Today’s post is an update to this post , wherein I was unimpressed with myriad things on the Kindle Fire HD.

I mentioned last time that the Silk browser was not the best browser I’ve used (which would include Netscape, IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome). But then, I was checking out my blog (the thing you’re looking at right now). This is what it looks like on the Silk browser that comes on the Kindle Fire HD and that cannot be replaced with any other internet browser.

If you use Silk to browse my site, I feel compelled to tell you that it’s not supposed to look like this.

I had people using all of the other most popular browsers (and IE) send screenshots of the site from desktops, smart phones and iPads and was going to post all of those here to show the difference, but they all looked the same. The way it’s supposed to look. Like this:

This is how it looks in IE. I-freakin-E, people. Silk, I am disappoint.

An Update on the native document handler, OfficeSuite . I expected my ire to wane once I’d become accustomed to the Kindle’s quirks. But OfficeSuite doesn’t make that easy. As it doesn’t open .docx files. An extension that was released in 2007. Of course, OfficeSuite is one of the apps that can neither be removed nor hidden so it’s just…there. Now I use Documents to Go , which opens .doc and .docx files, excel and powerpoint files. It can open PDFs, but won’t unless you pay $15. Yeah, thanks, but the free PDF plugin for  Perfect Viewer  does that just fine.

Update on Perfect Viewer : It’s great. It does what it says, which is let you read comics and image files. It’s definitely worth the $3.

I wanted to be able to comment and markup my PDFs, but can’t seem to get the Adobe Acrobat app to cooperate. Will report back. Typically, I get on fine with their Readers so I must just be missing something.

Battery Life.  The initial review was written a couple days after my Kindle arrived and so I couldn’t comment on the battery life. Thus far it’s been fine. I keep it in aeroplane mode most of the time so I can’t speak to spending hours watching streaming video. However. You know how I mentioned that it doesn’t come with an external charger and so you can only charge it through a computer? Well, when you plug it in, this is what your Kindle says:

Connected to low-power charger. Your kindle might not charge while in use. If you leave it connected, it will charge slowly while the device is asleep.

‘Slowly’ was an understatement. It was plugged in for hours, asleep and with wifi off and still didn’t fully charge. So the external charger isn’t so much optional as it is a necessity. A $20 necessity.

The actual app looks even better than this

Finally, though, some good news, the WordPress app works quite well and Notebooks by DroidVeda is an excellent note-taking app. It’s free, elegant and allows you to have multiple notebooks with as many pages as you’d like. You can PDF and send your notebooks to yourself by email or upload them to Dropbox. (Dropbox integration gets me every time.) You can also draw on pages rather than type and upload photos. I plumped for the $3 upgrade, but it’s by no means necessary.

Bonus Informations!

I was searching for an image, thinking something appropriate had to be tagged ‘effing technology’. No joy there, but I learned that there’s an actual company called effingtechnology , which made me smile for a moment. See? I can smile! I can be positive!

Typically, new technology makes me feel like this, for quite some time:

After three days, the Kindle Fire HD 7″ makes me feel like this:

And here’s why.

The Good
(Things that work and are great and yay)

It’s great for reading books (purchased from Amazon) and comics. I bought this in order to read my comics and books. My first Kindle (now called the Kindle Keyboard) was great, but reading e-comics (of which I have a ludicrous amount) on my computer wasn’t cutting it and trying to read them on my iPod Touch wasn’t worth the headache most of the time.
LCD Screen . I can read in the dark now. My previous Kindle had a case with a little light attached, but that sucker drained the battery like mad. LCD isn’t good for reading in bright sunlight, but the sun and I haven’t been on speaking turns since that second degree burn it gave me for my twelfth birthday so that doesn’t affect my life. For people who get eye strain, I highly recommend Gunnar glasses . I love mine.
Watching video . This was the first time I’d seen HD (because I’m a Philistine Technophile hybrid). Wow. Nicely done, technology-makers. If I want to watch Netflix on Virginia (the Kindle’s name is Virginia Poe) it will look and sound great. It’s highly unlikely I’ll want to do so, but it’s up to the task, should it be required.

The Bad
(Things that don’t work and should do)

Lack of Apps . After the embarrassment of riches that is the Apple Apps Store, the Amazon App Store is just embarrassing. Android doesn’t have as many apps, true, but Amazon further whittles down the list by offering a portion of that small number.  Cheers, Amazon. The next person who moans at me about how locked down Apple products are are getting an earful. [I'm not an Apple fangirl, I'm panOS with Windows, Linux, and Mac tech in the house, but damn, the anti-Apple people are obnoxious.]
No way to charge without a computer . I had to buy a charger. Really? If I’m close enough to a computer to plug it in to charge why aren’t I just using the computer? Well played, Amazon. Have another $20USD.
General Organisational Stupidity . I was somewhat prepared for this, as you can have the most well-organised file system of your ebooks, but put them on your Kindle Keyboard and it’s like, ‘Oh, here are all the files in no particular order! You can re-organise them into collections, though, so it’s all right!’ [See next comment]
No Collections . Not so for the Kindle Fire HD. You can sort your books by Title, Author, or Recent. No way to make collections, unlike the several-years-old Kindle Keyboard. How the crap are organised people (the normal ones) supposed to categorise their books? Amazon, find the whitest part of my Anglo-Irish arse and pucker up.
Silk Browser . My only guess about the Silk browser is that Amazon actually holds its customers in contempt and this is the way it shows that contempt. And you can’t download other browsers. Because of course. Oh, there ARE Android apps for Firefox and Chrome, but you can’t have them. Google Play offers them. But does the Kindle allow Google Play? Nooooo. And when I tried to browse the internet, thinking I’d just get used to the thing, it’s effing slow!
The provided document organiser leaves something to be desired . Like all the things. It leaves all the things to be desired. For files I’ve uploaded myself, I have to view them in the document organiser, OfficeSuite, which would be all right if I could organise them once they were on my machine. You can add new folders, but you can’t move files into them. Perhaps that’s a feature if you pay $15 to upgrade to Pro, but that’s not happening. I’m looking into other apps that will allow me to see personal documents and will report back.
No way to organise apps . They’re all just there. In alphabetic order. No way to make menus or even group them by type. I cannot possibly be the only person this makes crazy.
No way to remove unwanted native apps . I do not need IMDB, Kindle Free Time, or Skype, thank you. But there they are. I also do not need the email, calendar or contacts apps, but you can’t even hide them.
The email, calendar and contacts apps don’t work easily.  If you try to add an gmail account from the apps menu you get an error. Follow the directions on this page and do it from the ‘swipe down from the top of the screen’ menu (I don’t know what that’s called.) It took three days to work this out, as, when you search for the error ‘You do not have permission to sync with this server’ you get nowhere.
No way to change the menu on your homescreen . Speaking of things you can’t hide: On your homepage (above the Carousel, more on that later) you have a list of things to choose from including Shop, Games, Apps, Books, Music, Video, Newsstand, Audiobooks, Web, Photos, Docs, and Offers. I will only be using two things (games and books) and would like to edit the menu. Can I do that? Nope. And neither can you. We can be miffed together, friend. You can lock certain things down by using Parental Controls, but that just greys out the option. It’s still visible.

Perhaps I’m just accustomed to Linux, but I would like far more control over my devices than the Kindle Fire HD allows. Hell, my Apple devices have given me more control. But on to the worst part…

THE MOST Annoying Thing
(So annoying it gets its own heading)

No more MyClippings . This is infuriating. As you can probably tell by looking at the left sidebar of this site, I enjoy keeping quotes from books. The Kindle Keyboard had a MyClippings.txt file that had all of your highlights from both books bought from Amazon, as well as personal documents and PDFs. Now you can only access highlights from books purchased from Amazon here . This conversation says Amazon will keep highlights from personal docs if you email the document to yourself and have Personal Documents set to archive in your Kindle settings, but that didn’t work for me. This one pisses me off more than any of the other annoyances.

The Ugly
(Things that don’t automatically work, but can be made to function…sort of)

Dropbox . If you offer Netflix, why the frack don’t you offer Dropbox? To get around this, first: ‘Allow Installation of Applications’ from the ‘Swipe down from the top of the screen’ menu, tap ‘More’ then the option is under ‘Device’. Then go here to get the Android app from Dropbox.
Autocorrect . This has to be the most annoying autocorrect I’ve yet come across. Disable it under Settings > Language & Keyboard > Keyboards > Choose your current keyboard > Choose your capitalisation and autocorrection preferences.
Carousel . The first thing you see when you unlock your Kindle is the above-mentioned uneditable menu and the Carousel, which shows everything on your Kindle. Each app separately, each book separately. EVERYTHING. SEPARATELY. To remove things from your Carousel, press the icon until a menu appears and you can remove each thing. One at a time. It’s fortunate I only have five things on my Kindle. Still, my carousel is tidy now. It’s just the twenty books I’m reading and the two other apps I use (Perfect Viewer & MyBinder). I just pretend all the other tabs and menus are invisible.
Linux compatibility . I could manage my Kindle Keyboard with my Linux box by plugging it in. It wouldn’t charge, but I could move files around and such. No such luck with the Kindle Fire HD 7″. When you plug it into a Linux computer you get a note to go to this site , where they say Linux computers require an Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) USB driver. This post has step-by-step instructions, though you can get libmtp and gmtp from synaptic rather than fiddling with the command line. Then start with step three in that post.
Adding apps not offered by Amazon : According to this post, it’s possible to install Android apps not offered through the Amazon App Store using 4shared.com . I’d love to have Chrome on mine, but am iffy about installing software on something that said software could bollocks up without knowing how to fix it because it’s so freaking locked down. AND I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO HACK CHROME ONTO MY KINDLE. IT’S AN APP. IT EXISTS. OMGWTF, AMAZON.

The Jury’s Still Out On
(I haven’t had it long enough to know)

Battery life . Hard to say if it’s good or bad. Will report back later.

Boobly-Boo, Misc & Other
(Things peripheral to the Kindle Fire)

The Moko case is fantastic. LOVE the case. They’re made for each specific type of Kindle, though, so if you want one for the non-HD 7″ or the HD 8.5″, make sure you’re ordering the correct size.

Evernote.  I wanted a note-taking application and Evernote has been touted far and wide. The free version won’t let you access your notes if you’re not connected to the internet. The notes you’ve just taken on the device. If you pay they’ll let you see your notes. Nice of them. I wound up using My Binder , which is fine. It’s free and lets me make notes and even allows me to see those notes when offline.

Perfect Viewer (and Perfect Viewer PDF plugin ) : I got this thing for reading comics and so the $2.99 for Perfect Viewer was worth it. It automatically scans whatever folder(s) you designate and keeps your file structure. Something the $200 Kindle Fire HD doesn’t even do.

Final Thoughts

Looking over this post, a word that appears a LOT is ‘organise’. Clearly, the developers and testers of the Kindle Fire HD had something against organisation. Their homes are probably cluttered to the degree of  the Collyer brothers  and they probably like it that way and feel oppressed when someone (like me) says, ‘You know, if you put your keys in the same place every time you’ll always know where they are.’ They’d rather live in a hodge-podge of rubbish and their own filth than be able to easily locate important property. And that’s fine. For them. But give the rest of us the option to organise the crap out of our files, m’kay?

A Kindle Fire developer’s home.

I was expecting an experience similar to the one I had with my iPod Touch, which I got just for music and, while I *do* listen to music on it, that’s probably only 5% of what I use it for. I live my life on the thing. If I’d got the Kindle expecting only to read books and comics I wouldn’t have been disappointed. Fair dues, that’s on me. Still, this experience will apply to others.

What’s your experience been like? Tips? Tricks? Addresses of the people who worked on this thing?

There are certain places on the internet I have never had an interest in visiting, as I understand them to be packed to the brim with soul-shaking perversion. Two of those sites are 4chan and Reddit. Whenever I heard about either of those sites it was because of something completely unallowable like Doppelbanghers .

Recently, though, I was introduced to a subreddit called /r/BritishProblems , which concerns itself with the difficulties of being socially awkward at all times, in all situations, including when alone. And messing up tea in one form or another.

From there, I tentatively inched out into other parts of Reddit and discovered it was a just like every other sphere of reality; the most obnoxious and obnoxiously loud receive the most attention, but, by and large, it was harmless and some things were quite worthwhile.

For example, there is an entire hub of Safe For Work (SFW) porn subreddits, consisting of gorgeous photos of gorgeous things. (Or, occasionally, crudy photos of gorgeous things.) This is the page where you can browse the newest posts to all of the SFW porn subreddits, but if you go to any particular site in that multireddit, this appears at the top of the screen:

Each main section has a drop down list when you hover over them.

My fav SFW porn subreddits are: bookporn , cemeteryporn , abandonedporn , winterporn , and fireporn .

My husband’s favourite subreddits are:
dubstep : He’s discovered a lot of new dubstep, and learned quite a bit about the genre and subgenres, here.
birdswitharms : Birds photoshopped with arms on. I’m surprised at how freaking hilarious  it is.
explainlikeImfive : Where you can ask to have things explained as though you were very young, without being judged.
fiftyfiftysfw : You’re given two descriptions. The picture or video in the post could be either one. Do you gamble and click?
futureporn : SFW porn of what people in the past thought the future would look like, and what we think the future will look like.
speculativeevolution : Animals that do not exist (but could have done).
theendofyoutube : We’ve all done it. Clicked on one YouTube video, to another, to another x 85 and then… you’re at the end of YouTube. And it’s a weird place. This subreddit is full of videos that save you the bother of clicking the 85 links between sanity and ‘WTF is happening in front of my eyes?’ These are labelled if they’re NSFW, most are SFW.
cringe : Full of the sort of videos that make you think, ‘Did you not watch this before you posted it? You do know the entire world can see this, right?’
timeonhand : Things done by people who have far too much time on their hands. Usually impressive, sometimes just sad.

The most recent subreddits are at newreddits

After this adventure I realised the Internet in general, and Reddit specifically, is Manhattan. Once I was in New York, just wandering around–going no place in particular (but going really quickly and with purpose so people thought I was local)–and suddenly I realised I was in a sketchy area. I did NOT feel safe. Rather than freaking out and declaring all of New York terrifying and awful, I simply turned around–after pretending I’d forgotten an appointment in the other direction–and returned to the last place I felt comfortable, which was about one street up.

That’s Reddit, folks. You’re minding your own business, looking at interesting things, learning about the world around you, reveling in the incredible diversity of humanity on the planet, and you turn a corner and you’re … there. The place everyone eventually finds themselves. Just turn around and return to the last place you felt comfortable.

Reddit is good about tagging things NSFW if something is Not Safe For Work, so, if you see that acronym just turn around (unless you’re into that sort of thing).

Reddit also practises something called Hellbanning , which is a brilliant way of dealing with trolls. It lets them think they’re participating in the forum, but no one can see them. It’s taking the concept of not feeding the trolls to the next level. Brilliant.

Reddit Enhancement Suite (Chrome/Firefox/Safari/Opera) is incredibly useful, if only for its night-time mode, which replaces that whiteWHITE glare of the screen to a darker screen.

The subreddits above are a small number in comparison to the 24,000+ named subreddits [though over 1,ooo of those have no posts and a few thousand only have one post.] So if you enjoy any in particular, please share in the comments.

And I’m still not going to 4chan.

The Science Part of the Post

There was a bit of a kerfuffle in Russia this week. It seems a meteor exploded several miles above the earth and …things happened.

The sort of things that leave giant holes in ice lakes in Siberia.

So… we didn’t see it… I know we were all paying attention to the incredibly unimaginatively named 2012 DA14*, but a bit more attention to the things that could seriously bollocks up a well-populated area would be appreciated. After all, if outer space sends us an event that’s going to mess up Earth’s shit, there’s not a lot we’ll be able to do about it so let’s focus on things we can affect.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy

This is a very interesting page about the last time a (really big) meteor hit Russia . Basically, it must have been scary as hell before the time of massive media telling you the rest of the world wasn’t under attack by blue light fire throwers capable of breaking things forty miles away. So, though your day is a thousand times more bizarre than you’d expected, it wasn’t the beginning of an alien invasion or the end of the world.

Weather Underground has a great article with more information and photos and video, as well.

*I know that there are quadrillions of bodies in space and astronomers are very busy and don’t have time to name all of them, but if something is going to have any real impact (sorry) on Earth, give it a name a person can shout at the sky whilst clinching their fists in frustration. They should name them based on size, speed, and weight, as well as possible consequences; if it could do an enormous amount of damage it’d be a Class A Fuckton meteor with an appropriate name like Ragehorn or Titanium Handgrenade.

The Technology Part of the Post

You know how, sometimes you want information on a medical problem and you go to Wikipedia and MYGODMYEYESWHYYYYY!

YAY! I’mma learn something! NOOOOO!

There, in front of you are the most horrific, psychically scarring images outside of a Saw film. At least with gore-porn films, you expect it & you know it’s not real. But no one needs to know what an excised verruca looks like. After my husband and I finished gagging and cringing and lamenting our lack of eye-bleach over the aforementioned photos, we found Hide Images . It’s an extension available for Firefox, Chrome and Safari and will hide images, logos, backgrounds, videos, iframes (Facebook boxes, YouTube, etc.), and multimedia/flash objects.  Click on the button whilst the page is loading and it removes all images before they’ve had a chance to make you regret every life decision that’s led you to the moment of seeing those images. Click the button again and the images return. It’d be nicer if you could tell the extension to load all pages from a site without images initially, but I’m happy to no longer fear vomiting on my laptop because I wanted to learn something new.

With our tax refund I’m getting a subscription to Poe Forevermore , the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe from Library of America, and a Kindle Fire.

Ugly Hill by Paul Southworth

Its primary use will be reading comics, but I’d like to check out free apps. So please share your recommendations.

Yay! Kindle Fire!

Yay! Edgar Allan Poe!

Yay! Not being killed by a meteor!

One of my goals for this year is to improve my blog–in terms of hits and subscribers and such and, to that end, I asked the proprietress of a blog I quite enjoy, Upon a Midnight Dreary , Dahlia Jane, for advice. She asked what I knew about SEOs.

My response: I know what it stands for.

So I looked into plugins and came across WordPress SEO by Yoast, which, aside from having a staggering number of options to tweak to your geeky heart’s desire, comes with an extremely useful guide . The guide can be used by anyone wishing to improve their site or learn about SEOs, but it would work best with the plugin.

In the process of optimising TAitA, I’ve been learning about such exciting things as link rot and breadcrumbs . ['Link rot' sounds like a euphemism for problems with your willy, which makes me laugh. But I digress.]

The first thing I’ve done is acquired the domain for theautodidactintheattic.com, rather than including my personal domain in the address. Hopefully, this won’t mess up too very much, as WordPress are supposed to be good about re-routing and that sort of thing. If you have problems with the site, please contact me through the contact form at the top of the left sidebar or comment on the offending post or page.

RSS subscribers prior to last Friday will need to resubscribe. I’ve put the RSS link at the top of the right sidebar. However, if you’re using bloody Chrome and click on that link, you get the XML file rather than the option to subscribe through various services the way you do with Firefox and (probably) IE. This is a rather WTF since Google (the entity that owns Chrome) has an RSS reader. [ This  Chrome extension allows one-click subscribing to RSS feeds.]

From Ugly Hill by Paul Southworth

I’m learning a lot, and also having loads of, ‘What does that mean…why is it important’ moments. Discovering that there are loads of hidden rules of the Internet reminds me of this bit from Black Books:

Start at 7.00

‘The Internet is a game. It has rules. And you need to learn those rules because it’s not a game.’

If you have a WordPress blog and use plugins, please leave a recommendation in the comments. Or if you have any recommendations to improving hit-count and subscribers, your comments would also be appreciated.

Normally, technology and I are pretty damn good friends. We may have a tiff every now and again, but, on the whole, I prefer zeros and ones to humanity.

However.

Sometimes technology is a pain in the arse to the degree I begin to wonder if, perhaps, I’ve been unreasonable about the whole ‘going outside’ and ‘conversing with people’ thing; perhaps that would be preferable to shouting at an inanimate object. At least people change their behaviour in some way when cursed at like a drunken Irish truck driving sailor. At least humans don’t look at you impassively when you grab their face and scream, ‘WHAT THE BLOODY FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU GLORIFIED ABACUS?!’

But I get ahead of myself. Let me take you back to the middle of last week.

*going-back-in-time harp music*

So, at the start of January, I introduced my husband to Linux. (His not-very-old-Windows-7-running-6gb-of-RAM-having laptop crashed when he tried to run Python scripts. What. Ever.) I love me some Linux so put Mint 14 on his p.o.s. Dell Inspiron e1705 with 2gb of RAM machine. It was happy as Larry to run Python scripts and my husband, K, fell madly in love straightaway.

K dug the control and customalisability and immediately went about trying other distros to find just the right one.

Like any normal person, I like new and shiny software, and soon I wanted to try the distros he liked. This was the beginning of several days of technological problems. Here is an allegorical painting of those days:

I’m the girl. The Hellbeast is technology this week. When she walked in for the sitting it was a peekapoo.

Up until this point, Linux had been this to me:

You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’ll never eat all your system resources just by being open. luvluvluv.

Then I decided to try a few other distros and this happened…

WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT? ISN’T ONE GOOD ENOUGH FOR YOU? YOU WANT SO MUCH! GRAAAAAH

Um… I’m sorry?

For those playing along at home, this is what we tried:

Started with Linux Mint 13
Linux Mint 14 with KDE: Very shiny KDE 4, but damn, was it slow.
[I lose track of the order after that but the list includes:]

Linux Lite: It turned on my numlock and wouldn’t let me turn it off, so if I used the u, i, o, j, k, l or m keys I’d get 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 0. I couldn’t use a terminal (it didn’t recognise my password because of the numbers where there should have been letters) to do the things I needed to do to fix it.

Crunchbang, whose logo is to the right.  It’s perfect, because it looks like swearing, which is what I was doing when trying to install it. Wicd network manager can kiss the whitest part of my Anglo-Irish arse. This was a huge bummer, as it looked like that perfect system for me. (I tried the ethernet port and it worked for five minutes and then…stopped.)

Archbang: Very similar looking to Crunchbang, but when I went to install it, it wanted me to partition the drive using cfdisk, which I’d never done before and cocked it right up. Then I read the manual and saw gparted was included but by then… I don’t know what I’d done. (And what geek worth their cred reads the manual *before* doing something?) I tried partitioning the drive using gparted on a live USB from Linux Mint, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t even get Archbang to run from a live USB, let alone install.

Mandriva: Dude, if I wanted something that was going to be that slow, bloated and that much of a system hog I’d use Windows.

Linux Voyager (a flavour of Xubuntu): Seemed cool until it stopped recognising my wireless card the third time I booted up.

Ubuntu: Ugh. I switched to Mint for a reason. Thanks for reminding me.

Aaaaand back to Linux Mint 14, but using Mate. Fucking hell.

[There were two or three others I couldn't even get to boot, but I can't recall which ones anymore.]

The upside is that I now know our twenty-six digit alphanumeric wifi password off the top of my head. I’m considering using it for every password I need.

Wasting scads of hours on technology with nothing to show for it is annoying enough, but I’d had plans for posts for every day of last week in celebration of Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday. those will be posted this week. To get things back into the gloomy swing, the Poe Toaster’s replacement showed up on our man’s birthday… or I should say replacements, because it would seem many have taken up the mantle. Note: They’re supposed to leave bourbon, as well, but it looks like some people are cheap.

My Asus Eee Top has two internal hard drives. The one with Windows 7 on it is 40gb. I’d moved my Dropbox files to the 250gb, as well as anything else that could be moved. Still, the 40gb was consistently full. It seemed I couldn’t do anything without receiving an error message saying I only had a few megabytes of space on my hard drive. It gets old, fast.

Just… Fucking… GRAAAAAAA

Through the usefulness of the internet, I found Treesize Free , which checks the size of all files, including hidden files. Through this I discovered there were several months’ worth of backup files in iTunes, occupying several gigs of space.

The best way to delete those is by:
Mac: iTunes –> Preferences (or)  Windows: Edit –> Preferences
Then:
Devices > Delete Backup

You can then set it to backup via iCloud . mmmm cloud storage.

Another very useful piece of software for tidying computer files:  CCleaner

Poe was old-school even in his own time, tending towards overly-elaborate language no matter the audience–but modern fans can rediscover some of his work in a modern way through the  iPoe apps for iOS.

They’re incredible, interactive versions of several of his stories and poems. The text is unedited, but there is music and artwork and elements controlled by the reader. Volume One ($1.99) contains ‘The Oval Portrait’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ (which allows you to dismember the old man, whee!), ‘Annabel Lee’, and ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, as well as a brief biography and sketches from the making of the app.  All of these are excellently rendered, though I think Red Death is my favourite. Early on, you can make a Raven peck out a bit of a corpse, (which I had to do a few times, giggling every time) and the final arrival to the party is delightfully creepy.

Volume Two ($2.99) contains ‘Hop-Frog’ and ‘The Black Cat’, with ‘The Raven’ being added at a later date. Bonus material includes The Edgar Allan Poe Route, featuring information about his haunts (apologies) and another sketchbook. The pages you read from are a bit more ornate in this one, but it felt like the illustrations were less interactive than the first volume. Part of that could be down to the fact that ‘Hop-Frog’ isn’t one of my favourite Poe stories, though the app brings it more alive to me than before. All of the selections in both collections are extremely well-done.

My only quibble is that you have to forward all the way to the end of the stories to loop back around to the beginning, rather than being able to access a menu after each tale. That aside, I’m looking forward to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ though it’s quite long and don’t really expect it to appear.

Here is the tumblr account for the collections, which has illustrations both from the apps as well as other artists.

Other apps of interest to the Poe-ophile are hidden object games based on ‘ Murders in the Rue Morgue ‘, ‘ The Black Cat ‘, ‘ The Premature Burial ‘ and ‘ The Gold-Bug ‘. All four are made by ERS Games and distributed by Big Fish Games for the PC, though the first two are available for iPhone/iPod through iTunes.

I’m about halfway through ‘The Black Cat’ and it’s one of the best hidden object games I’ve played. Atmosphere, music, game play, story line, etc is outstanding. I have nothing bad to say about it. I’ve also started ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ which is similarly engrossing.

You can play free demos of all four and then purchase the full game, if you’re hooked. Prices are a few dollars for the apps and up to $15 for the PC versions, though Big Fish usually has some offer on that will bring that down a bit.

[Some people can get the PC-only games to work on Linux with WINE, but I'm having the devil of a time making that happen. If it works I'll happily purchase both of the currently PC-locked games.]

I’ve looked at some other apps, none of which impressed, but if you find any with merit, please leave a comment.

My current favourite distraction is Arcane Empires , a strategy game with a Steampunk feel. A pretty typical strategy game, the goal is to build a city and grow an army in order to continue building your city and growing your army. You mine and farm resources as well as learn magic in order to advance your goals. There are alliances (which are good) and a global chat feature, that takes up valuable screen real estate and cannot be shut off (which is bad). It’s free and would be fine for all ages if you could turn off the global chat. Currently I’m levelling up so I can train armoured mammoths. Very looking forward to that. Available for Android and iOS devices.

For those that prefer their Victorian a little less parallel-universe-y, I recommend Blackwood and Bell Mysteries & Gardens of Time . They’re by the same company and look extremely similar. The game play is the same, as well: you’ve just come on as a new detective and you earn coins and points by doing hidden object scenes in order to find clues. You then use those coins to buy things for your London street in Blackwood and Bell or garden in Gardens of Time. It’s the sort of game where you have to wait for your energy to refill so that can be frustrating. Also, you can’t really decorate your garden or block the way you’d like, as you have missions where you have to have a certain number of items before you can level up. So your screen winds up being cluttered with the multiples of the most high value items rather than a mix of what looks best. Still, they are a bit of fun. Both are free and can be played on Android and iOS devices, as well as on Facebook.

Sherlock Holmes and the Hound of the Baskervilles . I was really looking forward to this one, but there was a load screen between every scene and sometimes when trying to do something within a scene. The graphics were good, as were the hidden object scenes and minigames. The storytelling was fine from the preview I played, but the load screen issue gave me too much time to think, ‘Why am I doing this when I could be doing something productive?’ Really good hidden object games should make you regret wasting that five hours after you’ve done so, as you were too engaged at the time to notice. I opted not to purchase the full game, but it’s $2.99USD

There is a Latin proverb that runs something like: A wise man learns from the mistakes of others, a fool from his own. (I don’t know what you’d call people who don’t learn from their own mistakes, probably ‘too-stupid-to-live.’ But I digress.)

The point is, though I have never had a catastrophic loss of data, I have known people who have done and the very idea is terrifying. I used to have three back ups of all of my files on three different external hard drives. My husband thought I was being paranoid. Then his hard drive died.

My gloating was drowned out by his hysterical sobbing.

So now, he uses JustCloud  and Dropbox . Dropbox is a bit expensive, so we were considering GoogleDrive, which is incompatible with Linux. Really, Google, really? So, their own employees can’t use it? This set us on a quest to find a cloud storage provider that, you know, worked.

Thank you, Ars Technica :

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JustCloud isn’t on that list, but it doesn’t support Linux, either, effyouguys. JustCloud also doesn’t allow you to sync across devices–it’s only as backup for one computer.

More info on those services:

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So only Dropbox and SpiderOak work on Linux. This is why I have Dropbox on all of my computers (two Windows, one Linux, which is the main one I use) and my mobile device.

I was ready to completely switch to Google Drive, which is when I discovered the whole incompatible-with-Linux-WTF-Google-uses-Linux thing.

Back to JustCloud. My husband has a licence on his computer to sync up to 250GB to JustCloud and he doesn’t use half of that so he purchased a second licence in order to add my Windows machine. [They charged our card for it but sent no confirmation, so you have to find that yourself, be aware.]

We found the code I needed and installed the software on my Windows machine. I use a 2TB external hard drive as a sort of second (or third) hard drive, and wanted to back up 100GB of that to JustCloud. I went in to choose which folder to sync to the cloud and… was told I’d have to pay an extra $80/year to back up an external hard drive.

Me: B-but I only want to back up 100GB.
JustCloud: That’s fine. You can back up single folders on your computer.
Me: But I don’t want to put it on my computer. I don’t have room for it, there.
JC: Sucks to be you. Thanks for your money, though.

So I’ve had to remove media from my hard drive in order to back up other media, which sort of defeats the purpose of having an external hard drive as a level one back up for the files I’ve had to remove.

At least my most important files are backed up twice… (and I would make out with the creator of Dropbox.)

This goes out to all of my technologically-gifted friends, called into active duty by their less technologically-gifted friends, family, strangers-who-think-you-look-geeky.

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They even have it on a shirt .

Lifehacker Articles for handling the situation practically.
How to Fix Your Family’s Computer So the Rest of the Year is Easy
Troubleshoot someone’s computer remotely
How Can I Get Out of Doing All of My Family’s Tech Repair?

And a bit more humour

The Family Tech Support Meme

Or you can just show up wearing this :

Or this :

Whilst carrying this :

And if you absolutely have to fix someone’s p.o.s. computer, just think of this:

Roughly a week ago I received my new Asus 1215n netbook. It’s the fourth Asus Eee I’ve had and my favourite, thus far. The only complaint I have is that the trackpad malfuncations at least once a day. It only wants to move on the vertical and when I tap to click it reacts as thought I’ve right-clicked.

I consulted the internet and found out that many other people had had this problem. They were told by Asus to reinstall drivers to no avail. Then a few industrious souls opened up their machines to move a couple of pads beneath the trackpad and that worked. Well, that worked for me, as well. For a little more than a day.

Several people returned their 1215ns and received replacements. That had the exact same problem. It’s clearly a construction problem. No other Asus Eee has the same specs so I’m keeping this one. I’m just using an external mouse now.

Instructions on how to move the pads beneath the trackpad:

1. Use a credit card (technique shown at the 05:30 mark of this video) to pop the small tabs up all along the edge of the palm rest area, including along the keyboard. This piece will want to slide upwards towards the screen a small amount while being removed. Do not try to completely disconnect the palm rest, as it’s connected to the computer by a cable.

2. Move the grey/silver pads to the right:

–Some people completely removed the top grey/silver pad for success.

This information came from this site.