philipptoelke.de

How to keep track of what you are reading on your kindle

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I have a large number of articles from the internet on my kindle (see Infrastructure).

Since the kindles default (and most useful) sorting is "most recent first" and "most recent" means either "most recently read" or "most recentl added" it sometimes is confusing which article I am reading at the moment. For example, if I leave the current article to check something on wikipedia and while browsing have to stop reading (which happens, as I use the kindle mostly during commute), the article will be sorted on top. If I then add new material to the kindle it gets sorted on top.

Here is the workflow I use now:

1. Select a new file to read

2. Press the right-button

3. Add the article to the collection "current"

4. Don't press "done" to go back to the file-menu, but the back-button

5. Select "Goto beginning"

6. Read

7. Press the back-button, you will get to the file-menu

8. Select "Delete"

No more confusion, what to read and which file it is in!

Galileo was wrong!

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

(click!)

As you can see, galileo most likley was wrong:

Restaurant recommendation

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Anyone planning a visit to the East-german town of Gera should eat at the "Royal", a gourmet-restaurant in Sorge Nr. 4. The food was very good at reasonable prices (at least for me, being used to the prices in Munich) and the athmosphere priceless. Classical music in an oldfashioned room. In fact it is in one of the oldest buildings of the town. The proprietor, a Mr. König, handcrafted many of the furnishings during the time of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), waits himself and makes a wicked Crepes with honey. Crete honey.

All in all a very enjoyable evening!

Infrastructure

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

It is nice having infrastructure in place. It makes doing stuff so much easier:

Last week I was sitting at work and slacking of for a moment (yeah, yeah) and browsed through my Google Reader. When I found a longish article I wanted to read but knew that this was neither the time nor the place for it, I send it to my kindle.

I have a cups-pdf printer running on my home-server that is wired to send the resulting pdf-files to my kindles email-address (For all who don't know this: Every kindle has an email-address. Amazon converts every document sent to this address to a pdf-file and then you can download it to your kindle. This service is free if you use your own WiFi to connect the kindle to the internet). To access this printer I dialed into my vpn: Presto, the printer showed up in the printing dialog (cups is really cool in that respect) and a few minutes later I got the mail saying that my documents where ready to be downloaded with the kindle.

And later that evening I could read the article sitting on my couch, petting my cat. Without the pang of guilt that I was reading stuff on the companies time. And knowing that this was made easy by my obsession with creating infrastructure.

Euphemisms

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Recently we were watching stupid internet-videos and found this one. We joked around, that "bathing ones hedgehog" sounds like a cheesy euphemism, which is strange because the goal of euphemisms is to hide that you are talking about cheesy stuff.

But if a phrase such as "I was washing my hedgehogs" sounds dirty, euphemisms have "turned". Perhaps its time to say what you mean again...

If you find this interesting, google the phrase "I want to stick my long-necked giraffe up your fluffy white bunny".