Monthly Archives: February 2010
Every man has one thing he can do better than anyone else – and usually it’s reading his own handwriting.
G. Norman Collie
It Was All Yellow – Tumblr Theme
This is a customizable theme for a Tumblr blog.
- Colors can be changed without going into the code, through the Tumblr customize menu.
- If Tumblr has your twitter account info, a link to your page will appear in the header next to RSS.
- The title of your blog will appear at the bottom of the page, there is padding so you can read the full name when a person scrolls to the bottom.
- On the permalink for your post, Tumblr Notes will appear for any likes or re-blogs.
- The random button will display a random post from your blog everytime its clicked.
This isn’t my first tumblr theme (everything random), but the first one I’ve made for other people to use. It’s a pretty simple theme. I haven’t tested it in IE, mostly because I don’t like IE and didn’t have a Windows computer to test it on. If you have any questions or would like to see something added, just leave it in the comments. It’s licensed under creative commons and you can download it here. Enjoy.
Kindle Tips and Tricks
Previously, I wrote a review called My Weekend With the Kindle 2. This is a follow up article, originally published on the Fordham RETC website.
At the RETC we have been running a program to use Kindles in the classroom. This article is to share some of the things we’ve found from researching and running this program.
The Kindle supports .txt .pdf .mobi and .azw (Amazon’s own file type). If you are downloading books from other sources, you want to use the .mobi format this is a popular ebook format. There are over 30,000 public domain and freely available ebooks that can be read on your Kindle. These books are all either past their copyright date or were put into the public domain by the author.
A selected list of free (public domain) books available. If you visit this page on your Kindle, you can download the books directly to your device.
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carrol
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales – Jocob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Works of Aristotle – Aristotle
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
- Beowulf (revised version)
- The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – Washington Irving
- The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
- The Call of the Wild – Jack London
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Macbeth – William Shakespeare
- Government Documents
Websites for downloading free or public domain books
Free Kindle Books – (the name should be pretty self explanatory). If you visit this website in your browser it will look pretty plain, but its formatted for the Kindle browser. You can download book directly from the website to your Kindle over 3G and they’ll show up right away. The site is nicely organized and the best way to find public domain books directly on your Kindle. And since the site is just for the Kindle, you don’t need to worry about downloading the wrong format, everything is made just for your e-reader.
Project Gutenberg – This is the largest collection of public domain ebooks. You can browse and download the ebooks directly from the website to your Kindle. The website is not as easy to navigate on the Kindle browser because it’s not formatted for the screen. Also this site is very large. It has ebooks in many different formats. You need to download the .mobi format for it to work on your Kindle. I recommend searching this site on your computer first to find the books you want, its much easier. You can then plug in your Kindle and transfer the books or go to the specific URL on your Kind’e and download it directly.
Feed Books – Describing itself as “a cloud service for digital publishing and distribution,” Feed Books is a very large and organized collection of public domain and self-published books that are available through a number of platforms. Feed Books can be accessed through the web, through your smart phone, or any other system with access to the internet. It’s not made specifically for the Kindle, as with Project Gutenberg, so you will need to make sure you download the correct format (.mobi) when getting books. Finding books through the website is great, its very easy to navigate and gives you suggestions for other books you may like.
Edu Kindle – this site is “designed to provide you with information and tools that will enhance your Kindle experience, especially for school executives, teaching professionals, school board members–anyone with an interest in teaching and learning with support from the Kindle.” It is a site full of resources and a great community of educators through their ning social network. They also have the Kindlepedia, a web app the will work on your Kindle browser to transform any Wikipedia article into an ebook for the Kindle. You can then take the article with you anywhere you go, and read it offline. This is great for longer articles that you want to refer to often but don’t want to go through the Kindle browser every time you need to read it. It’s fast and easy.
Some helpful good and bad things
The Kindle supports book annotations. You can highlight and save clippings or quotes from any book on your Kindle and they will be saved in a seperate document on your device. It will put the quoted text, what book its from, and the location in the book. This is nice for remembering a quick quote, but it shouldn’t be used for lengthy projects. The Kindle puts all your clippings from all your books into one file, and does not organize this file well. If you have many clippings from different books at once, it can be very overwhelming and difficult to navigate through. You have to go through the clippings document page by page.
The E-Ink screen, because of its static design, suffers from image burn (text being left on the screen even after switching pages). This will happen if you leave the same page up for an extended time. To fix this you need to refresh the screen by clicking Alt + G on your Kindle’s keyboard.
eBooks on the Kindle don’t have the same paging system as traditional books. You are given a location number and a progress bar as to how much of the book you have read. This makes it difficult if you were to assign pages of reading to students or want everyone to be on the same page during a class. There wasn’t a very uniformed way to do this.
You aren’t able to ‘flip though pages’ on eBooks. Skipping around, going back, or finding a certain page isn’t easy. Moving around more than a couple pages within your book can be somewhat difficult. The Kindle is really made to read books beginning to end and not stray much from this. For most books this isn’t a problem.
Text to Speech is still up for debate. This feature will let you have the Kindle read aloud. It will turn a written ebook to a book on tape. This could discourage reading in some ways, or help slower readers keep up with other students. Its you judgement call to how good or bad this feature is.
The battery life really does last as long as they say. It lasts for days. The only downside is when you have the 3G (wireless internet) on it will drain the battery, and there is no dedicated button to turn this on and off. Even if you turn the Kindle off, the 3G will still be running unless you turn it off in the settings menu. So even if your Kindle is just sitting there it will be draining battery. Without 3G on, the battery won’t drain when the Kindle is off.