Kendall Giles

Our cat had kittens, in a box. Here is a short video of her new babies.

It is interesting to hear about Google's mobile book service, just days before Amazon's rumored announcement of a new Kindle:

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage. While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen.

The OCR'd text looks pretty good on my iPod touch.

UPDATE [November 25, 2009]: There have been a lot of improvements to the Kindle 2 since this post was written: the Kindle 2 now has support for viewing PDF files, allows for manual screen rotation, and provides for *global* wireless access.

The Kindle 2 shipped on Feb 23, (and now that mine has arrived, here is my review of the kindle book reader), but here is a roundup of a few interesting pre-reviews:

• http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/02/amazon-unveils.html

  A little more than a year after the Kindle made its debut, Amazon announced a new, updated version of its popular e-book reader Monday with a big endorsement from Stephen King.

• http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/feb2009/id2009029_980088.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_top+story

  Kindle 2 is more than just a prettier version of its Kindle 1. Though the 10-oz. machine is only one-third of an inch thick--that's 25% thinner than an iPhone--it stores up to 1,500 books vs. 200 in the original. And it offers sharper on-screen images, with 16 shades of gray to offer graphic nuances. Amazon added these based on e-mails from Kindle customers, says Laura Porco, director of Kindle Books. "We're always listening to customers," she says. "We took their feedback to design some things: They said, We want Kindles to hold more books, and we want crisper images."

• http://www.macworld.com/article/138722/2009/02/kindle2_handson.html?lsrc=rss_main

  The Kindle 2 now powers up from USB--a boon for all of us who hated carrying an extra charger with the original device. The mini-USB port at the bottom works not only for power but also for allowing the Kindle 2 to act as a USB mass-storage device, in the event you want to drag and drop files to the handheld.

• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2340721,00.asp

  So, yes, there are many reasons to dislike the Amazon Kindle 2, but as I see it, the benefits still far outweigh the disadvantages. Trust me, you're going to want a Kindle 2.

• http://ireaderreview.com/2009/02/09/kindle-20-review-should-you-buy-kindle-20/

  WhisperNet and Amazon's great range of book titles (over 230,000 titles including 7,000+ free public domain classics etc.) are still the 31 feature and make the Kindle 2.0 the best eReader available.

Here's my review of the Kindle 2 book reader.

But from the article "10 reasons to buy a Kindle 2 and 10 reasons not to", here's one of the reasons why you might not want to buy a Kindle:

7. Flight attendants will tell you to turn it off on take off and landing. You can't explain that it's epaper and uses no current. You just can't. It's like explaining heaven to bears.

When I got lost one day in my labyrinth of stacked journal articles, receipts, photographs, and other paper detritus, I knew I needed help.

While Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek (review), might suggest outsourcing the scanning all my documents into digital format for storage, in order to eliminate the paper yet retain the useful information, I first decided to go the manual route. This meant finding a good, easy-to-use, fast, document scanner that works on my Mac, and I think I found just that in the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner.

With a footprint smaller than an 8.5x11" sheet of paper, the ScanSnap is really cutting through my stacks of documents. It handles multiple pages and makes fast, two-sided, color pdfs of the documents with just one button push. It also easily scans in photographs, business cards, envelopes, etc. The software gives you a choice of saving the pdf to a folder, emailing it, printing it, importing into iPhoto, part of iLife '09, or creating a searchable pdf. The latter makes the contents of your pdf document searchable by your OS or other search/filter applications, for instant retrieval of information buried in a large document repository.

"One touch" pdf creation, indeed.