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.

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.

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..

My final EE project in undergrad was to build an embedded computer system from scratch, and my team decided to build a digital video camera, called "BenderCam" (Bender didn't really have anything to do with anything, other than that one guy just really liked Futurama).

Here's a picture of the final system:

The circuit board on the left has the main CPU circuit, which was composed of a Motorola 68HC11 microcontroller, a 32K ROM with the system software, 32K of runtime RAM, and 512K of auxiliary VRAM. It also has a Spartan II FPGA with some DACs that ran the VGA interface, as well as the RS-232 serial interface to a computer workstation. It's connected via an old IDE cable to the second circuit board on the right that has the CCD video sensor and another FPGA to drive the video capture.

Here's a picture of the back of the main board:

This was mostly hand wired by me, which almost caused me to go crazy since every wire had to be perfect or else the chips could all fry. The wires at the top are for the CPU and its two 16-bit buses, and the nasty mess at the bottom is the 24-bit buses for the VRAM double-buffer. If I had to do it all again I would almost certainly go with a PCB rather than hand-wiring the whole thing.

The system captured 640x480 video in black & white (we used a CCD sensor from a security camera) and displayed it on a VGA monitor. After some tricky optimizations in the firmware, I was able to get the framerate up to about 15 frames per second, though the bandwidth at that rate was too high for the hand-wiring to handle, and EM interference started to introduce random bit errors into the video stream. Here's a picture of it taking a video of us taking a picture of it:

The CCD sensor is the thing with the electrical tape all over it, to prevent light from leaking in. On top it has a lens that we cracked out of an old dead cellphone (high quality all around).

The microcontroller also hooked up to a computer via a serial connection which could be used to download new firmware as we were debugging it, as well as upload pictures back to the computer. The connection was only 56 kbps so it could transfer about one frame every 10 seconds. Here's the software after it has taken a picture of us and some random dude who jumped into the picture:

The random white and black pixels in the image are examples of the bit errors that happened at high speeds. The "washed out" vertical lines near the ceiling lights were caused by excess capacitive charge building up on the DAC, which could be easily temporarily fixed by licking your finger and using it to short out the DAC's voltage supply line.

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.

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.

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.

Fortunately I was able to get an employee discount of a few hundred dollars off the list price. I don't think it would be worth it otherwise, compared to just re-using an old desktop computer as a server. The advantages of this hardware are that it's small, quiet, consumes very little power (it has an AMD Sempron), and has server-class parts designed to be running all the time (SCSI .5 TB drives, etc). The disadvantages of the hardware are that it is headless (can't be used as a small media center or DVD player), and that it has only 512 MB of RAM.

I got it to replace my Mac Mini, which I had been using as my media center, MP3 server and remote-login server. The Mac Mini hardware apparently wasn't up to the task of running all the time, since it died a horrible death after running continuously for about a year and a half. I'm hoping this new computer will fare better.

I would use my normal desktop computer for server stuff, but the problem is that it's extremely loud, noisy, and sucks a lot of power, so I usually have it turned off at night and while I'm gone. This creates the problem that I can't log into my home network while I am away, in case I need to access an important file or do other, uh, tasks that can't be done at work.

One nice feature of Windows Home Server is that it is essentially a stripped-down version of Windows Server 2003, with some unnecessary parts removed (Active Directory server, etc), but useful things kept in, such as IIS. It gives you a free *.homeserver.com domain name, and automatically updates the DNS records whenever Comcast changes your IP address on you. At that address it serves up a little web page that allows you to log in and access files on the server, upload new files to it, and TS into the server itself or other computers on your network with Remote Desktop Proxy. Using the normal server administration tools, you can use Wake-On-LAN to boot up any of your computers, even if they are turned off or are sleeping (which is cool). You can also run whatever ASP.NET 2.0 apps you want on it (I'm trying to think of a cool one to write).

Another of the big features is that it can automatically back up your Windows computers every night with Volume Shadow Copy, and allow you to restore the entire OS to any point in time by booting off a CD and copying the image off the network. You can set it to back up the important data on multiple disks, so that if one of them fails in the server, you're still safe. These kind of regular backups are things that everybody knows they should do, but few really do, myself included. Up until now, my current backup strategy was "burn a DVD every 6 months or so", so this should be a lot better.

Unfortunately I am hitting one problem with the way it does the automatic backups. It sets your computers to automatically wake themselves up at 3:00 AM via ACPI and connect to the server to do the backup. After that, it seems to assume that the computer will automatically fall back asleep after 30 minutes of inactivity, or whatever the Windows default is. Of course, I have automatic sleeping disabled on my computers, so that doesn't work. For the last two days I've woken up to find that my computer woke itself up at 3:00 AM and stayed on all night. I made a small scheduled task that should put the computer back to sleep after it finishes backing up, so we'll see if that works tonight.

One of the interesting things about the HP server is the printed manual that comes with it. I don't know if they just never copy-edited it, or accidentally published the first draft instead of the final one, but it's absolutely terrible (almost 'Made in Taiwan'-bad). Here's a little gem on the DRM-troubleshooting page:

It refuses to boot or do much of anything at all when I push the power button (the only button or switch on the entire thing). I don't know whether it is the computer or the power supply. The AC adapter reads 0 Volts when probed, but it may just be waiting for a load to be applied. I suppose I can probably take it to the Apple store and see if they have a spare power supply I can test it with. It's out of warranty (of course), so I doubt it would be worth paying the repair fee if it's not just the power supply..

I didn't get a MacBook Pro because 15" or 17" is just too big. I like smaller laptops that you can actually fit on your lap. If they had smaller MacBook Pros like the old 12" PowerBook I used to have, I would have gotten one of those.

The MacBooks are also a lot cheaper than the Pros, so it was much easier to justify financially since I my old laptop (now dead) was only about 2 years old. The $100 UW student discount didn't hurt either (the Microsoft employee discount was also $100 so I could have used that too, but it just seems weird to use a Microsoft discount to buy an Apple laptop).

Fortunately it has 2 GB of RAM so I can run XP on it OK. I am using the 30-day trial of VMware Fusion and so far I am not impressed. I might try Parallels Workstation to see if that's better, but I doubt it will be.

Fusion's "Unity" mode runs Windows apps as native Mac OS windows, like so:

This all works fine and dandy until you try to do anything fancy, such as activate Exposé:

Doh! Look at the Notepad window overlapping the Calculator window. This is obviously due to limitations of the GDI rendering model (namely, windows cannot paint themselves when they are obscured by other windows), but I think VMware might be able to work around it in a future patch. In the meantime, however, it looks really bad. There are a lot of other weird bugs like this that make the overall experience very poor.

The other main adoption-blocker for VMware Fusion is that when you boot up your Boot Camp partition, Windows detects that your hardware has changed, and prompts you to re-activate. You can eventually get it activated, but every time you switch between Boot Camp or VMware, it forces you to re-activate. VMware has instructions in their support forums for supposedly fixing this problem, but they do not work. This essentially makes it unusable, which is really too bad.

Oh WGA, how we hate you