InstaKindle

Instapaper, Kindle Edition

For my breakfast this morning at Eggbert’s, I decided to opt out of the increasingly sparse print edition of the Tulsa World.  Instead, I took both my Kindle and my iPhone with me.

After scanning the Tulsa World headlines on my iPhone via their mobile site, I opened up my Kindle and activated its web browser to read some online articles I’d save with the marvelous Instapaper site, which I’ve written about before.  But for some reason I couldn’t login to Instapaper via the Kindle’s primitive web browser.  I’d already been disappointed in how the Kindle browser was rendering the new icon design of Instapaper, and now this.

But I wasn’t about to give up on Instapaper, which has been so incredibly useful to me.  So I pulled out my iPhone, started its Instapaper app, and used it to read Jerry Pournelle’s latest Chaos Manor column.  The iPhone is great for reading articles when I don’t have my Kindle with me, but its cramped screen really slows down my reading.

This evening I decided to look into what was amiss with using Instapaper on my Kindle, and was delighted to discover that Instapaper now has native Kindle support.  You can have a digest of your saved Instapaper articles emailed automagically to your Kindle and then browse through them like a book, which is even more convenient than accessing them via the Kindle’s web browser.

You have to configure your Kindle account to accept emails from Instapaper and provide Instapaper with your Kindle’s email address.  Then digests of your saved articles can be sent to your Kindle, each one complete with a hyperlinked table of contents.  This is far more convenient than logging in through the Kindle browser and bouncing back and forth between the saved articles and the Instapaper website’s index.  And, to top  it off, the Kindle’s rendering of the articles in this format is far better than its web browser’s rendition of them.

Amazon will charge you 10 cents to convert and upload each emailed digest from Instapaper, but even if you sent yourself a daily update, that would only amount to $3.10 per month at most.  And Instapaper let’s you send updates daily or weekly, and delay updates until a set number of unread entries have built up.

Hooray for Marco Arment, who has added great value to my Kindle, my iPhone, and my web experience in general.  Instapaper just keeps getting better.

Ground Zero

Little Boy hits home

Back in my college days I did a report calculating the effects of a 20 megaton nuclear bomb being detonated over Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City.  A new web mash-up makes that sort of thing terribly easy these days.  Ground Zero from CarlosLabs lets you detonate a variety of atomic and thermonuclear devices over any spot on Earth and see the effects.  They even include asteroid strikes.  The BLDG Blog has an interesting article on this.

Facebook Acquaintances

Facebook versus Sex

Molly Schoemann (and no, I have no idea who she is, but that’s the internet!) has posted a funny and cogent take on the downside of Facebook.  The site has swollen to well over 100 million accounts and consequently the number of “friends” one can accumulate is becoming problematic.

As a high school teacher (who has to be careful not to post anything on Facebook or this website that he doesn’t mind a complete stranger seeing), I have already accumulated over 400 Facebook Friends (FF).  The vast majority of them are former students, mostly from the past few years, whom I know only from the context of my classroom.  Most of the rest of my FF are merely acquaintances, and my closest friends don’t even use the service…at least not yet.

I should note that I do like, very much, how the service lets me easily and casually reconnect with former students and various acquaintances when they wish to communicate with me.  When a someone pings me, it is great that I can quickly find out if they are still in school/which school/what major, what sort of work they do, whether they are married, etc.  So I do NOT want to lose any FF or limit the growth of my friends lists.  But I dearly wish the service made better and easier use of those friends lists.

Those lists have let me categorize my FF as students, coworkers, etc. but Facebook needs to make it easy to set my News Feed to default to a selected list.  At least for now I have to click on several settings to filter the feed each time I visit the site.  I also would like a simpler yet subtler interface to tailor what can be viewed on my own account for different friend lists.  The current privacy settings are too blunt, awkward, and limiting.

Some of my former students who are exploring the ups and downs of college life are already complaining about how their parents or their friends’ parents want to be their FF and how that alters the dynamics of the site.  And lord knows they presumably would rather not have their old physics teacher scanning their walls or scrutinizing their photos, yet many don’t appear to be implementing privacy filters based on friend lists.  I suspect Facebook could go the way of MySpace and lose some of its core audience to a rival service if it doesn’t implement a better system for filtering different types of friends and allowing one to easily present different personas to different audiences.

UPDATE: 3 months later, Facebook implemented a new home page that allowed users to change the default page to the newsfeed from a specific group of friends.  Problem solved!

Give Thanks for the Gobbler

The Gobbler Supper Club

We give thanks today for architects and interior decorators, who bring us such memorable works as the infamous Gobbler Hotel and Supper Club.  A truly funny website courtesy of the talented James Lileks.

Killing Google’s SearchWiki

Killing SearchWiki

Google has a new SearchWiki function where you can customize the search results by promoting, demoting and adding new pages and annotate the results.  Like others, I find it visually annoying and Google won’t let you turn it off – at least not yet.  So I found an anti-SearchWiki GreaseMonkey script for Firefox to clean up my search results, which are already greatly enhanced by the Firefox GooglePedia add-on.