I’ve been away for a week in the wilds of Wyoming. For the trip, my suitcase was jam packed as usual, so I was delighted that instead of loading up further with a handful of books, all the reading matter I took was in my Kindle. On the road is where the Kindle really shows [...]
I try not to look behind my desk. It is one very scary place. There’s a rat’s nest of cables back there that grows more snarled and intertwined by the month. Every new device I add to my setup seems to add at least two, sometimes three more cables, and I have a bank of [...]
Second Life makes me sick. Literally. When I enter its 3D environment, my brain can’t believe what my eyes are seeing and, within seconds, I start to feel woozy. By the end of 10 minutes, I have the start of a nasty headache. If I stay longer than that, the vertigo when I finally return [...]
I’ve now had a chance to play with the Sony Reader PRS-505, Sony’s revamped ebook reader. When you look at the 505 side by side with its predecessor, the PRS-500, it doesn’t look like a whole lot has changed. Appearances are misleading. Cosmetically, the changes look minor, but in terms of usablity, they’re crucial. The [...]
I’ve put the Kindle and the Sony Reader aside for a day to finish writing my latest comparative review of database software for Australian PC User magazine. I’ve been writing such reviews since the early 1980s, when dBASE was top dog in the database stakes. It was a seriously buggy program, but in the very [...]
The Kindle and the Sony Reader are both flawed products. They have version 1 written all over them. And it doesn’t matter. Get either one of them into your hands, and chances are you’ll be hooked. The convenience factor is sky high, far outweighing the rough edges and design disappointments. So, how do the two [...]
So, Amazon has finally released its ebook reader, the Kindle. Within 24 hours of its launch, there were a couple of hundred customer “reviews” of the Kindle on Amazon.com, the majority of them uncomplimentary and almost all of them written by people who haven’t even seen the Kindle, let alone used it. Despite the detractors, [...]