As mentioned by Alan, Lisburn and Hillsborough Free Presbyterian Churches held a joint Creation Weekend, with speaker Paul Taylor from Answers in Genesis UK. I got my hands on the recordings thinking some people might have been interested but put off by the venue (as were a couple of attendees who left during the hymns and prayer but returned to hear Paul). This is his talk from Saturday night in Lisburn, entitled “200 Lost Years” it talks about the life of Charles Darwin and his legacy.
Apologies for the poor quality, it wasn’t me doing the video…
I took the time today for a little bit of overdue DIY and built a rack for pour-over/filter cone coffee. We’ll be bringing this out at the next BEAN AND GONE stall at the Lisburn Farmer’s market, along with a whole variety of coffees to brew on it, more on that soon. If anyone wants one of these, we’re thinking of building them and selling them for around £35-40. Contact @grib if you’re interested.
I’m probably breaking all the rules, but I’m going to start with a conclusion, the Amazon Kindle DX is an amazing device. End of post…
…Or at least it would be if I lived in the USA. The Kindle with it’s built-in “Whispernet” allows for purchasing and downloading books from Amazon and browsing Wikipedia and the web freely (apart from book cost obviously) until your heart’s content, providing you have cellular (Sprint?) coverage in the area. Living in the UK, I’m somewhat out of that coverage area, so even after crossing the hurdle of ordering from an Amazon.com account, delivering to a US address and then getting it brought back here, you’re limited to USB only transfer. After all that is it still appealing? Like the man from delmonte, I say “Yes!”
Fair enough you are losing some of the best additional features of the Kindle, but let’s remember, what they are additional features. The Kindle DX is the e-book reader that makes other readers like the Sony and even Kindle 2, cry and run away.
It’s got a big 9.7” highly contrasted e-ink screen, about (haven’t actually checked) 3.5GB of storage (which I’ve now filled), it’s slim, light, looks cool, renders PDF, but more important than all that, you can actually enjoy an e-book like a real book! I know the purists out there are going to wax lyrical about paper, the feel of a book and bla, bla bla… You know what? I don’t care. I love books too, but if I’m going on holiday or doing some development work, the last think I want is lugging a suitcase/bag around filled with books, especially text books.
That’s why the Kindle DX, in my eyes, is a winner, it’s an iPod for books, I can still have all the classics on my fuax-intellectual bookshelves, but if I’m going to leave the house and need a half-dozen iPhone dev books, I’ll be talking the Kindle DX with me. And on a technical note, the refreshing of the e-ink screen is not as jarring as I expected, and performance wise it can open most books and PDFs about as quickly as an iPhone 3G can open an app :P
Of course, before I even got a book on the device I’d already installed a hack from here which gave me SSH access and after a bit more jiggery-pokery let me share out my MacBook’s internet connection and browse the Amazon Store on the Kindle. Important note if you plan on doing this yourself the one piece of advice I can give is this:
Register the device with your Amazon.com account while it’s still in the US.
Otherwise, although you can browse the store, without registering, you can’t make any purchases or use the web bowser via the reverse tether. Some might say it’s a bit pointless anyway since you have to be connected to a PC anyway, but I’d still like the option, for completeness sake if nothing else.
I’ll be waiting for a UK/Europe release and further playing with the device, but most of all I’ll be reading.
If you’ve any questions or thoughts, you can catch me on twitter @grib
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I got invited onto the Denny D show on Feile FM today to talk about coffee, here’s a few photos of the studio and the delicious Vac Pot of Brazilian Inglaterra Acaia that I brewed up for Denise.
