Category Archives: Life

Updating the Kindle Touch

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I got a Kindle Touch for my birthday last year, although it didn’t arrive until around Thanksgiving. It has been something of a disappointment. My one child got a Barnes & Noble Nook about the same time, and it is by far the better product. (I’m not alone in that assessment.) (While I’m sure about the Nook, I’m not sure about Barnes & Noble. I chose the Amazon product to access the Amazon market. If ebook readers used a common industry-wide format, the Nook would be a no-brainer.)

Anyway, the Kindle Touch is a few grams too heavy to be comfortable, and the user interface is … well, there’s no way to sugarcoat this: it stinks. You never know where to press because sometimes you press in the invisible right-hand zone to move forward. Sometimes you “flick” things up from the bottom. To go forward you tap the right side. To go backward you flick the left. And so on.

But I see there is a new firmware update for the Touch. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it can hardly be any worse. I’m installing it as I type this. I’ll let you know how it works out.

New Car

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The last part of moving happened today, when I bought a new old clunker to take the place of the old old clunker we unloaded back in Yucca Valley. Here it is:

New Car - Exterior

And here’s what it looks like on the inside:

New Car - Interior

(If you click through to the pictures, you not only get the option of looking at higher-res images, but you get to read all the notes with which I annotated them.)

“Beater with a Heater”

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It costs a lot to ship a car to Alaska, so we sold the older of our two cars when we moved here.

And now we’re trying to find a replacement. My price range is “beater with heater,” so if you know something in that ballpark, let me know.

I’m mainly using Craigslist, of course, doing a lot of searching for “AWD” and “Subaru” there. Most of the attractive cars vanish in a few hours, but I keep seeing one that’s pretty tempting, in a danger-will-robinson sort of way: a 1991 Subaru XT-6.

I asked a friend and he sent me a whole raft of cautionary emails like this one. But it wasn’t all warnings. There was an article in Car and Driver, which calls the XT-6 a winter beater:

“The XT6 is undoubtedly the best Subaru ever built,” we gushed in a July 1988 test. Well, it certainly was the most complicated, offering height-adjustable air springs, electrohydraulic “Cybrid” power steering, and a choice of two all-wheel-drive systems.

We went over and looked at this one, and it’s still tempting. The owner bought it a couple of years ago and has poured a lot of effort into rehabilitating it. But it’s a 20-year old small-production small car. Do I want a car, or a hobby? Hmmm.

Tab Sweep Saturday

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Just a few tabs this week:

I really liked this: 1000 frame/sec video of an eagle owl’s final approach toward the camera.

Also this, which combines Legos, Star Wars, and computer graphics for a nerdy trifecta:

And, finally, a Firefly panel:

(There are several additional bits from that same panel.)

Moving CDs

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Empirical evidence suggests that a typical CD jewel case weighs between 3.0 oz and 3 1/8 oz. Let’s call it 3.1 oz. I have to ship about 864 of them to Alaska. That means I’m shipping 164 lbs. of jewel cases.

Alternatively, I can move the CDs to binder cases like these:

CD Binder Case (1)

Each of them weighs about 3 lbs and contains 324 discs. Well, really, they have 324 pockets, but as you can see, I’m loading every other pocket with the album art/booklet for the CD:

CD Binder Case (2)

I figure I need six cases like that. That means I’m shipping 18 lbs, for a net savings of 146 lbs. Sounds good to me.

The best part is that, when I get there, I can put all six binders into deep storage, since I hardly ever listen to CDs, once I’ve ripped them into iTunes.

(Bonus points if you can connect the bottom picture with the title of the post. Hint: what is the first disc on the next page?)