I have been very happy with my Kindle.  I find the e-ink screen easy to read, no different really to reading a book.    The texture of the screen means that there is very little reflection, unlike reading on a mobile phone or tablet.  The size and shape of the Kindle and the positioning of the page forward and page back buttons make it very convenient to handle, much easier than a thick book.  I believe that earlier models were a bit sluggish but I find the page turn speed is fine on my Kindle, as quick as turning the page in a  real book.

Keyboard

My Kindle has no keyboard but there is a  little button which pops up a keyboard on the screen, you then use the 5-way controller button to  select the letters you want to type.  It works fine for searching, I haven’t experienced the Keyboard version of the Kindle but I don’t think there would be a lot of advantage in having the keyboard, at least for the Kindle’s primary purpose, reading books.

WiFi or 3G?

My Kindle is the cheaper WiFi only version, we have a fairly good broadband connection at home and we already have a Wifi network so we didn’t really see the need for 3G.  If you don’t already have WiFi network at home then 3G makes sense, you can still use WiFi if you are somewhere with a network but you can use Amazon’s Whispernet system to download books pretty much anywhere in the world (with no network charges).  If you travel a lot then 3G would be perfect and you can use the (experimental) browser to surf the web anywhere in the world too.

Case

I have a 3rd party leather case which adds to the size slightly but it gives it a bit more of a book like feel, otherwise I think it might just be a bit too slim and sleek.  The case also incorporates a stand so I can prop the Kindle up and read it while eating my breakfast if I want to.  Reading on the Kindle can be a totally hands free experience (except for page flips of course), whereas some books can be a bit of a hassle to read one handed.   My only complaint about the particular case I have is that the case slightly blocks the 5-way controller button on the Kindle making it a bit difficult to scroll down.

Reading Books and Manuals

I have two main uses for my Kindle, reading for pleasure and reading for work.  I find the Kindle perfect when reading normal books,  each page is a bit smaller than a regular book (though you can adjust the text size and font if you wish), but you don’t really care where the page breaks come when reading most books.  When reading a book for work, mostly computer books, you do notice that the page breaks on the Kindle don’t always match the page breaks in the original and things like program listings aren’t formatted quite as tidily as in a printed book.  Having said that, I haven’t found this to be a problem, everything is still quite readable and of course I can carry  several kilos of computer books on my 170g Kindle with no problem at all.

The Kindle uses black and white e-reader technology so obviously colour isn’t an option but pictures and diagrams are very clear, there is no apparent loss of definition.

Availability and Pricing of Books

The Kindle can handle various file formats including PDF (though not quite as nicely as mobi files) and ePub but the biggest source of  Kindle books is of course Amazon itself.  There are many thousands of books available for the Kindle but the market is still a bit patchy.  A lot of classic books (out of copyright) are free which is nice, I certainly plan to read a few classics that I have never got around to.  Newer books are often available in Kindle format but the price is not always competitive, sometimes it costs more for the Kindle book than the printed version which doesn’t make sense to me at all.  In between are a lot of older books which just aren’t available at all in any electronic format.

There is a bit of ironing out with licensing and marketing agreements between Amazon etc. and publishers before the ebook market becomes mature.

An Aside

I subscribe to The Economist (an excellent paper, and not really anything to do with economics at all, I can recommend it), I noticed that there was a Kindle edition which could be delivered electronically to my Kindle every Friday morning.  But the Kindle edition costs more than the printed edition which I receive in the post every Saturday!

I believe that the difference in cost is because the print edition is subsidized by  advertisements whereas the Kindle edition is ad free.   While I am quite happy to flip past the ads in the print edition I think they would be a lot more intrusive on the Kindle.  Nothing is simple is it?

E-reader or tablet?

Most Kindles (including mine) are e-readers rather than tablet computers, the exception being the new Kindle Fire (not yet available in the UK).  E-readers and tablet computers (like the Kindle Fire or the iPad) are superficially similar but actually fill quite different slots in the computer eco-system.

E-Readers

A proper E-reader will use e-ink (or similar) technology to display the text on the screen, there are colour e-ink screens in the pipeline but currently only monochrome screens are generally available.  E-ink screens are not backlit, they rely on an external light source,  if you want to read in the dark you will need a torch just as if you were reading a normal book.  Most e-readers have non-reflective screens which makes them very easy to read even in bright sunlight, there are some touch screen e-readers but so far no touch screen has the non-reflective characteristics which make e-readers so good.

The good thing about E-readers is the reading experience, it is very similar to reading a book and much less tiring than looking at a computer screen.  The non-reflective, non-backlit screen means you can use an e-reader pretty much anywhere in comfort.  They also have a very good battery life, you need to recharge every few weeks rather than every few hours.  They are a viable replacement for a whole stack of books (a very large stack of books).

The Kindle comes with a web browser (labelled as experimental) so you can use it to surf the web but it is pretty basic and of course the web you see will be monochrome rather than colour.    And of course using the pop up keyboard for any length of time would be tiresome.

Tablets

Tablet computers don’t have e-ink screens, they have lovely shiny touch screens which display wonderful colours and provide great interactions with the websites you visit and the apps you use.   They are backlit so you can read in complete darkness if you wish but they are shiny so even the best of them isn’t easy to read in bright sunlight.  They are also more tiring to read on than e-ink.

For a proper web browsing and app using experience a tablet is way ahead of an e-reader and of course you can get a Kindle app for your tablet  so you can read your books on it too.  The downsides are cost (even the Kindle Fire which is a pretty basic tablet costs about twice as much as a regular Kindle), readability (you are still reading a computer screen not a book) and battery life (hours rather than weeks).  Also the iPad (with its 10″ screen) is quite a bit bigger than the Kindle (with its 6″ screen)  so it isn’t quite as portable (or chuckable).

If you have an iPad then it makes sense to load the Kindle app so you read your books on the iPad but I wouldn’t want to use it as my main reading device (but then I don’t actually have an iPad).

Conclusion

I am very pleased with my Kindle, in fact I would like to use it even more but I still have a lot of old fashioned books.   I   plan to use it as my main way of reading  in the future, the only issue may be availability and pricing of books.

Installing the card and it’s associated Ralink software was quite straight forward and it seemed to work fine on our new network.  Or at least it worked fine for me, but using Windows XP we have separate user id for each family member, the adults have administrator access but the children only have user access (to limit the harm they can do while exploring).

The Ralink utility screen as seen by a non administrator

The problem is that while users with administrator privileges have no problem accessing a profile on the Ralink software, limited users, that is users belonging only to the USERS group can’t access the profiles functions or use profiles set up by other users. The only way for them to use the wifi link is to manually logon each time they sign on to the computer, a bit of a pain for our younger users.

The Ralink utility screen as seen by a Windows administrator

After a bit of fiddling and a bit of searching I found a useful entry on the internet which solved the problem for me but the explanation on the FixUnix forums didn’t go into much detail so I decided to go through it step by step for those, like me, who don’t regularly dive into Regedit to solve problems.

First you (using an administrator logon) need to create a profile for the link you want to set up using the Ralink utilities.  Then you need to use regedit to make this profile accessible to users without administrator privileges, it is this second part that I am documenting here.

Using Regedit to allow non administrators access to the Ralink profile

I will provide thumbnail pictures of each step at the bottom of this post, please click on the images to see the full size pictures.

1. First click on Start, then Run to open the Run dialog box. In the box type regedit then click OK.  This will start the Windows Registry Editor.
2. In the editor click on the edit menu and select the find option (or use Ctrl+F) to open the search dialog in regedit.  You need to search for the name of the profile you created in the Ralink utilities.
3. Once you find the profile, I found mine in the CurProfile field of
   

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002bE10318}\0010

   
   you need to select the parent element, in this case the 0010 element rather than the CurProfile field.
4. Then right click on the selected element and pick Permissions from the drop down menu.
5. Scroll down through the different types of users (Windows XP Pro offers more options than XP home) to find the appropriate group, in this case Users (HOMEUSER\Users).  When you select the group you will see the existing permissions displayed in the bottom half of the window.
6. Click on the Allow boxes for Full Control and Read to give the necessary permissions, then click OK to close the dialog.  I did try just ticking the Read permission box but that didn’t do the job, Full Control was required to get access to the profile.
7. That is it; you can close regedit, logoff your administrator id and logon to a non administrator id, it should start using the profile automatically.  You still won’t have access to the profile functions but you will be able to use profiles set up by an administrator.

Please click on the thumbnails to see full size versions of the images in the gallery below.

We have a Whirlpool No Frost freezer which we bought a little over 1 year ago, so just out of warranty of course.  We have been pretty happy with it so far but a few days ago it began to warm up.  Normally it maintains the set temperature of -18°C quite well, but lately the temperature has started to slowly drift upwards, even with the Fast Freeze function on it wouldn’t go below -14°C and then -12°C.

Now this is obviously a pretty serious problem for a freezer, a freezer that doesn’t freeze is not a good thing.  So I rang our local refrigeration engineer. John Mazur in Moreton in Marsh has been very helpful in the past and proved to be very helpful this time too.  He was able to solve the problem over the phone.

It seems that there is a known problem with Whirlpool No Frost Freezers (or at least with some models).  Although they are supposedly frost free and so should not require defrosting, they do clog up over a period (in our case about 14 months).  The solution is simple, empty the freezer, leave the door open and then switch it off for a minimum of 24 hours.  During this period it will defrost a little so leave a towel or drip tray under the spout at the bottom of the door.

Whirlpool No Frost Freezer temperature display

After about 30 hours I switched the freezer back on and it came back down to the required temperature in another couple of hours, result! Thanks John!

I hope that this information enables somebody else to save the call out charge for a refrigeration engineer too.  But it does raise the question, if you have to defrost your Whirlpool No Frost freezer every year is it really a No Frost freezer? There isn’t a lot of ice to get rid of but you still have to go through the defrosting process.  We paid a premium for a frost free freezer but now it seems we have to defrost it anyway,  I think Whirlpool need to do a little work on this product range.

Finding the right keyboard

I recently bought a laptop for a friend. I bought a Toshiba Satellite P205D-S7436 on eBay from a vendor in the US. I was quite happy with the purchase, it is a good machine and the price wasn’t bad.

But of course being a US model it came with a US keyboard, so I needed to swap it to a UK model. With a regular PC this is a trivial task and there are any number of vendors selling compatible keyboards, but with a laptop it isn’t quite so easy. Even finding the correct model of UK keyboard for a US model laptop was difficult, hence this article, hopefully it will make the process easier for others.

To cut a long story short, I ended up buying a replacement K000050540 keyboard from http://www.topazsupport.co.uk/ their customer service was very good but they are quite expensive. My value laptop wasn’t such good value by the time I had spent an extra £55 on a replacement keyboard.

Changing the keyboard

Preparation

Shut down the laptop, unplug it from the mains and remove the battery pack, we don’t want any nasty shocks.

Make sure you are properly earthed, a wrist strap is a good idea. Any static electricity on you can do serious damage to the laptop.

Get out a small cross head screwdriver (I used a number 1), I also used a headtorch so that I had good light on the working area. A pair of tweezers may also be handy just in case you drop a screw, they are pretty small.

Removing the old keyboard

Open the laptop up and locate the plastic bezel which runs along the top of the keyboard. I was able to get my fingernails under the middle of this and gently lift it out, it unclipped without much trouble. If your bezel is a tighter fit you may need to slide something like guitar pick underneath to lift it.

Once the bezel is removed you will see 4 small screws (black on my laptop) along the top edge of the keyboard, unscrew these and put them somewhere safe.

Now lift the edge of the keyboard closest to the screen and gently pull the keyboard towards the screen, the back edge (the edge closest to you) will slip out from its retaining slots and the whole keyboard assembly will come free. Don’t pull too hard though, it is still attached to the motherboard.

Flip the keyboard over so you can see where the keyboard cable is clipped into a connector on the motherboard. You can unlock the connector by moving the 2 tabs on either side of the connector forwards (towards the screen), on my laptop the tabs are white. This releases the keyboard cable and you can now remove the keyboard fully.

Installing the new keyboard

This is just the reverse of the removal process.

Orientate the new keyboard so it is facing the right way then flip it up so you can see the keyboard cable underneath it. You will need to fold the cable back on itself to line up with the connector on the motherboard.

Slide the cable into the connector and move the 2 locking tabs back into place, the keyboard is now connected.

Slide the back of the keyboard (furthest from the screen) back into place with the retaining tabs fitting into place under the lip of the case.

The tabs at the top of the keyboard (nearest the screen) should now line up nicely with the screw holes. Replace the 4 little screws you removed earlier (you did put them somewhere safe didn’t you ?).

Orientate the plastic bezel so that the sloping edge is away from the screen and clip it back into place, there are tabs at each end so you will need to lift it in the middle a little to fit the tabs into place. Once located correctly it should clip back into place with a satisfying click, you shouldn’t need to force it.

That’s it! You have replaced the keyboard. Now you just need to tell Vista that you have a new keyboard layout.

Changing the keyboard settings in Windows Vista

1. Click on start
2. Control Panel
3. Regional and Language Options
4. Select the Keyboards and Languages tab
5. Here you will be able to add a new keyboard, click on Add to select from an enormous list of possible keyboard options, you want EN English (United Kingdom).
6. Once you have added your new keyboard you can Remove the old (US) one.
   If you don’t remove the old keyboard from the list of installed services you will be able to select which keyboard layout you want to use for Vista. Just remove the US keyboard option, you can always add it again if you decide to change back to the old keyboard.
7. Click on OK to save your changes, you will be returned to the Regional and Language Options page.
8. Click on the Administrative tab
9. Click on the Copy to reserved accounts button.   This will remove the option to select different keyboard types from the Vista welcome screen (before you login to Vista).
10. Click on OK.  That’s it!!