Month: April 2010

Over the past ten years, I’ve owned about a dozen different e-readers and tried e-reader applications on many PDAs, cell phones and smart phones. Of all those devices, the Sony Reader Pocket Edition is hands-down the best such device I’ve used.

The Pocket Edition is basically just a slimmed down 5″ version of Sony’s larger e-reader products. The screen is awesome (though comparable to other e-ink devices), and the Pocket Edition is one of the few e-readers I’ve used where the battery life actually comes close to the manufacturer’s claims.

The relatively small form factor means I can easily take it anywhere I could take a paperback, whereas with the Kindle and Sony’s larger e-readers, there were times I would leave it behind due to the large size (and, with the Kindle, because the damn thing was constantly needing recharged).

There is no SD card slot, which I miss, and I have no clue how well Sony’s software/bookstore work as I only read non-DRMed epub files on it.

Currently, the Pocket Edition reader can be had for $150-$170, and is a steal at that price.

I have to agree with Cory Doctorow that this tape has hands down the best product name evar.

Update: I would strongly recommend against using VipyrVPN or Giganews. VipyrVPN does per-session logging which it maintains for up to 90 days which renders it useless as a VPN in my opinion. I would not put much trust in Giganews (run by the same company) to maintain privacy and not log activity. There are better, cheaper options out there that actually respect the privacy and security of users.

 

Many months ago, I started using Giganews to download, uh, Linux distros (yeah, that’s it) over Usenet. Then a few months ago I saw some email cross my account from Giganews describing how they had added access to VipyrVPN for free to everyone subscribed to their highest level Usenet product, which I was.

I didn’t really pay much attention to the VPN partly because I didn’t have much of a use for a VPN at that time, and in the past I haven’t found such solutions very helpful — specifically, my previous attempts at using commercial VPNs was that they were too slow.

Anyway, a couple months ago I bought myself a new ultraportable and very quickly found a use case where I really needed to encrypt the traffic going to and from my new computer.  So I configured my system to use VyprVPN and have been very pleasantly surprised.

I haven’t actually done much in the way of speed comparisons, but at least for the sort of activities I normally do, I hardly notice any difference in speed or latency. And I feel a lot safer at reducing the risk of someone snooping on what I’m doing on the unsecure WiFi networks I need to use fairly regularly.

OpenLike is

an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications.

As the OpenLike website puts it, for consumers the protocol allows individuals to determine which networks they want to share their data about what they like, and for websites allows users to promote things to different social networks without the website operator having to know the details of each network.

A much needed alternative to the closed social networks such as Facebook, where data goes in but never comes out again.