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This is going to be a hub page with all of my writings and reviews related to the Amazon Kindle e-reader. Watch this space for more articles and news related to the Kindle, possible competitors and other related topics.

For starters here are all of the articles in the category “Kindle”:

Why a dedicated e-reader?

E-ink Simply put it’s the best display suited for reading other than print on a page (and some argue it’s better than print on a page due to being resizable.) Backlit LCD’s are not conducive to restful reading, full sun reading and tire the eyes.

Why Kindle vs. Nook?

For me it was personal preference. I’ve been an amazon.com customer for years and could find more positive information about Kindle’s ability to handle and render non English text as well as English language text. If you don’t know I like to Study Languages including Learning Spanish. I couldn’t find much definitive information on the nooks handling of accents and umlauts or other character sets. I’ve seen much discussion of this working and first hand proof of this working on the Kindle 3.

Why 3G vs. wifi only?

Show me anywhere else you can get the ability to browse the web from a mobile device over cellphone 3g for merely the cost of the device. One time, up front $50 premium to be able to have global 3g in case you need it is a pretty good bargain from what I see. Smartphone data plans are easily $60 a month with a 2 year commitment (plus the device). True they could change their terms soon and say that web browsing is billed at a certain rate. Buying books over 3g are free though and I expect will continue to be free. (Except for the obvious cost of the book plus possibly an international roaming charge.)

I don’t travel much right now and typically have wifi, but it’s nice to have the 3G as a backup particularly if I may travel more in the future and given that it’s JUST a $50 investment for it.

But it doesn’t have a touch screen?

This is something that I could see as being useful (especially for highlighting passages, selecting words for lookup or zooming and web functionality.) I think a future kindle may have a touch screen IF they can do so without adding glare to the screen AND if they can still keep the cost relatively low. Personally I think it’s possible.

But it’s not color!

Admittedly on the web browsing side color is missed somewhat. I’m not buying for web browsing I’m buying for books though and for most of those black/white is good enough. Color e-ink is on the way, although it will remain to be seen if it’s pushed into the Kindle anytime soon.

But you can’t borrow books from the library!

Right now, that’s true. I suspect it will change. I’m not betting on it to change, I just think that it’s a matter of time until that is no longer an issue. For that matter I haven’t checked out a library book in years and didn’t buy a kindle expecting to start.

But you can’t lend books!

I haven’t done that too much anyway. That’s coming soon to the Kindle and from what I’ve seen on the Nook, you can only lend a book once in it’s existence. (For 14 days). So it’s still not as good there as a real book that could be lent out over and over for long periods of time

But you have to buy from Amazon.com!

No, you don’t. There are many booksellers out there that sell in formats the kindle can read. For that matter there are many free books out there (project gutenberg) as well.

But I like a real book!

I do too. I don’t think real books are ever going away completely. (I certainly hope not.) There is a certain elegant quality to a nicely bound book. Most of the books I have bought in recent years aren’t nicely bound though. They’re not on my shelf as collectors items they are there to read. I struggle with reading for long periods of time with balancing the book with the right page open, holding my hand just so to be ready to turn the page. Ergonomically I think an ereader is an improvement.

But the iPad is cool!

Yes and to me the android pads are cool too. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good e-book reader. LCD’s aren’t great for that, there are LOT’s of potential distractions, shorter battery life, bulkier in comparison and for the most part typically more expensive.

But the Nook is better!

Not for my uses. If you’ve decided it’s better for you because of certain features then congratulations! Not everyone wears the same size and style shoes as you do either so don’t try to wedge us into your penny loafers.

One parting thought – When I buy something I research thoroughly. I read reviews looking for trends, etc. I have been amazed to see at the Kindle page at amazon.com around 70-80 new reviews EACH DAY, the vast majority are 4 and 5 star reviews. I think in the last two or three days I’ve seen 5-10 1 and 2 star reviews. (Maybe 5 a day.) For the most part the poor reviews are 1) people that didn’t realize that kindle wasn’t compatible with their library ebooks, 2) people that didn’t realize they couldn’t buy from just any bookstore online with an epub book. 3) people that for some reason expected touchscreen/backlighting or other features that were not listed. The first two points cut to the heart of what drm is today. Free (un-drm protected) epub files can easily be converted for kindle and it wouldn’t surprise me to see them natively supported sometime. DRM (which amazon kindle downloads do have too) is another thorny thicket. In music the drm-free emp3 seems to be winning the day. I only hope that in books drm-free formats will ultimately win out.

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This page will be divided between two principle types of uptime or website and service monitoring. The first group of listings will be websites that for free (or a fee) will monitor website uptime, or a service uptime and notify you of an outage. The other listings on this page may be of software that you can install that will do the same. Advantages of software doing the same are that you will not have to pay a monthly subscription, although the disadvantage is that the machine that is running the monitoring software must be up and running with an adequate internet connection. From what I have seen of many services, it may be cheaper if you have a lot of sites to monitor to setup a monitoring solution in a vps of your choosing (preferably at a different data center than your other hosted sites.) The only catch with this is that many of the service do offer other interesting features beyond whether or not a site is up or down.

Many of these services collect and can report uptime data in percentages of uptime, average web site response times, some even go so far as doing SEO monitoring and reporting as well, indicating how you rank for various keywords in the main search engines.

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Free Website Monitoring Services

There are many services that offer some level of free website monitoring however most of these will only offer free monitoring for a limited number of websites (between 1 and 5) and will have some restrictions on how frequently the sites are checked.

Montastic – I have used them for quite some time – Free for one site, around $10 a month for about 15 sites (and more frequent monitoring). Higher level package for more. Email notifications – rss feeds as well. Other than that, it’s a basic up/down check.

ezwebsitemonitoring.com – link popularity and uptime monitoring. Currently in beta – looking to keep a free service level when they’re out of beta.

site24x7.com – for free – monitor 2 web sites at every hour or longer. Multiple price points and packages based on the number of sites to monitor.

basicstate.com – looks to allow simple up down monitoring of several sites for free. It says every 15 minutes – I haven’t found it in my logs as of yet.

exactstate.com (sister of basicstate.com) – offers more advanced features including blacklist lookup for mailservers (great idea…) – Pricing is based on credits and credits are used per frequency of monitoring and whether or not it’s a blacklist lookup for single domain or multiple.

mon.itor.us – they look to be free for 5 monitors – have nice graphing of previous query responsiveness. This could be good for monitoring whether a particular domain needs to be upgraded or move servers. I’m not sure that they’re limited to 5 monitors – I have 12 that are currently updating info – but I am being nagged to upgrade to monitis. One thing I’ve noticed with the free monitoring is the statistics seem to be lost when I close the browser. Maybe it’s just me, but that may be the free limitation.

Monitis – is the pay service related to mon.itor.us above – pricing will depend on the number of sites monitored, frequency and other variables. Plans from $9 a month – for 8 external monitors – although customized plans are possible with configurable numbers of monitors.

Serviceuptime.com – Plans starting from around $5/month. Number of services monitored and frequency of checks are a trade off, you could monitor 10 services very infrequently at this rate, or 1 very frequently at this price level. They can monitor a number of services in addition to just web monitoring.

servermojo.com – free trial – single site monitoring from $10 month with keyword checking as well. (Discount if paying by the year).

host-tracker.com – they have a quick check on their main page which can be used for free to quickly check the status of a site. Pricing plans vary – 5 sites for $5/month – around 20 sites for $30/month. Discounts for paying quarterly, yearly or for 3 years.

Website or Service Monitoring Software

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Given that I use linux primarily, most of the software options that I will list are primarily linux related. Yes, there are probably options for windows. I may list some here, but right now I don’t know of any to list. One of the catches is that under linux there are more ways to do service monitoring than can be listed. I have in the past scripted basic bash scripts to check a web page, make certain that it responds and has some expected text on the page (such as the page title or perhaps the footer) and then change a status icon to green if it’s up or red if it’s down. This is well and good for one off, or a handful of monitoring tasks, but when you start having a long list of 30 or so…. it can be a bit hard to deal with.

One of the advantages with the scripting it yourself approach is that you truly can customize it specifically to your needs, but why reinvent the wheel. There are several remarkable monitoring applications or linux. This will not be a complete list:

Nagios – Enterprise class, open source monitoring – many plugins for monitoring of events and alerts – web interface with graphing. Lot’s of features, lots of things that can be monitored, with or without software installed on the remote monitored hosts.

Mon – can run on the same machine as the monitored service and restart it if it’s not running. Also can send alerts (email) – other alerts (configurable as well – you can create your own alerts).

zabbix – enterprise class, open source monitoring.

Argus – Less expansive than the enterprise class options, still fairly flexible with what can be monitored and the alerts that can be raised. Web interface – extensible.

Munin – web interface – open source

Zenoss

cacti

More details on some of the services listed above may be found in the following subpages:

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I don’t know how many “cheat sheets” and manuals for google I’ve seen out there with everything from the simple search operators to more advanced tools, guides to the google services/etc. Anyway, I wanted to finally start accumulating links to them here so I don’t have oodles of extra posts on the latest greatest google cheat sheet.

Google Cheat Sheets v. 1.05 – this gives a guide to the addresses for many google services plus some background info on each, as well as some more advanced search operator usage.

The Official Google Cheat Sheet – yep, from google themselves the guide to using their search engine.

Google Advanced Operators Sheet – from the GoogleGuide – this covers the more advanced usage features of google search.

Google Calculator Sheet – Form the Google Guide – this gives you all the calculator functions that you can use through the main search interface.

Google Docs Keyboard Shortcuts – Help document from Google on all the keyboard shortcuts available within Google Docs. (Spreadsheets too)

More to come….

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As I run across linux compatible twitter clients I’ll be posting them here. If you don’t know twitter.com is a site where you can post short messages (140 characters) from a cell phone, through their web interface, or a standalone client. These messages are searchable, viewable by those that follow you and you can see updates of the users at twitter that you follow.

This is not an exhaustive list, more will be added as I have time.

Twhirl – Adobe Air based client for twitter – neat features including multiple login profiles support. Since Adobe Air is available for linux – twhirl is as well. Currently this is my favorite twitter client.

TTytter – interactive console based command line twitter client. (In fact, this is the reason I started this page, I wanted to keep track of the command line linux twitter clients….) It looks like the Official US House of Representatives account uses this client. (Scriptable..)

Wget/Curl…. – yes the swiss army tools of the linux command line can also post your latest tweet…

wget –keep-session-cookies –http-user=youremail –http-password=yourpassw \
–post-data=”status=tweet using wget” \
http://twitter.com:80/statuses/update.xml
Wordpress mangles doubledashes into some sort of long hyphen so the above may not be copy/pasteable…

curl -u youremail:yourpassw -d status=”tweet with curl” http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

(credit for the above two – ibm.)

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