I’m not down with the Hemingwrite. My objections start with the price, end with the functionality, and somewhere in the middle I get really hung up on the pretentiousness of it all. Read more →
The Side-Eye
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On xoJane: FOR THE LADIES: Why Bluetooth Speaker Purses Are My Least Favorite CES Trend
Tech/Fashion combos are not all ridiculous, but enough of them are that it hurts. Major case in point: a growing number of Bluetooth speakers that are also purses except they’re not real purses because you can’t carry anything in them. The first one I saw just made me roll my eyes. When I caught a glimpse of the second, I knew I was witnessing the beginning of a trend. A horrible trend… for the ladies.
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On Digital Trends: 5 reasons to liberate your ebooks from their DRM prison
This week, ebook lovers got yet another reminder of why DRM (Digital Rights Management) is terrible for ebooks. While attending a library conference in Singapore, Jim O’Donnell lost access to the titles in his Google Play Books app. Apparently, the app detected that he was in a country where Google Books aren’t available and subsequently denied him access to his books. Stories like this crop up every now and then, each time highlighting some crazy ebook restriction or policy that most people aren’t even aware of. The way things are set up, you kind of need to protect the digital books you buy from the companies that sell them. There are a growing number of ways and reasons why Amazon, Google, or a book publisher might strip you of your digital library.
The best way to protect yourself is to break the DRM on your ebooks for the purpose of keeping a local, personal backup.
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On Digital Trends: Paper rules: Why borrowing an e-book from your library is so difficult
Four years in, borrowing an e-book from your local library is still a difficult and confusing process that varies wildly depending on what kind of e-reader or device you own. And once you finally figure out how to borrow a book, there are other frustrations. …
So why is it so hard to borrow an e-book? It’s because none of the companies involved are working together. The e-reader makers, library lending software developers, and the publishers are all working at odds and it’s us who suffer. E-book library lending is broken.
Taking Points Off For Not Catering To The Well-Off
I hesitate to even make this post, lest it should activate sleeping evil elsewhere, but this is something that’s been annoying me for a while. I was just reading SlashGear’s post on the Archos 13 ultraportable and amongst the things they’re not pleased about is the lack of HDMI port. This is something Laptop Mag dings devices for, too. And… Read more →
Firefox: Down Memory Lane
I’m conducting a bit of a survey and I’ll need your help. It’s all about Firebox, the browser I love, and how it breaks my heart every day. Do you love Firefox? Then please help me with an intervention. If you have Firefox open now and you’re running Windows, go to your Task Manager1 and click on the Processes tab.… Read more →