Tag Archives: amazon

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Pricing

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It’s been known for a while that the upcoming upgrade of Mac OS X Snow Leopard is $29, for people who already have Leopard. (Five user family pack is $49)

I didn’t know this, but for people who didn’t upgrade to Leopard, there’s a Mac Box Set with Snow Leopard , similar to a Mac Box Set including Leopard, priced at $169.

iLife and iWork separately costs $79 each from Apple. So by some fuzzy math, the person who gets this Mac Box Set ends up with paying $11 for Snow Leopard. Of course, this isn’t completely true, since people might not want iLife or iWork, but it’s interesting to see the repackaging that Apple has done here.

Note: I actually didn’t know of the existence of the Mac Box Set with Leopard until today. I wonder when this packaging happened… I did a search for a Mac Box Set with Tiger, but there doesn’t seem to be any information on it.

Oh, and if you still haven’t gotten your Snow Leopard yet…

Hacking The Kindle: Kindle Books Store – Free Books?

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If you’re keeping up with my Tweets, you know I made my first impulse purchase on the Kindle yesterday night. The fact that Kindle makes buying books so ridiculously simple forces me to make the comparison to buying songs from iTunes (except, I don’t buy songs from iTunes… I’ll talk about this in another post).

This isn’t like those other “hacks” that people keep talking about getting your own eBooks on the Kindle, but to download from the Kindle Store; free, copyrighted material.

Disclaimer: This is all for educational purposes only. I’m NOT responsible for what you do with your Kindle with this knowledge. And I can only hope that Amazon figures this out faster than the rest of the Kindle freaks like me. If you know someone who can fix this bug inside Amazon, please let them know.

The hack

Steps are as follows:

  • Buy the book
  • Lie and say you’ve accidentally purchased the book
  • Turn off the wireless just after the book has been downloaded

I don’t know, but you probably should wait on the screen that has the accidental purchase link until the book has finished downloading… I didn’t really think about this, but my download is fast enough on the awesome 3G network anyway. (Go Kindle GO!)

A couple of seconds after I turned on the wireless, the books did disappear. To get around this, simply make a copy of the file on your computer.

As a sidenote, while I was messing around with moving .azw and .mbp files the book that was downloaded seems to be about twice as big as the sample… I wonder why this is the case. I can only think that there’s some compression going on.

I had to see if there was some kind of remote killswitch on the DRM, and turns out… there isn’t. After the original downloaded copy was erased by Amazon, Amazon was satisfied it seems. I turned on my wireless again and as I expected, I was able to use my Kindle on wireless while reading my “free” book.

Dear Amazon,

Fix it. I don’t even know who to talk to, but I’ll try to forward the link to this post to some people I see on Twitter.

Kindle 2 Official Leather Cover Review

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Being the first adopter of anything, in this case, a physical product, you run the risk of not only having to deal with the gadget itself, but with any other issues that related accessories might bring.

I can think of numerous examples of this. I remember when I got the 1st generation iPod nano, and I dropped it not one day from when I opened the packaging. There was no cover/case at the time, and so I used the plastic packaging that came with it.

More recently, just before the Kindle, it was the MacBook Pro. I had a Brenthaven Metro bag (which, to this day, I love and cherish… the sucker is built like a womb for the earlier MacBook Pros), and when I switched up to the late 2008 unibody one, it wouldn’t fit. Actually, nothing would fit it snugly at the Apple Store, except for the not-so pretty 15″ Incase sleeve/bag.

Now, with the first Kindle, I hear there was a cover included, which sucked: the Kindle would fall out of the cover constantly (and I bet the fact that you couldn’t pick up the Kindle without turning the page didn’t help with it either). Here, it’s an additional $29.99. Is it worth it?

In a Nutshell

Yeah, It’s absolutely essential. That screen has absolutely no protection whatsoever. With the iPhone, you have whatever magical substance between the LCD and the world around it (which is why I was okay with not having a case for it… until I dropped it, but there’s a story there… moving on). With this cover, I feel much secure in knowing that the top and bottom of the Kindle is safe and sound.

So here comes the pics. In the same way as the Kindle was packaged, you have to tear open the box using the neat tab marked “Once upon a time…”

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For the Kindle 2 redesign, they made sure to incorporate notches to the unit itself, so that it would work perfectly with the cover.

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I loved the instruction insert. Very clear. You first insert the Kindle into the lower curved hook, rotate it to be parallel to the cover, then use the top latch (which retracts to its original position) locks the Kindle in place.

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The trouble I had was with the lack of any attachment on the right side of the Kindle. The hooks in the binding of the cover are strong, but fairly thin. This picture above shows how far the back cover will open up, if left hanging. I fear for the notches on the Kindle 2 might get ruined if held like this for a while. Of course, this hopefully never happens, as you will always be holding the whole case firmly… but it’s not a big deal.

Minus this single downside, everything else is amazing. The leather cover and the soft inside feels wonderful. The fact that the front cover can be folded behind the back cover like a magazine is great. The added thickness and traction actually makes the whole Kindle reading experience a bit better (although, I do like to take it out of the cover now and then, and feel how amazingly light it actually is). The cover also makes it very easy to just close up the “book” and go.

If I’ve somehow convinced you to buy the cover, here’s the link: Amazon Kindle 2 Leather Cover

I still have a couple more Kindle reviews left in me: one general one about the Kindle itself, and at least another about how Kindle is going to change my reading habits. Stay tuned for those.

Kindle 2 Review: The Unboxing

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I was delightfully surprised by the unboxing process. I definitely felt like it added to the whole experience.

I have lots of pics from my awesome iPhone camera (sorry, I don’t own any others… photogs, please don’t hurt me). Thanks to Flickr for footing the bandwidth.

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Just as I gave on UPS delivering this thing on time before the end of my lunch break (I kid you not, I was reaching for the doorknob as I was leaving my apartment), I heard the knock on my door.

A few unboxing pictures had made it earlier today, however, I didn’t see any pictures peeling open the box, so I was excited to tear it open.

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Inside were two more boxes, one for the Kindle and the first party case I bought.

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In my hurry to open the box, I was annoyed at how difficult it would be to open the box. The flaps were glued shut. Then I took a deep breath, calmed myself down a bit, and looked for another way in. Then, I realized that there was a nice tab opening on the side, with the words “Once upon a time…” written on it. Definitely a nice touch.

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Inside, I saw a lovely black embossing of letters feeing into the plastic compartment that held the Kindle.

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Again, with the same tab action. After that, you see the innards. Basically, it comes with the Kindle itself, a quick start guide and a USB cable with an adaptor.

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That’s the shot of the stuff behind the Kindle.

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But wait, here’s the moment where I was in awe of the whole unboxing experience.

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It looks like it’s a protective plastic sticker with an even quicker start guide printed on it. I removed the sticker… and the guide was still there! Oh, you lovely e-ink! Even as I use it right now, I can’t believe I’m not using a lot of (if not, at all) power to have the characters stay on screen (minus the wireless, of course).

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Happy little loading screen later, I’m in business.

More on this, as I find time to blog. And here’s an affiliate link, just in case I’ve somehow made you buy the thing. Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

More to come, with time and use.

Kindle 2: Initial Impressions

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I don’t have pics. I’ll post them up later tonight.

Packaging is great. I like the whole “Once Upon A Time…” opening strips on both the Kindle and the cover accessory. The rest of the packaging has a nice mixture of cool and environmentally-friendly.

Mind explosion #1: I open the Kindle, and I see a nice diagram about what I should do first on the sticker covering the face of the Kindle. Of course, I remove this sticker after I plug it into the wall, and those same directions are there. I did a double take. Ah ha, I figured out. It’s this awesome e-ink business. Oh, you trixy Kindle.

Another cool thing is that whenever you turn off the Kindle, it defaults to a portrait of the writer. Last time it was Poe. This time, it was Twain. I wonder how many of these portraits exist.

The new cover design. I hear the first gen Kindle’s kept falling out of their covers (which was included back then… not so anymore. These revisions are a bit better, although it seems like one more latch of the right side of the Kindle would have been nice. The Kindle is only attached at the binding, which might cause the two tiny little slits on the Kindle to break if opened improperly. You’ll see what I mean when I post some pics.

The size. Much smaller than I thought… then again, I’ve never seen these in real life. Not a good or a bad thing, just a thing

One HUGE disappointment: responsiveness of the UI. The page turning is fine. It’s a tiny tiny bit slower than what I’m used to, going from page to page on a normal book… but when you start messing with that 5-way button, the lag is ridiculous. I feel like this is a firmware issue, and not a limitation of the device… but it does bother me a little bit. However, it’s not missing my clicks, so I can just hit it 5 separate times to have the cursor go down 5 lines… it just takes a little bit of time for the Kindle to catch up.

Yeah, I know. No pics, or it didn’t happen. Blah.

Goodbye Dreamhost.com, Soon?

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It’s been a fun ride. I love your company’s willingness to be open, with your dreamhoststatus.com page and your awesome blog. However, I can’t take the recent flurry of downtimes, which are just causing me quite a bit of pain.

I’ve been using a service called Montastic to track down time. In the past two months, my site has been down not once, not twice, but eight times (and even, two and three times on the same day).

This is from my gmail account. I get emails from Montastic when the server goes down. And when I do get the email, I go check instantly.

Downtime.

Some of these were hiccups, with it possibly being Montastic’s fault. Though, often they were huge downtimes that really hit my traffic during peak hours. By the way, my web server name was erebus, and I can’t even find postings about it in the past two months on the dreamhost status page.

I can’t really trust Dreamhost like I did back in the days when my web presence wasn’t very important to me. I think it’s still a great starter web host, hiding a lot of the menial tasks of setting up a web server… it’s just that I feel as though I need to move up to something a little bit more… expensive?

I’m thinking Media Temple. I might just go all out and start using Slicehost as my main blog and dev server. I might throw in some Amazon S3 for making my site even faster. Anyone have any ideas?

Edit: Looks like I may possibly be sticking with Dreamhost. I went and played around with MediaTemple for a night, and I didn’t like what I saw. The UI isn’t very clean, as much as Dreamhost was. Maybe I should talk to Dreamhost directly to get a response on these down times…

Delayed Ion Drum Rockers From Amazon

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I was sad to find out that my order of the sweet Rock Band drum set has been delayed this morning. /cry.

They were supposed to get here today, but it looks like their estimation has moved to the 23rd.

This really puts a damper on my weekend rocking plans. I guess it just means I have to go rock out somewhere else. Through sweet code.

Face-melting solo? Check.

Small posts feel so weird. It’s like in that land between Twitterville and Essaytropolis. It’s like I’m on the highway, with a blown tire, not knowing if you walk one way or the other.

EDIT: Looks like there is some discrepancy as to how Amazon figures out the priority for shipping these things. I ordered mine on the 20th of August, and by the looks of it, no one else on the Rock Band forum had ordered these before me… but yet, these people are getting it earlier. Called Amazon, and they’ll be getting stuff in stock on Friday. This is still garbage though. I should call again and ask for a discount.

Rock Band 2 Is Going To Eat Me Alive

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Harmonix, you brilliant purveyor of delicious time “occupying” goodness.

You guessed it, it came. Even though I read all these horror stories about Amazon being bad on game pre-orders, I knew my Store In The Clouds would provide.

I’ve been able to tear myself from this amazing gaming development feat to bring you this quick review of the whole shebang.

  • While I had owned and played through the Wii version of the game, I don’t really have a good reference point to compare it with its first revision, since the Wii dropped a lot of features. The lack of DLC as well as character creation/editing might have really angered some Wii owners, but it didn’t mind me.
    • DLC: I was fine with getting them in disc form. Heck, I could just rent them using Gamefly anyway. And besides, I love sightreading songs: It gives me quite the rush. (I guess I could have somehow threw in some pun with Rush, but I refrained.)
    • Character Creation: Funner than I imagined. I just like to play the songs, but being able to play dress up… but most importantly the guitars. I might find this more fun because I’m currently in the market for my first electric guitar, though.
  • The UI is slick. I love the revamped song selection screen. I might estimate that you can now see twice as many songs or more, with even more information on difficulty of the song across all instruments. Having the album art also helps to identify the song. If I feel nerdy enough, I’ll tear through this UI.
  • HOPOs (Hammer On’s and Pull Off’s) seem much more responsive than Rock Band “1″. But I feel this way about Guitar Hero 3′s ease of HOPOing vs GH1 and GH2′s near impossibility of it. I kinda prefer more ridiculous fretboarding than strumming: Makes me feel more like a rock star.
  • Song Selection: I like. I feel like there were more contemporary songs that I knew in RB2 than RB1. And with DLC, I’ll be able to pick and choose. As always, a couple songs will piss me off, but that’s expected.
  • Nintpicking, do you actually gain a tiny tiny bit of Overdrive as you whammy through a sustained white note while already being in Overdrive?? I don’t think this was the case in Rock Band 1, where your Overdrive bar would not increase or decrease.

Okay, that’s that. I hope to not touch this game until my drums arrive. I haven’t said a word about playing Rock Band 1, though… time to go unlock some Achievements.

What An Achievement Whore.

I know. And I just found out today Stack Overflow has badges, rewarding users for active usage of the system. So very interesting. Feels a little gimmicky, but hey, still a cool idea. Does anyone know if Atwood and Spolsky explained the reasoning behind this feature on their podcast? Can someone point me to it?

Okay, Back To The Verk Verk.

Day 3: Regroup

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After a normal sleep cycle, I returned to my computer to start cracking.

Of course, life threw its usual curveballs. After church, I had realized that my printer was being wonky. I also realized that NewEgg’s return policy on broken items sucks (you have to pay for shipping for sending it back), which makes me not want to order from them ever again unless it’s something like an.. xbox live 12+1 month card. (Which I didn’t get from them, because buy.com has it better. DO IT.) I’m probably continue to order from Amazon… I love everything about this company, from Prime down to its amazing return policy.

That took a while, then I had a couple hours of fun on the guitar as well as the 360. Eh, it was bound to happen.

Productivity

Then I buckled down. I realized all the physical needs of a human being, including sleeping and eating, really gets in the way of doing some productive work. I worked on and am still working on organizing all the web “properties” I have. I’m talking email addresses to AIM screen names to… you guessed it, domain names. Yesterday night, I did something I should have done a while back.

I finally bought joshk.im. Currently, I’m beta testing something called SweetCron, which is perfect for the purpose of that site. I have this strange feeling this might be a project I look forward to committing some changes to. Yes, even though it’s PHP… but it’s so well written! So pretty! I’ve never seen CodeIgniter code before, and it looks very very clean. I’m only used to seeing the insanity that is Symfony. It might just be that the guy who’s writing this thing, Yong Fook, is quite good. It was interesting to find out that SweetCron was going open source just as I found his blog a couple months ago. I really do hope for great things, if he’s reading this.

But alas, I may do something else with my newly acquired shiny domain name. I’m fresh out of ideas at this point, but I really wanted it to be a site for just that.

So What’s The Next Project?

I’m still figuring this out. I hope to have a list of my requirements for this project. Here’s a preliminary list:

  • Must not depend on advertising as the main stream of revenue
    • Basically comes down to freemiums or charge per use.
  • Must use Rails (if I’m doing a web project)
    • This is to learn Rails, btw… I’m not saying Rails is the end all for web projects.
  • Must be doable by “myself”
    • I’m sure I’ll be hitting up people left and right for help, but largely, it has to be my own.
    • It could be a source of pride, but I need to make sure I can do something on my own.
  • Must not neglect health of body and mind
    • This is like… uber important. Must maintain some kind of healthy habits.
  • Must blog daily progress reports, like this one
    • Accountability: So people can call me out. Important thing is to stay truthful.
    • You’re going to see lots of FAIL on this blog starting from… before this blog started to the day I die. I hope to see more WINs in the days to come, though.
    • Maybe, possibly, someone else is trying to do something like I’m doing. Maybe by doing this, I can find someone else who’s trying to do it his or her own way.

Sidepoint: Blogging Schedule

So I’m looking back on February 2008′s posts, and it seems like I stopped blogging like a madman after I found Twitter. Then this blog turned into, for lack of a better phrase, a Twitter archive. But before then, when I actually contributed to the world with some meaningful posts on the web… ugh… 2.0 market and on life in general, I would have multiple posts in various stages of completion.

I’m back at that stage. I have screenshots and halfway finished posts all over the place. I may need to slow down a bit, but I feel so energized.

I want to have these daily blog entries about the status of the “project”, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be doing some other random updates along the way. I have a feeling something about Rock Band 2 is going to get posted. Effing Braid needs to get a good review also. So many lovely post ideas…

Completely Random

Man, what the heck did I do with all this time I’m using up for the blog? I really have no idea. Must have been watching and playing things… Hmm. If I could have tracked all that lost time… but really, what’s the point then? What’s the point of being meta with things that you can’t change if you’ve already changed and are looking back?

Ah, the meta-life post. [Creates a new draft] I’ve deleted and rewritten this post so many times, physically, electronically, and mentally. ARGH.