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?

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?

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.

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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 :

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:

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.)

There are myriad digital tools out there to help you be more organized. One can get addicted to those tools and wind up having more junk-it being on your computer doesn’t make it not-junk. Here are the tools that I find most useful.

Database software.

Tellico for Linux; GStar for Windows.
I love me a database. I have one for my library, one for my Locus Communis (more on that in my next post), and one for my daily accomplishments.
Both are highly, highly customizable and searchable.
Yes, you can learn how to build a database with Microsoft Access or OpenOffice Base, but the former is like going to a warehouse with mechanical parts and being told you can build any type of vehicle you could possibly want. The latter is like one of those car websites where you can customize the specific type of car you want.

Mind-mapping software.

FreeMind - I can’t say enough great things about this software-it allows you to map ideas and link mind maps. Just go check it out

A journal.

I use a Tellico database for a quick overview (book read, words written, etc). And I was using an OpenOffice document for my thoughts on this project before beginning this blog, which will help me keep my focus and give me specific goals, as well as helping me put my thoughts in order and practice my writing.
Everyone has a blog, so go ahead and get a free one from somewhere. There’s something very nice about seeing your words on the screen on a nice template-links and pages are also quite useful.

Time-tracking software.

Hamster applet for Linux is imperative to seeing how much time I’m spending on any given thing-when I began using it I was surprised at how much time I spent doing things that had nothing to do with reading, writing or learning (that weren’t necessary like chores or work). This has helped me enormously in wrangling my time better. I use Hamster (on Eeebuntu Linux) because it fits in the tray, but there’s a multitude of time-tracking software for all platforms. Another good one is by Adobe Air. The point is to see where the time is going that you could be using to be productive-a pen and paper would do.

Computer

Asus netbook - I know that this will seem superfluous, but netbooks are much easier to carry-mine is the size of a hardback book. Someone over at Dell is a comedian and decided it would be a good idea to affix the 1GB of RAM to the motherboard, unlike all the rest of the computers (every company has at least one), which are upgradeable to 2GB.