Unfortunately, you do kind of need to go back and forth between the iPhone and the PC because when you put a picture in your blog from the iPhone, the smallest you can set it at is 640 x 480??  That’s huge when you come in and look at it on a PC.  It looks fine on the iPhone but hideous in a PC browser.  Maybe I’m missing something, I haven’t googled the forums on any of this.

Another downside is that there is no landscape mode (BOO).  So, OK, off to the RSS feed reader.  I posted a couple comments on this blog and it works OK, the bummer is that I need to know the RSS feed URL.  It seems that you would be able to browse and select a blog.

Anyway, I guess the app is okay for quick little blurbs, I mean, I’ll use it from time to time and it only cost $1.99 so what the heck.

Ok, I got the free version to connect and post a text based blog so on to the $1.99 version. See next blog

View From my Desk at DTNA

Wow, what a month! I didn’t get much of a chance to do any of my typical software\hardware exploration in September. Just one of those months I guess.

Funny, I haven’t been doing any IT work on the side either, just my regular job at DTNA and still, I’ve been running around so much that I really don’t have any reviews to write about.

I did have another episode with my iPhone, where the new 3.1 OS push blew it out of the water again. This time, even the Apple store couldn’t fix it and they ended up giving me a new phone. It’s kind of ironic that I wasn’t comfortable trying to Jailbreak my new iPhone because I didn’t want any of the upgrades to be a problem. Turns out both upgrades so far HAVE been a problem even though I didn’t Jailbreak it. Maybe I should huh?
I just loaded Aptana Studio 1.5 on one of my Linux machines. I’ll be checking this environment out over the next few weeks before giving any opinions. I have used Aptana Studio on my XP laptop and I do like it for creating websites but I wanted to check out the eclipse version on Linux before really giving any opinions, so hang tight…real tight apparently. Guess I need to follow up on this one.  Funny, I just got through building an entire database driven website and did I think to use Aptana Studio? Uhm…no, I used Notepad++, MySQL Administrator and Adobe Illustrator.  Guess I need to break out of the mold

Dave

I’ve had the Kindle 2 for about six months now. When I purchased the Kindle, I  envisioned loading it up with the latest bestsellers so that I would always have  something to read while sitting around the airports or lounging around the swimming pools while on vacation. However, I have found it much more useful than that.. I love the fact that I can get the Seattle Times delivered to it daily. It’s great to sit down in the morning with a cup of coffee and read the paper without getting ink all over my fingers. It would be nice if my local paper, The Oregonian, was visionary enough to offer a subscription on Amazon but I guess that will have to wait. As an IT professional, I also like being able to subscribe to industry magazines. I won’t go into plugging names, I think I’ve done enough of that for a blog that is suppose to be about the Kindle.

Another big Ah-Ha that I hadn’t foreseen, is that I find myself sending a lot of my technical manuals, which are usually in PDF format, to my Kindle, simply to keep them all in one place, instead of scattered all throughout my laptop. After using my Kindle, as my technical manual library, for a few months now, I’ve found that the searching and bookmarking features have saved me a lot of time when trying to find that one paragraph, which contains the vital information I need. With my workload ever growing larger and my brain ever growing older (and in dire need of a memory upgrade), this aspect of the Kindle has been a very pleasant surprise.

I have downloaded a few bestsellers, to have when the opportunity arises, although I still have a stack of paperback versions that I need to get through, which brings up another advantage that should be mentioned. Many times I have an hour or more to kill and, believe it or not, I’ve left my stack of paperbacks at home! I’ve always got my Kindle with me, so now I’ve got something to read and hey, its not the most graphical browser in the world but it sure is quicker to open up my Kindle and google something than to crank up the laptop and connect to the Internet.

One thing that I would like to have seen is the ability to create folders under the Documents (Home) folder so that I could organize all those technical manuals and light reading material a bit better. Although the Kindle is good about coming up to where you left off last, its not a real quick task to locate a book or manual when your list is four or five pages long.

Another thing that I would change, if I had the opportunity, is that joystick. It’s not really an issue when reading a novel, because you’re typically not jumping to the next chapter, however, reading through the newspaper can really give you a kink in the thumb joint. Typically I don’t read an entire newspaper, and I doubt that many people do. I usually read a headline, and maybe a paragraph or two, and if its interesting then I read the whole article, but more times than not, I skip to the next headline. In the case of the Kindle 2, that functionality is provided by a little square joystick, at the very bottom of the unit, that looks like an IBM Thinkpad eraser head, without the eraser. This is not only awkward but I found that after reading through my first long Sunday newspaper, my wrist felt like I’d just spent four hours playing Asteroids. That probably dated me but my point is that this joystick should be farther up the side of the unit, like maybe right above the Home button. This would allow the user to balance the Kindle while keeping a thumb on the joystick. Oh, and maybe put an eraser head on it so its comfortable.

Ok, enough venting, I truly do love my Kindle and I’m very happy that I bought it, even though my wife could kill me for spending $350 bucks during the worst recession of our lives.

One last note; about the music, I guess a little background music while reading a novel around the swimming pool, isn’t bad but I truly hope that Amazon doesn’t try and add a bunch of mpeg player buttons and bells to the future Kindle versions. I love that it is as simple as reading a book, and if I need music too, I can use an iPhone. What the heck, you have to carry a phone anyway.

Dave

The internal wireless card on my laptop bit the dust and considering the thing is close to four years old, I decided to just buy a new laptop.  I looked around and with the financial slump we are all going through, decided that $350 is a pretty good deal for the little Acer Aspire One Netbook.  Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks, I can give my unbiased, and of course unopinionated, view of this little piece of crap!  Just kidding, I actually like it.

Just to set the record straight, this is the larger of the many Netbooks out there, with an 11.6″ LCD screen and kind of a full keyboard.  The keyboard is big enough to type fairly comfortably, although some keys, like the ‘Home’ and ‘End’ key, which I use more often than I would have guessed, are incorporated with the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys so you have to hit the ‘FN’ key simultaneously to use them.  I’m not sure why they didn’t reverse that.  I seldom, to never, use the ‘Pg Up’ and ‘Pg Down’ keys.

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with it.  It came with XP, which I like much more than Vista.  I’ve loaded a lot of high end software on it (Office 2007, Adobe CS, AutoCAD) and they all run just fine.  I would be interested to see how one works with MobLin on it, since it is using the Intel Atom processor.  Maybe after I’ve had it long enough to wear off that “New Laptop Smell”, I’ll blast it and load Moblin on it.

The downside… it is small.  Its just fine for writing blogs, checking mail and doing some light work on but I certainly wouldn’t want to write a book with it.  I can’t imagine what the smaller 6″-8″ models are like.  I think typing on my iPhone would be comparable although I haven’t tried one out.  If anyone has, let me know what you think!  I imagine that after some practice… I mean even my big fat thumbs are getting pretty quick on my iPhone

Til Next Time!

db

Dave

This is great!  Now I have a YABTOW

(Yet Another Blog TO Write)

I’m going to try and do this more often, so hang in there for some opinionated words of wisdom (or not)