Koozie Notes

Kindle Keyboard Shortcuts

I will be using this post as a collection point for useful Kindle keyboard shortcuts.

1. Check Time:  ALT + T
2. Jump ahead or back by 5%:  ALT + Next Page or ALT + Previous Page
3. Bookmark Current Page: ALT + B

Other cool Kindle hacks, like changing the default screen-saver, can be found at [http://igorsk.blogspot.com/].

-Chris

Shanghai Daily: New Newspaper Addition for Kindle

By recently adding "Shanghai Daily", a $5.99 Kindle newspaper subscription, Amazon bumps up their newspaper subscription offerings to 18.  [Post from Shanghai Daily]

I'm still surprised that USA Today hasn't jumped on board, since they hold the top position in the United States.

-Chris

Coverage Map for Amazon's Whispernet

Below is a link that shows a US coverage map for Amazon's Whispernet for both the EVDO and lower speed 1X wireless data service.

http://www.showmycoverage.com/mycoverage.jsp?id=A921ZON

-Chris

Firefly Novel: My Own Kind of Freedom

Steven Burst had released his novel titled, "My Own Kind of Freedom," under a CC license.  His story is based on the Firefly television series and movies by Joss Whedon.  Grab a Kindle version by downloading the PRC version [http://dreamcafe.com/myownkindoffreedom.prc]

Here is an interesting tidbit for his book.

[T]he book was written in emacs on a box running Mandrake Linux

I know, I know, I need to get a life.

--Chris

Download "Little Brother" under CC license

Using the steps from my previous post, you can download Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" directly from your Kindle.  The url is [http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/] and you'll want to download the .PRC file.

-Chris

How to download free content directly on Kindle

Steps to download free content from the Manybooks web site [http://manybooks.net/] directly from Kindle using Wispernet.  Note: This does not require the USB cable.

1. Open the web broswer "Basic Web", found under experimental menu.
2. Enter the url, "mnybks.net"
3. Locate the book you want
4. Click on the Mobipocket version of the book to download.  Please keep in mind only the mobipocket version will work on the Kindle.
5. Confirm the download message, which reads "You are about to download a file to your Kindle."
6. The book should now be located on the home screen.

--Chris

Free Kindle Content

This post is going to be my place for remembering where I can download free Kindle e-books.  I've been downloading the non-drm versions in mobi format, which seem to work fine on the Kindle.

1. Manybooks.net [http://manybooks.net/]
2. Feedbooks.com [http://www.feedbooks.com]
3. MobiPocket [http://www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/default.aspx]
4. Manybooks.net [http://mnybks.net] Download directly from Kindle
5. Diesel E-Books [http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/category/free_download]
6. Tobias Buckell, sci-fi author [http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2008/03/04/free-ebooks-three-points-and-a-whole-lot-of-rambling/]

Of course, most of this content comes from Project Gutenberg, but I appreciate that the other sites have already formatted the content into mobi for quick uploading to the my Kindle.

-Chris

Kindle Reading

On Tuesday, my new gadget arrived, the Amazon Kindle and overall I'm impressed.

Over the last few weeks, I've been mulling over whether I should drop $400.00 on e-book reader and it took me some time to finally get up the nerve to make the leap.  The final straw for me? --- Newspaper subscriptions.

Before Tuesday, I had two (2) newspaper subscriptions delivered to my home.  The Wall Street Journal gets delivered Mon-Sat and I take the Austin American Statesman on Sundays only.  By switching to the Amazon Kindle, my annual subscriptions for these two (2) papers drops from $332 to $192.  And I get to enjoy the convenience of not reading an occasional wet paper.  As an added bonus, I don't have to worry about recycling the mountains of used newspaper that collect in my home.

Even though I find reading on my Kindle pleasant, I really haven't found a good rhythm for skimming newspaper articles.  However, I did find another Kindle advantage -- I no longer have to jump to page A16 to continue reading an article.

--Chris

Windows SteadyState: XP Lockdown

While listening to Security Now, episode # 129 [Transcript], Steve and Leo provided an excellent and thorough review of Microsoft's SteadyState Software, a tool for locking down a computer running Windows XP.

Windows® SteadyState™ is now available. (Windows SteadyState was formerly known as Microsoft® Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.) Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet café, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them. Windows SteadyState is easier to download, set up, use, and maintain than Shared Computer Toolkit.

Steve sums this up with the following.

So the beauty of this, instead of putting, like, a write lock on your hard drive - which Windows won't tolerate because it's constantly updating the registry, and there's all kinds of things going on with Windows, as we know, our hard drive light is flickering there even when we're not doing anything. So instead of write-locking the hard drive, it basically sequesters any writes. And when the administrator logs off, the administrator being a special user to Windows SteadyState, it will prompt you, saying do you want me to retain these changes or flush them? A normal user, a non-administrative user, does not have access to that. There's no choice that they're able to make.

So if you want to lock down your windows computers, Windows SteadyState might be a good solution.  To better understand the pros and cons of SteadyState, I would highly recommend listening to episode #129 or reading the transcipt from Steve Gibson's web site, grc.com.

-Chris

Mac Printing Issues on 10.5.2

This evening I was banging my head against a wall trying to figure out why I couldn't print to my HP LJ1200 printer over TCP/IP from my new Powerbook with OSX, version 10.5.2.   I finally stumbled on to this thread from Apple Support, and found the missing ingredient:  Add "LP" for the queue name.

Now, when one sets up a new printer under Leopard, you begin with system preference and printer& fax.  After clicking on the "+" sign to add a new printer, I elected LPD for protocol box.  Next, I enter in the IP address for my HP printer.  After that, you come to the third item, queue name.  For some reason, Apple has the statement "Leave blank for default queue." right under this box.  When I left it blank, my print jobs kept stalling.  I tried different drivers, differnt options, but nothing worked. 

Finally, I deleted all my printers and started over.  This time I entered "LP" as the queue and guess what? I'm printing.  By the way, this solution worked with the generic postscript printer and the HP LJ 1200 drivers as well.

-Chris

Vacation Invitation Postcard

In today's mail, I received a postcard claiming that I won "Two Roundtrip Airfares to Anywhere in the U.S.!"  They also noted on the card:

• WE'VE BEEN GOING CRAZY TRYING TO CONTACT YOU!
• This is NOT a solicitation for a Time Share. *Certain Restrictions Apply

This might not be pitch for a time share, but I will assume that they will be trying to sell you something.  Their toll-free number is 800-979-3072.

I also found related stories about similar post cards on the 'net.
    Star Vacation Club/Vaction Resort Group
    800 Notes
    Consumer Alert

-Chris

Telemarketing to Cell Phones

Don't you hate it when telemarketers call you on your cell phone?  Especially ones that claim you won a free trip to Las Vegas or San Francisco.

I went ahead and posted my experience to 800notes.com.  The caller-id on my cell phone read (301) 882-9967.

-Chris

Ron Mueck Collection

On Sunday, I had a chance to view the Ron Mueck Collection at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.  His sculptures seem truly life like. 

While staring at his work, I wondered what would happen if one of his sculptures started to move.  These thoughts seemed to creep me out a bit.

-Chris

Ron Mueck Flickr Photos

They Call Me Insane

What happens when you share with friends that you signed up to run a marathon?  ...

"Are you insane?", seems to be the winning response.

Anyway, I've been training over the last few months using Jeff Galloway's "Book on Running" as my guide.  If all goes well -- knock on wood, no injuries -- I should be ready to tackle this race in February.   One side effect of my training program is that I'm really enjoying my long weekends runs.  I'm just hanging out by myself, running, reflecting and mulling over issues while enjoying Austin's scenery.

-Chris

Rails vs ?

In the spirit on the Apple TV commercials, Rails Envy has published a few short videos poking fun at different web tools when compared to Ruby on Rails.

At the Lone Star Ruby Conference, we watched a few episodes and had some good laughs.

-Chris

PDFtoTEXT: Font Encoding Issues

While working with PDFtoText, a great little command line program for extracting the TEXT from a PDF file, I ran into a text conversion/extraction problem while working from a client's PDF.  In the past, I've successfully used PDFtoText to dump mountains of text from internal PDF reports, which make it much easier to munge with Perl or your script language of choice.

When I ran PDFtoText on my client's PDF, I kept getting undecipherable ASCII text in my output file.   After searching a few forums and web sites, it appears that this problem can be caused by: (1) font subsetting, where only a portion of the embedded font is included with the PDF, and/or (2) custom encoding for the generated font subsets which depend on the sequence of the requested glyphs as they appear in the input stream.

Since I couldn't find a reliable method of extracting the text, I ended up going back to the client to get the data in a different format.

The URLs listed below do a pretty good job explaining why it can be difficult to extract text from a PDF document.

•  Perl Monk:  Problem with Searchable PDFs

• Code Comments:  Copy & Paste Issue with PDF

• Ruby PDF Blog: Converting PDF to XML

• Converting PDF to HTML with Publication-Specific Profiles

• PDF to HTML paper: [PDF]   

IRS Updates their Procedures for Filing 1099 Electronically

The IRS published their new procedures for filing 1099 electronically for tax year 2007.  This is normally documented in IRS Publication 1220, but you can find the same information in IRB 2007-30. [html] [pdf]

If you new filing 1099s electronically, wikipedia has a decent article to get you up to speed.

-Chris

*UPDATE* 29 AUG 2007

IRS has published an updated version of IRS Publication 1220, which covers electronic filing of 1099s for tax year 2007. [IRS PDF Download site]

Outlook Express: Error Message

A user brought another interesting problem to my attention.  For E-mail, they used Outlook express on their Windows XP computer with Office 97 installed.  Whenever they click on the spell check button from within Outlook Express, they receive the following error message.

"Error occurred while the spelling was being checked"

After searching on Google, I came across a quick solution that required downloading and installing a single dll file [CSAPI3T1.dll]. 

1. Download the dll file from the web page listed above.
2. Copy CSAPIeT1.dll to C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Proof.
3. Shutdown Outlook Express.
4. Start Outlook Express.

As soon as we restarted Outlook Express, spell checking was working fine.

-Chris

SysAdmin Day

Today is SysAdmin Day.  What, you do not know about SysAdmin Day?

SysAdmin Day is celebrated once a year on the last Friday for July.  There is even a web site which advocates this celebration and provides some nifty gift ideas for them.

So go find your sysadmin and let them know how much you appreciate them with a great big hug. :-) 

-Chris

Note:  Also take a look at Sysadmin of the Year.

Perl Survey 2007

If you are a perl programmer, the perl community would appreciate if you could spare five (5) minutes to complete the 2007 perl survey.

Take part in the 2007 Perl Survey!

The Perl Survey is an attempt to capture a picture of the Perl community in all its diversity. No matter what sort of Perl programmer you are, we'd love to hear from you.

Be sure to read the privacy policy and complete the survey before September 30, 2007.

-Chris

Mossberg Reviews Picnik: Online Photo Tool

Wall Street Journal columnist, Walt Mossberg, has a good piece in today's edition on Picnik, an online, web based photo editing tool.

One of the best examples of these slick new Web-based application is Picnik, a sophisticated, photo-editing application offered free of charge at picnik.com. I have been testing Picnik and I like it a lot. It's a fast and impressive program for tweaking and improving your photos, then posting them to popular photo Web sites, saving them to your own computer, emailing them, or even printing them.

Looks very promising for web based applications.

-Chris