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Back to the Toilet Technology

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In June, we reviewed the MJSI HydroRight Dual Flush converter, and discussed the principles of toilet technology. Amazon has some good deals on two pieces of MJSI technology. One is, of course, the Dual Flush Converter. The other is the HydroClean Water-Saving toilet Fill Valve.

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So, we already know that the HydroRight Dual Flush converter is a drop-in converter to turn your toilet into a water-saving dual flush. Of course, you need a concentric-float toilet fill valve, and that is where the HydroClean valve comes in as a perfect pair to the HydroRight.

The water-saving advantages of the HyroClean are that it is adjustable, and allows you to not waste water in your flush, so even if you are reluctant to go Dual Flush, this will limit wasted water per flush. It even has a cleaning tube to clean the gunk off the bottom of your tank.

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We’re thinking of pairing this with our HydroRight in order to improve water efficiency, as we still think we are wasting water on our toilet. Best of all, it is not an expensive improvement.

And it is now legal in New York City, as we discovered it wasn’t when we originally installed it.

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Published on November 28, 2010
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HDHomeRun to Start Preorder in December

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The Digital Media Zone reports that the SiliconDust HDHomerun Prime will be released to production in two weeks, shortly after which pre-order and release dates will be announced. The HDHomerun Prime is a three-tuner cablecard ready networked tuner. The price will be $249.

This, coupled with the fact that Copy Freely material may now be used by Linux devices, and that SiliconDust has long worked with MythTv developers, makes us potentially excited.

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Published on November 25, 2010
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Some Observations on the Kindle and E-Book Reading

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Over a month ago now, our editor went out and bought a Kindle. This was a hard decision, as we had spent a lot of time over here at Gadget Wisdom talking about how we weren’t going to buy a Kindle. Of course, when we said that, it cost significantly more than the $139 we paid to buy a Kindle.

Amazon announced this week you can now give Kindle books as gifts to anyone with an email address. This is a tremendous boost in possibilities. You get to give more thought to a gift than an Amazon gift card. And if the person doesn’t like it, they can get the gift card instead. We eagerly await the day we open up an email and discover that someone has gifted us a book.

The latest generation Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces, and measures 4.8 by 7.5 inches. Mashable suggests the true audience for a dedicated e-reader is someone who travels frequently, has overcrowded bookshelves, or read books for hours at a time. We focued on the overcrowded bookshelf issue. One commenter on the same story described the Kindle as “the ideal bridge for those interested in moving to a paperless environment.”

So, why did we go with the Kindle? We already had the Kindle App on Android, along with the Nook App, the Borders app, and Aldiko Book Reader. We read an entire e-book on the Droid, and it is doable. But it is a little screen. The 7″ screen is such a good, yet portable size, we’re already wondering about 7″ Android tablets(but that’s another blog post entirely).

We don’t really like DRM. If we have a choice between DRM and DRM-free, the DRM-free gets our business. So we buy O’Reilly books directly from O’Reilly, and then port them to Android and Kindle ourselves. But, with the Kindle app available on all platforms(save Linux), making it relatively easy to use your property anywhere, it is hardly the restriction that some DRM programs are.

Earlier today, we tried a free trial of a magazine on Kindle…a magazine we used to read every month. While we quickly cancelled our trial, as that title did not provide the value we desired, we still wished to read more content off the screen and on the Kindle…which is where Calibre, which we previously mentioned, comes in.

Because, as many have said before. With all the information overload that we experience with real time information sources like Twitter and such…it is nice to have a device where we can focus on what we are reading.

The next step we may do is the elimination of our classics sections in favor of Kindle books. Kindle versions of the classics are free of charge. And the shelf space would be most welcome. We’ve bought too many books to have room for more without losing something And that is why the Kindle works.

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Published on November 22, 2010
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Xmarks and Bloglines will Live

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Cross-Browser Bookmark and Password Syncing Service Xmarks will remain alive, it seems. The company is in the final stages of a sale to an as-yet unrevealed new owner who will keep the product alive. The new service will have a free and a premium component, and details will be forthcoming. So those of you who have already switched, you can come back.

Another product, Bloglines, a once-popular RSS aggregator, also slated to shutdown, has been sold to MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns. The free service will remain, and new services will grow around the technology. The Clippings feature will be discontinued, but all other features will remain.

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Published on November 8, 2010
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LaCie PassKey

LaCie USB KeysToday, we were at the store returning a faulty hard drive and saw the LaCie PassKey sitting there, and picked it up at a discount.

LaCie(pictured right), makes a line of USB keys that are shaped like keys. The Passkey is a microSDHC reader you can keep in your pocket.

The Passkey, as opposed to some of others, is pretty bulky up at the key section, but it is solid metal. Most USB drives use a plastic exterior, and can crack under heavy use. And it takes microSDHC cards, the same sort used in cell phones, which we are carrying anyway inside a cell phone.

It isn’t news, but it is certainly worth a look. There is nothing geekier than a giant USB key on your keychain.

Published on October 31, 2010
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Fun with Instapaper

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In the course of reading and assembling topics to write for Gadget Wisdom and other sites, we come across many different articles we may wish to reference later. Which means, as there are never enough hours in the day, we end up with stuff we need to read or review later.

You can bookmark the site, as we did, but keep doing that and you end up with a very crowded bookmark list with things that stay there long beyond their usefulness.

Recently, we decided to try Instapaper as an alternative. We set up folders for our categories, and a pull down menu of bookmarklets that save the current displayed URL into them. We use Google Reader to read blogs, and it offers a Send To function for stories that will send them right to Instapaper.

On the Android, we are recommending Instafetch, as the paid version supports folders, unlike the free Everpaper. If you want to save money, of course you can move things into folders later.

If you don’t have the desire for any apps, you can forward emails with links directly to a special Instapaper email address. Or, our personal favorite, email your Instapaper articles as a Kindle book to your Kindle for reading.

Instapaper is not new, but being as we just started using it, it seemed worth a a bit of a review. Try it out. And if you have thoughts for improving our workflow, send them on along.

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Published on October 28, 2010
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MythTV .24 Release Candidate 1 Available

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The MythTV Development team has announced that the first release candidate for MythTV version .24 is now available for download. This means that the full version is not far behind. The Dev team has adopted a much more aggressive development cycle of late, possibly due to the long period between .21 and .22. New features of note(at least to us) include:

  • A new themeable on screen display
  • Audio – Support for 24 bit audio and HD audio formats, output up to 7.1, autopopulation of soundcard devices in settings
  • Beginnings of Blu-Ray support
  • Experimental support for CrystalHD hardware accelerated video decoding
  • Rework and Stabilization of DVD Playback
  • Support for ISOs over storage groups, which was missing from 0.23
  • Add a custom rule example for re-recording SD shows when/if it re-airs in HD
  • Enabling backend as a source of internet content sources, scripts, and grabber search requests
  • Allow the scheduler to attempt to rerecord a failed recording
  • MythNetvision now has grabbers for BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Revision3, The WB, PBS, Comedy Central, TedTalks, etc.
  • MythWeather now supports wunderground as a source
Published on October 19, 2010
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Fedora Docs Directly in your Electronic Reader

Publican, which is the software that generates Fedora Documentation, now supports OPDS, the Open Publication Distribution System. OPDS is a syndication format for electronic publications. Thus, Electronic Reader programs or devices can be given a URL for the Fedora Docs catalog, and can browse through it, and download publications for reading.

If you have a program that supports OPDS, add in the URL http://docs.fedoraproject.org/opds.xml, or if you want our preference…US-English, try http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/opds.xml.

We use Aldiko,  an ebook book reader for the Android mobile OS. But there are several more. For a list of some complaint readers, click here.

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Published on October 5, 2010
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Xmarks to Shut Down

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XMarks is a service that offers cross-platform and cross-browser bookmark, password, and tab syncing. We’ve been using this service since it was Foxmarks, many moons ago. However, now, after four years, they have announced the discontinuing of service in January of 2010.

We’re not sure what we’ll do, as we tend to switch between Chromium and Firefox, using Xmarks to keep the two in sync. At this point, we suppose we’ll have to abandon one or the other. Firefox offers Firefox Sync. Chrome/Chromium offers sync to your Google account built in. Tough decision. As tough as choosing a browser.

Todd Agulnick, Co-Founder and CEO in a farewell blog post, thanked users, investors, and colleagues for their loyalty and signed off in true geek fashion, quoting Douglas Adams, “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.”

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Published on September 27, 2010
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Calibre and the E-Book

Calibre is an Ebook Management Platform. Originally started in 2006, it has grown, with a team of dedicated developers from a small project to get content onto a reader to myriad of options.

  • Library Management – Calibre manages e-books stored in it for you, including options to sort, tag, comment, etc. Supports the downloading of metadata.
  • E-Book Conversion – Supports all major formats(full list here) including EPUB and MOBI. The conversion program supports rescaling font sizes, automatic detection/creation of chapters/table of contents, and insertion of metadata at the start of the book.
  • Syncing to E-Book Readers – Supports a list of devices it can sync to(Full list here) and automatically chooses the best format for the device.
  • News Ripper – Downloads news from websites/RSS feeds, formats it into an e-book and sends it to the device. Supports full versions of articles, not just summaries. Pre-supported sites include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, etc. You can create custom ‘recipes’ for other sites and use them, even upload them to share with others.
  • Built in E-Book Viewer
  • Content Server – Calibre supports acting as a web server to access your collection using a web browser. Supports email and mobile devices.

Now, this is great if you have an E-Book Reader. Let’s go back to our recent discussion of the Amazon Kindle, with Wi-Fi. Many papers are available for free online. Let’s take the Wall Street Journal, which does charge. The cost of an Amazon Subscription to the WSJ is $14.99 a month. The cost of getting the newspaper is $2.29 per week($9.16 a month) and online only at $1.99 per week(7.96 a month). Personally, while we think charging more on the Kindle is wrong, here’s a way to extract the information using your login and send it to your Kindle.

We did a little test of this feature, and picked a few of their over 200 English news sources(They have additional foreign language offerings). We were able to program it to autogenerate a few choice news sources and send them on a custom frequency to our device as long as Calibre was running in the background. Next, it seems to have a command-line interface, and we’ll have to see if it can run as a cron job on our server.

We have yet to test it, but according to the Calibre forums, the following should work…

ebook-convert <calibreroot>/resources/recipes/nytimes.recipe todays_nytimes.mobi

That should work if set up as a cron job, but e-book conversion, we gather, can be resource intensive. We’ll have more on these experiments later.

Either way, Calibre is available for PC, Mac, and Linux. Why not give it a try?

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Published on September 26, 2010
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