I have been very happy with my Kindle.  I find the e-ink screen easy to read, no different really to reading a book.    The texture of the screen means that there is very little reflection, unlike reading on a mobile phone or tablet.  The size and shape of the Kindle and the positioning of the page forward and page back buttons make it very convenient to handle, much easier than a thick book.  I believe that earlier models were a bit sluggish but I find the page turn speed is fine on my Kindle, as quick as turning the page in a  real book.

Keyboard

My Kindle has no keyboard but there is a  little button which pops up a keyboard on the screen, you then use the 5-way controller button to  select the letters you want to type.  It works fine for searching, I haven’t experienced the Keyboard version of the Kindle but I don’t think there would be a lot of advantage in having the keyboard, at least for the Kindle’s primary purpose, reading books.

WiFi or 3G?

My Kindle is the cheaper WiFi only version, we have a fairly good broadband connection at home and we already have a Wifi network so we didn’t really see the need for 3G.  If you don’t already have WiFi network at home then 3G makes sense, you can still use WiFi if you are somewhere with a network but you can use Amazon’s Whispernet system to download books pretty much anywhere in the world (with no network charges).  If you travel a lot then 3G would be perfect and you can use the (experimental) browser to surf the web anywhere in the world too.

Case

I have a 3rd party leather case which adds to the size slightly but it gives it a bit more of a book like feel, otherwise I think it might just be a bit too slim and sleek.  The case also incorporates a stand so I can prop the Kindle up and read it while eating my breakfast if I want to.  Reading on the Kindle can be a totally hands free experience (except for page flips of course), whereas some books can be a bit of a hassle to read one handed.   My only complaint about the particular case I have is that the case slightly blocks the 5-way controller button on the Kindle making it a bit difficult to scroll down.

Reading Books and Manuals

I have two main uses for my Kindle, reading for pleasure and reading for work.  I find the Kindle perfect when reading normal books,  each page is a bit smaller than a regular book (though you can adjust the text size and font if you wish), but you don’t really care where the page breaks come when reading most books.  When reading a book for work, mostly computer books, you do notice that the page breaks on the Kindle don’t always match the page breaks in the original and things like program listings aren’t formatted quite as tidily as in a printed book.  Having said that, I haven’t found this to be a problem, everything is still quite readable and of course I can carry  several kilos of computer books on my 170g Kindle with no problem at all.

The Kindle uses black and white e-reader technology so obviously colour isn’t an option but pictures and diagrams are very clear, there is no apparent loss of definition.

Availability and Pricing of Books

The Kindle can handle various file formats including PDF (though not quite as nicely as mobi files) and ePub but the biggest source of  Kindle books is of course Amazon itself.  There are many thousands of books available for the Kindle but the market is still a bit patchy.  A lot of classic books (out of copyright) are free which is nice, I certainly plan to read a few classics that I have never got around to.  Newer books are often available in Kindle format but the price is not always competitive, sometimes it costs more for the Kindle book than the printed version which doesn’t make sense to me at all.  In between are a lot of older books which just aren’t available at all in any electronic format.

There is a bit of ironing out with licensing and marketing agreements between Amazon etc. and publishers before the ebook market becomes mature.

An Aside

I subscribe to The Economist (an excellent paper, and not really anything to do with economics at all, I can recommend it), I noticed that there was a Kindle edition which could be delivered electronically to my Kindle every Friday morning.  But the Kindle edition costs more than the printed edition which I receive in the post every Saturday!

I believe that the difference in cost is because the print edition is subsidized by  advertisements whereas the Kindle edition is ad free.   While I am quite happy to flip past the ads in the print edition I think they would be a lot more intrusive on the Kindle.  Nothing is simple is it?

E-reader or tablet?

Most Kindles (including mine) are e-readers rather than tablet computers, the exception being the new Kindle Fire (not yet available in the UK).  E-readers and tablet computers (like the Kindle Fire or the iPad) are superficially similar but actually fill quite different slots in the computer eco-system.

E-Readers

A proper E-reader will use e-ink (or similar) technology to display the text on the screen, there are colour e-ink screens in the pipeline but currently only monochrome screens are generally available.  E-ink screens are not backlit, they rely on an external light source,  if you want to read in the dark you will need a torch just as if you were reading a normal book.  Most e-readers have non-reflective screens which makes them very easy to read even in bright sunlight, there are some touch screen e-readers but so far no touch screen has the non-reflective characteristics which make e-readers so good.

The good thing about E-readers is the reading experience, it is very similar to reading a book and much less tiring than looking at a computer screen.  The non-reflective, non-backlit screen means you can use an e-reader pretty much anywhere in comfort.  They also have a very good battery life, you need to recharge every few weeks rather than every few hours.  They are a viable replacement for a whole stack of books (a very large stack of books).

The Kindle comes with a web browser (labelled as experimental) so you can use it to surf the web but it is pretty basic and of course the web you see will be monochrome rather than colour.    And of course using the pop up keyboard for any length of time would be tiresome.

Tablets

Tablet computers don’t have e-ink screens, they have lovely shiny touch screens which display wonderful colours and provide great interactions with the websites you visit and the apps you use.   They are backlit so you can read in complete darkness if you wish but they are shiny so even the best of them isn’t easy to read in bright sunlight.  They are also more tiring to read on than e-ink.

For a proper web browsing and app using experience a tablet is way ahead of an e-reader and of course you can get a Kindle app for your tablet  so you can read your books on it too.  The downsides are cost (even the Kindle Fire which is a pretty basic tablet costs about twice as much as a regular Kindle), readability (you are still reading a computer screen not a book) and battery life (hours rather than weeks).  Also the iPad (with its 10″ screen) is quite a bit bigger than the Kindle (with its 6″ screen)  so it isn’t quite as portable (or chuckable).

If you have an iPad then it makes sense to load the Kindle app so you read your books on the iPad but I wouldn’t want to use it as my main reading device (but then I don’t actually have an iPad).

Conclusion

I am very pleased with my Kindle, in fact I would like to use it even more but I still have a lot of old fashioned books.   I   plan to use it as my main way of reading  in the future, the only issue may be availability and pricing of books.

This new notice comes from an outfit called ZUNCH who only seem to have a gmail address zunchdomainservices@gmail.com which indicates that it is a pretty low budget attempt, you would think they would at least use their own domain name.  They do have a domain because Zunch.com advertises their Search Engine Optimization services.  Of course Zunch.com doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with zunchdomainservices@gmail.com but they do have the same street address and fax number.

This email isn’t a domain renewal scam, instead it is offering “Domain Name Search Engine Registration”, basically it seems to be an overpriced Search Engine Submission service.  They don’t say what they do for their fee, which ranges from $42 for 1 year up to a “Best Value” $499 lifetime service,  but they try to scare you into paying it by saying Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web. 

My advice is delete this email, it doesn’t offer anything worth paying for and may not offer anything at all.

Free Search Engine Submission

These days Google indexes new sites so quickly and so thoroughly that it often has a new site indexed before I set it up in Webmaster Tools (a free service),  Bing isn’t quite so quick but again Bing Webmaster Tools  is a free service which allows you to submit new sites and offers lots of good monitoring tools to go with it.  Yahoo has it’s site explorer (again free) and of course the Open Directory Project is free too.

Given that other search engines usually pick up their data from one of these sources 4 submissions usually gives pretty good results, covering well over 90% of searches. The only other search engine with a significant market share is Baidu but sadly my Chinese language skills are pretty limited.   If you have a site dealing with a particular niche there are specialist search engines which can be very useful but for most sites if you submit to Google, Bing, Yahoo and DMOZ your site will be found.

The email from Zunch Domain Services

From: "Zunch Domain Services" <zunchdomainservices@gmail.com>
Reply-To: zunchdomainservices@gmail.com
To: registrar@cotsweb.com
Subject: Domain Notification Mr Mark A Cassie This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing - COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ

Attention: Important Notice DOMAIN SERVICE NOTICE Complete and return by fax to: 1-972-455-4848 15770 N. Dallas Parkway Suite 450 Dallas, TX 75248 United States of America   ATTN: Mr Mark A Cassie ADMINISTRATIVE CONTACT  registrar@cotsweb.com South Hill Farmhouse, Fosse Wa Stow-on-the-Wold Glos GL541JU GB - COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ Domain Name: COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ Search Engine Submission Requested Reply OCTOBER 24, 2011 PART I: REVIEW SOLICITATION Attn: Mr Mark A Cassie As a courtesy to domain name holders, we are sending you this notification for your business Domain name search engine registration. This letter is to inform you that it’s time to send in your registration and save. Failure to complete your Domain name search engine registration by the expiration date may result in cancellation of this offer making it difficult for your customers to locate you on the web. Privatization allows the consumer a choice when registering. Search engine subscription includes domain name search engine submission. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated below unless you accept this offer. Do not discard, this notice is not an invoice it is a courtesy reminder to register your domain name search engine listing so your customers can locate you on the web. This Notice for: COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ will expire on October 24, 2011 Act today! ——————————————————————————————– DETAIL OF SERVICE: ANNUAL WEBSITE SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION FOR DOMAIN NAME COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ Detail of Service: SEARCH SUBMISSIONS Reply by Date: 10/24/2011 For Domain Name: COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ Select Term Your Existing Domain Period Covered Price COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ [ ] 1 year 10/24/2011 – 10/24/2012 $42.00 [ ] 2 year 10/24/2011 – 10/24/2013 $72.00 (save 15%) [ ] 5 year 10/24/2011 – 10/24/2016 $159.00 (save 25%) [ ] 10 year -Most Recommended- 10/24/2011 – 10/24/2021 $295.00 (save 30%) [ ] Lifetime (NEW!) Limited time offer – Best value! Lifetime $499.00 Please ensure that your contact information is correct or make the necessary changes. Full Name:  Mr Mark A Cassie Email:  registrar@cotsweb.com Email 2: ____________________ Phone: _____________________ Want to receive this notification for other domains you own? simply list them below: _____________________ _____________________ _____________________ _____________________ Today’s Date: _____________________ Signature: _____________________ Payment by Credit Card PLEASE COMPLETE AND RETURN BY FAX: 1-972-455-4848 ( Please do not include your credit card number on this form just fill the information above and fax it to us, once we receive your fax we will send you instructions on how to make a payment by credit card ) COTSWOLDBEDANDBREAKFAST.BIZ ——————————————————————————————– By accepting this offer, you agree not to hold ZUNCH liable for any part. Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this offer. The information in this letter contains confidential and/or legally privileged information from the notification processing department of ZUNCH. This information is intended only for the use of the individual(s) named above. There is no pre-existing relationship between ZUNCH and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration. Search engine submission is an optional service that you can use as a part of your website optimization and alone may not increase the traffic to your site. If you do not wish to receive further updates from ZUNCH send an email to zunchdomainservices@gmail.com and in the subject line only put remove to unsubscribe. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that disclosure, copying, distribution or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents for  this letter is strictly prohibited. * 100% satisfaction guaranteed, you may request a refund within 30 days.

Please Remove Me From Your Mailing List 

In my research for this article I found this blog from Chris Neilsen saying much the same as I have, just delete this email.

The Internet Explorer Nightmare

Microsoft is creating a nightmare for the web development world, IE6, 7 & 8 all have significant market shares still so need to be catered for. IE9 is much better of course but won’t run on anything older than Windows Vista which means that over half the world’s computers will never be able to run it, obviously this will change as people upgrade computers but at the time of writing IE6 still has nearly 10% of the browser market and Windows XP has over 50% of the OS market.

And now it seems that IE10 will only support Windows 7, not even Vista, this means that there will be another tranche of customers with Vista machines who are unable to upgrade beyond IE9.

It is very difficult to run more than one version of Internet Explorer on the same machine, I use VirtualBox to run several virtual Windows machines but that does mean that I need a separate Windows licence for each machine.

So my full browser array (on my main development machine)  is;

1. Opera – my default browser (I like Dragonfly)
2. Chrome – almost always open too
3. Firefox 6 – for all the great extensions
4. Safari -mostly for testing
5. IE6 – if it works here it usually isn’t too bad in later versions of IE
6. IE7 in an XP machine under VirtualBox
7. FF3.6 in the same XP machine under VirtualBox
8. IE8 in another XP machine under VirtualBox
9. IE9 in a Windows 7 machine under VirtualBox
10. IceMonkey under Knoppix under VirtualBox

Browser Deployment

You may notice that I didn’t refer to different versions of Chrome or Safari, that is because by default these browsers keep themselves up to date so the “tail” of older versions is very short.

Opera & Firefox do the same but the user has to actually agree to download major version changes, hence the tail of FF3.6 users, people have to agree to update to FF4 (but I think FF is now changing to the Chrome model for deployment). The same applies to Opera but as its user base is quite small and quite geeky (I use Opera as my default browser) it tends to look after itself.

Of course the major problem in the browser world is Internet Explorer. Usage of versions older than IE6 has fallen enough that I now ignore them when developing websites but all the later versions still need to be catered for (in my opinion – some developers take a much more aggressive view).  It is possible that IE7 usage will also shrink to almost nothing but I can’t see IE6 disappearing for quite a while yet and of course Windows XP still has a huge user base for whom IE8 is the best that can be installed.  And  there are a few million Vista users who can never go beyond IE9.

I’m sure Microsoft are aware of the mess they have created, I just wish they wouldn’t keep on doing it.  If Chrome/Opera/Firefox etc. can run on any version of Windows (and Mac and Linux) it doesn’t seem too much to ask that Internet Explorer should do the same.

Now I figure that a good proportion of people are using Firefox 3.6 or later, Chrome, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 9 (actually not too many of them yet but it is growing).  As long as what I did still looked ok in the older browsers I thought I would try out enhancements to make the site look a bit prettier.

So I styled the supplier images with rounded corners and drop shadows;

img.supplier {
float: left;
margin: 1em;
vertical-align:   top;
border: 4px solid #888;
border-radius: 5px;
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px #888;
-moz-box-shadow: 4px 4px 4px #888;
/*   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(offx=4, offy=4, color=#888888);  */
}

Browser Support

The rounded corners are supplied by the border-radius directives and the drop shadows by the box-shadow directives.
I have also used the -moz versions of these directives to keep Firefox 3.6 happy (quite a few people haven’t yet moved to FF4), Firefox 4, Opera, Chrome and IE9 are happy with the standard directives. Safari uses the border-radius but doesn’t yet support box-shadow, it probably supports the -webkit version but I think it will catch up with Chrome pretty soon so I didn’t bother adding another line of code which would soon be redundant.

Now older browsers like IE6, IE7 & IE8 don’t support the CSS3 rounded corners or drop shadows but IE has supported drop shadows by a proprietary directive for a long time, so I added a filter directive to give the drop shadows.  All sorted!

But IE9 supports CSS3 AND filters

Oops! When I tested this in IE9 I discovered a problem, IE9 being a modern browser provides pretty good support for the CSS3 directives, but it is still Internet Explorer and also supports the filter directive.

The results weren’t very pretty, nice rounded corners and drop shadow with an ugly square drop shadow behind it.  This is why the last directive in the CSS above is commented out.

I needed a separate stylesheet to give the extra instructions to the older versions of Internet Explorer but not to IE9. So where I called the main stylesheet in my HTML page I added an extra bit of code.

<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<link href="stylesIE.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<![endif]-->

/*
* This stylesheet contains only those styles which we need to make IE versions less than 9 work properly
* IE9 is close enough to a modern browser that it can use the main stylesheet
*/

img.supplier {
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.DropShadow(offx=4, offy=4, color=#888888);  
}

The results?  After nearly 2 months of tracking I can say that about 2.5% have javaScript disabled, or 97.5% have javaScript enabled.

The website I have been tracking is  a business and visitor guide to Stow on the Wold.  I chose this site because it is fairly busy (about 4000 visitors per month) and because it very much a general purpose website with a wide cross-section of visitors.  I suspect that a more technical site might show more people with javaScript disabled, my theory is that most people don’t want to disable javaScript and wouldn’t know how to disable it if they did want to.

Update 21st December 2011 – A few more months of data show the percentage with javaScript disabled fairly steady at about 3%.   So about 97% of my visitors have javaScript enabled which is useful to know.

Immergas CRD Digital Remote Control

I searched and searched for an instruction booklet but I couldn’t find anything on the internet, however I did find the Immergas website. I emailed the company (they are in Italy) asking for help and within 30 minutes I had a reply with the English version of the instruction manual attached as a PDF file. Very good service from Immergas.

It appears that the manuals are on the web, but only on a portal reserved for Immergas’s service centres. So with their permission I publish the PDF document here so that anybody else with the same problem can find the solution.

Immergas CRD Digital Remote Control 3.016362 Instruction Manual

I hope it is useful to someone.

You may have heard of The Race to Infinity campaign, BT are offering to upgrade the top 5 exchanges based on the proportion of subscribers who vote for their own exchange to be upgraded. There is a minimum number of 1000 votes to get into the competition and Stow only has 2398 subscribers but if we managed to get to 1000 votes we would have 42%, which (currently) would put us in at number 8! Realistically I think we will need 2000 votes to stand a chance of making the top 5, it’s a tall order but not impossible.

It doesn’t cost anything to vote, all you have to do is click on this link and enter your telephone number and postcode. So please vote for Stow, and if you aren’t on Stow exchange why not vote for your own exchange to be upgraded, it is worth a try.

Please tell as many people as possible, domestic or business subscribers, they all count!

For the All product listing and New product listing pages the product_type_layout file determines which fields appear on the screen.  The simplest thing is to duplicate the existing product_type_layout entries for product_type = ’1′  (Product – General), the copy can then be used as a base for the display of the new product_type.

So to save somebody some work I offer this mySQL statement which copies all the product_type_layout records for Product – General and creates a new version for Product – Print;

INSERT INTO product_type_layout 
  (configuration_title,
   configuration_key,
   configuration_value, 
   configuration_description,
   product_type_id,
   sort_order,
   last_modified,
   date_added,
   use_function,
   set_function)
SELECT
   configuration_title, 
   REPLACE(configuration_key,'PRODUCT_','PRODUCT_PRINT_'),   
   configuration_value, 
   configuration_description,
   '6',                                                      
   sort_order,
   now(),
   now(),
   use_function,
   set_function 
FROM product_type_layout
  WHERE product_type_id = '1';          

• configuration_id isn’t explicitly set, this will be handled by mySQL’s auto_increment.
• The configuration_key text PRODUCT_ is replaced by PRODUCT_PRINT – we can’t have duplicate configuration_key values.
• The new product_type_id = ’6′ which is the value for my new Product – Print type.
• The last_modified and date_added fields are set to the current date/time.

I ran this enquiry using phpMyAdmin in my test environment but I used the Tools/Install SQL Patches option in Zen Cart’s admin area to apply the same change to the live site.

Nice browsers like Opera and Firefox display abbreviations with a blue dashed line underneath, when you hover over the text a tooltip pops up to display the title text of the abbreviation. So you can do something like this to expand an abbreviation

<abbr title="Hyper Text Markup Language">HTML</abbr>

Chrome & Safari offer the tooltip feature but don’t show the dashed underlining unless you provide a style for the abbr tag. Internet Explorer is different again, IE7 & IE8 will display the tooltips (but not very reliably) but ignore the styling, IE6 doesn’t do anything.

To get working properly in all browsers I thought I would try adding a class to each tag to see if Internet Explorer liked that. I had already styled the abbr element to keep Chrome & Safari happy so I just added a selector for a new abbr class to the existing style.

abbr, .abbr {
border-bottom-style: dashed;
border-bottom-width: 1px;
border-bottom-color: blue;
}

It worked better than I could have hoped, I didn’t need to add class=”abbr” to any of my html abbr tags at all. It seems that just declaring a style for a class of .abbr makes Internet Explorer work like the other browsers. And as a real bonus it also works in IE6 and IE8 behaves more consistently too!

I don’t know why this works and perhaps I am not the first to discover this but I thought it was worth sharing.

Method

It’s quite simple in principle. When a user loads one of the pages we are using for this test several things happen:

1. A PHP script creates a session on the server and logs this in a mySQL database
2. If no session exists already then the PHP script writes a little bit of javascript into the HTML page to be served
3. If the client has javaScript enabled on their computer the script will run sending an asynchronous call (to avoid slowing down the pageload while waiting for a response from the server) to the server
4. Another PHP script on the server will find the mySQL record created in step one and update the javascript_enabled flag
5. If the client doesn’t have javaScript enabled then the script won’t run and the database will not be updated

Results

So far we have checked 18985 sessions and 1258 of them have had javaScript enabled, a rate of 6.6%.

We will give this trial a little time and a bit of analysis before we roll this out for some proper results (and publish the code so other people can do the same).

Edit: Well the first change was to exclude robots, Googlebot and Slurp from Yahoo! were very quick on the scene and of course they don’t use javaScript.

Further Edit: 31st Aug 2010 The second change was to remove the logging from this page, it seems like my little script was interfering with something in the header of the blog page, perhaps Google Analytics.
I am suspicious about the very low percentage of javaScript we are seeing, further investigation is required. It could be that people are reading this post through feed readers rather than directly and so not activating the script.

Further Edit: 6th Sep 2010 Something isn’t right here, the logging works for me but the numbers look far too low. I wonder if there is something wrong with my javaScript code (I am no javaScript expert) which is causing it not to make the ajax call for most people. This is the code that is included into the header of the testing page:

<script type="text/javascript">
// 
// This script is part of my javascript logging routine.
// If javascript is enabled it sends a request to the server which will log the fact that javascript is enabled.
// 
// The cunning bit which copes with the fact that IE6 doesn't know about XMLHttpRequest, thanks to
// http://ajax-prototype.blogspot.com/2007/02/workaround-to-make-ajax-calls-on.html
//
if (!window.XMLHttpRequest) {
  window.XMLHttpRequest = function() {
    return new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP');
    } 
}
//
// Send the PHP session_id to the server script so it can update the log record for this session
//
request=new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open("GET","http://www.cotsweb.com/update_javascript_log.php?session_id=&lt;?php echo(session_id()); ?gt; ,true);
request.send(null);
</script>

Perhaps someone else can see what I have done wrong?