David.R.Gilson

Tip of the Week – 27th November 2009

Nov 27

How-To Guides David No Comments
cloud, fonts

[Fonts Tip]

If you would like to see which fonts you have installed on your system but don’t feel like browsing through your Word Processor’s limited font browser, then try this website, http://www.flippingtypical.com. You can type in anything you like at the top, and it will display what you type in all the fonts that your system has installed. Pretty nifty!

The very simple interface of FlippingTypical.com.

Tip of the week – 20th November 2009

Nov 20

How-To Guides David No Comments
firefox, minimise, space, toolbars

[Firefox Tip]
If you want to make use of your bookmark toolbar, but don’t want to make the toolbar any deeper than it already is, then this tip is for you.

1) From the view menu, activate the bookmark toolbar.
2) Right-click on the menu bar and select “Customise”.
3) Drag the bookmark toolbar icon from the bookmark toolbar to the menu bar.
4) Click “Done” on the icon box
5) From the view menu, deactivate the bookmark toolbar.

Can Electronic Book Readers Succeed?

Nov 18

Editorial David 9 Comments
amazon, apple, book, download, DRM, e-book, ebook, electronic, file, freedom, iphone, ipod, kindle, market, mobile, mobile phone, mp3, pdf, phone, sharing, store

Electronic Book Readers

With the release of the International Kindle from Amazon, the subject of e-book readers is heating up. This is one of those technologies I want to love, who wouldn’t? You have a low power device that gives you a much more natural, ink on paper, like reading experience than any backlit LCD screen can. Then with Amazon you have an integrated discovery and delivery method for receiving books to your reader, just like Apple did for the MP3 player with iTunes.

Then again, I’ve just compared the Kindle book store to iTunes, perhaps this is where the problems start. We all know that in its early days, iTunes was locked up with DRM to the point of madness, the only way to free your content was to burn everything to audio CD and re-rip to MP3. Of course, things are now better in the digital download music market, with DRM gone and a choice of music stores. Although, both the movie and e-book industries have yet to catch up to the current state of sanity we enjoy with music downloads. I remember many years ago when I experimented with the e-book store for my Palm Pilot. Not only were your e-books tied to your credit card number, but they were tied to your device too. If either changed there wasn’t a clear route for how to get your books back. So when I did inevitably change my device, I lost my books.

With the Kindle, things aren’t quite so restrictive, from what I’ve been able to find out, not having one myself, your books are only tied to your Amazon account. This means that you can transfer to new Kindles, and also to the iPhone application. Unfortunately, Amazon haven’t released an application for other mobile platforms yet. Still though, the Kindle isn’t the only e-book reader out there (there’s also Sony and Bebook readers), but you can’t get your Amazon e-books on any of them. Whereas, the music I buy from any music store on the web can be played on any device I like. So the Amazon e-book system still ties you to the one device, just like iTunes with the iPod, which I submit is a reason not to use iTunes. The same goes for all current e-book stores.

My phone vs the Kindle. Which would you rather carry around?

I think the e-book and movie industries needs to learn from history. All encompassing ecosystems like iTunes work for a while, until the market (i.e. consumers) learn enough about the restrictions that DRM puts on them. Electronic documents already have a standard, PDF, which is so ubiquitous, it would be hard to imagine any other format being used. Yes, PDF’s can be copied without restriction, just like MP3′s. Although, a recent study has shown what many people believed all along, file sharers buy the most music, and I am certain that the same will be true for books and movies when they are available DRM free. Currently, the only way to get DRM free e-books and movies is illegal. Which is a shame for those industries, because by not using DRM free formats they are denying themselves a large and enthusiastic market segment.

Finally, lets look at the devices themselves. Despite the attractive features I mentioned at the beginning of this, it is still another device to carry around and look after. E-book readers are fairly large when compared to the likes of MP3 players and mobile phones. They are also expensive, the cheapest setting you back over £200. Sure, I imagine they’d be nice to have laying around at home. Although, in our busy lives, sometimes the best time to read a few pages of a book is in those strange little pockets time during the day (as David Allen would put it). Is it really worth carrying around something the size of an e-book reader? In these days when convergence seems to be an irresistible force, I find it hard to believe that e-book readers will get a firm foothold when mobile phones can do the same job, with a PDF application providing a free or inexpensive electronic book reading function.

Feed Rinse

Nov 16

Reviews David 2 Comments
feed rinse, filter, keyword, RSS, Twitter

Setting up a filter in Feed Rinse.

I came across a great web service last month called, Feed Rinse. The idea behind Feed Rinse is to apply keyword filters to an RSS feed, and return you a new feed URL, in which the content has been rinsed clean of all the stuff you don’t want to see.

This is handy if you subscribe to something that is particularly noisy. In my case, I found it useful for two Twitter users. I had followed them because they said really interesting things that I wanted to read, but, they were awful for doing loads of tweets at the same time, with lists of other Twitter users they wanted to thank for retweeting them. This was ruining my Twitter time-line.

By using Feed Rinse, I was able to add the RSS feed of each user, and apply the filters so I could block out all the content I wanted to read. Now, rather than following them on Twitter, I read them in my newsfeed reader, via the feeds Feed Rinse.

Tip of the week – 13th November 2009

Nov 13

How-To Guides David No Comments
alterts, monitoring, website

I’ve just come across a website that will notify you when a website you’re interested in goes down and comes back up. You can even select whether to be notified via e-mail, SMS (not sure about country restrictions), or even Twitter.

http://www.dingitsup.com/