Kindle

Before my trip to Asia I got a second-generation Amazon Kindle, which had just been released. I was too busy to write up a review at the time, but maybe that's just as well since now I have the additional perspective of having owned it for several months.

Kindle Review

Pros

• I got it explicitly for travel reading since it's so small and light. It's about the size of a paperback book, except thinner - it's less than 1 cm thick (a little more with the case attached). It's a lot more convenient than carrying around multiple books on a long vacation. You can load it up with a whole library of books and have a lot more variety than you would otherwise.
• The battery really does last a very long time. Since it only uses battery power when updating the screen to flip pages, it can go for weeks between recharges, unlike a phone or a laptop which would die after only a couple of hours. I used it extensively on a 15 hour flight to Beijing and barely any of the battery power had been consumed at all.
• You can load it up with public domain books for free. Internet people have converted pretty much every significant book published more than 70 years ago to Kindle-compatible formats, and it's really easy to subscribe to these "book feeds". I have loaded mine up with tons of books I've been meaning to read for a long time but have never gotten around to - Thoreau, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Verne, Tolstoy, etc.. Obviously you can also read all of these books for free on the internet, but then you're tied to a computer screen or a regular laptop with poor battery life.
• When you plug it into a computer, it just shows up as a 1 GB USB thumb drive. One less gadget to worry about carrying around. This has already been handy a couple of times.
• It's easy to change the text size. Unlike a real book, if you feel like holding it farther away from your face, you can make the text bigger. Or if you feel like holding it closer, you can shrink the text and get more on one page.
• It has a built in Oxford dictionary - just move the cursor over a word and click to get the definition. Very handy for books with lots of uncommon words.
• You can buy books from Amazon right on the device and start reading instantly - no need to drive to the store or wait 3 days for them to be delivered. Most books are $9.99 or less - even the new hardcover books which would regularly be $19.99. So if you buy a lot of those you can actually save money.
• There's a companion iPhone app on which you can also read your Amazon-purchased books (but not public domain books). They both keep in sync via the internet, so you can easily change devices and pick up right where you left off.

Cons

• The screen size is pretty small - the actual screen is about 4 inches across. It's particularly annoying because there's a large 1 inch bezel on all sides of the screen. It would have been a lot better if this extra space could have been used for the screen. Of course, only weeks after I bought it Amazon announced the "Kindle DX" with a large 10 inch screen. I haven't used one of those in person, but it actually looks a little too big, particularly for carrying around while traveling around or commuting.
• It's very difficult to "flip through" a book and search for something, like you can easily do with a real book. It takes about 1 second to flip a page, which is OK when reading regularly, but it makes it pretty much impossible to casually flip back a few pages to quickly re-read something, or pick up a reference book and look up some information.  There's a search function and a little keyboard, but they get to be infuriating if you're trying to do anything much more complicated than jumping to chapter headings.
• You can't give a book to a friend (obviously). I read an interesting book about a topic I know a friend is interested in, but too bad: no book borrowing (or re-selling).
• The text layout abilities of the Kindle are fairly limited. If a book uses any formatting much more complicated than a typical novel, it's probably going to get munged and look wrong, particularly if the book was "ported" poorly to e-book format. This is all doubly true for any complicated illustrations or charts, some of which are rendered completely illegible.
• There's a serious design flaw in the way the case connects to the device, as noted by a class-action lawsuit. It's extremely easy to get the case into a position where it will bend the plastic, and eventually break the screen. Because of this problem I always remove the case before using it:

Overall I think it's quite an interesting device, especially for people who like both gadgets and reading. However, its limitations can be quite infuriating at times, and I don't think that it's ready for the mainstream market yet. These problems will no doubt be corrected fairly soon by newer devices. E-Books and digital distribution are definitely going to be the way of the future. Hopefully the publishing industry will understand this fact better than the music and film industries do.

Personally, I'll probably use the Kindle for travel reading, fiction novels, and "pop" books that you read straight through once and never again (Dan Brown, Malcom Gladwell, etc). It doesn't work very well for more substantive books or programming & technical reference books, so I'll probably continue to get "dead tree" versions of those.

Another Dead Laptop HD

On Thanksgiving day my laptop decided to boot up with the "flashing question mark folder" error of doom.  No amount of recovery tricks helped - it looks like the disk just mechanically failed.

The laptop hadn't been bumped around too much, but it did get its fair share of everyday jostling. Still, failing after one year still seems pretty bad (of course it was just over one year, and the warranty was for 1 year). It reminded me of the recent CMU study which showed that real disk failure rates are 15 times what vendors claim..

Fortunately I had properly backed up all of my data and didn't lose anything important, other than 3 hours of work since my last CVS commit. Unfortunately I hadn't actually backed up the entire system, so after I replaced the disk with a spare I had to reinstall all the software and re-tweak all of the settings, which took several hours. Lesson learned: I have now applied the hack to enable Time Machine backup to network shares and am fully backed up.  Unfortunately, Time Machine is basically incompatible with FileVault (unless you log out and back in every day), which sort of makes it impossible to either back up or encrypt your important stuff (and on laptops especially, you want both to work).

Anyway, my next laptop will definitely have one of the new Intel SSDs, which should theoretically be much more resilient to mechanical failure since they have no moving parts. They haven't been on the market long enough to get any good reliability data, but it would be hard to do worse than the Seagate drives I've had recently.

Computer Graveyard

A local recycling center is having a special tomorrow, with free recycling of old computers. I have a few old ones lying around, so tonight I decided to drag them all out and get them all ready to go.

I was surprised at how much old computer junk I have accumulated over the past few years. It's really sort of embarrassing to consider how many physical resources were used up to manufacture these things, and now I am getting rid of them. Fortunately they will be recycled as much as possible and the nasty pollutants won't go into a landfill.

It's probably a bit late for this, but if you see anything you would want before tomorrow afternoon, let me know (Seattle-area people only).

The pile includes:

• 3 old desktop PCs
  • An old 200(?) MHz Pentium I computer which my brother found when some local business went bankrupt (If I remember correctly).
  • A 500 MHz Pentium III desktop - the first computer I was able to buy and build for myself in high school, after saving for years.
  • A 1.8 GHz Pentium IV desktop - the computer I built while in college.
• 3 laptops
  • A 500 MHz PIII Dell Inspiron - my first laptop (now dead)
  • A G4 12" Apple PowerBook, with bad hard-disk controller (dead)
  • Another Dell laptop, this time a P4, with a bad motherboard  (dead)
• G4 Mac Mini (dead integrated power supply)
• One extra original XBox (functional - I randomly won it in a contest, keeping the other one)
• One dead Nintendo Wii (killed by my homemade component cable)
• 3 CRT monitors
  • 15" Gateway (bad condition, but functional)
  • 17" Sony Trinitron (good condition)
  • 21" Sony Trinitron (functional, except for a big gash across the glass screen - I filed a BBB complaint against UPS and then got it for free)
• 2 identical Samsung DVD players (the first one got lost by FedEx for 4 months, during which time I had complained and gotten another one for free)
• Bunch of keyboards

Now that I have started preparing to get rid of all the computers, it's taking a surprisingly long time to shred all the hard-disks with a Knoppix CD. I should have started this earlier..

Server noise

Unfortunately, after a couple of months of operation, my Windows Home Server has started to make a lot of noise. The case fans were always pretty loud, but now the hard disk has started making a high-pitched whining noise. Normally this wouldn't be too annoying since you could eventually get used to it, but the noises fluctuate in pitch at seemingly random intervals. This is irritating since you can't habituate to it and ignore it.

My first thought was to put it in the garage with a little Linksys WiFi bridge:

This worked pretty well and it certainly took care of the noise problem. Unfortunately it was a little far away from the AP, so the wireless connection went out every once in a while when doing things like using the microwave. It wouldn't normally really be noticeable, but it interrupted things like streaming music to the Squeezebox.

Another problem with the garage setup was that an outlet shortage forced me to run a power extension cable across the ceiling on a water pipe, right next to a fire sprinkler:

This was a disaster waiting to happen in more ways than one, and it also irked my inner-Electrical Engineer.

Now I'm trying a new solution, which is to stick the server in the laundry closet. This looks like it's working better so far (it's also a lot closer to the AP), but I'm waiting to see if it might overheat the closet or computer when the dryer is running.

RAM Upgrade

One of the problems with the HP MediaSmart windows home server is that it only comes with 512 MB of RAM by default. This is probably sufficient for a file server, but it gets pretty slow when you load it up with other stuff and try browsing the web. Here's my Task Manager results after two weeks of normal usage:

The way to check if your computer doesn't have enough RAM is to compare the Physical Memory and Commit Charge numbers. In this case, the server has 512 MB of RAM (Physical Memory = 490956 K), but the operating system has currently allocated about 545 MB of memory (Commit Charge = 558872 K), which means that it's 6.5% over-allocated even when it's idle and doing nothing.

The 'Peak' Commit Charge reflects the heaviest usage the system has seen since it was booted, which probably happened when I was using Firefox. In this case it was about 753 MB (770832 K), or 241 MB (47%) over-allocated. When this happens the system grinds to a halt as it tries to move unused blocks of memory to the hard disk in order to keep the 'Available' physical memory (98672 K here) high enough for programs to run smoothly. These are the kinds of slowdowns we want to avoid since they are the ones that happen when you are actually trying to use the computer.

Fortunately these days RAM is cheap and a 2GB stick can be had on NewEgg for only $50, which should be more than enough for the foreseeable future. I was surprised at how easy it is to upgrade the RAM in the HP server - it just required removing a couple of screws and sliding the motherboard out of the bottom of the case:

With the new RAM the system is running a lot faster, but the bottleneck is now the relatively weak 1.8 GHz AMD Sempron processor, which doesn't appear to be readily upgradeable. One of the reasons to go with a Sempron is the power/heat savings, so it's probably an acceptable tradeoff at this point.

Dead cable modem

While I was gone on my brief Christmas vacation over the last week, my computer back at home disappeared from the internet - the IP address did not respond to any connection attempts at all.

Naturally I feared the worst, namely that some thieves broke into my apartment and stole all my stuff, or something like that. Fortunately, when I got home I discovered that the cable modem had simply stopped working, and everything else was fine.

There may have been a power outage or some other electrical anomaly while I was gone, because the cable modem seemed to be fried. When I plugged it in, all the LED lights turned on but it didn't seem to do anything else. I searched around on the internet but couldn't really determine what these symptoms meant, or how to fix the problem (for the reference of anybody searching for the same thing in the future, it's a Terayon TJ 715x cable modem).

What happened next was the most amazing thing I have experienced all week. I thought for sure that I would have to call Comcast, argue with them ("yes, I tried rebooting the computer.."), make an appointment for two weeks in the future, which they would be late for, causing me to miss work, etc. (being without internet access the whole time, of course).

What actually happened was that I called Comcast, immediately got a real person on the other end, explained the problem, and got a maintenance appointment scheduled for "right away". A half hour later, the guy showed up, swapped out my modem with a new one, and now everything works again. In total, it took about 45 minutes.

So I am pleasantly surprised that Comcast had such good customer service and I was able to get the problem fixed so quickly. Of course, this doesn't excuse them blocking our, uh, bible, downloads, but there has definitely been a lot of improvement since my last encounter with them.