// October 2nd, 2011 // No Comments » // My Ramblings
I’ve migrated my Google Reader to a new account. They had a simply to use export/import process, but it doesn’t bring over past shared items.
If you are interested here are the old items, and here are the new.
// September 22nd, 2010 // No Comments » // My Ramblings
I’ve had the new Kindle for about a month now and I love it. I get more reading done on a Kindle then I ever did before owning one. I wouldn’t trade it for an iPad because that wouldn’t get nearly as much reading done. The device has a great constrast ratio, it handles PDF’s well, and I love the ability to highlight and take notes anywhere. The Kindle has fueled my passion for buying my e-books elsewhere though.. Amazon makes great hardware, has excellent prices, offers an easy to use website, and provides superb support so I’d love to give them my money for ebooks. They don’t quite get it though..
You see, I love O’Reilly books and have recently started to really enjoy using oreilly.com. It’s quickly becoming my preferred book seller for a number of reasons:
However, there is no Whispernet syncing when you buy your books elsewhere. That leads me to my recommendation.. Allow consumers to use cloud based storage for as much content as we want (at a cost per gb) and you simply provide the logic to sync books, the last read page, notes, highlights, and so on. If you truly believe in competition let us pick between Dropbox, Amazon S3, RackSpace Cloud Files, or even a simple FTP/SCP location. I want to have my content available where ever I go, and whenever I want. If there were open standards for this type of thing this wouldn’t be an issue. When I click the Buy button at any e-book sellers website I should be able to send that file to my preferred storage provider and have it instantly appear on my device.
Businesses should be thinking about long term profits. Long term open standards win and consumers will get what they want. If you fail to deliver pieces of the puzzle than a competitor eventually will fill that want. It’s not hard to understand… Some day Amazon will get it, drop the DRM, and add some of these missing features. If they don’t someone else will step on their market share and do it for them.
// July 5th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // My Ramblings
After spending the past month debating if I wanted to pay $500 to buy an iPad I ended up deciding against it. The iPad has an incredible looking screen, but it seemed to be lacking some really key features for me:
Instead of buying an iPad I went in the other direction and picked up an Amazon Kindle for $89. On July 1st Amazon cut it’s pricing of the Kindle (3G – world data connectivity) to $189. I also remembered that Audible.com was running a promotion to get $100 off select devices that could play back their audiobooks. Being owned by Amazon.com one of those devices is a Kindle (sorry, the iPad isn’t on the list). I love audiobooks for when I’m on the road and when I’m at work so joining Audible.com seemed like a great idea, and this pushed me to finally do it.
If you want to take advantage of the same deal you should join Audible.com’s Gold program here:
http://www.audible.com/deviceoffer/
It’s $14.95 a month, but you get one free audiobook each month. It also comes with the digital edition of the Wall Street Journal, which is nice. That more than justifies the membership price for me, but it it doesn’t for you then you may want to pass on this deal.
Next browse over to Amazon and pick up the Kindle with world wide connectivity here: Kindle Wireless Reading Device, Free 3G
Make sure you enter the $100 off code that Audible.com gives you when you check out and bam, you have a new Kindle for $89 with free two day shipping. If you’re like me and have Bing Cashback laying around you can get it for even less by choosing to receive that with Amazon Payments. Hopefully there are other audio book lovers out there that will appreciate this post. It seems like the $100 off promotion is hidden away.. Most podcasts will encourage you to join Audible.com, but with their code. This blows their other promotions out of the water from my perspective.
Enjoy!
// September 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // My Ramblings
This evening I migrated my websites from the SliceHost VPS that I’ve been using for the last year to a RackSpace cloud server. In reality these are pretty much identical products with different pricing and branding. In my case I don’t push a lot of bandwidth from this site so the RackSpace offering will actually be slightly cheaper. It was largely to satisfy the inner geek within and to see what they’ve put together to compete with Amazon EC2.
// October 27th, 2008 // No Comments » // My Ramblings
If you managed to stumble across Ebersviller.com then congratulations. This domain is primarily being used to provide email addresses to family members. However, you will also find my various ramblings and notes on this page. As a Windows and Linux Systems Administrator who dabbles in .NET and various scripting languages I often have the need to document my latest findings. I can’t promise that it’ll be all that interesting, but if it happens to help you that’s great. It’s my scratch pad of notes, but made public so others may be able to benefit from my findings.
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