Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

So Amazon launched it’s new Kindle 2.0 “e” book reader on monday.  The original device was intended to save the forests of the world by allowing us all to read our books off of a re-usable platform, vs the standard paperback, or in other words make Amazon a crapload of money by locking users into a proprietary platform for reading books that has a long long payback period.

I like the idea of the kindle.  I would much rather read my books from a small reusable device that I could take with me anywhere, and the screen does look really really close to actual print.  There is, however, some problems: the platform is proprietary, closed, AND DRM laden.

You see when you buy a book from the amazon store you may NOT:

1. Let your friends borrow the book (without the whole reader) when you are done
2. Sell the book when you are done

And this really annoys me.

Now, back to the original point of this story – the kindle 2 release came with only one “surprising” feature – Text To Speach.  The kindle can now read books to you!  Pretty interesting right?

Well, the writers guild has decided this is a violation of copyright law because it is read out loud.

This begs the question: is it illegal for me to have an inner monologue while I am reading a book? =D

Just a quick message to Amazon – I would buy the kindle tomorrow the following changes were made:

• Some sort of new payment scheme for books – subscription, buyback, who knows
• It could read RSS feeds – i know it wouldn’t want to be “syncing” rss all the time, but maybe over wifi only or something?

So I am in the market for a new notebook, currently pretty undecided, not too happy with any options.

Anyway, I have been paying close attention to the new macbook release as I want to buy a new notebook for work / play by the end of the month.

So today I have been watching all of the apple blogs etc, and I have to say there is something that I don’t understand – why is everyone so hyped up about the nvidia stuff???

Here is my case:

1. nVidia has a horrable reliability problem lately, not only with it’s graphics chips. I can say from personal experience that their desktop chipsets have been not so good too. Yes, they may be top performers when working, however that is not often the case in my experience. Then there was the whole “defective packaging” debacle hampering nVidia’s last two generations of chips, including the 8600m chips in current gen macbook pro’s as well as desktop gfx chips (two of which I own).

2. The graphics chip “upgrade” that the macbook pro’s will be getting, reported to be a 9600m card, is mearly an iterative update from nVidia, offering little real performance gain. In other words, nothing much to be excited about.

So what gives? I mean I understand that any “update” including only rounding some corners will be received gratefully by mac fanboys (and I may in fact be one, owning an iphone and considering a MBP), but seriously I am disappointed because I wanted perhaps something a bit more innovating rather than than an alternative chipset (and nobody thinks montevenia is bad).

I would like to hear what others think of this.  I really don’t mean to be a troll, and I still might buy a MBP, however I want MORE!

Recently I have been working with the ruby on rails guru Daniel Morrison on a rails app for one of our web clients.  Daniel along with Brandon and Brian form Collective Idea, a ruby on rails house that also runs Sessions, RoR and other training sessions in Holland, MI that I attended a couple of months ago.

Anyhow, Collective Idea produced the open source (free) Ruby on Rails plugin called acts_as_geocodable (free to download/instal from github), which we were implementing for the project I am developing.

While working on that, Daniel showed me the quick google maps mashup he produced over the past weekend to map political signs.  The basic idea is to map where you see Obama or McCain yard signs to get an idea of the overall political composition of your neighborhood.  Pretty cool, and a good showcase of acts_as_geocodable

Map your neighborhood’s political signs here.

UPDATE: signs.collectiveidea.com is now yardvote.com