Category: software

  • Free Kindle apps getting magazines, lending coming too

    I’m not sure what Kindle whiners are going to have left to whine about by next year (well, yes I do, DRM, but I digress…). Some big news emerged on Amazon’s Kindle discussion board the other day. First, the Kindle team revealed that you’re soon going to be able to read electronic newspapers and magazines…

  • Assembling a network storage server from spare bits

    I have a pile of old hard drives sitting in an attic closet gathering dust — but out of the hands of identity thieves, not polluting the water supply and generally staying out of trouble. So when I saw a diskless version of the Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ super-cheap, I decided to buy it and conduct…

  • Internet TV a long way off because that’s how they want it

    (updated 10/22) There’s a really important article semi-buried on page B3 of the New York Times today: Internet is a Weapon in Cable Fight. You should go read it but the short version is that the Fox network is fueding with cable provider Cablevision over payments for carrying regular TV stations on the cable system.…

  • Review: New York Times new iPad app is a step backwards

    The venerable gray lady, the New York Times, overhauled its iPad app this week. The original app, which supposedly annoyed Steve Jobs greatly, was called “Editor’s Choice.” Instead of including all the stories in the paper, it included only a selection. And the stories were arranged in the app much as they wold be in…

  • Review: MarsEdit 3.0 useful for offline blogging and editing

    For the past few years, I’ve been composing and editing most blog entries directly on the web inside my browser via the WordPress installation that runs Gravitationalpull.net. Every now and then, I get burned when the browser crashes or loses web connectivity after I’ve written a big chunk of unsaved text. It also means that…

  • How to exclude some pages from your WordPress header menu

    I am planning to change my header image to something more fall-like and as I started mucking around with some image files in various dimensions, I got tired of tweaking the various settings and php files of the SubtleFlux theme. So I decided to investigate alternatives. Just on a lark, I clicked on the new…

  • Newest Kindles are the iPods of reading more than ever

    What the iPod Nano is to music, the Kindle is to reading. –Jon Gruber, Sept. 21, 2010 It’s been almost three years since Amazon introduced the Kindle, a groundbreaking electronic reader that — just as the name promised — ignited the long smouldering e-reading revolution. Way back then, I wrote a blog post for Businessweek…

  • Amazon Kindle ad not at war with iPad

    Who is it that said all markets are conversations? Seth Godin? Robert Scoble? I can’t remember. But the new Amazon Kindle TV ad which debuted today immediately reminded me of the phrase. In the ad, a nerdy guy at the pool can’t read an ebook on his spiffy new Apple iPad because of the sun…

  • What Steve Jobs actually said about iBooks market share

    There’s been a bit of controversy about what Steve Jobs said yesterday (video here) in regard to the market share of the new iBookstore. To recall, Apple opened a new front in the electronic book wars when it introduced iBooks alongside the iPad two months ago. iBooks, sold in a proprietary DRM-locked format only at…

  • Out, damn’d spot – Reviewing iPad’s great Shakespeare app

    There are already a lot of very nifty iPad apps, from Entertainment Weekly‘s cool, interactive “Must List” to the show-me-the-radar greatness of Weatherbug to Amazon’s simple yet invaluable Kindle app. But so far, only one app has blown my mind: Shakespeare Pro (iTunes web link). It cost $19.99 but it’s probably worth $199.99 if you…