Technology reviews

So lovely wife bought me a Kindle for Christmas. Ain’t she lovely? Now we could argue a lot about the merits of Amazon’s eBook reader: a lot of people are dubious about them at first, but I love mine and once I’ve shown them how it works, what it’s like to read with, the free/cheap books you can get for it, etc, they generally end up wanting/buying one.

So part one of this week’s question is:

Do you want/have a Kindle? If not, why not?

However, an often overlooked advantage of the Kindle is that when it comes to going on holiday, it’s a revolution. We normally take about an entire suitcase full of books with us, most of which we end up leaving behind at a book exchange. We end up having to weigh all our suitcases very carefully before we go to make sure the books are all evenly distributed so we don’t go over our weight allowance.

Take a couple of Kindles and their battery chargers, though, and you’re pretty much sorted, since it weighs about a quarter of a kilo (half a pound) and can fit 3,000+ books in its memory. Woo hoo!

However, you do need ebooks for it and while I’ve got a lovely supply of free eBooks, I would like some more things to read when I’m on holiday next week. So part 2 of this week’s question is:

Are there any books you’d recommend for holiday reading, preferably available on the Kindle?

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog

So I have this thing called an Elgato Turbo.264 that plugs into my Mac. It’s designed to speed up video conversion, which it does more or less: anything I’ve recorded on my EyeTV gets exported to my iPhone or AppleTV a whole lot quicker than without it, other things not so less. Still, it integrates nicely with Video Drive, which has been giving me problems of late with regular old QuickTime, so it’s hard to do without.

Trouble is, it’s having problems with other videos now, particularly AVIs.

Continue reading “Turbo.264 starting to annoy me now”