49 Euros for the Pyrus Mini ebook reader : Totally worth it.
Aug 25Books : Some like the smell of paper, the sounds of gentle footfalls in the hushed silence of libraries, some like flipping though pages and the rustling sound of paper turning in the night … I’m not one of those persons. To be honest : I’ve been reading digital books since the beginning of this century. From devices as primitive as the Palm to my much beloved Sony PRS-505 I am proud to say that I only read about 2 paper books in the last 12 years. My latest device of choice on which I have devoured many a book was my iPad mini. ( I had ‘loaned’ my Sony eBook reader to my 86 year old gran .. and she’ll never ever give it back). But where the iPad mini shines in the dark (its active screen is great for reading in the bedroom) it gleams in sunlight (its reflective glass is terrible for outside reading). So with my holiday coming up and plenty of reading to do .. I thought I would try out something new.
It was in fact Niejana who pointed out the Trekstor Pyrus Mini on our last visit to our favourite geek-friendly store in Aachen. Three things immediately made me fall in love with the device : The size (It reminds me of my trusty Palm devices) The color and texture (It has this rubbery enclosure thats a dark blue) and its price : 49 euro’s ! I mean : What could go wrong for 49 euro’s ?
The Pyrus has a 4.3 inch 800 by 600 Pixel E-Ink display. It has 2 gigabytes of onboard storage that you can extend by shoving in a micro SD card. There is no Wifi, Bluetooth or 3G connection. Just some buttons to navigate pages and adjust things like character size and the language of the interface. In the end this device is horribly horribly simple .. and that is just brilliant ! The Micro Usb connector is used for charging and adding titles to the onboard memory and since the screen is pretty small .. the battery time will last you quite a while. It can read all popular formats (it does have a hard time with large PDF’s) but can not read .mobi (Epub is fine though).
But aside from the price, the one thing I love more about this gadget is that its so small, thin and light that you can just slide it into your coat pocket and whip it out anywhere without having to bother with lids and casings and having enough room on the bus to read your book. At the size of a smartphone it might appear to small to read on, but the variable character sizing does make up for that. The screen has a very good contrast ratio and not a micron of ‘glare’.
Sure its not as robust as some of the ebook readers out there, sure it does not have all of the functionality of a Kindle or a Fire .. But for 49 euro’s this is the “paperback novel cousin” to the “hardcover collection” ebook reader that you can find on the market today I’m NOT afraid to use it, loose it, break it or get mugged for it. It just lets me read my favourite collection of Justin Bierbers Fanfic .. anywhere.
Related Posts
iterm2 : The best terminal replacement for the mac.
Jun 16Sliding around from OS to OS and using the terminal as your ‘best friend’ makes for some interesting challenges. For one finding the answer to the question : ” What terminal do you use ? ” Most of you mouse jockeys might say ” Who cares ? A command line is a command line ?” But it is not that simpel. Every “terminal application” gives you different ‘ways’ to interact with the terminal. From keyboard shortcuts to multi layout windows .. every terminal app is a little different.
On Linux one of the favorite apps I use is “TERMINATOR” (No, Not you Arnold) The reason being that it gives me one big window that I can devide up into smaller terminal windows. That way I can have multiple connections or applications open at the same time.
On the Mac I found a great alterative that does not only offer that same functionality but also lets you tweak and tune your terminal application into a nice place to hang out.
iTerm2 lets you do all the things Terminator does and ads sassy looks to boot. You can customise color schemes, fonts, backgrounds and more, so you can make the terminal behave and look just the way you want it. Mountain Lions ‘FULLSCREEN’ function is actually useful for a change as it turns your iTerm window into a full screen “virtual desktop” that you can easily switch back and forth from in order to get stuff done.
iTerm2 is free and works on most versions of OSX.
Screenshot : My iTerm2 setup on the Mac. A nice Ubuntu wallpaper, light fonts, transparent background, running in fullscreen and connected to 2 of my virtual machines.
Related Posts
Bittorent Sync brings cloudless cross platform file syncing.
Apr 27If I have learned one thing over the last couple of weeks is that although all good things in life are free, free doesn’t always last forever. With the sudden demise of Google reader (and the associated apocalypse for all of my fancy social-media-autoposting scripts) I’ve decided that my trust in ‘free cloud services’ is something that no longer comes by default. Lets face it : In any free online product that offers you a service without any visible revenue model, YOU are the product .. not the client. Its like that with Facebook, Google+, Gmail and so forth. You are in some form or another the “product” they brior whatever else they might think of : You make THEM money and THEY have no obligation whatsoever to keep the service (and your dng into the service in order to make money for their “Clients”. (Usually advertisers) If this is in the form of adds, your personal information ata/information/etc) available to you. Add to that that some of these services thread loosely around issues like “Privacy” and you need to start wondering : Would I not be better of doing this on my own.
One of these services that personally springs to mind is : Dropbox. Its free online storage offering us a cross platform solution for herding our files across multiple systems. But meanwhile that data also resides on “some server” “somewhere”. Equally tied into my workflows like “Google Reader” the loss of Dropbox would be a serious problem. Any alternatives ?
Owncloud is a beautiful solution that gives you just that. Run your own owncloud server and have clients on most operating systems. Access your files, contacts and (private) calendars from anywhere. Free and open source it has the downside of being a little tech-intensive when you want to set it up. (You need an Apache server and there is some tinkering involved when it comes to securing your traffic).
BUT : Now there is Bittorrent Sync and the setup is quite simple. You sync folders on your different machines using the power of Bittorrent. Yes the same protocol that rushes Linux ISO’s and illegal copies of pron dvd’s our way now helps us to get our files across.
HOW : Install the client on your different machines (all flavors of Linux, Windows and OSX are supported) and tell it what folder to sync. You will be offered a “secret password” that you will need to use when you ‘add’ a machine to your sync cloud and voila : there are your files.
No Cloud required : The good ? : No cloud required : you sync files between YOUR machines without the need for cloud storage with a third party. I would recommend choosing a “master system” that is always online to make sure a recent copy of “everything” resides at least somewhere. The bad ? : This stuff is pretty new, so I would not recommend using it for personal or financial data until it “matures” a bit.
Free : What are you waiting for : Head on over to http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html and give it a spin and TELL US what you thought of it in the comments section.
Related Posts
Free satnav on your iPhone or Android device without a data connection.
Mar 18I live in a part of Europe that is called the “Euregion” because I live at about 2 hours drive from three different countries. I go east for 20 minutes I end up in Holland. When I put the pedal to the metal for another 30 minutes I”m in Germany. When I go south for about 90 minutes .. I end up on Luxembourg Its cool ! The downside is that when I go “beyond Belgian Borders” I run into very very expensive roaming charges for my data connection. So when trying to use my Android or Ios smartphone for my GPS navigation. Sure : I can use Google Maps in Belgium .. But if I would do so abroad , I would be better off buying a house wherever I get lost instead of finding my way back home on Google Maps.
Navfree GPS is available for IOS and Android and gives you the ability to download the maps of the Benelux area, but also Spain, the US and many other countries. Its free because it uses the open source alternative to the Google Maps called “OpenMaps”. Download the app of the country you need and watch as your wife/girlfriend/husband and your smartphone go head to head whether its left our right. (Because you also get Voice Navigation .. for FREE !)
Its open source, its free, its a GPS and it does not use an expensive data connection. If it was wrapped in Bacon I would probably eat it.
Related Posts
The Sky is the limit with Skydrive and ‘office for free’.
Mar 05You have heard us rave and rant about several “Office” alternatives on the Knightwise.com blog many, many times. To be honest, anything that could get us away from the highly OS-centered clusterf*ck that was called ‘Office’ was a good excuse for an article. We’ve taken you on journeys to the cloud and explore GoogleDocs, we have given you amazing alternatives like Openoffice and Libreoffice .. we have even herded you towards the command line to type out your contribution to this existential plain using a command line only application. Let’s face it : Ever since that nosy paper clip told us like it “LOOKED” like we were writing a letter .. we have gone off the deep end. .
So to be consistent we are going to do something completely different today. We are going to chase you back into the cloud towards the plains of Redmont to get the most out of you free skydrive. Yes, that magical place in the cloud where you can store your favorite cartoons of Bill and Balmer dancing in pink tutu’s, that place where you store those “pie in the sky”-charts away from the wretched claws of your dying harddrive .. that place .. that you have hardly visited after opening up an account 6 months ago. However .. that is about to change because we are about to tell you some cool things you can do .. with your skydrive (aside from storing documents in the cloud .. of course)
Create documents : The coolest feature that Microsoft would like you to not know about is that you can create and edit documents in your skydrive for free using the web based versions of Office. This is a pretty spiffy alternative for those among you who don’t want to spend the 100 dollars a year on Microsofts new SUBSCRIPTION based model of office, but still won’t go that far as to use GoogleDocs or another product.
Share and collaborate with others : Just like Google Docs skydrive gives you the ability to work together with others as you are writing the next Twilight-killer novel. Because you still want a Social life you can use some granular security settings to define who you want to be able to access those documents.
Access files on your home computer : For this one your computer needs to be ON and needs to be a Windows machine running the skydrive client. You can log into the skydrive web interface and rummage around on your home harddrive without ever having to leave wherever you are at that very moment. (That IS the whole point of working remotely.)
So you ready to get started ? Get your skydrive account here and dive into this PCWORLD article on “Getting started with Skydrive” and embrace the power of clippy once more.
