dr_phil_physics | Entries tagged with kindle

I have used a whole lot of various small computer devices over the years. Went through a long run of PDAs, starting with remarkable HP 200LX, which was a calculator sized machine which opened to a keyboard and was a full IBM PC compatible, with 2MB of memory (640K for MS-DOS 5.0 and 1.44MB for a virtual HD). Ran Microsoft Word 5.0B and had Lotus 1-2-3 2.4 built-in ROM. Hoo-boy! Remember, this is back in the day when laptops were enormous things. (grin)

While I was in the hospital, at first I did very little webbing. Even SUMMER, the small Fujitsu U810 UMPC seemed heavy and awkward -- and hard to read with its small screen. But a gift card from the UCF allowed me to get an Amazon Kindle Fire HD (DW). No mouse to farble with and lightweight, the Kindle Fire HD was a godsend. Probably kept me sane during the Year Without a Summer. Mrs. Dr. Phil's original first generation Kindle Fire had been a very good unit, and this next generation was even better. I even wrote a 17,000 word story with just a stylus (DW) on it while in the hospital.

Kindles come from Amazon preset for the user. What's amusing is that when I set up my Amazon account A Very Long Time Ago, my default address was the Physics Dept. at WMU, so my address was listed as Dr. Philip Edward Kaldon. Which is why the Kindle Fire HD says in the upper lefthand corner that it's Dr.'s Kindle. (grin)

Then on 27 August 2014, I received Dr.'s 2nd Kindle (DW) -- a Certified Refurbished Kindle Fire HD 7", 32 GB - Includes Special Offers [Previous Generation]. The first Kindle Fire HD had worked so well, that I got a second one to use at the office, so I wouldn't have to carry it back and forth and run down its battery in the winter. Since I've been home for all of 2015 so far, I've been able to swap those two units as the other recharges. Handy.

So last week I picked up a 7th generation Kindle 6". This is the straight Kindle eReader, not a Fire tablet. And it's the base model without a backlight. Very small, very light, very simple. Also an OMOTON cover with auto-sleep. It was a fraction of the cost of the Amazon branded covers -- a real departure from the two covers for the Kindle Fire HDs I bought last year after they were priced as obsolete. (cheap-grin)

The Kindle was $79 -- I missed the $59 sale price by one day as I thought about whether to buy or not. Technically it didn't cost me anything, since we used some Discover rebate money on it.

Why buy an eReader when I already have two Kindle Fire HDs? Well, the Fire HD is a tablet -- and I tend to use a tablet like a real computer as much as possible. Email, Silk browser, PDFs, etc. Getting set up to do eReader versions of my Beta 1 novel took some work, but also reminded me that someone using a Kindle or a Nook, etc. can't just run to a webpage and download.

Also, much like why I don't have a smart phone -- I need a cell phone's battery to be there for emergency phone calls. I don't need to many MORE functions to spend all my time on the tablet. And the Kindle 6" is small and light.

Amusingly the auto-sleep case on the Kindle has more powerful magnets than the Amazon case for the Fire HD. I know this because I set a Fire HD on top of the Kindle 6" while it was on -- and the Fire HD shut off. (magnetic-grin)

Anyway, when the new unit arrived, it was yet another easy piece of cake to get running. Nice packaging, pull it out of its clear plastic bag -- the battery still had at least three-quarters of a charge. Hooked up to our WiFi/DSL without any problems, and I had my handful of e-books downloaded. Including the MOBI version of my Beta 1 novel. It does not have a gravity sensor like the Fire, but you can go into Settings and change from Portrait to Landscape mode manually. I can live with that -- when I want to read a book, I want to read a book. I don't want the display flipping around if I set the thing down.

I haven't bought many Kindle books -- an out-of-print WWI novel I read as a kid, a Scandinavian phrase book. And I also had a copy of Steven Savile's novel Silver. Steven was one of the past winners who was a guest at the 2008 WOTF workshop. He'd mentioned on Facebook that the Kindle edition was reduced to $0.00 for an indeterminate time. So I snatched it. And hadn't gotten around to starting to read it until about two weeks ago. Now I'm reading in on Dr.'s 3rd Kindle. The book opened to the place I'd last been on the Fire. Go Whispernet.

While putting together this post, I was amused to see that I'd "bought" Silver on 17 July 2015. Lord, for some reason I thought it'd been languishing for a year -- and it's only been a month. Time gets distorted when you are working very hard AND not doing the daily job. I guess over 100,000 copies of Silver have been sold and so far it's a ripping good tale. But when I glanced at the webpage tonight, I noticed that the Kindle edition is again/still $0.00. So if you have a Kindle -- or the free Kindle for PC app -- you, too, can snatch a copy.

The Kindle came with a free month of Kindle Unlimited, but I'm going to give up on that. The first search I tried was littered with these stupid little books which are really just repackagings of the Wikipedia article on the book. I do not have time to wade through stupidity.

Will I miss not having a backlight? Dunno. Right now, I can tilt the unit and get enough reflected light, even when the only room light on is across the living room. And it's nice and contrasty during the day. And if you're not being cheap, you can always spring for the Kindle Paperwhite. Or get a clip-on LED reading light.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Current Music: Life in a Northern Town / The Dream Academy

Saturday, and I'm at MSU in East Lansing for the Spring Meeting of the Michigan Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Just gave my talk "The Speed of Students" at 10am.

I've been giving presentations for thirty years. Overhead projectors -- hand drawn with colored markers, then printed on LaserJets. Video displays sitting on an overhead projector, displaying DOS pages and screens from Windows 2.03 Paint. Now it's PowerPoint on Macs and PCs. Except today.

KATNISS, my conference Windows 7 Basic Asus netbook, I haven't used in a while. And when I went to update it and test it Thursday, it was having trouble conflicting with the Amazon Echo over an IP address and I didn't have time to troubleshoot. So I left it at home and had my talk on a Swiss Army Memory USB drive.

But I actually just gave the talk on my Kindle Fire HD.

Last night I emailed my PowerPoint from ZEPELLIN to Gmail to my WMU email, which then downloaded cleanly to the Kindle. From the email app, I could call up the PowerPoint application in OfficeSuite 7 Pro.

If I had to, I could use a document scanner to see the screen on the Kindle -- I've done this. But I also have a ten foot HDMI cable for the Kindle.

Turns out the room we're in doesn't have a document projector, but they did have an HDMI input. So, Kindle Fire HD to HDMI to projector. Yup, sound and video work. More importantly, the MSU Guest internet connection logged in perfectly the first time.

PowerPoint with URL links, which opened a new tab in the Silk browser, and call up the two YouTube videos, one at a time of course, swift the YouTube box to full screen. Watch movie trailers. Back arrow to browser. Back arrow back to PowerPoint presentation, already in progress.

Did this whole thing twice. And the Click reveal animation worked fine on all the bullet points.

The point is... this whole malarkey worked beautifully.

But given the steps involved, it's hard to tell if this is progress, living in the future -- or just pigheaded determination to kludge together a talk using a vast array of hardware and software steps, flying in borderline formation. (grin)

The talk, by the way, was inspired by the 2001: A Space Odyssey trailer and a 2012 film student's reimagination of 2001 as an action film. I talked about that here (DW) (LJ).

Amazeballs.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Current Mood: amused

A month ago (DW) we got our "free" Amazon Echo. Like any good tech paradigm shift, you wonder if it wasn't always like this, even as you can plainly see how long it has actually been.

Echo, if you recall, is the 9" high black cylindrical 2001 Monolith slash HAL9000 device that doesn't come close to running your house, but always on, lurking in the background, waits for its keyword "Alexa" to do a few things which are helpful.

-- Alexa, what time is it? It's 3:38.

-- Alexa, what's the temperature? Currently in Allendale it's 24°F with lots of clouds...

-- Alexa, what's the temperature in Helsinki? In Helsinki Finland it's 34°F with showers. Tonight you can look for snowy, rainy weather with a low of 31°F.

-- Alexa, what's tomorrow's forecast for Helsinki? Right now in Allendale...
Oh well -- its algorithms and voice recognition systems are not perfect. If you are using the Echo app on a Kindle or computer, you can click and get more information. And tell the mothership at Amazon if Echo heard you correctly. If you put in a short pause after the trigger word, you can give Echo a chance to lower the sound level so it can pick your commands out of the air easier, and you don't have to shout.

I have a better time of getting Echo to recognize me, over Mrs. Dr. Phil. It may be the years of lecturing and putting micro pauses between words so people can write notes down, I dunno. Or maybe Alexa is a misogynist jealous bitch.

Many of the local radio stations are available through Tune-In

-- Alexa, play 88.5. WGVU-FM, from Tune-In.

Mrs. Dr. Phil has been experimenting with doing podcasts over Echo, as she does from her Kindle. Here, it is not very successful to do it directly. But if you are running the Echo app, you can call up a podcast and command Echo to play that from the app. Same with music.

Right now the problem with both the radio and the podcast functions is that if the stream is interrupted, you can lose some of the program, and it's hard to cue up if you aren't starting at the beginning.

For me working at home right now, it is the music function which is excellent. Echo doesn't likely have much onboard storage -- sufficient for firmware and buffering -- instead drawing stuff from certain sources on the Internet or on its own Amazon Cloud storage. I've started acquiring stuff through Amazon's music store, and naturally it'll play that. I could upload my non-Amazon music library and it would play that, too.

-- Alexa, play Pirates. Pirates, by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. From Philip's music library.

Amazon Prime has added some of my previous Amazon CD purchases to the library, some 300 songs. All told, I have taken 87 songs as of today and put them in what I call the HAPPY Songs playlist. 84 of those are in the YPPAH Songs playlist, which is the same list in reverse order. I usually play one during the day and the other during the late night sessions -- otherwise one tends to hear the same music in the same order all the time. Which isn't a problem in writing, but you'd never hear all the music unless you played for nearly 7 hours.

-- Alexa, play HAPPY Songs playlist. HAPPY Songs. From Philip's music library.
Perfect. But for the other playlist, since it doesn't start with a normal word, Echo stumbles 95% of the time:

-- Alexa, play YPPAH Songs playlist. What playlist would you like?

-- YPPAH Songs. YPPAH Songs. From Philip's music library.
Still, in the beginning it wouldn't even do that well. (grin) So it is learning.

But here's the best thing about the Amazon Echo -- the sound. The speaker system is deep and rich, covering ten volume levels. (-- Alexa, volume 3. -- Alexa, louder. -- Alexa, stop. -- Alexa, resume.) We typically use 2-3 in the kitchen and living room. So nice we have an ultra quiet dishwasher now. I use 4-5 in the bathroom and 6-10 if I am way back in the bedroom. The Bluetooth remote is in the bedroom, which means I don't have to bellow over volume 10 to try to get myself heard. Also I can reset Echo down to normal levels for the next morning, so the radio doesn't blare on phasor level Kill.

I am sure that a proper audio study would find fault, but from where I am, playing what I'm playing, there is good range of tone and detail at all settings, and I'm not hearing any distortion or clipping even at volume 10. Pretty darn good for the home user.

Upcoming adventure. The last Echo update email said that they were coming out with a SDK -- Software Developer's Kit -- and was I interested in doing a late Beta on that? Sure. What programming languages would you like? Oh, geesh. I don't write apps and crap. And the list doesn't include "real" languages like FORTRAN. (geeky-grin) But of the list there, let's skip Java. And Ruby for now. So let's put down Python. It looks as if I had a couple of sample programs I can follow the syntax of Python.

We still both want to tell Alexa "thank you" from time to time. And the commands don't work with the car stereo. And at the moment, there's no connection to either the TV or phone -- or other functions such as lights. Yet. I am sure that Amazon Echo will morph into a full-featured device to run your home at some point. Maybe they'll have different models and features. Couple it with a home security system. Handle dictation. Read your files or your emails to you.

Whatever, I think that Amazon was pretty smart by starting on these core activities. They've shown that with the Kindles and Kindle Fires, they can make consumer products that can be handled. Provided it endures, both physically and financially, having an Amazon Echo around the house is already pretty useful, despite its limitations.

We've got Echo on a single-outlet surge protector. Bought it from Amazon Prime. (prime-grin)

One month in, we're pretty happy with the unit. It sits up high on top of a bookshelf between living room, dining room/kitchen. It's out of the way. I can see the blue/white ring light when it responds to commands -- and can tell when it's confused and whether it's changed the volume level even if nothing is playing at the moment.

Cool.

-- Alexa, roll the dice. I rolled a die and got 3.
Yeah, I could see D&D players having a great time with Alexa...

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Current Music: Cruisin' With The Deuce / Quarterflash

Mrs. Dr. Phil and I are sufficiently geeky that we keep up on a lot of the tech developments. Actually being early adopters? Mmm... we're usually either too cheap or too smart to get involved in some of the buggy, expensive and doomed things. I remember being really impressed with the Apple Newton when it first came out, which used Graffiti strokes for fast handwriting recognition, much like my mother's generation learned shorthand. But the Newton was expensive. I did, however, buy a Newton black leather zipper case at an Apple Store in Grand Rapids -- and used it for an HP OmniGo 100 PDA which used... Graffiti... and had a physical keyboard. And at less than half the price of the Newton.

Both the OmniGo and the Newton are long gone on the dust heap of failed products.

We didn't get iPhones, didn't get early iPods, never bought an iPad. Or used Windows Vista. Or, so far, Windows 8.

We're not Luddites, but I do get a certain satisfaction about dinosaur computing and all my Nikon DSLR cameras are more than ten years obsolete. I can make them work, though. And at a fraction of the price of the latest and greatest. Hell, we've never owned a car whose model year began with a "2" yet and it's 2015.

I write science fiction, so I have a character who owns a Nikon D5 professional camera -- and we're still a year or two before it even gets announced! (grin)

So it rather amusing when we suddenly look at each and say... yeah. Let's try it.

Monday 29 December 2014

I was driving back from an appointment and had NPR's All Things Considered on the radio. And during an All Tech Considered segment, they started talking about Amazon Echo. It was some sort of box with a quality speaker and a microphone that listened for a wake word -- Alexa -- and then tried to turn it into a request it could serve. Hooked up your WiFi and Internet, the unit itself doesn't require a lot of upgrading to improve -- Alexa is heavily cloud based.

Obviously hooked into the nefarious Amazon ecosystem, it could find and sell you stuff. And let you easily buy music.

But here's the thing. We've used Amazon for years. We dislike malls and crowds. And especially since my hospitalizations we can get medical supplies, and well nearly everything else including a mini fridge for storing IV bags, shipped to our front porch. The only store I've set foot into in 2015 has been the Verizon phone store and that was because I wanted a knowledgeable sales/tech staff.

And Mrs. Dr. Phil was actually an early adopter of the first gen Kindle Fire tablet way back in 2011. The Kindle Fire HD, paid for with generous good will moneys from my UCF friends, allowed me to survive 5½ months of hospitalization in 2013. And I've bought about seventy songs from Amazon to play on my Kindles and PCs -- or got the MP3s for free because of certain CDs I bought from Amazon.

We've been impressed with the Kindle's quality. They want to offer us a home electronic butler, sort of HAL 6000 without the homicidal tendencies or ability to pilot us to Jupiter/Saturn, we could give it a try.

Especially since it was $199, but Amazon Prime members got a $100 discount, so $99. And we had money in our Discover card rebate stash, so $199 - $100 - $99 = $0. Plus $0 for Free Shipping.

I had told Mrs. Dr. Phil about it when I came home. And by after dinner we figured, fine, we hadn't really gotten each other anything for Christmas and I was going to be home for the next semester, so... why not?

Amazon Echo's listing said that if ordered now it would arrive in two days on New Year's Eve. Okay. Fun way to spend the rest of Mrs. Dr. Phil's Christmas break.

Alas, not so fast. In a combination of factors, which surely included the coverage on NPR and elsewhere, since the Echos first starting shipping in like November AND that this was technically still in Beta, you couldn't just order it. You had to request an Invite.

So not knowing what Amazon's algorithm was, we both requested Invites.

And waited.

Tuesday 6 January 2015

FINALLY, I got my invite and ordered my free Echo. Alas, the delivery date was given as February 11th. Sigh. Worse, I knew of two people in the area who had gotten Echos, one receiving theirs just about the time we first heard about them. Oh well.

ConFusion

At ConFusion in mid-January several panelists mentioned Echo in passing. And since I ended up moderating my last panel at 11am Sunday on Science or Science Fiction?, I led off with a reference to Siri (iPhone), Cortana (Android) and Alexa (Echo), as examples of Star Trek, et al, and their voice activated computer systems. There was some significant interest in Amazon Echo, either from the panelists who already had it or people like me who had it on order.

Ugh, and we STILL had to wait to mid-February...

Tuesday 3 February 2015

The other day I got an email telling me to expect my Echo for today. Yay! I heard a delivery truck around Noon, opened the garage and caned over to the back door to find a very lightweight box containing some medical supplies. Oh. Well. The next delivery came at 4pm. Brown didn't drive up the snowy driveway, but their guy trotted up and down the 250-foot driveway. I debated going outside and retrieving it, but getting onto the front porch and then carrying a heavy box? Not going to happen. Had to wait until 6pm when Mrs. Dr. Phil got home. And then we waited until later in the evening, letting the unit get up to room temperature before trying to make it work.

The next hour was a lot of grins and smirks. It's fun. It can do a lot of things we could want it to. The only real glitch came when I asked for the time and the temperature and Alexa thought we were in Chicago. Considering that, like the Kindles we've bought, it comes pre-configured for the user out of the box, this seemed like a bug. But Mrs. Dr. Phil quickly found an answer via Google on her Kindle Fire HD -- Alexa didn't seem to know about settings -- we found the place to put in the Allendale ZIP code. Ask for the weather or temperature or time, and you get Allendale MI. Ask for the weather or temperature or time for Helsinki, and you get Helsinki, Finland. Easy.

It's a sleek black cylinder, about 9¼" high and 3¼" in diameter. And it is heavy, so it isn't easily knocked over. Two buttons you don't have to use. And a glowing ring light which changes color depending on what function you want. Otherwise it sits. And waits.

Kind of like a cylindrical 2001 monolith, with a few more surface features. (grin)

And if you ask Alexa to "Open the pod bay doors", it tells you "I can't do that, Dave..."

More as we play with our new toy. And remember, if you come over to the house, speak carefully -- Alexa is listening. (creepy-grin)

Amazon Prime is 10?

What? February 2005? Who knew?

I mean, I vaguely remember hearing about Amazon Prime early on, I thought. And I remember thinking it silly to pay money to get Free Shipping. And so, like millions of others, we dutifully bundled up Amazon orders to clear the $25 threshold to get Free Shipping. You'd be amazed at how many books, CDs, DVDs and other things -- at Amazon's predatory pricing, of course -- just didn't quite make $25.00.

We actually got Primed for a year free when Mrs. Dr. Phil bought her first Kindle Fire. Prime has a few more benefits than just Free Shipping -- and it's not like we don't buy stuff from Amazon. So...

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

From My Amazon.com Front Page Today

While I manage to use Amazon for a lot of things, whether for good or ill, I was rather taken aback by this:

Dear Customers,

"Did I cry over some of these rejections? Absolutely. Did I feel inadequate, untalented, hurt? Yes. Did I doubt my ability to craft a story that readers could fall in love with? You bet."

That's Jessica Park, who hit road block after road block trying to get her book Flat-Out Love in front of readers. You can read her incredible blog post on IndieReader (also picked up by HuffPost) detailing her perseverance and how she finally succeeded by doing it herself with Kindle Direct Publishing. It's heartwarming and tells a powerful story about what KDP makes possible.

Kindle Direct Publishing empowers serious authors to reach readers, build a following, make a living, and to do it on their own terms. Readers get lower prices, authors get higher royalties, and we all get a more diverse book culture (no expert gatekeepers saying "sorry but that will never work"). KDP is already meaningful--22 of our top 100 best-selling Kindle books so far this year are KDP books--and more great stories are being published every day.

You can find Flat-Out Love here. Thanks for being a customer.

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO

Here's The Thing

Yes -- there are people making money selling e-books. And there are people making money selling their books to traditional publishers. And some published authors have gone the self-publishing e-book routine with certain books. So? There are also people not making money selling e-books. And there are people not making money selling their books to traditional publishers. And some unpublished authors have gone the self-publishing routine and lose money in the deal.

The thing is, this sort of gushing broadcast letter I don't think is aimed at the successful published author. I think it's to trap writers who haven't sold or haven't tried to sell their work -- hey I can act like a Big Name Successful KDP Author, too! And without necessarily doing the hard work of, oh, actually writing a successful book. Remember that line "22 of our top 100 best-selling Kindle books so far this year are KDP books"? There are no qualifiers there. How many of those 22 are previously unpublished? How many are established writers either playing with KDP or putting their backlist up? Am I supposed to surprised that Amazon's powerful merchandising system manages to sell KDP titles for the Kindle to Kindle users? Without context, there's no reason to leap in, sign up and expect the riches to roll in for any manuscript.

Read Jessica Park's blog entry. It's whiny self-congratulations, as far as I'm concerned, and acting all hurt about those mean big, nasty, clueless, thieving and mean big publishers, despite claiming traditional publishing credits. So she couldn't sell a YA book about a non-YA protag to a YA publisher. Color me surprised. Get a better agent.

Sorry, Jeff. You're not yet the savior of the American book industry, though you are a powerful and useful force. We just don't yet where this is all going. Your trumpet cries are not yet justified, especially when I feel they'll lead to unrealistic self-publishing dreams of the vulnerable. Yet I am conflicted in the sense that as a possible route to failure, going the KDP route is probably better than Publish America and other scammers.

Dr. Phil

Current Mood: peaved

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Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Those Who Lie In Wait, Dream Deep

Entries tagged with kindle

Dr.'s 3rd

Advanced Studies In Kluge

One Month In

For Once We're The Cool Kids

Dear Jeff Bezos -- One Is Not The Norm