Archive for January, 2011

Amazon Kindle ebook sales higher than paperbacks

Amazon Kindle 3GInteresting to see two bits of news in the press today about the Amazon Kindle. First there’s the report that Amazon Kindle ebook sales has outstripped traditional paperbacks in the US during the final quarter of 2010. This trend has apparently continued in to January 2011 too, with 115 ebooks being sold for every 100 paperbacks. (Source: HERE)

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CODY1 is now available on Amazon’s Kindle!

How cool is this, you can now subscribe to this blog through my very own Amazon Kindle subscription (link HERE).

As with all blog, newpaper and magazine subscriptions on Kindle there’s a 14 day free trial – so what’s to lose?! It’s only 99p per month too – and there’s always new jokes, information, advice and general news being added.

To find out how to publish your own blog to Amazon’s Kindle service – click HERE – and read my other post about how to do it.

Understanding engineers jokes

I had this sent through to me today on the email and thought it was quite amusing… it obviously helps if you know any engineers, of course!

Understanding Engineers #1

Two engineering students were biking across a university campus when one said, “Where did you get such a great bike?” The second engineer replied, “Well, I was walking along yesterday, minding my own business, when a beautiful woman rode up on this bike, threw it to the ground, took off all her clothes and said, “Take what you want.” The first engineer nodded approvingly and said, “Good choice: The clothes probably wouldn’t have fit you anyway.”

And there’s more…

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Use Windows Task Scheduler to send news to Kindle with Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GFollowing on from my earlier post about “Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre” (link HERE), nickredding over at Mobileread.com suggested a much simpler approach. Rather than using a separate wake up timer application to wake my PC up, ready to run Calibre – I should use the one built into Windows.

Windows Task Scheduler allows you to schedule your PC to wake up and run a specific application at a specific time.

Calibre will have to be set up the same, in terms of scheduling the download of news from specific sites at specific times, so as to coincide with the task scheduler, but it just means you don’t have to download the separate wake timer.

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Kindle and wordpress

Amazon Kindle 3GThe more I play around with the Kindle the more uses I’m finding it for it. Already there’s a plugin that can be used with WordPress to benefit Kindle owners/users. It’s called Kindle This (more info below HERE). And if you’re wanting to publish your blog to Kindle – then you can do so now – and it’s actually surprisingly easy, taking around 10 minutes to do; info on this, including step by step instructions is included below HERE.

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Kindle ebook news server using Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GI’ve been reading around the topic and I’m still struggling to understand just how to install Calibre on my web server. I want to be able to run Calibre 24/7 on my server so that I can serve up news according to my pre-determined schedule, as opposed to using the process described in my other post: Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre.

However, I have come across three resources that I think might help.

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Streaker FAIL video… very funny!

This guy has absolutely no idea that there’s a door there…

Peter Kay in funny John Smiths advert

I saw this on TV the other day and thought it was really funny…

Automated free news for Kindle using Calibre

Amazon Kindle 3GThe Amazon Kindle is a fantastic piece of kit, with lots of great features and an immense and growing library of available resources. Check out my other post HERE to read more about the Kindle and find links to some great resources.

However, one of the things that I’m not overwhelmed with is the selection and quality of news sources that are available for subscription through Amazon. Not only are they quite pricey which, for a digitally delivered item, seems to be exploiting the new device and the growing market of people with ebook readers. But there is a solution, if you want to take a little time and effort to set it up properly. That solution is CALIBRE – download available HERE.

I’ve read around various sources and have outlined a relatively simple process for setting up Calibre to automatically fetch and send news to your Kindle. (If you’ve not got a Kindle yet, you can click HERE to buy yours now)

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GD Star Rating records IP addresses

The rating plugin that I’ve used on my site is provided by GD Star Rating (link HERE). It’s a powerful, free plugin for wordpress that “allows you to set up an advanced rating and review system for post and comments in your blog using single, multi and thumbs ratings.” More information is available on the wordpress.org web site HERE.

A summary of features is detailed below – but one of the really useful and perhaps underplayed features that is included within the rating system is the ability to record IP addresses of the visitors that vote on the various posts. A quick lookup using http://whois.domaintools.com revealed some interesting facts for me, when I was looking at the latest batch of votes… all of which occurred within minutes of each other today, and all originating from my ex-employer’s IP address! Surely people have better things to do than visit my personal web site and try to rank down my own posts?! But apparently not…

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