Diary of a Network Geek

I haven’t heard much in the US news about the fires in Victoria, but I know it’s bad.

I know people down there, though, thankfully, none of them seem to be effected by the bushfires.  Still, a lot of people are and the death toll has topped 200.  But, I won’t dwell on how bad it is.  Instead, I’d rather point out some folks trying to help.

This is mainly for the techies and comes to me via ProBlogger.  SitePoint, who publishes really interesting web design books, among other things, has their headquarters in Melbourne, the capital city of Victoria.  In their effort to help out their neighbors, they’ve got a special deal going on their eBooks.  Now, through Friday, Australian time, SitePoint is offering five books of your choice for the price of one, in PDF format.  The proceeds of this will all go to help the Australian Red Cross Victoria Brushfire Appeal.  It’s a worthy cause and you get some great books out of the deal, too.  So, if you’ve got the cash, it’d be a great way to help out.

Just thought I’d let folks know.

Right, so I’m sure a couple of my readers are waiting for me to weigh in on the new Kindle.

Yeah, yesterday, Amazon released the new, very much improved Kindle eBook reader. Lot’s of folks were talking about it; Lifehacker, the Houston Chronicle’s TechBlog and, of course, Gizmodo. The most coverage is at Gizmodo, though, as they did a liveblog through the release.
In a nutshell, what they’ve improved is the design itself, the battery life (by 25%), the memory (now two gigabytes, or about 1,500 books), the screen and graphics. So, you know, just about everything on the physical device is better. Also, there’s an experimental feature that reads the books to you, which actually sounds sort of cool. And, now, apparently, you can move books from reader to reader, though they did seem to be only in one place at a time. You know, I’m actually okay with that, if I can transfer the book to someone else’s Kindle, because then it’s no different than a physical book that can only be in one place at a time. If, and that’s a big if at this point, if that’s how it works, I may just have to get me one of these.

The one “downside” to this is that the price is staying the same. Now, I think it may just be worth paying that $359 for this device. I mean, it really seems more worth it to me. Oh, and the cover which came with the older version is now an extra $25, or so. So, that bumps the price up a bit, but, still, I’d probably be looking at a better cover anyway.

The one thing that I haven’t seen any coverage on is adding my own documents to the Kindle. I have a lot of personal documentation of one kind or another that would be really nice to have on a reader like this. PDF files and text files filled with all sorts of custom and personal manuals and instructions and the like. If they made it easier to get that onto the Kindle, then, I may just be sold.