books for me has been the Gutenberg project. All of the out of copyright classics are free to download. I am finally able to read all of the great books from the past. There are a number of more modern books for free on this site but I found many to be lousy reads.

I am a big fan of Manning publications technical books. They have a great policy where you can download soft copies of any paper book book you buy. You can also buy soft copies. Everything is available in PDF and MOBI formats. I keep these on the Kindle in case I need them.

Another decent source of ebooks is the local library our library system has a decent collection of ebooks but unfortunately they don’t have any of the big fiction writers. Most of their ebooks are nonfiction. I like to read at my own pace without the pressure of a due date so I limit what I borrow from the library.

The kindle has some other features that others may like. The text to speech is decent. The MP3 player is lame but it is not why you buy a Kindle. The web browser feature is neat considering this is a ebook reader. My favorite feature is the built in dictionary. I use it often.

In my opinion if you like to read and don’t want to always carry multiple books this is a great choice. The lightweight and cheesy feel of the device is actually a benefit. It is easy to hold while reading. The touch version is nice and there is less chance of accidentally hitting buttons.

I told the guy at Dell and he tried to blame it on the “factory” for sending the wrong part and that there are so many power supplies for this computer. He fucked up and would not admit it. He goes on the Dell loser list along with the guy that tried to sell me memory when my laptop drive failed.

The laptop is off warranty now so I ponied up for a replacement. Went with a 500GB WD 7200rpm drive this time. It’s an upgrade in space and speed. It’s louder than the previous drives, but the speed and capacity are worth it. Now, if it lasts longer than two years I’ll be happy.

I somehow happened upon a wikipedia page and learned that Opera is a Norwegian company. I thought that was interesting and it piqued my interest. I installed the latest version and was surprised to see that some of the annoying layout quirks that kept me from using it before were gone. I may have to give Opera browser another try. I use Chrome for surfing and Firefox for development. Opera is a refreshing change.

So far my experience with Chrome has been positive. About ninety percent of the things I do on a regular basis work just fine. I haven’t noticed any significant changes in the speed of web sites I visit, but I have a slow cable connection and use Firefox 3.0, which is pretty quick.

The developer features are a nice addition. Being able to see how much memory, CPU and network resources are used for each tab is a nice touch. The intelligent address bar makes for a nice mix of history and Google search hits. The new tab initial page showing a list of most often visited sites and recently closed tabs is very handy.

Chrome does have some issues though. For some reason I cannot access any of the Google sites that require me to log in from my work computer. I can click the sign in link, but the browser just dies on the redirect to the Google account login page. I haven’t found any solutions online and I really can’t afford to spend much time at work to diagnose the problem further. I just stick with FF to check my email.

Some sites are work just don’t work. I wrote an Ajax application that includes quite a lot of code and which uses Prototype, but this simply fails with some odd exceptions indicating that the Prototype “update” method doesn’t exist. It’s very weird especially since the application works find in Safari as well as FF 2-3 and IE 6-7. Seeing as Chrome uses WebKit much like Safari it should have worked. Since the app fails horribly I think the V8 JavaScript engine must be at fault. I’ll give it time though and see if any future updates to Chrome resolve this problem.

The one major thing that does affect me most directly is the very poor performance of Flash applications in Chrome. Vimeo and Youtube players just don’t work well in Chrome. They run very slowly, lock up the entire application and are generally less responsive. View the same Flash object in FF 3 and there is no problem. This needs some work.

Although it is not a bug I have a bit pet-peeve when it comes to the phrase “Aw, Snap!”. This is the most unprofessional and idiotic phrase that the developers’ could have chosen for the error screen. Drop the “Aw, Snap!” and the error screen would be perfect. This doesn’t sit well with me, but I don’t think (I hope) that the developer’s remove it before the next release.

I’ve been using it heavily for a couple days to clean up some old audioooks ripped to MP3 that I have. None of them had the same tags or followed any consistent naming scheme. A few minutes with Mp3Tag and things are much nicer. Everything is in order and the file names match the data in the ID3 tag.

I sound like a spokes person for this thing, but now that I’ve discovered how to use it I’m very impressed. It’s definitely the geeks or developers Mp3 manipulation tool. It has its own scripting language and supports reg-ex. Not bad for freeware. The only complaint is that the documentation isn’t that great for a newbie. There is a forum out there, but I just didn’t find what I was looking for. Maybe I just think differently.

American video equipment (DVD players and TVs) all play NTSC format video, but very few can handle PAL format video. Well, sure enough the movies we have are PAL format. Instead of the 720×480 at 29.97fps that NTSC expects, the DVDs are 352×288 25fps. They’re a low quality, long running DVD in the wrong format. You can buy DVD players with PAL to NTSC converter chips in them, but they start at $200 each and go up very quickly from there. A $75 LG DVD player with a chip will set you back $299. No thanks.

So, I’m doing what I can to learn how to convert PAL to NTSC format on my computer using free tools. It’s a challenge. The last test I ran resulted in a great looking video, but the audio did not properly sync up. Essentially the conversion includes demuxing the DVD content using dgindex (extracts the audio and video files out of the vob files). Then use another set of tools to resize the video to the NTSC resolution and increase the framerate from 25 to 29.97. Changing the framerate is a process better left to mathematicians, but there is a nice tool that helps (dgpulldown).

In the end you need to sync up and combine (mux or encode) the audio and video streams into one vob (or some intermediary type that a DVD authoring package can handle) and finally burn to a DVD. The process can be painful especially to the newbie who just wants to get it done. The last test I ran took 6 hours to resize the video and encode it into an mpg. Only then did I find out that I can only change the framerate before encoding, but my tests show that doing that results in out of sync video and audio.

I’m cutting my losses for now and reverting back to using Nerovision express. It does an okay job of converting PAL to NTSC, but sometimes it creates some visual defects that are annoying. Again it is not a quick process. Nero takes about 3 hours to convert and encode the files before I can burn them. I also need to recreate the chapters and menus, which is a hassle seeing as the episodes are not of equal length. You have to watch parts of the video to find the end and then mark the chapter.

I’m sure there is a much easier way to do all of this, but I’m not ready to lay out big bucks on software to do it. It isn’t cost effective and I’m sure that it can be done I just don’t know enough about what I’m doing and working with to make much progress.

I will say one thing though that the avisynth tool is pretty impressive. You create an .avs file containing some basic avisynth script commands and then use the avs file using other software. Avisynth acts as a frameserver, which uses the script commands to process the specified input and then serve it up frame by frame to the player. You could use this to read in an AVI then apply some filter or resize the file and then output it to a player on the fly. Pretty neat stuff.

If I ever figure out the best way to create a high quality conversion from PAL to NTSC I will have to post the steps. Until then it’s back to the research for me.

Roman characters and Chinese characters now appear a bit easier on the eyes. They look more like print than the choppy, pixelated crap that Windows usually renders. Too bad the Chinese fonts on Ubuntu (Gnome) are still superior to those that come with Windows.