I have longed for an ebook reader for some time, but the most popular one – the Amazon Kindle – has long been reserved solely for the US market. Whilst it has many competitors, like the Sony Reader, I had to wonder about how many titles were available for such platforms. I used to use my iPhone to read public domain books, through the

Amazon recently started exporting the Kindle to other countries, so I bought one. Amazon struggled to negotiate deals with European carriers, which was one reason why the Kindle was not already available to the European market, so instead, the Kindle roams from the AT&T network.

The features are fairly similar to those available to American customers. One can subscribe to and download newspapers, magazines and buy and and download books. One can’t, however, download the images inside the newspapers and magazines, browse the Web or subscribe to blogs. This is all down through a mobile internet connection, either 3G/GPRS.

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Tags: 3g, amazon, amazon kindle, e ink, ebook, ebook reader, kindle, mobile internet
Categories: Amazon, Hardware

Macs don’t have a PrintScreen button, and if we want to take a screen-capture, the default program we use is Grab. Grab is great in a few ways; you can choose to use a timer before a screen-capture is taken and it can be used to ensure only a certain area of the screen is captured. Unfortunately, after a screen capture has been taken, Grab lacks any features to edit it (eg cropping) and only lets you save it as a TIFF.

It can be somewhat cumbersome to capture a screenshot in Grab, and then have to move it into a program like Photoshop to manipulate it. And if you want to share the image, you have to change its format.

An alternative piece of software is Skitch, screen-capturing software for OS X. Skitch provides screen-capturing facilities similar to Grub, but integrates some editing tools and also provides tools to share the images.

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Tags: mac, os x, screen capture, screen capture software, screen capture tool, screenshot, Skitch, Skitch.com
Categories: Mac, Online Services, software

When I switched to a Mac, I did not purchase an iPod for a few months. I previously had a Creative Zen Vision M media player. Unfortunately, this device was not mass storage, but utilised ‘Media Transfer Protocol’. Whilst several pieces of software on Windows provide the facility to move music to the device, OS X or iTunes has no integrated support.

Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) is utilised on a range of devices, but especially so by Creative. Creative Zens (and their variants) utilise the protocol. Whilst the Creative NOMAD isn’t MTP, it too uses an awkward protocol not natively supported by OS X. The infamous Zune (in the eyes of an Apple fanboy) too uses MTP, however, Microsoft make it very difficult to transfer data to.

XNJB is a piece of software that provides a graphical front-end to a libnjb and libmtp: free and open source libraries that allow communication with devices like Creative NOMADs and Creative Zens. Unfortunately, neither support the Zune, due to additional restrictions Microsoft put in place. The libraries work on other POSIX operating systems, like Linux, but XNJB does not.

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Tags: apple, creative, iPod, libmtp, libnjb, libraries, mac, media transfer protocol, mp3-player, mtp, njb, os x, portable devices, xnjb
Categories: Gadgets, Hardware, Mac, Music and Video, Open Source, Tools, software

In March, Martin discussed QR codes, a form of 2D barcode that phone cameras can rapidly decode, with appropiate software (which can be found easily on Google). The practical uses are for phone numbers to be quickly entered or websites to be quickly launched; QR codes can feature in magazines, websites or on packaging, for example, to take users to related mobile websites.

QR codes can also feature in much less conventional mediums, a few of which I will highlight.

© Nicolas1981, 2009, under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence

In Japan, most phones come with integrated QR code readers and, as such, QR codes are slightly more prominent than they are in the EU and US. When you read Wikipedia’s article on QR codes, one of the first things you see is a picture of a billboard that features a QR code. Whilst this is definitely an interesting concept, I don’t know if I’d feel comfortable pointing my phone at random objects in the middle of a large city at night!

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Tags: barcode, barcodes, densawave, design qr, qr barcodes, qr code, qr codes, quick response code
Categories: Misc

For anti-phishing tools to work, phishing sites must be identified to analyse and to warn people about.

Sites like Web of Trust allow users to share information about phishing sites, but scores of similar tools exist and as it would be counter-productive for each to maintain their own database of phishing sites.

PhishTank centralises phishing reports and allows developers to use their data free-of-charge in their own applications, with manual or automatic download enabled (although the latter requires a free API key).

PhishTank offers a service a lot of web users will use without even realising it. Whilst certain tools might submit their data to PhishTank too, you can help your fellow web users and fight phishers through submitting data directly to PhishTank.

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Tags: anti-phishing, antiphishing, phishing, phishtank, Security, social-phishing, web of trust
Categories: Security

Wikimedia recently conducted a study into how to make their projects, like Wikipedia, more usable and user friendly. The study highlighted a number of interesting points, like that many users had never been to Wikipedia’s homepage, instead finding articles through search engines. These points have helped steer development.

One of the first things to come out of the Usability Project was a new skin. Wikipedia currently uses a skin called Monobook and has done so for over five years. Since Monobook was chosen, design trends have changed, as have web browsers and the way in which we surf.

The skin, called Vector, makes a number of changes. Vector gives the searchbar a more prominent location, declutters pages and looks much more modern. Basically, it makes it much easier to browse Wikipedia.

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Tags: skin, The Web, vector skin, wiki, wikimedia, wikipedia
Categories: The Web

I recently found the need to install Ubuntu on a machine with a poor CD drive (and no USB ports) that could not read large amounts of data, but could manage to read smaller amounts of data. As such, the machine could not read the 700MB but could read smaller amounts, like 10MB.

I found a bootable disc image smaller than 10MB which downloads the packages on the machine on which they’ll be installed, rather than having to burn them onto a disc and then run them. However, this method of installation also allows the user to only select the packages they want to download, which potentially dramatically reduces the size of the download.

This small disc obviously uses a text-based installer. Whilst this isn’t quite as user friendly, it ensures compatibility and can be used in many scenarios in which the alternative installation CD would currently have to be used.

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Tags: boot disc, booting, install, install ubuntu, Linux, Open Source, operating system, Operating Systems, ubuntu
Categories: Linux