Why the Kindle Just Ain’t Good Enough
The Kindle (which is the name of Amazon’s eBook reader) is an awfully good idea with simply awful execution. That may be too harsh, I guess. Let’s say that it is an incomplete and at least slightly clunky realization of that idea. So much could be done to make it so much better that it seems almost trivial. Whatever else Jeff Bezos may be good at, designing hardware is not one of them.
The Kindle is too large. It needs to be just very little larger (width and length) than a page in a hardback book, and no smaller than that. It needs to be no thicker than a MacBook Air, if that thick. It needs to display the equivalent of what you see on that hardback book page. The very last thing it needs is a keyboard. You’re not going to write books on it, you’re going to read them. It needs one button that will bring up a keyboard on the screen, which need to be a touch-screen. It needs to have a USB port for an external keyboard.
For control, it needs a menu button. That would bring up a function menu on the touch-screen. It should be able to search from that menu. It should be able to go to a specified page. There are a number of other functions that it needs, outlined a bit further down. The major hard controls are simple menu, page forward, and page back. Get rid of all those ugly buttons and keys. This is not a laptop, Jeff.
It needs to have wireless. You should be able to use it at home to read books that are stored on your home system. It also needs to be wireless to buy books. I understand that Bezos doesn’t care about brick and mortar, but a lot of us do. I should be able to walk into Borders or any other bookstore, ask for a book, and have it transferred into my eBook reader. It should also have a port dedicated to this transfer function, maybe the same port that is used for the keyboard. The Kindle is not so much a book reader as it is Bezos’ idea to put brick and mortar book stores out of business.
That same port should connect the reader to the user’s computer, as should the wireless. There should be an easy-to-use, comprehensive control program on the computer that allows you to move books from your electronic library to the reader and back again. You need to be able to set all of the default for viewing pages from the computer, as well.
It needs to control, really control, the brightness and contrast of the “page.” Once the user sets it, it should hold those settings regardless of the ambient light. If an eBook reader is not comfortable to read, it’s just a boat anchor that is too light to be useful. Speaking of user senses, it can’t be slick plastic. It needs to be comfortable to hold, soft but firm. Padded, leather-like vinyl on all surfaces but the screen, hardware controls, and a port inset would be perfect.
The Kindle, without most of the features which would make it a worthwhile device, is not even close to the mark. Any reader of books could probably come up with even more requirements. I thought of these in just a few minutes. I have no idea what Bezos was thinking, but it wasn’t about readers. It was about Bezos.
As it stands, the Kindle is a joke that is just too expensive to be funny.
Tidbits from the Geek – New SU Blog and Themes
First, I have been missing for a few days because I was making good on my threat 
to start a blog strictly about StumbleUpon. If you wish, have a look at StumbleBlogger. It is up and running and I have added it to my once-a-day writing list, meaning that it will get a new post most days. Have I mentioned that I love StumbleUpon?
What took so long to get StumbleBlogger going was not server space, or DNS settings, or code problems, or anything like that. It was just a problem in finding a theme. I have written about this problem before. I was able to find one that I really liked, and I went to work on it to use it on the new site. I did not get too far before I discovered that the footer used encrypted PHP.
The intent behind that is to keep you from removing the advertising links from the footer. I find that to be a highly objectionable practice. A “free” theme, as this one was advertised to be, is not free when you are forced to advertise for the theme producer and his cronies. On a more practical level, the encryption hack also made it impossible to modify the footer as required to use Google Analytics.
Once WordPress finally (yawn…) gets their theme viewer back in operation, they say they will remove any encrypted themes that are uploaded to the site because they violate the principles of WordPress and Open Source. If you say it is free then it is supposed to be free. I don’t mind themes for sale. If the one I downloaded had been unhacked and for sale, I would have bought it.
Instead, though, I was being blackmailed to help the writer spam the world with their links. Removing their hack is pretty trivial, but I am as opposed to theft as I am to blackmail. So I just went on to another theme. I have, of course, modified it fairly extensively, just like I usually do. I will probably also modify it for use with my other blogs, including this one.
By the way, if you would like to stop by and pick up a theme from those same link spammers that I encountered, you may visit their site here.
StumbleUpon Ate My Blog!
I am such a StumbleUpon fan that the SU topic has been threatening to take over the Geek From Kansas blog. Although I am sure there are a few people who might approve of this, there are a lot of things that I still want to do with this particular platform. I want to espouse Open Source and Linux, I want to help to define the paradigm of What Comes Next, I want to help the non-technical user take this trip along with us geeks, and so on.
So I am starting a new blog just for StumbleUpon topics.
I have the domain, the software is on the server, and I am tidying up the details. The new blog will be up in the next day or two. You may be assured that the Geek will point you to it at that time. It’s going to be an interesting new challenge to go along with the others that I have already accepted. I promise not to neglect the Geek from Kansas, or anything else that I do.
Honestly, the StumbleUpon topics deserve their own home. I have built a nice one for it, and I plan to spend a fair amount of time decorating it with all things StumbleUpon. The new blog is going to be all StumbleUpon, all the time, and I hope that those of you that are interested will come along for the ride. I think it will be fun, and I imagine we can all learn some things.
I love this thing! ;o)
StumbleUpon and Intellectual Property
Since I have written a couple of very positive articles about StumbleUpon, a few people have said that I must find something negative at SU, and have asked what it may be. I am always willing to consider the other side, and I discovered that there was something I found annoying. That is the rampant pilfering of intellectual property on SU that results in seeing the same information time after time after time.
I’m sure you know what I mean. One recent example is the car that is also a submarine. The second time I saw that information, it dawned upon me that I was probably going to see it a lot., so I got out an index card and started making tick marks. I have seen it 14 times in about a week. It gets a little boring.
The words “intellectual property theft” may be a little strong. Most of these items started life as a Web version of the press release. Publicity is exactly what the original publisher wants. And, boy, are they getting it. Therefore, being ripped off a couple of dozen times is probably exactly what they want. The problem for SU users is that once they have seen the original, they gain nothing by the other dozen or so tedious repetitions. At the end of the week, I hated that damned car, and would throw eggs at it if I ever saw it.
There is an easy way to avoid this problem. People should try hard to publish original content. That is to say, they should do more than copy the contents of someone else’s page, put it on a page of their own, then publish it like it was their own information, looking for ad revenue from someone else’s work. That is just the epitome of being lazy and the ethics aren’t all that great, either.
I write, with my own two fingers, everything that I publish. It might not be glitzy enough for prime time, but at least I have thought about it, and what I post is my own original thought. Since I have never seen any of it ripped off by anyone and repackaged, I will assume that it’s not really good enough for that purpose. (Undoubtedly, now that I have said that, people will start doing it. Screw you in advance. LOL!)
These parasitical articles waste a lot of my time, and yours. We can’t stop it, I don’t suppose. I am still trying to figure out what my SU reaction should be. I have stopped reviewing items that were obviously pilfered from somewhere else. A review is better than a thumbs up and I have no real desire to overly reward copycats. So far, I am still giving most of these a thumbs up because the content, even if not original, is still of interest to me and sometimes useful.
What do you think the correct response is?
A Few More Random Thoughts About StumbleUpon
The StumbleUpon experience has gotten even better since my last post on the subject. Not only did a lot of my StumbleUpon friends see fit to agree with that post, but a lot of people that I do not know also found the page to be interesting. It is just marvelous knowing that a lot of people see SU as a positive experience and enjoy it as much as I do.
My wife joined SU today, which I found out when I had a very familiar-looking new fan in my list. I think she figured if I was going email her so many URLs of pages that I liked, she may as well join and make that process easier. Now, she is also sending pages to me, leading to more and better discussions on all kinds of subjects! Of course, now we may never again see each other in person so that we can have those discussions…
Almost all of the reaction to the “How to Treat Your Friends” page was good. A few people scoffed at the possibility of reading 150 or so pages a day. It is not only possible, but it is not all that hard. I am a fast reader, anyway. Plus, some of the pages that my friends Stumble are photos and cartoons, which are very fast to deal with. On average (I find after keeping close track for a few days) I am spending about 45 seconds on the average page. That takes about two hours a day. Not bad, especially given that I am interested in 90% of what my friends find or comment on.
Of course, I also try to get in some random Stumbling every day. This time is not as productive, I suppose, since the focus is a little looser. Still, this half hour to an hour a day gets me some real gems! I know I find a lot of good stuff because of the amount of bookmarks that I have saved. I started a StumbleUpon folder when I first started Stumbling. I have since added a LOT of subfolders. When I count the number of bookmarks that I can attribute to SU, it is just over 3,500. That is just under half of the pages I have stumbled. Not a bad average.
Then, of course, you may say that three hours a day is a lot of time. And I would reply that it IS a lot of time, but where else can you get a pretty good continuing education in 120 subjects a day in three hours? I sleep six a day, giving me 18 hours a day to do something else. I find StumbleUpon to be a great use of 1/6 of my waking time. It’s a bit less on weekends. Hell, I know people that watch American Idol reruns three hours a day. And I still have four hours a day to write, and a bunch of hours to goof off. ;o)
WordPress Theme Woes
It has gotten to be a little dicey picking a theme for a WordPress blog. First and foremost, the Theme Picker at WordPress.org has been down for months. No uploads, no updates, no corrections, no nothing. Since themes are a fairly important part of the overall WordPress experience, I am baffled as to why this has been put on the furthest back burner that they have. It was, when it was working, a place that you could trust, in terms of information about the themes.
Don’t get me wrong. It is not as if there were not approximately thirty-seven million places on the Web to look at WordPress themes. There certainly are. Almost none of those places tell you much of anything about the themes they present. Although there are many theme sites, most of them seem to have the same fifty themes as all the rest, and offer no way to look at specific groups of themes. I know what I want, within certain bounds, and I would rather look a the 20% I care about than every theme that was ever uploaded to a Web site.
More baffling is the lack of information about WordPress version compatibility. The theme authors do not include text files with that information. The Websites that promote themes tell you nothing about that situation. What are we supposed to do, guess? Every upgrade that I have done in the last year or so has broken something about one of the themes I am using. Then what are you supposed to do?
The authors like to tell you how wonderful their themes are, but they don’t much want to answer questions. I understand that they are not making any money at this. I’m not making money with every one of my blogs, either, but when people ask a question, I am decent enough to answer it. Two themes ago, the author just folded her tent and stole out of town, leaving I don’t know how many of us with her bad CSS.
This current theme was done by Brian Gardner. I just replaced the header graphic. I really like the theme, but after repeated emails, he has never answered the simple question, “What WordPress version does this theme work with?” All I can tell you is that it is nether the last two nor the current one, and the only reason I know that is by all the errors and hangs I receive while running it. And Brian is supposedly one of the shining lights of the industry. What can we expect out of the unknowns?
Brian is now hawking a theme for pay in conjunction with someone else. Why on Earth would I buy something from someone who has proven to be irresponsible in terms of answering even the simplest questions? I don’t mean to pick on Brian. I’m sure he’s a wonderful fellow. But my experience has been less than sterling. One of the beauties of this whole WordPress thing is the tight, friendly community. I have had great luck working with the developers of add-ons. But the folks who write themes are a whole different story.
I didn’t really want to learn how to do all this stuff myself, but maybe there is no choice but to do it that way. Once upon a time in the Open Source movement, if you wrote it, you were responsible for it. WordPress theme developers have, in my experience lost track of that, and the world of WordPress is worse of for it.
How To Treat Your Friends At StumbleUpon
I am an almost-addicted Stumbler. I love the SU concept because it takes me to Websites that I enjoy, but that I would probably never find on my own in a million years. I have also met a lot of great people via StumbleUpon, with many of my same interests. Some of those people are my StumbleUpon friends. Because they take me to so many interesting places, I want to treat them well. Here’s how I do it.
- I subscribe to the RSS feed of all of my friends, the top feed that is marked “Reviews and Blog.” Several times a day, I refresh my RSS reader and go look at every page that every one that that of my friends has discovered or reviewed.
- If I like a page, I give it a thumbs up. If I really like a page, I also review it. With my current number of friends, I am giving a thumbs up to between 160 and 220 pages a day, and writing reviews on about 60 of those.
- Because I select friends with many of my own interests, this simply means that I am helping out my friends and promoting thousands of pages every month that I like, on subjects that interest me, so that other people who will like them are also able to benefit from them.
This is not altogether altruistic. I also hope that my friends will look at the pages that I review and comment on, so that other people with similar interests will also see those. That’s what Stumbling is all about. StumbleUpon is a great place. I have learned a lot there, and it has taught me a great deal about a wide variety of subjects. I would not trade the StumbleUpon experience for any other in my twenty-eight year on-line life.
Think about treating your StumbleUpon friends to the same red carpet treatment. Even if you don’t have the time every day, do it whenever you can. You will learn a lot, you will have a lot of fun, and it will pay off in the end. Happy Stumbling!
(This is the first post in an occasionally-appearing series.)
Backup Software
I’m looking for some advice from readers. Maybe someone out there is doing what I want to do, and can make a recommendation. Now that I have this wonderful backup drive (the WD Passport), I need some software to use it in the way that I wish to. I don’t want to compress backups. I have a lot of room here, after all, and compression just adds an element of possible error that I don’t want. All I want to do is the following:
- I want to copy my files to the backup drive in their native form, no compression, no changes.
- I want to update that file set on a daily or weekly basis.
- I only want to replace the files that have been changed or are new since the last backup date.
- I want to be able to copy every file on every drive, including those that are in use by the operating system.
- I would like to be able to schedule this activity for when I am in bed. ;o)
I purchased Acronis True Image, so I am able to (and have) made images of the system drive. That is not a problem. I don’t think I trust the software that comes with the drive, because it seem to be into proprietary compression. I have done a number of searches on line, and the best that I have found is Cobian, I think, and would love to hear from someone that has used it. Otherwise, I’d love to hear about something that you have used, and liked.
Oh, yeah. I don’t really want to hear about native Windows utilities. I’m ditching Windows, remember? ;o)
Western Digital Passport 320 GB USB Drive - Part 3
Problem solved! Neither of the two computers that I was testing this drive on were putting out enough voltage to the end (or for that matter the beginning) of the USB cable. The desktop is home-built, based on a good Asus motherboard and a good power supply, but anything is possible. It is also five years old. But the two-year-old Toshiba is a surprise. Both were about 15% low. That is apparently enough to cause significant errors.
My answer was fairly simple. A quick trip to Office Depot netted me a Belkin powered USB hub. I probably overpaid for it, and I bought it with almost no research other than reading boxes in the store, but it did the trick. Its voltage readings are both exact and steady and it has made the drive a happy camper. It now writes flawlessly at a rate of about half a gigabyte per minute. I have moved about 130 gigs of data in the post-Belkin mode without error.
I have a feeling that the low voltage levels I was experiencing are not uncommon, especially given that the Toshiba was so low. It might save Western Digital a lot of trouble if they would put a circuit into the controller to read the voltage, and a bit of error code in the firmware to tell the user that their voltage is insufficient. It would have saved me two days work, and might save Western Digital a lot of RMA returns.
Despite all the bother, I’m happy with the Western Digital Passport USB drive. I am not thrilled to have to carry a powered hub around with it, but that not WD’s fault. Now that I have figured out the problem, it does pretty much what I wanted it to do. I’ll give the hardware five stars.
Oh, yeah. I wrote an email to Western Digital support on the first day I started having problems. I finally received a reply six days later. Annoyingly enough, the fist thing is said was that they would consider the case closed if the didn’t hear back from me about their fairly vapid cookie-cutter suggestions within four days. If you figure you might need actual support for your USB drive, both quick and free, this may not be the drive for you. I give Western Digital’s “customer support” no stars at all.
Western Digital Passport 320 GB USB Drive Part 2
The next day, I started over with a newly formatted partition and looked at the drive with the Western Digital WinDlg utility, which I downloaded from their website. Their simple SMART test passed, but the actual surface test quickly failed because of an excess of bad sectors. So I ran the windows version of checkdisk on the drive, asking it to fix any errors found. That ran for a long time. This is a BIG drive. Then I ran the WinDlg extended test again, and it passed. In the interim, the drive lost about 30 megabytes of space, which were apparently bad sectors removed from service.
After the test, it took two reboots to get the system to recognize the drive, even in the system off, plug in drive, system on process. Plugging it in hot is simply not possible at this point. Then I tried again to copy the contents of a drive containing about 24 gigabytes of data. About 2/3 of the way through this copy process, an error message flashed up quicker than I could read it and the copy was aborted. When I tried to delete the files that were left on the drive, several could not be deleted because they were corrupt. This, of course, required that I run chkdisk with the Fix option. I was then able to delete the corrupted files.
Next, I tried the Passport on my laptop, which is a pretty respectable two-year-old Toshiba Satellite, also running XP Pro. The laptop did manage to recognize and run the Passport without having to reboot. That’s a plus, and probably points to some kind of an issue with my desktop XP machine, although it has recognized and used every other USB device that I have plugged into it, including several different printers, several different cameras, my cell phone, and several USB flash drives. I’m not sure what makes the Passport different.
I do know that it also failed to write properly when attached to the laptop. It copied about 60% of 30 gigabytes of data, then errored out because of a bad sector, just as it had on the desktop machine. Either the drive is bad, which would be odd for a Western Digital product, but not impossible. Hmmmmm. So I got out my trusty multimeter. Voila!
The solution tomorrow…
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