Instead of going with one of the Smashing Magazine Wallpaper Calendars for this month I decided to make my own. Photo Credit. Download
Josh Betz
Made with 🧀 in Madison
Made with 🧀 in Madison
Instead of going with one of the Smashing Magazine Wallpaper Calendars for this month I decided to make my own. Photo Credit. Download
As many people know if you watch the smmas podcast, I recently got a Kindle 3. I haven’t been a huge reader. There have been a few books in the past year or so that I’ve taken time to read, but most of the reading that I do is on the web. Now, if I knew that wasn’t going to change, I probably wouldn’t have bought a Kindle, but there has been a small list of books growing over the past 6 months or so that I want to read, with more coming in the next 6 months. I also want to read more books in general and figured this would be a pretty good way to do it.
The first thing that I notice when I hand someone the device, even before commenting on how small it is, they ask if the words are real or if there’s something taped to the screen. I know exactly what they mean because I wondered the same thing when I first opened the Kindle and saw the Amazon Kindle screen. At first I thought there was a protector taped to the screen like you get with other types of devices. People are usually amazing when I then take the Kindle out of sleep mode and show them them that it is actually just what the screen looks like.
The letters are so smooth on the screen they almost look fake. It’s hard to believe any hand-held device could be so easy to read.
There are several ways to get content on the device. The first, and most obvious way, is the Kindle Store. I believe Kindle books are in a proprietary Amazon format, but that doesn’t really matter because I don’t know of any way to get the books out of the Kindle. You can, however, install the Kindle application on any iOS, Android, Mac, or PC, as well as being able to sync with any other Kindle that you might own, so it’s not as though any books you purchase are stuck on this Kindle. They are tied to your Amazon account and are available in any Kindle or Kindle app. One of the really nice things about the Kindle store is that you can try any of the content before you actually purchase it. For books, you can send a sample to your Kindle and for Newspapers and Magazines you get to try the first 14 days for free.
Along with the Kindle store, you can also put any .mobi books on the Kindle. This includes all of Project Gutenberg and other sources like A Book Apart. I did notice that there’s a large collection of public domain books available from the Kindle store, so I haven’t had a chance to actually grab anything from Project Gutenberg yet. I did buy a couple of books from A Book Apart though, and was able to email the books to my Kindle, which worked great.
Before now, I haven’t been a user of Instapaper, but it works great with the Kindle and will automatically send unread Instapaper items weekly or daily just as a newspaper. It has been a great way to read some of the news that I’m not willing to read on my LCD monitor, or a good way to read when I’m out away from my computer or on the road.
Overall, it’s nice to be able to carry around this super thin, super light device with a full library of books, newspapers, magazines, and web articles, and be able to read all of that anywhere in book-like quality and readability.
So I got a Solid State Drive for my computer this holiday season and wanted to do a completely fresh install of Snow Leopard since it’s been quite some time since the last time I did one of those. So instead of transferring the old data and apps over I downloaded everything and started from scratch. I was thinking ahead when I did this and wrote down the apps that I knew I’d have to install. The following is a list of apps that I couldn’t live without.
Also, the OCZ Vertex 2 is excellent. I’ve got a three year old macbook and it’s zippy again. This is easily the best thing you can do for a performance upgrade on any system.
Anyway, this list:
Soon we’ll be seeing WordPress 3.1 and since I’ve installed the beta on my blog network, I thought I’d share some of the new features that I’m a fan of. Keep in mind, this is in a multiple user environment so some of the stuff that I’m talking about here is specific to that. I think most of it should apply to everyone though.
The first thing you’ll notice is the “admin bar”. If you’ve ever used wordpress.com, you’ll probably recognize it from there — although it’s not exactly the same. Since I’ve got multisite running on my network there’s a list of “My Sites”. It also gives you a link to your profile, along with dropdowns for “Add New”, “Appearance”, and a “Comments” tab. They take advantage of the new shortlinks api introduced in WordPress 3.0 by giving a short link tab on some posts and pages.
In a multisite environment, the Network Admin tab on the left has been removed with a new link in the top right that will take you to a special Network Admin dashboard. This is pretty much all the same stuff that you’d get in the “Super Admin” options panel in previous versions. You can manage the sites, themes, plugins, all the normal stuff you’d expect there.
We’ve had custom taxonomies for a while now and 3.0 gave us custom post types, but in 3.1 we get archives for the custom post types. The work around for this previously was to create a page template with a custom query and use that as your archive page. Now we get a new set of templates to work with archive-post_type.php where post_type is the name of the custom post type.
Those are some of the big ones, but here’s the rest of the list from the Beta 1 announcement:
I’ve never done this before, but I think New Year’s resolutions might not be such a bad idea. And if I’m going to set goals for the year, I might as well write them somewhere so I don’t forget what they are. So these, in no special order are my New Year’s resolutions for 2011.
