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I bought a Kindle 2 last month and joined the e-book revolution. I love e-books for various, practical reasons:
1. Books pile up around the house. I don’t have room to keep all of them. Selling, training, giving, or donating them is a pain. Throwing out books makes me sad.
2. Books deteriorate. I typically purchase used books, and I’ve had to pass a lot of good titles by because they were too musty, yellowed, or brittle to read (enjoyably, at least).
3. Books can be heavy. I have a number of large hardcover books that I don’t read simply because they are huge, heavy, and cumbersome to hold. On business trips and vacation, I can only take one or two books–and rarely the largest ones–or else I run out of space in my bags.

The best thing about e-books is that you can get many titles for free and read them on devices you already own (your computer, your smartphone). Dedicated e-book readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook, are now relatively cheap (about the price of 10-15 books) and offer better readability than cell phone and computer screens. I really like my Kindle, and find that I can read faster on it and focus my attention on the text far better than on non-dedicated e-readers.

Devices such as the Kindle have built-in or preferred e-book stores, but you don’t have to rely on them only to get books. Project Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Internet Archive, Google Books, and even (if you’re inclined) BitTorrent offer a ton of free or low-cost books. Sometimes, however, the books you get from these secondary sources aren’t in the correct format to read on your device, so you’ll have to convert them (hopefully for free!) before you can read them. To convert them to a new format, I recommend using Calibre.

Calibre

Calibre is a free and open source application which aims to be, for e-books, what iTunes is for music and video files. It does a little bit of everything, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes.

Here is a list of its most prominent features:
• Organize and manage your e-book library
• Edit and automatically edit e-book metadata and assign covers images
• Convert e-books between formats (its killer feature)
• Syncing books to/from numerous hardware devices (Android phones, iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.)
• Supports all e-book formats, including EPUB and MOBI (though it does not overcome DRM)
• Downloads news from web sites and transfers it to your e-reader device
• Allows you to run a content server to access your e-books via the web
• Read e-books (though its built-in reader is slow and kind of horrible)

Calibre isn’t the prettiest looking software. The icons are bright and clunky, though immediately decipherable. There are too few keyboard shortcuts and way too many right-click options. There is a lot of dead space in the main window, which is the main reason, in my opinion, that it looks amateurish compared to, say, iTunes.

That said, looks aren’t everything. Calibre is free, it’s updated and improved very frequently, and it does a heck of a lot. Its e-book conversion routines are probably the best available to date (and definitely the best available for free). It’s automatic metadata and cover download feature saves a ton of data entry time. The interface is very customizable, allowing you to change the window layout from wide to tall, and to select any number of data columns. Calibre supports user-defined tags, categories, saved searches, and even user-defined data fields, which allow you to organize your e-books in a myriad of ways. All in all, Calibre is extremely powerful. That said, most of the time you’ll spend in two windows (the library and the metadata windows), and use the handful of toolbar icons to navigate from function to function.

I love using Calibre to maintain my e-book library, and to convert e-books to the MOBI format, which is one of the few open formats that my Kindle supports. E-book conversion isn’t perfect, but it is very, very good, and represents Calibre’s killer feature. In the near future, I plan to post some recommendations on converting e-books from PDF to MOBI for reading on a Kindle.

When I was in high school, we used to play a simple but addictive shareware game called Scorched Earth, a turn-based artillery game. It involved tanks shooting at each other with crazy weapons, fun upgrades, very basic controls, and a little dumb humor. I was delighted to find out that there is a version of it on the Android platform, called Barrage. I think it captures the essence of the original game perfectly, and is easy to pick up and play on your phone. It’s a lot of fun, especially if you’re a nostalgic gamer.

Barrage Lite

Barrage Lite is free and includes the entire game. You can purchase the paid version to add more weapons, remove the unobtrusive ads from certain non-gameplay screens, and save your high scores and publish them for all players to see. Sadly, there is no online play, though that would be awesome. Still, it’s very good, and I heartily recommend it if you played the original in the DOS days!

I hate getting up in the morning, and have long had trouble falling asleep at night. These two apps by Mobitobi work together to make it a bit easier.

Gentle Alarm

Thanks to the Motorola Droid’s dock and clock (ahem, “Multimedia Station”) mode, my phone became my alarm clock the day I brought it home. (Of course, due to the insanely bright LED lights on the Droid, I have to shut off the display before turning in for bed! The LEDs Hack doesn’t work for me very well.) Android’s default alarm clock is fine, but I really wanted an alarm that didn’t blast me out of bed in the morning, but started out quietly instead, and gradually increased in volume until it woke me up. Luckily, the Gentle Alarm app exists for just this purpose.

Gentle Alarm's Main Screen

Gentle Alarm provides alarms that fade in over a user-definable period, and customizable snooze times, too. It can ring any alarm, audio file, or ringtone on your phone. (The app, and your Android ROM, come with a number of alarm sounds by default.) Gentle Alarm’s defining feature is its “pre-alarm” feature, which tries to take advantage of your sleep cycles to wake you up when you are refreshed. The idea is to ring a very quiet alarm, prior to your normal wake-up time, to rouse you if you are already almost awake. If you are still in a deep sleep, you won’t be able to hear it. (It’s true!) The app helps you calibrate the volume, so the pre-alarm will only wake you up when you are not sleeping deeply, and the main alarm will always ring loud enough (eventually) to rouse you out bed. I’ve found that the pre-alarm helps me wake up earlier, or at least hit snooze less often, and still refreshed.

Gentle Alarm's Profiles Screen

If you’re worried about replacing Android’s tried and true alarm system with a third-party, and potentially unstable, application, don’t be. Gentle Alarm hooks into Android’s normal alarm routines, so, short of your battery dying, you can be assured that the alarm will ring.

Gentle Alarm's Alarms Screen

It took only one night’s trial for me to fall in love with and purchase the Gentle Alarm app. (The free version only works 6 days per week.)

Sleep Now

Sleep Now is a great app for the power napper or anyone who has trouble getting to sleep at night. It’s a fancy white-noise generator and alarm clock wrapped up into one package. I really like it, because I think it helps me fall asleep faster, and sleep more soundly, than I did without it.

Sleep Now's Main Screen

You set up programs to fall asleep to music or white noise.

1. Relax to music (whatever is on your phone), white noise, or other sounds included with the app.
2. Sleep to white noise, other sounds, or silence.
3. Wake up to a gentle alarm.

Programs can be configured to a fixed sleep timeframe, such as a 20-minute power nap, or to prompt you for a sleep duration when you run them. The alarms are similar to the Gentle Alarm app, but cannot be scheduled to exact times of day, and do not include the pre-alarm function. Like Gentle Alarm, Sleep Now allows you to calibrate your volume.

Sleep Now's Sleep Programs Screen

Two Apps?!

I bought both apps and use them every day. I think that Gentle Alarm could be folded into Sleep Now, because only two features of Gentle Alarm (alarm scheduling and the pre-alarm) are missing from Sleep Now as it is. The developer may do that in the future. Because the apps are not that expensive, I use them every day, and I like to support small developers, I didn’t hesitate to buy both.

I bought my Motorola Droid the morning it was released to the public. The first app I installed on it was Locale, which promised to automatically set the phone’s volume, wifi settings, and so on, based on its current location. I thought this was a great idea: I could automatically silence my phone at the office, and turn the ringer on while at home. Unfortunately, after a couple days, I realized that Locale basically never updated my location, so it never worked right. I still stuck with Locale for a while, because it also allows you to set you phone’s volume (etc.) based on the time of day. After Locale became a $9.99 app, I uninstalled it in favor of a free alternative: Timeriffic.

Timeriffic allows you to change your phone’s volume (ringer and notifications), wifi, Bluetooth, screen brightness, and airplane mode, based on whatever day and time schedules you create. It is easy to set up (though the UI colors are kind of garish), stable (no force closes), and has almost no effect on battery life.

Timeriffic

I use Timeriffic to silence my phone while I am asleep. Typically, I don’t receive phone calls in the middle of the night, but I receive a lot of notifications, which I don’t want to wake me up. Silencing the ringer or notifications with Timeriffic is an all-or-nothing setting. The downside to Timeriffic, as opposed to Locale, is that you can’t “whitelist” phone numbers to ensure that certain people can reach you, even when you’re phone is set to silent. That isn’t a problem for me, but then again, I don’t have a job that requires me to be on call.

Locale has more features and a better user interface, but it is way too expensive, for what it is, to recommend. For my needs, the free Timeriffic is more than adequate.

MPlayerX, an OS X video player that I really like, just released an update a couple days ago. I noticed today, when I launched the app. The 0.9.8 update seems to fix a lot of MPlayerX’s stability problems, and introduces a more refined interface. I found that it starts even faster now, too! I’m very impressed with this project, and hope that you check it out.

Go Ask Alice

I hate shopping, especially for stupid little things, like trash bags, facial tissues, and toilet paper. The list goes on, actually. There’s all sorts of stuff that I need, but is no fun to buy. Luckily for folks like me, there’s a service for that.

Thanks to an article on the state of online grocery shopping at Ars Technica, I found out about a useful shopping website called Alice.com. I’m really exited about it, because it promises to save me a lot of time shopping for mundane, boring items that my wife and I need, and run out of, regularly.

Alice.com Screen Shot

Alice.com specializes in toiletries (their tagline is “never run out of toilet paper!”), cleaning supplies, a nonperishable pantry items (cereal, coffee, tea), and all sorts of other household products that we need on a regular basis. You tell Alice what items you use, how often you use them, and Alice will remind you when you need them, and get them to your door. Shipping is free, provided you order at least six items. Ordering six items at a time isn’t a big deal, considering an item can be as small as box of tea bags or a tube of toothpaste. You don’t have to order each product in bulk, which is great for normal people and households. Alice promises all that, plus automatically-applied coupons and the lowest prices around.

Chasing Rabbits

I am incredibly frugal. I prefer generic drugs, store-brand foods, no-name detergents, and so on. That said, I find that most of the products my wife and I buy are name brands of some kind or another. All of those name brands are available on Alice.com. They have about half of the biggest ten consumer-packaged goods companies on board with their offerings.

Noticeably absent from this site, from a frugal shopper’s point of view, are generics. Everything on the site comes from a recognizable, quality name brand. In fact, the companies that own those brands are selling to you directly, and paying Alice.com a fee to collect data about your shopping habits and your opinions of their products. I don’t mind the data collection, because every grocery and drug store I shop at does it, too. It’s a really interesting business model.

The web site is oddly addictive, considering the mundane products for sale. It’s a very effective interface for shopping, and for getting you to complete your ultimate shopping list. You have to try it to believe me.

Manufacturer’s coupons are added automatically whenever they are available. The site pushes all sorts coupons in your face, to be honest, which is good for helping you save money, and spend more money, which betrays Alice’s true purpose: marketing.

A well-integrated price comparison engine, promises to prove that their prices are always the lower available online. I never trust a company’s listing of competitor’s prices, but a few spot checks revealed that Alice is honest about other online stores. If you are willing to buy slightly different products or package sizes, though, all bets are off on cross-site price comparisons. You’ll have to do your comparison shopping the old fashioned way: yourself.

The site also has a slick “Budget” feature, which shows how much you spend on average in each of the site’s product categories, and how much you saved using its coupons.

All told, prices on the site do seem reasonable, considering shipping is free with no dollar minimums. (Note that they do charge your local sales taxes, unlike some other online stores.)

Remember What the Dormouse Said

I think the social networking aspects built into the website are pretty laughable. Do people, especially people keen on avoiding the messy human contact of big box stores, really want to talk to other people about toothpaste and contact lens solution?

Wonderland

My first Alice.com order was delivered two days after I placed it. I’m very pleased with the service, and think it will save my wife and me a lot of time going forward.

My first Alice.com delivery was waiting for me when I got home in the evening, two days after I placed the order.

If you are interested in signing up for Alice.com, please use my affiliate link. If you do so, you will receive $10 off the first $50 you spend there. Other than the referral link, I am not receiving anything from Alice.com, so you can be sure my review is unbiased.

After a long suspecting it was a total waste of time, I eventually grew to love Twitter. It’s a great way to share bits of information about yourself and your interests, and it’s a great way to market yourself to the world.

Though I’ve learned to love Twitter the service, as evidenced by my frequently-updated Twitter stream, I still have grave concerns about Twitter the company. First, the service is overloaded, and fails quite often. Second, everyone’s on the same system, so a failure affects all its users simultaneously. Third, Twitter gives away everything, and has no sustainable revenue model (in my opinion). What happens if (when?) it fails?

Twitter Fail Whale

These practical, technical considerations led me to think that Twitter should not control the entirety of microblogging. It should be set up to work like email or instant messaging (that is, like XMPP/Jabber, not like AIM), with a network of independent, multiple providers communicating with each other.

Email, unlike Twitter, is an open system. Anyone can become or subscribe to an email provider. No matter which provider you use, you can email people who use different providers than you do. If you dislike your email provider’s terms or level of service, you can leave and find another one, but you can still email everyone you did from your old provider. When your email provider goes down, not everybody loses email. If, on the other hand, Twitter goes belly up, we all lose the ability to post and connect.

In order for a Twitter-like service to stand the test of time, it should be decentralized, run on open standards, and be flexible, to accommodate different classes of users. Decentralization removes the single point of failure, so a fail-whale would only affect Twitter users, and not those of other, compatible platforms. Open standards allow for inexpensive and broad implementations. Every university and business with an email server could run a Twitter-like server to accommodate its user base; so could cable and DLS providers. Flexible, open-source implementations would allow people to improve the platform collaboratively, or to tailer their own software for special-use cases, such as a private intranet service for intra-company communications.

Identica

My description above is already coming to fruition, thanks to an open source project called StatusNet, and the OpenMicroBlogging group’s initiatives. The leading open-source microblogging implementation is Identi.ca, a service that runs on the open-source StatusNet platform. It’s basically an open source Twitter, with some cool functions you might not expect. For example, you can subscribe to users on any other StatusNet or OpenMicroBlogging provider, such as the TWIT Army. You can subscribe to groups, which are basically lists of people who share your interests. Your messages are covered by the Creative Commons license, not by some Company’s terms of service (which I like) You can host your own instance on your own server, if you want, too. And lastly, it sports a Twitter-compliant API, so third party microblogging apps like Twhirl support it.

It is a great service. It isn’t perfect—the Twitter integration doesn’t work well yet, in my experience—but it is a great product to try out and support. It has a great user community of technical professionals and open-source aficionados that I’ve already learned a lot from.

I am really rooting for Identica and StatusNet to succeed, and encourage you to try it out to support open microblogging standards. You can find me at http://identi.ca/mjdescy.

I got into Linux in a geeky and typical way. I had an old Dell Pentium IV computer with 512 MB of RAM that struggled to run Windows XP. It ran like a dog, even though I never had any viruses or spyware on it. I’m reasonably sure of that, since I always ran a firewall and antivirus, and did a clean reinstall of Windows every couple years, too. When I bought my MacBook (which I love), I finally bit the bullet and installed Ubuntu, a leading Linux distribution, on the old Dell. I was shocked at how snappy it was. I could run a ton of programs at once, and it would handle everything just fine.  It downloaded files just as fast as my Mac, which is 5 years newer, did. When I ran a program, the computer jumped at the chance to execute code. My whole PC was absolutely flying, in a way it had never done before. I found myself using it for web  browsing and programming, and loved how I could freely download all the tools and software I needed.

The dusty old PC that runs Ubuntu Linux like a champ.

A basic Ubuntu Jaunty desktop. Photo credit: Wikipedia.

Next, I bought a $40 Linksys NSLU2, which is called the “Slug” by enthusiasts. It’s a tiny, silent, ultra-efficient  network attached storage device (NAS) that hooks up to an external hard drive. I was able to install Debian Linux on it, and run a web server (lighthppd), a barebones but excellent BitTorrent client (rtorrent), and cross-platform network file sharing (Samba). It was a fun challenge to get everything working from the command line.

The Slug, which is about the size of a small paperback or a large deck of cards.

At work, I got an assignment which required me to work with huge, many-gigabyte -sized files. These files often needed simple things done on them, such as removal or appending of file headers, concatenation of multiple files, simple filtering to pull rows we are examining, and so on, before they could be used for testing. Since I couldn’t open these files up in the editor, and the ACL software I’m using is painfully slow and cumbersome to use for these tasks, I relied on my Linux command line knowledge. I installed CygWin on my Windows XP machine to create a virtual Linux command line (or, more accurately, a POSIX environment). It was incredibly useful for my work. I made great use out of Bash scripting, and the cat, head, tail, sed, and grep commands. I also used rsync to run our data backup scripts, which ran a lot more reliably than Windows copy commands, and were just as fast as third party file copying tools such as TeraCopy.

I am very impressed with Linux, and learn more and more about the benefits of using free and libre open source software every day.

A few years ago, Gillette came out with a 5-blade razor, exactly as The Onion hilariously predicted. At the time, I was a loyal Gillette customer through the Sensor, Sensor Excel, and Mach-3 days, but the Fusion was one step, and two blades, too far. I had some gripes with King Gillette. My shaves were quick and very close, but the blades kept getting more expensive, and I kept getting razor burn and ingrown hairs, too. Fortunately, for me, I found a way around these problems. I ditched the modern cartridge systems and switched to wet shaving. Now, when I’m at home, I use a double-edge safety razor, shaving soap, and a badger brush, just as my grandfather did when he was my age.

These inexpensive items will last me many years, and give me excellent shaves for pennies per day.

I’m not sure where I found out about it first, but I soon found a series of amazing wet shaving instructional videos posted by YouTube user mantic59. His videos are chock full of information, and should be watched before you make the change, and referred to for refreshers during the first week or so that you are wet shaving. The Art of Manliness blog has a great post about wet shaving as well.

I switched to the wet shaving method almost two years ago. The equipment cost a little bit of money up front—around $100 total—but over the past two years it has been cheaper than the Mach-3 or Fusion blades and shave gel that I used to buy. It’s going to be even cheaper per month in the long run. I bought a $30 Merkur razor (which will last forever), a $20 package of 100(!) blades, which will last me almost two full years, a few $4 discs of Colonel Conk shaving soap (each one lasts me 6 months or so), and a wide-mouth mug for lathering. I have saved a bundle of money so far, and I will save far more in the long run. The generic consumables I use are dirt cheap, thanks to open competition in their manufacture, and the razor handle itself will last a lifetime. Not only is it cheaper, but I’ve had far fewer razor bumps and instances of razor burn, too (remember to change your blades when they become dull, which helps a lot). Best of all, I actually enjoy shaving now. It’s nice to have a purely masculine ritual in my daily routine.

I bought my kit from Amazon.com. I’m just going to put the product names down, because I’m sure the links to them will change over time.

• Merkur HD (this is a classic, sturdy, and easy to use beginner’s model)
• 100 “Derby Extra” Stainless Steel Double Edge (these are the least expensive I have found, and last me 4-5 shaves apiece)
• Colonol Conk Shaving Soap (it’s cheap and good)
• Pure Badger Shave Brush (I bought a $25 pure badger hair model, and it is fine)

The only caveat I’ve found about wet shaving is that the supplies do not travel well. You can’t bring your safety razor on a plane unless you check your bag, so I still have a Mach-3 in service for when I travel. I don’t use it that much, though.

I wholeheartedly recommend that all men try wet shaving. It’s a worthwhile tradition that I’d like to see continue for years to come.

Most people I know seem to visit the same few websites regularly and scrape content themselves when they want to read something. There’s a much more effective way: RSS feeds. Almost every website I visit has one of more feeds that will effectively push fresh content to you, sometimes filtered down only to the categories that you are interested in. Aggregating a few dozen RSS feeds into one place is an effective way to review a lot of disparate information quickly, from a central location.

My favorite RSS reader is Google Reader, which is apparently the most popular one these days, too. Have a Gmail or Blogger account? If so, you already have a Reader account, which is how I ended up getting started. Google has extensive online help, and tons of cool features, such as keyboard shortcuts (just hit “j” or “k” to speed through your feeds), feed aggregation via folders, and a great mobile interface.

If you want to keep up with my website updates, and use an RSS reader such as Google Reader, you can subscribe to this site’s RSS Feed. Just click the “Subscribe via RSS” link at the top of my site!