Shameless

I love trying new things; whether it's new equipment or a new piece of tech or playing with the code within the blog to make a scrolling blog list.

I enjoy the thrill of adding new features and seeing them either work or fall flat and then having to work out where I went wrong, and all this for someone who has a very basic knowledge of this kind of sort.

Since getting the Kindle I have wondered how I could get some personally content on to it. First off was to get the Londonbackpacker blog on there; although personally I can't see the point of this, as there are enough apps on the kindle to get the rss feeds through the kindle browser and the 3G network.

After that I turned my attention to getting an ebook/let on to Amazon and the Kindle. The only real piece of writing was the Journal from last year's TGO Challenge.

So this was converted into a .mobi file (this is the format that the Kindle eReader works in) and sent to the Kindle Direct Publishing site and within 24 hours the ebook was on the Amazon site and ready to download.

The ebook has been up for a few weeks and without any mention of it, I have managed to sell a few.

So here the shameless plug, if you click the TGO Challenge box at the top of the blog, it will take you to the page with information on how to obtain the ebook.

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"....and secondly it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover."

So far I been enjoying the Kindle for book reading but one of the things I dislike, is the screensavers that appear when the reader is in sleep mode.

In fact a couple are a bit scary; especially the one's of Emily Dickinson and Harriet Beecher Stowe (if you have a Kindle you know what I mean).

Amazon don't actual have a way of putting your own pictures on the Kindle but it is possible to achieve this with a bit of jiggery pokery.

The jiggery pokery is to jailbreak the Kindle to allow you to place your own pictures on there.

After doing this the only picture that could go on the screensaver was:-



If anyone is interested in changing the screensavers on their Kindle the instructions are at How-To Geek and it goes without saying that you do this at your own risk.

Update: Amazon have updated the firmware to the Kindle to 3.1 and because of this the Jailbreak and Screen Hacks don't work on the new firmware.

Kindle Reader

I recently bought an Amazon Kindle 3G and I'm planning to write a few posts on my experiences using it.

First off the Kindle is an ebook reader, that's it, it doesn't do anything else. Saying that though you can access the internet with it, you can play mp3's on it and in some cases it can read a book to you via the text-to-speech function; more on these in a later post.

The Kindle's physical size is roughly the height and width of a paperback book and 8.5mm thick, the display is black & white only and uses an E-ink screen; this screen looks sharpe and it's like reading a normal book page and it weights 270 gms.

The screen reminds me of the children's toy Etch-a-sketch. Each time the page is 'turned' the screen has to refresh and this means that it flashes, on some of the videoes I watched before buying the kindle I was a bit distrubed by this but once I started using it, I can say that I don't notice it anymore.

The screen is not backlit so this does mean that you need to have some kind of lightsource to read by, but it also means that eye strain is kept to a minimum unlike lcd screens.

The Kindle can store roughly 3,500 ebooks on it which by any standard is a lot of books!

I will cover books, blogs and newspapers in another post.

The Kindle is advertised as having up to a month of battery life (when the wifi is switched off) so far I have only done one charge and still have half the battery life showing.

So far the kindle has renewed my interest in reading books again and with is new interest I have set myself a challenge.

The challenge is to read 100 books (either Physcial books (p-books) or e-books) in 2011. I have set up a page on the blog that will appear in the menu bar (above) to show what books are read and how I getting on.