The Amazon Kindle

Some pictures of the Amazon Kindle.

Electronic ink, very easy and pleasant to read. Being used to touch screens meant repeatedly trying to select and scroll through the pages with futile finger-sliding attempts.

The keys are hard to press cleanly, navigation through and selection of the text feels odd using the joystick.

There's a cumbersome multi-step process to retrieve annotations to save elsewhere as it isn't possible to pull them directly from the device, and annotations will be lost if Amazon wipes-out your book collection. There's a limit to the amount of annotation (Amazon calls them clippings) available on some books controlled by DRM, it's not possible to check what this limit is other than by hitting it.

It's thinner than I expected at about a centimetre, and it looks better than the advertising and review pictures portray it.

It needs a wave of the Apple design-team magic-wand but a viable alternative to carrying a bookcase with you on to a train.

Graffiti art

I keep walking past this giant chap on the way to work, it took some time to work its way through my early-morning lack of consciousness but eventually, over this last week, it sunk in enough for me to take a photo.

It looks too neatly structured to be a free-form spray work, not sure if stencil or masking was used. Is the text to the left to do with the picture, it looks too amateurish, like the tag behind his backside? But the text has been written by the chap himself, the paint brush in his hand answers the question, although the tag would still be by someone else. Above the tag there is what looks like a signature in the more stylised form of the picture itself. It's on this wall on a main road.



Here's another one that's around the University campus, this appears to be a stencil although the spectacle frame over the right eye might suggest otherwise.



I don't think these examples are detrimental to the environment, I'll keep a look out for others, if I'm awake.