My kindle thoughts and experiences

Lots of people at work asked me about this, so while I'm writing it down, I might as well blog it..

I bought a Kindle Keyboard, Wi-Fi, 6" E Ink Display for myself last year over Christmas - got it delivered for free to a contact in the US that came back to South Africa that time, saved +-R800. Last month I helped my grandma buy a Kindle DX, Free 3G, 3G Works Globally, Graphite, 9.7" Display with New E Ink Pearl Technology - ordered it on the Monday got it on the Thursday +-R400 delivery (double that with import duty:( ).

Here are some of my opinions about what to buy.

9"big DX vs 6"small

• 6" - nice and portable - fits in your cargo-pants-pocket/purse/small bag
• 9" - better for reading pdfs - the letters are quite small on the 6" but if you rotate it 90 degrees it is still readable
• 9" - double the price for 2.5 times the screen area (IIRC)
• Because my grandma is a bit visually impaired (mainly got it to listen to audio books from audible.com) I made some adjustments to hopefully help her. We decided to get the bigger Kindle for her because it has ever so slightly bigger buttons, but they are better positioned and I could hack it a bit.

E-ink

I would not buy something that does not say e-ink i.e. black&white, no backlight, can read in the sun, looks exactly like paper and is an absolute joy to read.

Leather cover with built-in light

• Its almost as expensive as the kindle itself.
• Worth it in my opinion.
• Uses the kindles own battery - never stuck with flat battery at the wrong time.
• great for reading under the covers
• With any cover you must be careful how you open it because if you open it on the wrong side you can crack your Kindle. I added some paper clamps and took off the levers for my grandma to avoid any nasty accidents (saw this tip on the interwebz):

Only buy from Amazon

Local importers pay the same price as you do and then add commission

Check the R/$ price before you buy

The 2 times I checked the Dx prices it varied from +-R3800 to R4200, just after I bought it the R/$ rocketed up another 40cent which whould have been another R400!

Buy international version if you are not in the US

When I bought mine, I had to go to the special international kindle page, maybe that changed..

3G or not?

• 3G version is 40% more expensive :(
• Its handy to be able to buy books over 3G when away from any ADSL with wirless.
• I think 3G coverage is done by MTN in RSA, so if you have bad 3G reception where you live then maybe it is not worth it..
• I'm not that sorry that I didn't go for the 3G one, because I do most of my syncing and buying from home in any case.

FINALLY:

If you have not noticed it so far, I absolutely LOVE my kindle, I can almost not read anything else. Other cool features:

• Has awesome text-to-speach for books bought from Amazon (DRM:( .awz) and free (.mobi) books
• Can play audio books bought from audible.com, you can buy them directly from a wifi device but not from a 3G device!!?!
• Can play mp3s for you in the background
• Can play podcasts or mp3 audio books - just copy them into the audible folder on the device
• Includes a free dictionary and you can look up any word while reading.
• Make notes, bookmarks, underlinings (can even see commonly underlined stuff if you are too lazy to do it yourself:)
• Calibre is the awesomest crossplatform e-book management tool ever! and works great with my Kindle.

I just could not sit it anymore

Len Weincier opened my eyes to the possibility of a standing desk a couple of months ago and I've been pondering it ever since.
Recently I found myself in much pain when having to sit and work for extended periods of time (Since my baby son started sleeping in his own room about a month back I can't work in his room lying on my back any more).
It is so distracting that I'd rather stop working and go to bed.

Well tonight I could not sit it any more and I decided to try it out. I was thinking about all the things I'll need to move around if I want space in front of a wall in my study and how much work it will be, then it dawned on me I have everything I need to build a prototype and try it out.
My standing desk version 1.0 (to my wife's dismay I'm sure when she sees this in the morning):



Long-running preparations:

• Learned to touch type (with the help of learning to type using the Colemak keyboard layout)
• Got a proper usb keyboard to try this out.

Next steps:

• I'm still googling to find out if its a good idea in the long term, but for now this seems much nicer.
• Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk (some more awesome prototypes :)
• 17 standing desks that will help you live longer (even a walking desk :) I may even try this treadputers some day since I have a manual treadmill standing around)
• Are You Sitting Down? Why a Stand-Up Desk Might Save Your Life
• Are Standing Desks Healthier Than Sitting?
• Get some stickers to put on the index finger home keys. I saw Gary van der Merwe had them and I think it will help me a lot because this new keyboard has really tiny dots for feeling the where your index fingers should go.
• See if I can come up with a better design with a higher spouse approval factor. It would be cool to have something that can easily convert between standing and sitting to avoid over-standing it.
• Get a LCD screen so I don't have to balance my laptop so tenderly.
• I can already see that my touchtyping skills will go to a next level with this because my hands are now under my laptop and thus it is much harder to steel a quick glimps (especially for seldomly used keys)

JPA not instantiating mapped collections.

I struggled a while now to figure out why I am getting a NullPointerException
when trying to access a mapped collection:

@OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, mappedBy = "cmTypedef")

private List cmParamdefs;

I instantiated a object, then em.merge() it but still I got a NPE.
I really thought that merge would populate all the fields.


Then I tried to make it Eager:

@OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, mappedBy = "cmTypedef",

   fetch = FetchType.EAGER) 

private List cmParamdefs = new ArrayList();

Still no luck :(


So merge didn't do the trick, but trying everything I saw that if I do

em.flush();

em.refresh(ret);

after the merge, then like magic the collection is populated..


Finally I remember I had this issue before and the simple solution I have so far is
to manually instantiate the collection:

@OneToMany(cascade = CascadeType.ALL, mappedBy = "cmTypedef")

private List cmParamdefs = new ArrayList();

I'm not sure if this is the best practice, but it works and is simple..