Meador Manor

Kindle 2, where are you?

Posted on February 10, 2009 by Granger Meador

Kindle 2

Amazon announced the Kindle 2 yesterday, and once I read the specs I hopped over to the piranha-infested place to put in my order. Since I’m a happy owner of a Kindle 1, I get bumped up in the waiting list and should receive mine in about two weeks.

The new model is thinner and has better page control buttons, improved battery life, more built-in memory (but no longer has a SD card slot for expansion), sixteen shades of gray instead of four, and can read a book aloud to you (!).

The last feature could be intriguing for those times my eyes are tired but my mind remains restless. If the computer voice isn’t too bad, it sure would be cheaper than audiobooks. But Audible’s narrators shouldn’t worry – a good audio acting job sure brings a book to life.

The old navigation with the clickwheel and cool “glitter ribbon” along the side is replaced with a movable cursor and clicking joystick. Hopefully the improved E Ink display is speedy enough that I won’t miss the glitter ribbon. One report says the movable cursor is now practical because different parts of the display can now refresh, rather than having to redraw the whole thing for each change.

I’m most looking forward to the new page forward and back buttons, which are reduced to a more manageable size and click inward instead of outward. So you should be able to pick the Kindle 2 up by its edges without accidentally flipping the pages. Of course, I just stuck a rubber band under the Kindle 1’s right-side page forward lever to deal with that, but that makeshift solution had to be adjusted now and then.

As for the Kindle 1, one of my closest friends is a librarian and I’ll be de-registering my Kindle 1 and giving it to her once I get the Kindle 2 set up. I’ve bought and read 24 books on my Kindle 1 since I bought it last June, and any entries in my existing Amazon library can always be downloaded to the new unit. If I kept both Kindles Amazon can now synchronize their internal libraries. I’ve also read several free e-Books on my Kindle which I downloaded from publishers and places like Project Gutenberg and manybooks.net. Those have no digital rights management or copyright infringement issues, so I can give those away and keep them for myself at the same time.

Many people disliked the leatherette cover for the Kindle 1, but I loved it. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is doing a Steve Jobs this time around: he introduced the Kindle 2 with a Jobs-like presentation, complete with special guest (author Stephen King instead of some iTunes singer). And this time around he’ll sell you a leather cover for the Kindle 2 for an extra $30 and Amazon also offers a bunch of other even more ex$pensive covers, a la the accessories at an Apple iPod store.

Posted in technology | 2 Comments

Doubling Up on the 5th Dimension

Posted on February 1, 2009 by Granger Meador

Imagining the Tenth Dimension, split into parts one and two, is a video explaining the ideas set forth in Rob Bryanton’s book of the same name.

Posted in physics, video | Leave a comment

Charting Life and Death

Posted on January 31, 2009 by Granger Meador

Survival Chart

How much time do I have left?

Charles Platt is posting some interesting charts over at Boing Boing. I can’t say I’m surprised to see that over half of my time on Earth is gone. Better make the best of it!

Posted in random | Leave a comment

Facebook Acquaintances

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Granger Meador

Facebook versus Sex

Molly Schoemann (and no, I have no idea who she is, but that’s the internet!) has posted a funny and cogent take on the downside of Facebook. The site has swollen to well over 100 million accounts and consequently the number of “friends” one can accumulate is becoming problematic.

As a high school teacher (who has to be careful not to post anything on Facebook or this website that he doesn’t mind a complete stranger seeing), I have already accumulated over 400 Facebook Friends (FF). The vast majority of them are former students, mostly from the past few years, whom I know only from the context of my classroom. Most of the rest of my FF are merely acquaintances, and my closest friends don’t even use the service…at least not yet.

I should note that I do like, very much, how the service lets me easily and casually reconnect with former students and various acquaintances when they wish to communicate with me. When a someone pings me, it is great that I can quickly find out if they are still in school/which school/what major, what sort of work they do, whether they are married, etc. So I do NOT want to lose any FF or limit the growth of my friends lists. But I dearly wish the service made better and easier use of those friends lists.

Those lists have let me categorize my FF as students, coworkers, etc. but Facebook needs to make it easy to set my News Feed to default to a selected list. At least for now I have to click on several settings to filter the feed each time I visit the site. I also would like a simpler yet subtler interface to tailor what can be viewed on my own account for different friend lists. The current privacy settings are too blunt, awkward, and limiting.

Some of my former students who are exploring the ups and downs of college life are already complaining about how their parents or their friends’ parents want to be their FF and how that alters the dynamics of the site. And lord knows they presumably would rather not have their old physics teacher scanning their walls or scrutinizing their photos, yet many don’t appear to be implementing privacy filters based on friend lists. I suspect Facebook could go the way of MySpace and lose some of its core audience to a rival service if it doesn’t implement a better system for filtering different types of friends and allowing one to easily present different personas to different audiences.

UPDATE: 3 months later, Facebook implemented a new home page that allowed users to change the default page to the newsfeed from a specific group of friends. Problem solved!