Can Amazon push Netflix out of limelight? | Media Maverick – CNET News — I would be all over this, if only it ran on one of my existing boxes (Wii, PS3, or Apple TV).
Year: 2011
Borders Stores Closing
I don’t see my local Borders on this store closing list. I buy most of my books at Amazon these days, but it’s nice to have a bookstore where I can go to browse through actual, physical, books, on actual shelves.
Around here, we’ve got one Borders and one Barnes & Noble, and not much else. In Somerville, we used to have one small bookstore for new books, and two used book stores. They’re all gone now, though I think one of the used book stores just moved to a different town.
I do hope Borders survives. I try and buy stuff there once in a while, even if it’s more expensive than Amazon, just to help keep them afloat.
Verizon iPhone thoughts
I’ve had my Verizon iPhone for a few days now. I’m mostly liking it, but I admit I miss a few things about my BlackBerry.
Stuff I like about the iPhone:
- I haven’t had to reboot it. (I used to have to reboot the BB almost every day.)
- Lots of apps. (I had just a handful of apps on the BB. The way memory worked in the older BB OS, you just couldn’t install too many apps.)
- Much better web browser.
- No more need for Missing Sync.
Stuff I miss from the BlackBerry Storm:
- Dedicated camera button on the right side.
- User-assignable button on the left side. (I had it assigned to QuickLaunch, which I also miss.)
- Ability to star a GMail message right in the native mail app (via the enhanced GMail plugin).
- SurePress. I know most reviewers weren’t keen on it, but I kind of liked it.
Kindle DRM
OK, one more Kindle gripe. When I first set up my Kindle 3 yesterday, I opened a couple of the books that I’d copied over, just to make sure I could. I didn’t have a problem, so I assumed that there weren’t any DRM issues with the books. I was wrong on that; apparently, I’d picked a couple of DRM-free books when I was checking them. So this morning I had to go through and delete 40 DRM’d books off the Kindle. They all now show in my archive view, and I haven’t had any trouble re-downloading a couple of them, but why should I have to do that? The device is registered to my Amazon account, and it’s got internet connectivity. Why can’t it just quietly go up to Amazon’s servers and re-authorize any files I’ve copied over from the old Kindle?
new Kindle software
Purely by coincidence, on the same day I got my Kindle 3, Amazon announced a new software update. Sounds kind of interesting.
new Kindle
I got my new Kindle 3 in the mail today. And I’ve successfully transferred all my stuff over from the Kindle 1 to the Kindle 3, wiped the old Kindle, and boxed it up for Gazelle. It’s worth $15, which I guess is fair for a three year old, two generation behind, device.
So now here’s my list of gripes with the new Kindle:
- Biggest gripe: I didn’t realize that old magazine issues are DRM’d to the Kindle on which you received them, and cannot be transferred to the new one. Apparently, you can re-download recent issues to your new Kindle, but you cannot just copy the files over from the old device to the new. I had a bunch of Newsweek back issues on my old Kindle that I hadn’t read yet, and I was quite surprised to see that I couldn’t open any of them on the new Kindle. And they’re old enough that they’re no longer available for re-download. I don’t have any current Kindle magazine subscriptions going, and now I’m a good bit less likely to start any new ones.
- The keyboard. It’s just not as easy to use as the Kindle 1’s keyboard. And there are no dedicated number keys, which just seems weird. I’ve discovered that Alt-Q works for 1, Alt-W is 2, and so on, so there is still a way to type numbers, but it’s weird.
- Collections. I was fairly excited about this feature, but it turns out that, when you put something in a collection, it stays on the main screen also. I was really hoping to use collections to get some stuff off the main screen, just to make that more manageable.
- No user-removable battery. No SD card slot.
And now for some stuff I do like:
- The screen. It’s definitely an improvement on the Kindle 1, which itself was pretty good.
- The size and weight. Not that the Kindle 1 was heavy or anything, but it’s nice to have something just a little smaller and lighter.
Stuff I’m not sure about:
- The case. I bought the default M-Edge case. I’m not sure if I like it or not just yet.
- The navigation pad. I’m just not digging this yet. It might grow on me though.
I probably sound like I’m not that excited about the thing, but I am really excited to, once again, have a Kindle with a working battery in it. My main problem with the Kindle 1 was that the battery was pretty much dead. I’d thought about just buying a replacement battery, but decided that it was time to just go ahead and get a new Kindle. I bought the old Kindle in Feb 2008, so it had a pretty long life, as first-gen consumer electronics devices go.
done with taxes
I managed to talk myself into doing my taxes before the SuperBowl started. I bought TurboTax this year instead of the H&R Block At Home (aka TaxCut) software, which I’ve been using for more than 10 years. I was curious about TurboTax, since I’ve never used it before, but it turns out that there’s not much of a difference between them. Either one is fine.
I think this may be the earliest I’ve done my taxes in years. I usually wait until around St. Patrick’s Day to file.
catching up on paperwork
The last time I really sat down and brought all my accounts up to date in Quicken was in April 2010. Well, after feeling kind of sick yesterday, I’m feeling better today, and I decided that it would be a good day to do a lot of catch-up work. I entered all of my 2010 Merrill statements into Quicken, manually.
And I decided to give up on entering my 401(k) statements from my old job. I had quarterly statements going back to 2009 that I hadn’t entered. I decided to instead just let Quicken update that account automatically. That account is managed by Fidelity, and I had previously had trouble getting Quicken to update that account automatically, but it seems to be working now. The reason I still have that account, by the way, is because it’s still help up in some kind of audit related to the bankruptcy of that company. I’m hoping it will get released at some point this year, and I’ll be able to roll it over into an IRA at Merrill.
I also now have an inherited IRA with Merrill, which is basically half of my mother’s old IRA. I decided to just set that up as automatically updating, rather than entering it manually. I think that will work OK. I’d like to switch my main Merrill CMA and Roth IRA accounts over to auto-updating too, but I’m still a little afraid to do that. At one point, the way Merrill fed data into Quicken was pretty weird and not quite right. I’m going to watch how this works with my inherited IRA for a few months, and see if it’s looking reasonable enough at this point to switch all my accounts over to auto-update.
Meanwhile, I had really planned on firing up TurboTax today, and getting at least a first draft of my taxes done. That hasn’t happened yet, but at least I’ve “cleared the decks”, so to speak, so I can get started with that, without worrying about all the other paper that was piling up on my file cabinet.
Oh, and I think I’m supposed to watch the SuperBowl today too.
consumer electronics
It looks like my Verizon iPhone and my new Kindle 3 will both be arriving this week, probably on Monday or Tuesday. This means I can get rid of my Kindle 1, 1st gen iPod Touch, and my BlackBerry Storm 1. I haven’t checked Gazelle lately, but I imagine they ought be worth maybe $20 altogether.
Verizon iPhone
I tried to order a Verizon iPhone this morning, but Verizon’s site really doesn’t like the idea of shipping it to my work address. If I tell it that the shipping address is a business, then it tells me that I need to enter a company name, but the form doesn’t have a field for company name. If I switch the drop-down to say that I want it shipped to a residential address, and just enter my business address anyway, then it tells me that I’ve entered an invalid address. A number of people have reported these problems in the Verizon iPhone 4 forums.
I eventually got the order to go through by playing around with different ways of formatting my company’s address until I hit on one that Verizon liked. I really think they could have done a better job on this though. An hour or two of QA on their preorder site, and they could have at least uncovered the company name bug and fixed that.