Roasting in Amazon's Kitchen (Kindle Edition)

Since my BeBook left this world, I mostly use Kindle for Android in order to read books.

I do love cooking books (yes, I am weird that way) so I decided to buy Roasting in Hell’s Kitchen by Gordon Ramsay. Whole process was painless until I got famous “This title is not available for customers from your location in Europe”. Quick search has shown that I am considered worthy enough to buy paper edition.

I will not even go rambling about Kindle recommendation system that recommended this book to me even I cannot buy it. I will not even ramble about extra $2 on almost any book just because I am not from triple-letter country. I will however say what I will do: I will download this fucking book - I may not read it - but I will download it.

This does hurt a little. Everybody that knowns me is probably aware that I am licence freak. I do have all my software either paid for or freeware. Sometimes I even donate to authors of particularly good freeware service. As far e-books are concerned I probably bought more of them than I have paper-ones.

If somebody does not wan’t my money, I will not force it upon them. I am sure that some other book will be worthy purchase.

Reading on Mobile Phone

Lately I am reading a lot on mobile phone. Two thinghs combined encouraged me to do so - damage to my BeBook mini and Kindle application for Android mobile phones.

After reading few books on my phone and more than a few on stand-alone eBook reader with EInk screen I feel quite capable of judging which one is better. In short - mobile phone sucks.

Screen size

My phone has 3.7" screen and this is just barely enough for normal reading. As soon as I have need for bigger font size (I like to read while walking), phone fails me misserably. Screen is just too small.

BeBook mini was on small side of e-book reader and while 5" may not seem much, I consider it quite a good balance between portability and readability.

Reading at daylight

Lot of my reading is in sunlight. Anything not eInk is just painful. Visibility under direct sun is zero and shade improves things only marginally. Fingerprints on my touch screen do not help much either. I keep finding myself cleaning damn thing every few minutes.

Reading at night

Here is where mobile phone shines. Backlight is just something that you don’t get with eInk. Kindle application even allows adjustments of brightness level and paper color.

Final verdict

Anybody saying that LCD is perfectly suited for reading probably never tried eInk. - Yes, eInk is expensive. - Yes, eInk devices are only good for reading. - Yes, eInk has no backlight.

With all that in mind I still prefer it. For pure reading pleasure eInk is way to go.

RA4

Electronics is hobby of mine. Whenever I feel like relaxing I get myself PIC, some additional hardware and I make a board. This time I wanted to make LCD driver. Not for full-blown graphic LCDs but for small character ones. Yes, I know that there are solutions freely available for that exact purpose but reinventing a wheel is probably most important aspect of a hobby engineering.

As soon as powered whole mess of parts - nothing happened. Fault was easy to locate - it must be in my PIC code. After spending hours simulating in MPLAB (where everything seemed alright) I decided that board must be at fault. Quick test with LED lights showed that my LCD clock line (E) was dead. It took changing PIC chip and half of hardware before I acknowledged defeat and went down standard road - When everything else failes, RTFM.

As soon as I started looking into datasheet I had one of those enlightenment moments and I recalled similar problem I had on one previous board. RA4 pin (and only RA4) I was using is open-drain input on that particular chip. In practical sense it just means that pull-up resistor is needed for it to be of any use as output.

One cent component was all that was needed for LCD to be alive.

This whole experience was quite humbling since I was dealing with PIC I already knew and I thought that re-reading manual was waste of time. Of course Murphy found a way to teach me a lesson.

ClientLogin

Google offers quite rich API for users of their services. Most of it needs some form of authentication. Without much ado here is my C# implementation. Only limitation is lack of captcha support, everything else should be there.

P.S. If you are interested in Google Data API, you might want to check .NET client library. It is open source project and it covers pretty much whole API suite.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

It was easy to recognize me on my way to work - I was one reading from small black device. Not anymore.

Worst thing has came to pass - my BeBook mini is broken. From all symptoms I can deduce that inner glass layer has shattered and that there is no revival here. It was in cover, I did handle it gently (ok, at least I handled it with more care than other devices I own) and I did adore it.

What now? Currently I use my mobile phone (HTC Desire) for reading books but that will not last. Once you start using e-Ink, there is no going back to inferior technologies (as far as book reading is concerned). There is no other choice than buying another book reader. Problem is which one.

Since my kids do like to eat occasionally, my choice is limited to devices under $200. And really there are only two devices I consider worth buying in that range. Amazon Kindle and (yet another) BeBook mini. BeBook is devil I know and it did serve me well. I prefer it mostly for it’s small size and huge capacity (with additional SD card). Kindle is big, bulky and has huge keyboard that just gets into way but it also has huge choice of books and you can use it without any computer near.

I will not make decision this week, probably not even next one, but I am quite sure that next spare money goes to this purpose.

In memoriam BeBook mini (Nov 2009 - Jun 2010).