I unexpectedly received a Kindle for Christmas. Did I want one - sure! E-Ink, long battery life, always on Sprint EVDO, limited web browsing - it’s a totally cool concept. But with it’s $360 price at or above the cost of a little netbook/subnote - it’s hard to justify. But free is a great price, and I’ve been enjoying trying it out, using it for story reading, browsing, etc - and overall I like it. But the big problem is it doesn’t necessarily make sense for the end user.

Right now, ebooks are deficient to their physical media. Sure, on the Kindle I could carry around hundreds of ebooks, and with that evdo link, I can buy/download books without having to go to the store. But what happens if my kindle breaks, and I want to read my books without spending another $360? What happens if Amazon cancels my account, or goes out of business. Also, what if when I’m done reading the book, I want to loan/give it to a friend or library?

Now the business model could make sense here, especially for things like magazines. But what the people setting the price should realize is that their product is functionally limited and price accordingly. If the ebook/emag has all these limitations but costs half the price - sure, I’d consider it. But when it costs more - then I just feel like I’m getting ripped off.

It’s like when MicroSoft first started offering movie rentals on the xbox360. So, for $20 I can watch a movie for 24 hours? Um, how’s that compare to the Target down the street where I can buy the same thing and watch it forever and resell it or give it away when I’m done - and costs $14.99? Like the way NetFlix moved into the electronic distribution method for it’s movie rentals, ($20/month for unlimited movie rentals at home? That’s a package option consumers can appreciate.) eBooks will probably eventually succeed, but not until the content owners stop trying to price the electronic version as higher than the traditional.

On the other side, watch how the cable companies will try to block NetFlix users while claiming they’re doing ‘network management’.

While looking at the last awesome Tank of the Month, I saw the owner had been dosing it with vodka daily. That sounded interestined ehough that I wanted to read more and found this..

The addition of vodka/ethanol is thought to increase bacterial biomass. For this, vodka addition would result in bacterial growth and reproduction. During this process nutrients in the water including NO3 and PO4 are taken up for the formation of new macromolecules that are needed in cell synthesis and viability. Due to this rapid growth and reproduction, NO3 and PO4 can drop quickly from detectable levels by most test kits on the market. The increased biomass of the bacteria leads to a notable increase in skimmate production, removing more waste than without vodka addition. The increased skimmate is thought to remove the bacteria or bacterial biproducts that have assimilated the NO3 and PO4 within the water column leading to NO3 and PO4 depletion.

via Vodka Dosing by ‘Genetics’ and ‘Stony_Corals’ - Reefkeeping.com.

The way this book starts out will probably make those familiar with scifi classics anticipate parallels with A Boy and his Dog (book, forget the movie), and there are indeed a few common elements. The plot line however, is entirely different. In this first of the series, our protagonist is a boy growing up in a world where everyone and everything broadcasts telepathic thoughts. It’s also a world with a typical pseudo-religious madman, a town where all the men are driven half mad between the constant barrage of each other’s rambling thoughts and depression about how all the women died off from virus in the past. Things get quickly mixed up when one day, the boy discovers two entirely new things - a place there’s no thoughts - and a girl.

I picked this one up last night, and finished it in the early AM. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series, since this one ends at a pretty unpleasant cliffhanger.

Amazon.com: The Knife of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking: Book One: Patrick Ness: Books.

Want a quick way to find a bunch of publicly available free books that you actually might want to read and are grouped into lists that actually make a little sense? Check out here:

Feedbooks: Browsing Lists.

AutoScan-Network is a network discovering and managing application. No configuration is required to scan your network. The main goal is to print the list of connected equipments in your network.

Features:
•Multithreaded Scan
•Automatic network discovery
•Low surcharge on the network
•Simultaneous subnetworks scans without human intervention
•Realtime detection of any connected equipment
•Supervision of any equipment (router, server, firewall…)
•Supervision of any network service (smtp, http, pop, …)
•Automatic detection of known operatic system (brand and version), you can also add any unknown equipment to the database
•Complete network tree can be saved in a XML file.
•Intruders detection (in intruders detection mode, all new equipments blacklisted)
•Telnet Client
•Nessus Client
•Wake on lan functionality
•Privileged account is not required

http://autoscan-network.com/

WifiZoo does the following:

-gathers bssid->ssid information from beacons and probe responses *(now the graph contains the ssid of the bssid :), new in v1.1)*
-gathers list of unique SSIDS found on probe requests (you can keep track of all SSIDS machines around you are probing for, and use this information on further attacks)*new in v1.1*
-gathers the list and graphs which SSIDS are being probed from what sources *new in v1.1*
-gathers bssid->clients information and outputs it in a file that you can later use with graphviz and get a graph with “802.11 bssids->clients”. It gathers both src and dst addresses of packets to make the list of clients so sometimes you get weird graphs that are fun to analyze (basically, because I still need to omit multicast dst addresses and things like that). Using the dst address means that sometimes you get mac addresses of wifi devices that are not near you, but I think gives you information about the wifi ‘infrastructure’, again, I think :).
-gathers ‘useful’ information from unencrypted wifi traffic (ala Ferret,and dsniff, etc); like pop3 credentials, smtp traffic, http cookies/authinfo, msn messages,ftp credentials, telnet network traffic, nbt, etc.
-and I think that’s it.

via WifiZoo.

First of all a little background about Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Its a small-form-factor, mobile computing platform (think of it as a ready-to-use computer on a tiny motherboard a bit like the image you see below-right.) that includes a CPU core which is based on a licensed ARMv7 architecture. ARMV7 is the architecture used in the ARM A8 Cortex CPU design that you can now find in the new Archos devices, the Open Pandora and BeagleBoard (image below-right) projects. Snapdragon has been a four year, $350 million project. It’s not clear how many snapdragon versions there are but the one that CNet are talking about is the new dual-core QSD8672 capable of clock speeds up to 1.5Ghz. The platform also includes the following features: (Details from Qualcomm.)

via Analysis: Dual-Core Snapdragon and Netbooks from Qualcomm | UMPCPortal - The Mobile Internet and Computing Reference Site.