EduKindle

In a surprise update (a surprise to me, anyway), Amazon announced improvements to the firmware of the Kindle 2 yesterday. Thanks to Teleread, Len Edgerly, and the KnuckleHeadNetwork, I learned about the improvements in great detail.

For an educator, this upgrade is a win. First, the K2 will now support PDF files directly, without conversion. On top of that, Amazon is offering a PDF conversion via email that will make the text reflowable. Interested to hear what people who have tried that think.

Second, the battery life has been extended. Since the same battery is in the device, the software must manage the connection to the Whispernet better in some way. I have to say by manner of recantation that my whining about the departure of the exterior Whispernet switch in an earlier post was wrong. The battery management on my DX has only gotten better and better, and this update promises even more.

Finally, the firmware update apparently enables manual control of the page orientation on the K2, a must-have feature for the reading of PDFs and the viewing of images. Even with the zoom and the landscape orientation, the Kindle resolution still isn’t good enough for the detailed illustrations from, say, an AP Biology textbook. But it’s getting there…

I knew something was up when I got up this morning and saw Ralph Ellison staring at me from my sleeping Kindle DX. Just a little extra touch from the Kindle folks, and a nice one at that.

The remarkable finding that there is a LOT more water on the moon than previously thought makes for an excellent story in the annals of modern space science. I mean, quasars and pulsars and the like are pretty interesting, but what could be more fun to minds of a scientific bent than throwing a rock really hard at the moon and seeing what splashes up? (Thanks to NASA for the picture.)

So I used Kindlepedia to make an article on LCross, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, from the page at Wikipedia. You can download it here.

One nice feature of viewing this article on Kindle for PC is that all the external links are live, meaning that you can follow all the footnotes and references to their sources. Of course, you can also use those links if you are reading on your Kindle and the Whispernet wireless connection is on.

At any rate, we are back on the moon, and the article points out that the results from LCROSS are expected to have a big impact on a decision about whether we ever could colonize the moon. With the amount of water kicked up by this little rock-throwing experiment, I’d say the future of the moon looks bright.

And another thing about the Kindle battery: I only charge with the wall socket adapter. I plugged the USB cord into my computer and let it charge while in sleep mode one day, and it actually ran out of power while it was supposed to be charging! Maybe this approach to charging would work if the Kindle was in the “off” position, but it was discouraging to see the battery go dead while connected to a power source under any conditions.

Oh, yeah, even plugged in to the wall, I find that my Kindle charges faster when in the “off” position. That’s recommended (by me).

The rule of thumb is that if you are not 1) using your Kindle like an iPod, 2) using an SD card with a couple thousand books on it, or 3) leaving the whispernet on all day, then anything short of three or four days on a charge is abnormal and should be reported to the authorities immediately.

From what I hear, they will replace the faulty battery for you.

The different experiences that people have with battery life on the Kindle has led to a bunch of theories:

1. that turning the Kindle off saves more battery than sleep mode
2. that “indexing” of the books on your Kindle goes on in the background and drains the battery
3. that playing music on the Kindle drains battery life more quickly than reading

What do we know? First, sleep mode and “off” mode drain precious little power. I can’t tell the difference, and I don’t have to wait for the Kindle to boot when I want to start reading, so I go with sleep mode. Second, it seems like the phantom “indexing” comes into play the more “junk” you have loaded onto your Kindle, particularly if you are using an SD card for additional storage. It makes sense that the more file management you require, the more the battery will drain. Finally, who plays music on the Kindle?

My experience, with lots of sleep mode every day and no SD card, is that I charge the Kindle twice a week. Since most of my little freeze-ups and other funny outputs seem to come with a single bar showing, I charge the minute the third bar disappears.

What you can count on: me forgetting to turn the whispernet off after downloading the Journal every morning noticeably reduces battery life.