Kindling
What with the announcements of new Kindles galore, I suddenly realised that I have never really mentioned my Kindle on here. It arrived as an unexpected birthday present, secretly plotted by my wife, a gift that one that I now consider one of the most useful and entertaining ever.
I take it most places and generally fit in some reading each day, whether it is on the bus journey to work or during
my lunch break.
I have to admit I was nervous of adopting the Kindle in favour of paper-based products, but I really do enjoy the flexibility it offers.
Whatever my mood I can find a book to suit and it’s certainly easier than carting a number of books around in your bag.
I think that samples functionality is great, allowing you to browse the Amazon site for books & send samples of those that interest you to your Kindle.
Samples allow you to expand your reading landscape without having to spend anything, they are a great way to find new authors, genres or forgotten favourites.
Owning a Kindle causes a number of odd things to happen:
- Random people will just start talking to you about books, not
always a bad thing. - People who are interest in Kindles expect you to try and sell the product too them, very odd lines of questioning.
- Other Kindle owners seem to only read free books, you feel like the only one purchasing books.
- I read things that I’ve not bothered to pick-up before now
- Visiting WH Smiths & Waterstones become an exercise of picking out title you may like for later.
- People expect it to be a touch screen and I laugh.
Many people still seem uncertain about buying Kindle, they seem to see it as a question of Kindle or new [Insert Pad Device Here], with the new Kindle (without keyboard) is bringing the device closer to peoples price range, I hope to see more family and friends with one.
In my experience it?s changed my reading habits for the better, even if it?s a little pricier due to the VAT being charged for online books (except when you notice how they compare to hardback prices on new
releases).
PC Upgrade
We’ll I’ve finally got my new hard drives installed with a fresh version of XP too.
My old SATA discs were a little old and both had snapped the plastic support for the data cable off. This meant they were a little flaky at times and the one drive hadn’t work for the last 3 months.
I planned on cloning the OS and migrating the whole lot over to the new discs this would have been fine, only due too my partitions things weren’t going to be so easy.
Happily I have discovered that there are 2 great benefits to how I game.
MMOs – all my mmo games that I moved over worked off the bat, which is rather good considering their size and the potential downloading that could have been required to re-install them. (LoTRo was a game that didn’t like this last upgrade but It wasn’t installed this time around)
Steam – Horrah for Steam, well nearly. You see my steam installation wasn’t exactly the same as the one described in the Steam Knowledge base. They assumed my steamapps folder was under the main steam folder (steam\steamapps) when in fact it was located at steam\config\steamapps.
This resulted in a bit of a headache because moving the apps folder to that new location resulted in Steam not loading up. But after some trial and error I found that I needed to boot Steam up without the apps folder and it would be created, then keep the files that it generated as they held the correct path. A little awkward but worth it as downloading 43GB of game data wasn’t as appealing as you’d think.
So I’ve now got my shiny Christmas presents installed and a massive 500gb Free 
Guitar Hero (4) World Tour (Wii)
I was very surprised when I got home on Friday to find that Rach had bought me the latest in the Guitar Hero series.
I have to admit I wasn’t planning on purchasing this until the new year but I was very excited by all the new shiny components. So on Friday evening we started on the career mode for our band JAM BADGER.
I got stuck into the drums while Rach stepped up and took on the task of singer. It was tricky to start with but we soon got the hang of it and tore our way through a good few gigs.
On Saturday Dok visited and we made some serious progress into the track listings. It is quite silly that you earn more cash from single player than group play, which meant that some solo parts had to be played before we could unlock the Tool gig.
I think one of the hardest tracks but also the most satisfying was System of a Down – B.Y.O.B.
Dok highlighted the fact there are potentially issues with the drum kits, he’s experienced this on his Xbox GH drum-kit where the green drum isn’t working at all now. He also highlighted the fact that Activision have admitted issue with the drum-kit and will be supplying drum tuning kits. The only issue with my drum-kit is that it can activate star power by accident, so not all bad just quite annoying.
But all in all I really enjoyed playing it, top stuff Rachy.
EDIT: it appears that Dok has resolved his issues with the drum-kit.
