Category: Companies

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • High-end pocket cameras still trail far behind low-end D-SLRs, sadly

    Everyone loves the gorgeous pictures that their digital SLR camera takes but no one likes carrying around the unwieldy, weighty cameras themselves. So we’re all on a perpetual quest. We want a much lighter camera that still takes great pictures and allows for the kind of fiddling and fixing — both in the camera settings…

  • 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…

  • Caught up with too many remote controls for the home theater

    One of the biggest problems so far with our home theater set-up is juggling the three remote controls plus keyboard/track pad needed to operate all the various devices. The Samsung TV has a control as does the Samsung Blu-Ray player. Each of those two controls can sort of control some of the functions of the…

  • 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…

  • New version of Civ? New Windows box

    Well, it happens every four or five years and it’s happening again. Firaxis is about to release a new version of the extremely fun and highly addictive computer game Civilization (Civ V, if you must know) and so we need to build a new Windows PC. It could be months or even years before the…