Akubot.com Blog

New Solar Refrigerator Prototype from Chile

An article by Paula Alvarado on the TreeHugger web site describes a prototype of a solar-powered refrigerator that uses adsorption:

"So what's the difference in the Chilean model? First of all, the heat, which comes from the sun. Second: the choice of substances for the process.

"Most of these models (except the one from Grosser) use ammonia as gas, which can create too much pressure if heated up and can be dangerous if leaked. The Chilean prototype uses methane as gas and active carbon as absorbent. While production of active carbon is a very energy intensive process, methane is highly biodegradable if spilled and less inflammable (although it can be toxic if ingested or in contact with eyes)."

Kindle 2 Explorations, Part 3

(You can also read Parts 1 or 2)

Charging Time

I didn't use my Kindle 2 for a week or so, and when I pulled it out of its case discovered that the screen displayed a message saying the battery was dead and I needed to recharge. So I plugged it in, and am happy to report it took less than 2-1/2 hours to charge fully (the user guide claimed less than 3 hours).

I didn't realize until today that my Kindle was actually "asleep" but not completely off. So while asleep it apparently does use some energy. However you can turn the device off by holding the power switch for four seconds and then releasing. In this case the screen goes blank instead of displaying a static screensaver. When you turn the reader back, it only takes a few seconds for it to spring back to life.

Search

My first attempts at search a couple of weeks ago were unsuccessfully. I was able to bring up the search page as described in the documentation, but when I searched for words in my documents I got zero hits. I made sure to use words that I could see in one or more books, but all attempts to search within or across books failed.

After recharging my device this week, I tried to search again across all of my content. Shazaam! Now it works... sort of. In the search results I saw the list of books with hits, and an entry below that indicating that several books hadn't been indexed. So my earlier attempts failed due to lack of indexes.

Unfortunately there's no mention of indexes or indexing in the user guide, nor did I find any official info in Amazon's online help pages. So I sent another note to Amazon support, asking:

"Can you send me URLs describing more details on how Search and indexing works on the Kindle 2? Specifically, when does indexing happen, how long does it take, etc."

They responded with:

"The index process begins as soon as the book is downloaded to the Kindle. The Kindle will automatically index during any idle time. There are no specific numbers on how long the process takes and will vary from book to book.

"I apologize for the limited information I have, and I hope that it at least answered your questions. If you have further questions, please feel free to call us."

Left unaswered was whether "idle time" included the sleep state. Since I'd barely used the device during the most recent period where the battery ran out, my guess is that it does perform indexing while asleep.

Sync

One option I was curious about on the Menu list is labeled "Sync & Check for Items". Since I had copied several books over USB from my notebook computer to the Kindle, I wondered whether Amazon's site would magically upload copies of those books to my Amazon account. Nope. It is one-way down from the Amazon store to your device, i.e. anything you bought for your Kindle from another computer will be downloaded once you pay.

The exception to this one-way traffic is something called Whispersync. This keeps track of where you left off in your electronic books on all your portable reading devices. So if you own more than one Kindle, or have a Kindle and an iPhone with the Kindle software, Whispersync automatically shows you the page you were last reading on whichever gadget you pick up next.

So if you want a backup of your free Kindle documents, you need to manually transfer the files over USB, which isn't that hard. The Kindle shows up in Windows Explorer as a USB storage device, so you just drag and drop files between folders.

File Formats

In addition to displaying Kindle books, the reader will display various types of documents from your computer including plain text, HTML, most PDF files, and Microsoft Word documents. You can send a document to your Kindle quickly by emailing it as an attachment from your computer to your email account at kindle.com.

Today I emailed myself a random Word document to my Kindle account, and within a couple minutes I saw it appear in my book list on the device. When I opened it up, it was easily readable, though not all of the document was translated properly. The original document contained some horizontal lines and a variety of fonts; on the Kindle the lines were missing and it translated some of the fonts.

Just for the heck of it, I created a PDF of the Word document using CutePDF, and emailed that. Again it arrived very quickly, and although overall the formatting on the Kindle was not as accurate in the PDF, it was still easily readable.

Automatic Software Updates

Another pleasant surprise was that the Kindle 2 automatically downloads and installs software updates. It does this when you slide the power switch to place the device into sleep mode, assuming you have wireless activated.

IBM Develops HSTP for interconnecting voice applications

From IBM's web site:

"Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP) is a protocol, analogous to HTTP, that provides a mechanism to connect telephony voice applications with each other. It enables voice-driven transactions that can span multiple cross-enterprise voice applications thus providing a seamless browsing experience to the telephony user."

IBM develops a technology that will allow users to talk to web

Data visualization in 3D with Glasshouse

An exciting new product named Glasshouse by Green Phosphor

An article to check out:

Glasshouse injects 3D representation of data into a virtual world

Blogs

http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/technology

Kindle 2 Explorations, Part 2

My First Kindle Book Purchase

Recently I was at a Borders bookstore, and flipped through a paper copy of "A Short History of the United States" by Robert V. Remini. I'd already learned about this book through research I'd done from home. After looking at it in person, I decided to see how easy it would be to get via the Kindle 2.

Turned out it was dead easy -- fast and painless... now I need to find some more time to read the book!

My rapid purchase raised a concern. Amazon uses 1-Click to let you buy the books directly from the Kindle. This service normally lets you quickly buy stuff from your computer with minimal fuss, especially avoiding re-entering of your credit card info. Even though I currently have 1-Click disabled on my Amazon account, it is forced to be enabled for my Kindle. This means that if my Kindle were lost or stolen, someone could order books from the Kindle.

Naturally I wondered what to do, since there is no way to lock the Kindle with a password. So I wrote to Amazon, and here's what they wrote back:

"In case if your kindle is lost or stolen and you no longer have access to your Kindle, please visit the Manage Your Kindle page (http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle) and deregister it from your Amazon.com account.

"Deregistering online ensures that your Archived Items are no longer available from that Kindle and additional purchases from that Kindle won't be charged to your Amazon.com account.

"While we do not have the feature you have requested, we value strong customer feedback like yours..."

Obviously this is not ideal, but I don't intend to leave the Kindle sitting around at a cafe anyway.

Battery Life

A few people asked me how the battery life is. I'm happy to report it's excellent. Since the initial charge when I received the device, I charged it only once after about 1-1/2 weeks. Now keep in mind that I used the device only occasionally during that time. I had wireless "ON", which uses the battery up faster, so I imagine you could go weeks without charging depending on usage.

Bookmarks

Kindle automatically keeps track of where you left off reading each book. On a subsequent occasion, when you click on that book again it takes you to the last page you were reading. If you like you can also add bookmarks or notes to each book. If you like to go back and forth within a document, you might want to add a bookmark at the maximum location you've visited. That's because if you go back to an earlier page, that's the page the Kindle will remember.

Reading

So how does it to read a long document? Very pleasant -- actually I felt like I could fly through pages quickly. There's only a very slight delay after you press either of the Next Page buttons. Because the Kindle is so light, lighter than most any book, it's easy to hold (even for these programmer arms). I haven't yet tried reading in bed...

As I mentioned last time, you can adjust the font size. Here's an animated image from the Amazon site that demonstrates the different sizes:

Death of Paper

Many of the people I showed the Kindle to fretted over the death of paper newspapers, magazines, and books. They usually mention liking the feel of paper. Personally I also enjoy a break from my computer and don't want to see paper disappear. Obviously newspapers and magazines are already having serious problems. It is possible that ebook devices could help kill them off in the near future, and that would be sad.

Nevertheless, I don't expect paper publications to disappear anytime soon. New disruptive technologies tend to supplement previous technologies rather than replace them. For example, radio didn't kill phonographs, telephones didn't kill telegraphs, and TV didn't kill radio. Computers haven't even killed calculators.

Author Revenues

Another worry I hear about from friends relates to authors being ripped off. As a budding author I echo this concern. Recently there were some news articles about the Kindle's text-to-speech feature, and how it would cut into the audiobook revenue stream for authors. Here are two links related to these controversies:

Kindle 2.0's "Read to Me" Text to Speech feature under attack

Amazon: Kindle Owners Buy More Books

I think it's too soon to say whether authors will benefit from ebooks more than they would the old way. However, ebooks (or reading books on portable electronic devices more generally) will not go away. So the real solution is for authors to negotiate (through the Authors Guild et al.) favorable ebook publishing terms.

Kindle 2 Explorations, Part 1

Last week I received my Kindle 2, the glorious new "wireless reading device" from Amazon.

In the upcoming weeks, I'll document my experiences as a new Kindle user. I hope this will benefit others who might be interested in buying one or comparing them to competing products, or who are just curious.

Before deciding on purchasing the Kindle, I read some newspaper articles and comparative reviews. On balance it seemed to me that at best there might be some devices that are almost as capable, but none that are clearly superior within the price range. I was already happy with how easy it is to purchase books with Amazon's web site, and decided that having the option to buy from a list of approximately a quarter of a million titles for $10 a pop was a terrific incentive.

After one week my initial reaction to the latest model is quite positive. I never got to use the first version of the Kindle, which was released in November 2007. However a few months ago on a plane, a man sitting in the middle seat happily demonstrated the device to me and another passenger to his right. He showed us the grayscale display, which benefits from ambient light unlike a typical laptop screen, as well as the controls along the edges. He seemed to be happy overall with the features (storage capacity, performance, book availability, etc.) but noted that the usability was hampered a bit by the positions of some of the buttons.

I was impressed by the fact that you can download books quickly, without connecting it to your computer. The unit was fairly light and it looked like it would be comfortable to read with it, once you became accustomed to it. In fact the owner said it was pleasant to read in bed, if you could leave a light on.

Regarding my new Kindle 2, the first thing I noticed was that it shipped without any paper manual whatsoever. There was simply a removable plastic sticker on the front of the device, with instructions on charging it for the first time with the supplied USB cable. Once the device was ready to use, I discovered an electronic user guide was available on the "Home" page. The guide includes a few diagrams and is very well-done. I believe most people will find their common questions answered there.

The Kindle has a small "5-way" controller that let's you move the cursor around on the screen. It's like a tiny joystick but with more limited positions. You can move it forward, back, left, or right, or push down to "click." There are page controls on the left and right sides of the device, and a QWERTY keyboard with tiny keys below the display.

Overall my out-of-box-experience can be summed up in one word:  WOW. It's very easy to start reading with the Kindle. In the first week I demonstrated it to at least 10 people.

My biggest initial disappointment was the difficulty in finding free books directly from the Kindle. One of my motivations for buying the Kindle was that I heard that thousands of public domain books were downloadable. I'm writing a political book that relies on some old books, some of which are now available electronically. I figured that the Kindle would more than pay for itself if I could avoid buying about 10 or 15 books.

Silly me -- Amazon wants to sell us books! I expected to use the search capabilities to easily find a free version of Thoreau's "Walden". Instead I saw only the non-free ones show up from the Amazon store. The Kindle lets you do web searches too, but ultimately I decided to use my notebook computer to find lists of free books that can be manually downloaded and transferred to the Kindle. (More on that in a later blog post.)

My second significant disappointment was that even using the largest font setting, my mom couldn't read the display without a magnifying glass. Her vision is greatly impaired by macular degeneration, and I'd hoped the Kindle would be easier to use for her than paper publications. I might try using a Fresnel lens to see if that makes any difference for her.

So far I've only spent a few minutes at a time reading with the Kindle. In a future post I'll report on how it feels to read for longer stretches of time.

P.S. Although you might see links here to Amazon.com, I'm not an employee of Amazon and the opinions stated here are my own unless indicated otherwise.