Category: Gear

  • Instapaper’s instantly useful for sending articles to Kindles

    For a while now, I’ve found that the best way to read long-ish online articles and blog posts is to email them to my Kindle. This avoids the horrid eye strain from reading them on my computer and is more environmentally-friendly than printing them out on paper. Back in December, I even wrote a simple…

  • Insanely great Kindle on iPhone needs one big improvement

    (Updated 3/5) Wow – just wow. Pretty much ever since Amazon announced its nifty Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, people have been predicting that Apple would jump into the e-book game and blow Amazon away. Today, Amazon decided it wasn’t going to wait around and introduced an e-book reader program for the iPhone and…

  • The messy, the missing and the mistakes: Adventures in iTunes Plus upgrading

    Well, it’s been almost two months since Apple announced the huge expansion of higher-quality and DRM-free music in its iTunes Store “Plus” offerings and I think it’s fair to say that the upgrade process is an unmitigated disaster. Despite personally paying 30 cents per track to upgrade hundreds of tracks, Apple has erased my metadata,…

  • Exciting e-book progress from Amazon and Google

    It’s been over two years now since I first starting writing about electronic books and e-book readers on my blog. At the 2006 introduction of Sony’s reader, I was concerned that the “long tail” of niche and out-of-print content was being ignored in favor of making the latest John Grisham best sellers available on an…

  • Amazon: Follow Apple’s lead and don’t blow Kindle opportunity

    I think it’s fair to say I’ve been of the earliest, strongest and most prolific fans of Amazon’s fabulous electronic book reader, the Kindle, since the day they unveiled it, just about 14 months ago. I’ve defended the Kindle against reviews from people who’d never actually had one, iPhone fans who like to read their…

  • Making the transition to a Blackberry Curve

    Well, the two-year handcuffs on my Verizon-locked Treo 700p smartphone finally came off and it was time to reevaluate. The biggest downside to the Treo was its miniscule battery life, though its bulky weight was another serious bummer. My company pays for the phone so my replacement choices were fairly limited. Since my wife appears…

  • Better to choose form or function for new printer

    Where is fantasy bred, in the heart or in the head? -Willie Wonka (channeling The Merchant of Venice) My basic office printer, an HP Deskjet 6980, is having major problems seeing its ink cartridges and out-of-warranty repairs cost more than a new printer so…time for something new. As HP values ink more highly than gold,…

  • Last minute gift ideas for iPod owners and the gadget deprived

    Not much time left before the year-end holidays are upon us. Still stumped for the perfect little gift for your gadget-loving friends and relations? Here are a few suggestions based on things we actually bought and used this year around Casa GravitationalPull.net. Links below are mostly to manufacturers’ pages, but I’m sure you can find…

  • Using Applescript to send articles to my Kindle

    I’m constantly finding new ways to use my Kindle e-book reader. Lately, I’ve found a way to save eye strain and trees when reading long magazine articles posted online. Instead of reading them on my laptop, and making my eyes watery and tired, or printing them out on a zillion pieces of paper, wasting all…

  • Which is smarter? An old-old phone or a new-new phone?

    Planning for a little office reshuffling and reorganzing, the mind of the gadget geek turns to gadgets, unsurprisingly. Ever since I got hooked on AMC’s Mad Men show, I’ve been remembering the visceral pleasure I used to get when I had an old-fashioned, multi-line phone on my desk in a long-ago newsroom. You remember them,…