Skip to main content

Gadget Wisdom

Category: Lifestyle

1 Response

Google Music vs. Amazon Cloud Drive – Some Limitations

Amazon Cloud Player
Image by pmsyyz via Flickr

Out of the various online music lockers that are springing up, Google Music seems to have the best interface for metadata. This is especially important if you intend to be able to sort through your music. This is why, despite supporting Moozone, we decided to upload our music to multiple clouds. In terms of user experience, Google wins hands-down.

Amazon Cloud Drive, by comparison, seems to offer no ability to edit the metadata, which affects playback and search. It makes the experience a bit harder. Their web player is not very feature filled and their Android app is equally lacking in aesthetics. Google Music could use more functionality, but it offers a compelling set of features.

Amazon makes it easy to download files, Google does not. You can make files available offline in the Android app, but you can’t download them. So it isn’t a backup solution.

Neither company offers a public API, so third-parties can expand their offerings, however. Amazon Cloud offers a free and paid product. Google has yet to offer a paid product, and it may or may not.

We’re still on the fence about this. Ironically, we prefer the Amazon music to the Google Music store, but Google has the better interface. And neither supports OGG, unfortunately. But, so far, in this battle, Google has won. But we often find ourselves using Amazon’s MP3 App for Android right after we’ve bought a song. Something to be said for ease of use.

What do you think?

Related articles
Published on December 30, 2011
Full Post
2 Responses

Adventures in Global Smartphone Travel – Call for Feedback

For use on the English Wikipedia page LG Ally
Image via Wikipedia

Recently, we started making plans to travel out of the country for the first time since most of us here at the Weneca Media Group got a smartphone.

Since that time, the advice given about smartphones(once you get one, it is hard to go back), has rung true. The idea of being without one and its instant data access wherever we go seems a strange one.

However, most of us have selected a CDMA carrier. Mostly Verizon, but Jere over at Android Buffet has a Sprint phone. The majority of the world uses GSM as its standard, rendering these phones useless. However, Verizon offers a limited series of global phones, including the Droid 2 Global and the Droid 3, both available in the Gadget Wisdom collection.

So, our conversation started with Verizon. Despite the fact Vodafone owns nearly half of Verizon, they do not offer a good deal on data. Signing up for a 50MB plan is $30.

Looking around at prepaidgsm.net, which summarizes rates around the world for prepaid gsm, there are better deals to be had. The downside is that you can’t keep your U.S. number, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

As a Verizon customer, we would need to unlock our Global phones. Verizon Global Tech Support advised they would unlock one phone every ten months for a customer in good standing. The phone would have had to have been on the account at some point. So, time to decide which phone is going overseas. Perhaps the one not being used in daily life…

If we wanted to chuck all data concerns out the window, Telestial offers inexpensive prepaid world SIM and prepaid phones, and can be purchased through Amazon. They offer both a U.S. and a U.K. phone number, with cards starting at $5. We may get one of these as a backup.

Our plan is to go for something decoupled from the phone for the U.S. issue, Skype. Skype offers a service called Skype-To-Go numbers. They will assign a number that will forward to an overseas number at your expense, which is significantly less than the cost of having same done by a phone company. You can even forward your normal or Google Voice number to this number, making it seamless for friends and business associates. It would also, if we set it up after arriving and purchasing a prepaid SIM card, allow us to use the cheap local plans, instead of other options.

What do you think? We haven’t done any of this yet, but what do you suggest?

Published on October 18, 2011
Full Post
0 Responses

Are Bookshelves No Longer for Books?

MUNICH, GERMANY - APRIL 02: Lars Dafnas, hea...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The LA Times questioned the future of paper books, based on the information that the classic Billy Bookcase is being redesigned. Next month, the shelf will be rereleased as a deeper shelf, meant to display decorative items, and is already pushing glass doors as an add-on.

Our perspective is probably interesting, as a previous Ikea redesign on the Billy Bookcase, which is over thirty years old, halted our expansion plans. We had invested in Billy with the idea we could gradually add to it. Unfortunately, they discontinued the color, if not the bookcase.

As for the fact that over ten percent of the population now has an E-Reader, we addressed the issue of gradually decluttering your space with an E-Reader. When we first brought in the Billy Bookcases some years ago, there were three of them. We’ve since eliminated one by gradually going digital. But there are some books that we will never get rid of.

For most people, while e-readers may mean a slowdown in the purchase of paper books, it does not mean a complete elimination. For one, too many materials aren’t available electronically. E-Books are not transferable, nor can you buy them cheap used. Thus there are limits to their utility and we doubt they’ll ever completely go away, and we don’t want them to. Our prediction is that the publishing industry will migrate to a print-on-demand model. There may still be trade paperbacks printed, but if you want a copy of the majority of books, they will print it on request.

As we write this, we paused at this moment to turn around and look at the Billy behind and wonder about the future. The Billy we got rid of, we did add in a smaller bookcase which is filled with movies. Is the future visual and audio entertainment, over the written word? Maybe books of all kinds are on the way out.

If they aren’t, will we read on e-ink screens? Tablets?

Many people prefer a dedicated e-reader not just because e-ink screens tend to be less harsh on the eyes than LCDs, but because they have the same distraction-free nature as books. They aren’t designed for multiple streams of information. They allow you to focus on the book.

There are many kinds of people in this world. We all have different needs. Some are better with audio, some better visually…the newest generation has been conditioned to learn best with multimedia. There will always be demand for printed material, even as things change.

But that’s us. What do you think?

Related articles
Published on September 11, 2011
Full Post
4 Responses

Switching From Dropbox to Wuala

Image representing Wuala as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We were once a big booster of Dropbox. But recent events have caused us to doubt them. On July 1st, Dropbox revised their policies. This was in response to a well publicized authentication breach where, for several hours, access to accounts was permitted without valid passwords. This followed the realization that despite assurances, Dropbox employees can access your data, but only to the extent that they need to(or so they say).

Does this mean we doubt the sincerity of the company? No more than any other company. But we’ve decided to move on…to Wuala. Wuala is a secure online storage service that provides many more features than Dropbox, if less supported.

There are three core principles of Wuala:

  1. Security and privacy
  2. Bridging web and desktop
  3. Economic technology

In terms of security, Wuala offers client-side encryption, which means that the encryption is performed on one’s one computer. During the upload, data is split and stored in multiple locations. They promise that because your password is never transmitted, no one, including their employees, can see private files.

Wuala offers a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is even a web version. You get 1GB for free, and you can gain additional storage by paying for it, trading your local storage for extra storage(more on that in a moment), or inviting friends to join Wuala.

Wuala offers both backup and synchronization options. Backup saves local files regularly into the Wuala Drive, at an interval of your choosing. The backup are read-only. Sync allows you to sync files and folders across multiple computers. Dropbox provides sync only.

If you want to pay for storage above the free 1GB, it is $29 a year for 10GB, $49 for 25GB, and so on. You can also trade for storage. You can trade up to 100GB on your computer in exchange for 100GB in the cloud. You get whatever you provide multiplied by your online time. You must be on for at least 4 hours a day. As they put it, this doesn’t give you extra storage, but you give up storage locally to gain it elsewhere, which has its advantages.

We’ve set up the Wuala client on our headless server to trade storage. It also resides on our desktop systems to sync our files. We have plans to expand the headless part, to generate backups of the entire Wuala sync and send it to a secondary backup site as well, but that is for the future. The Wuala client allows it to be mounted as an NFS partition for that purpose.

There is an Android client we have tested. It lacks many features of the Dropbox app, including directory download/sync/upload and support for the Android sharing functionality. Of course, the Wuala developers have acknowledge this as a desired feature, but there is no timetable for its implementation. If they are slow in doing so, there would be hope of a third-party app, however, the Wuala API is in Alpha and only supports GET requests. It has been in this state for over a year.

When it comes down to it, Wuala is not perfect. But it offers a more complete feature set than Dropbox, if a less mature API and Android client. But, like many things, it is a matter of what is more important to you.

Related articles
Published on July 5, 2011
Full Post
1 Response

Decluttering Your Life with an E-Reader

Stack of books in Gould's Book Arcade, Newtown...
Image via Wikipedia

[adrotate banner=”15″]

We’ve continued to grow more and more enamoured with the Kindle as an e-reading device, especially now that it has become so comparatively inexpensive. Business Insider reported today that the Kindle with Special Offers is the bestselling Kindle.

But, how can you, as is our title, declutter your life with an E-Reader, kindle or otherwise? Start by reducing your book collection with a few simple tips.

  • Replace all your books that are in the public domain with free electronic editions.
  • If you have a shelf of O’Reilly reference books, take advantage of their $4.99 EBook upgrade. Get the e-book version of any book you own for only $4.99. They don’t specify you have to keep the book after that.
  • Identify beloved books in your collection that are falling apart. If they are worth keeping for your love of them, it may be worth repurchasing them in e-book form.
  • If you want to go to the extreme, go a step further and sell your paper books in favor of a complete digital library. You will lose money on this deal, but think of the space you’ll gain

We asked Len Edgerly of The Kindle Chronicles podcast to solicit feedback from his users, asking how many of them had actually repurchased a book they’d owned in paper form in electronic form. We recommend the podcast, even if you aren’t a Kindle owner, for his excellent and informative interviews.

What other papers other than books can you save? Well, magazines and newspapers are not quite all there yet. A big part of this is that the layout of these, when offered on e-readers, leaves much to be desired. Many pieces are omitted, or substandard. Many titles are not digitally available(More on this in the future).

What about article reading? Many people print/clip articles to take with them. There are services that will send articles to your reader. To name a few, popular service Instapaper, which we’ve mentioned before, will send you the last 20 articles you saved in it on a time schedule. You have Send to Kindle extensions and sites. There are similiar ones for other formats. An we’ve mentioned Calibre as a way of sending even more content to an E-Reader

So, what is left? Simple Note taking?

[asa]B004LSLN0I[/asa]

There’s a decent app for that that might eliminate a basic notepad.

Ultimately, you can’t do everything with every device. But, imagining how much stuff we could get rid of if we moved our written materials digital is a very interesting and compelling idea. There are many things we will never part with, many books in particular. But there are plenty that our attachment is to the words, not to the form, snd would not mind compressing our collection.

What do you think?

Published on May 13, 2011
Full Post
2 Responses

Moving Back to RSS from Twitter

This icon, known as the "feed icon" ...
Image via Wikipedia

It is amazing that we would come full circle from where we were when we started with Twitter in January of 2009. When we began using Twitter, part of the appeal was as a real-time replacement for RSS reading. But, recently, we’ve returned to RSS feed reading as a much more reliable manner of ensuring we get our news.

That does not mean Twitter is not still a big part of our news delivery, but it has become overwhelming. But if your feed consists of nothing but your news feed piped into Twitter, then we will now go back to following you in Google Reader. We will now take advantage of the greatest benefit of Twitter to someone looking to get news and information…curation. The most valuable stories will float to the top as people tweet them.This will make Twitter much more social for us.

In January, an article made the rounds, maintaining that RSS was being ignored, and we should be worried. Google Chrome has no native RSS support built in, Mozilla is killing off the RSS icon in Firefox 4.0. How RSS integrated into systems may need to be rethought. Google Reader is all well and good, but that is a website, not a browser. That same article has some good suggestions.

  • Why can’t, when you visit a blog article, the browser reads the comments RSS, and when you next come back to that article, it can tell you that there have been new comments since, and highlight them on the page?
  • Why do we go through the same daily routine of checking certain sites over and over again? Can’t our computers be more intelligent here? Isn’t the purpose of the computer / browser to save us time!? Why doesn’t the browser, when you open it, tell you how many new items there are, on what sites you commonly visit, without you having ever configured this?

Dan Frommer, on Business Insider, countered that RSS is not dying, normal people never used it. In his opinion, RSS is a fine backend technology. In fact, many who moved to Twitter are reading feeds pumped to Twitter from RSS. That using RSS in an RSS reader has never been mainstream, which is valid. O’Reilly points out, as a backend technology, RSS never blocks you or goes down.

We wanted there to be a Twitter alternative, and there very well might be. Twitter is a stream. Twitter Lists would allow everything to be neatly organized in an intuitive way,  but the issue is that there is no adequate solution to reading longer and in-depth on your desired sources for Twitter. There is paper.li and the Twitter Times. There are social feed readers. We will be exploring these at some future point for discussion. But magazine/newspaper like feed readers seem to be the rage right now.

What do you think?

Related articles
Published on May 2, 2011
Full Post
0 Responses

Kindle Library Lending is the Last Big Missing Feature of the Platform

Amazon Kindle PDF

Amazon announced yesterday a new feature for the Kindle, Kindle Library Lending. In partnership with Overdrive, a company that already provides E-Book lending services for tens of thousands of libraries, Amazon will offer customers the chance to take books out of their local library.

Lending will be enabled not only on the Kindle itself, but on the ubiquitous Kindle apps. That means the books will be lent to the account, not to the individual devices within it. The service will offer not only Whispersync between devices, but the opportunity to annotate books. If you later purchase the book, your notes will return.

We’re not sure if you’ll be able to browse a library collection and take out books easily directly from the Kindle. The shopping functionality on the Kindle already lacks in ease of use compared to shopping on the Amazon site.

Unfortunately, while the announcement is now, the actual functionality will not be available until later this year. Librarianbyday.net commented on a few lingering questions.

  • Existing E-Books that libraries have will now be available in Kindle format. But it does not say definitively whether or not there will be an additional cost for this for the library
  • Are you required to link your Kindle account to your library account to the point at which data is exchanged between the two? If so, how much data? Does Amazon get to know all of your checkout history

We’ll have more on this when it actually happens.

Related articles
Published on April 21, 2011
Full Post
0 Responses

Switching from Instapaper to ReadItLater

The concept of a Read It Later service is not new to our workflow. Back in October of 2010, we discussed moving our workflow to Instapaper. Then, our storage expanded to Pinboard, and we discussed integrating Pinboard and Instapaper into a writing and reading workflow.

However, the developer of Instapaper is very iOS-centric. He released an official iPad and iPhone app, and many of his updates are paired with an app update. We do like the product, but we decided to consider the competition when ReadItLater released an official Android app(Market Link), which is available currently at 99 cents. We had initially looked at ReadItLater and moved on, but things have changed.

The Android app offers an exclusive feature not available for any other platform app. Instant Push Sync, which ensures new items instantly download and are available on the phone, even if the phone is offline. Also on the Android side of things, there is a ReadItLater plugin for Dolphin Browser.

Read It Later also has a Firefox extension with a feature we were hunting for(unfortunately not also available for Chrome), which is Save All Tabs for Later. It also offers offline reading, Google Reader integration, etc.You can mark items as read directly from the browser.  Overall, it is much more tightly integrated into the browser experience.

Pinboard also supports the same import from ReadItLater it does from Instapaper, which means that end of my workflow(the archive) is unchanged.

Read It Later also has a beta paid feature called Digest. This turns your Read It Later stories into an online magazine format, and automatically sorts them into topics. The magazine format is very popular right now.

It does lack the auto-send to Kindle function that Instapaper offered, but this can still be reproduced using Calibre. It lacks folders, but supports tagging(which can accomplish the same thing)

If your priorities are clean formatting of long-form text content and integrated portability to an eReader, you may lean toward Instapaper. If you do your reading with your browser or mobile device and want to keep up with content-rich pages with lots of images or videos, Read It Later may be more suited.

Related articles
Published on April 15, 2011
Full Post
0 Responses

Amazon is Selling More Kindle Books than Paperbacks

First, Amazon announced that Kindle Books were outselling Hardcovers. Now, Kindle Books have outpaced paperbacks. For every 100 paperback books the company has sold, they have sold 115 Kindle books. During the same period, they sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. These numbers are for the United States, of course.

The Amazon Kindle store has more than 810,000 books, of which 670,000 are $9.99 or less, in addition to millions of out of copyright titles.

But why is this the truth?

  • The Price is Right: The Kindle 3 Wi-Fi is $139, and $50 extra gets you lifetime 3G. They will likely continue to try and bring the price to sub-$100.
  • You don’t need a Kindle to Read Kindle Books: There are Kindle apps for every mobile platform, desktop(Linux excepted), and for the Web(full content pending). You can read a book anywhere.
  • Whispersync: Not only can you read it anywhere, but it remembers where you where you left off when device-hopping.
  • Simplicity: Amazon focused on a replacement to the book experience. It didn’t try to make a device that did everything, like a tablet. It may make one of these someday, however. But their design focuses on readability, battery life, etc.

And we say all this being a latecomer to the Kindle, after we thought it was too expensive, during the early days.

Published on January 30, 2011
Full Post
2 Responses

Organize your Workflow with Pinboard and Instapaper

Image representing Pinboard as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

One of the hardest things to do in writing a blog is keeping up on all the developing news and keeping track of reference materials that might be needed for a story. Research is very important, and for the longest time, we neglected keeping our materials organized to the point we ended up with thousands of bookmarks inside our browser and we could never find anything.

Then, Xmarks, our bookmark syncing service announced it was going to shut down(It didn’t), and caused us to rethink how we were doing things. We started with Instapaper. Instapaper is a holding queue for things we have yet to read. It isn’t designed for long-term storage.

Which is why we added Pinboard. The price for joining Pinboard is, at time of post, $9.20 and increases a fraction of a cent with each user. Pinboard is a low-noise bookmarking site, billed as social bookmarking for introverts. It offers the opportunity to store all of your bookmarks and tag them with descriptive terms. It can import links from a Twitter feed, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc. automatically.

Due to a recent boost in popularity caused by news of the imminent shutdown of Delicious, Pinboard is bursting with new users, and new features are planned. Support for multiple Twitter accounts is coming, as well as a Firefox plugin, downloadable archives for backup, tag recommendations, etc.

So, in our current workflow, an item we read quickly and want to keep for the future goes directly to Pinboard. A more timely item or something we want to read in more detail goes to Instapaper rather than sitting in the browser in a tab and eating up active memory. While Instapaper has a Pinboard feature to send Starred Items to Pinboard, and Pinboard has a feature to import from your Instapaper feed, we are hoping for a feature in Instapaper to send archived items directly to Pinboard, as opposed to Starred ones. Other people want a way to integrate Pinboard’s built-in Read Later tag with Instapaper.

So, when we need something, we can search our Pinboard archive for the information. We’re not the only one who uses the combination of the two to keep organized. One blogger called it “Organizational Bliss(Almost)” The benefits of Instapaper for organizing information you want to read and Pinboard for information you want to archive are great. Why not give them a shot? The developers are committed to continuing to improve these services for us.

We even have access to them on Android devices. There are multiple Instapaper clients for Android, all unofficial, but we recommend Instafetch. Instafetch is free, but there is a paid service component to it. There is only one full fledged Pinboard client, Pindroid, which is a port of a Delicious client that is slowly coming into its own.

Of course, our next organization project is finding more hours in the day to actually write things. Anyone have a website for that?

Related articles
Published on January 20, 2011
Full Post

Get New Posts By Email