ZENSTEALTH

Kindle Touch Assassin's Creed: Glitch Decal Review

2013-03-14T00:00:00-04:00

A few weeks ago I picked up a very cheap quality clip-on LED book light at the local dollar store so I could read my Kindle in dark. I tried to attach the light to it, but the very flimsy metal clips that hold up the light ended up scratching the top bezel (and it wouldn’t even hold the light in place). Since seeing scrathes all over my Kindle distracted me everytime I tried to use the device, I decided to get a skin for it, and after much searching I found this awesome Assassin’s Creed themed one:

This book is surprisingly good for a book that’s based off of a videogame.

It was the first time I bought a skin from DecalGirl, and I really liked how easy it was to apply the skin to the Kindle, and to readjust it since. I actually bought the skin from Amazon – it was a lot cheaper and the shipping was included with the other stuff I bought from there.

It looks badass.

While I am very glad I don’t have to shell out $130 bucks for Paperwhite now, I still wish my Kindle Touch came with a built-in backlight and a higher-resolution screen.

2013 New Year's Resolutions

2013-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

It’s that time of the year again, so here are my resolutions, which for the first time ever is publicly viewable. I think all of them are achievable, for the most part.

Here’s to surviving the apocalypse, and for a more prosperous new year.

~~Strikethrough indicates completeness.~~

Life

Get a new, more local job. If successful, then:
- Get a Driver’s License
- Get a scooter
- Get a fountain pen, new watch, and compass (because they’re cool)

School

~~Get better grades in my last semester of high school~~
Pass the SATs
~~Get accepted into a college~~
~~Get a date to the Prom~~
~~Successfully complete my Senior Project~~

Skills

Get better on the electric guitar
Replace the pickguard and knobs on my Fender Strat
Get a ukulele and ~~learn how to play it~~
Learn how to do Surface Mount Soldering

Tech

~~Make this structure of this website more responsive~~
~~Fix the permalink structure of this site~~
Complete building my Raspberry Pi + Hubot powered robot butler
Learn how to use GNU Screen

Organizing Books In The Kindle File System

2012-12-24T00:00:00-05:00

Whenever you purchase any sort of content for a Kindle from Amazon, it automatically downloads the files into a single directory – the /Kindle/Documents/ directory. If you only buy books from Amazon, or if you have a tiny reading collection, then you probably won’t mind that all your content resides in a single folder. If you’re like me and like to read a lot of books, and like to gather them from various different sources on the internet, then a keeping track of giant library full of hundreds of books becomes very unmanagable very quickly.

If you already have some sort of organizational system for your Kindle and it works, then great! If you need help with creating one, or would like some ideas on how to do so, then you’ve come to the right place.

How I Organize My Books In The File System

Active Content
Books
- Fiction
  - Comics & Manga
  - Fiction (Classic)
  - Fiction (Modern)
- Non-Fiction
  - Futurism
  - Historical
  - Life
  - Medicine
  - Philosophy & Politics
  - Science
  - Tech (1337)
  - Tech (Culture)
  - Tech (RTFM)
Samples

As you can see, I like to seperate my books depending if it’s fiction or non-fiction. For fiction books, I sort it by type: Comics & Manga, Classic (books written before the 1950s), and Modern (books written after the 1950s). For non-fiction books I sort them by genre: Philosphy & Politics, for example is for books like The Art of War and Science is for books like A Brief History of Time. After all of that then I group books by their author’s name.

I place samples into their own folder, because I don’t consider them a full book yet. It’s also a good idea to seperate the active content stuff (Kindle Games & Apps) too.

Caution: The first time you reorganize your books and move them around to different folder, it will *probably* reset their status and be recognized as a newly downloaded, so you might lose your place in the book, and you might have to add them back to their respective collections again. If you already have a big giant library with many different collections, then this step will take a very, very long time to complete.

Rsync Makes Kindle Backups Easy

One benefit of having an organized ebook collection is that it makes backups painless if something unfortunate were to happen to your Kindle, or to your Amazon account.

I presume that you know what already know the basic of Rsync, so here is what you’ll need to enter in the Terminal:

$ rsync -rtvuah --delete /Location/Of/Kindle ~/Location/Of/Backup/Folder

This will copy every file in the Kindle storage into a folder on your computer, exactly the way it exists on the Kindle. Please note that —delete means that it it will delete any file that on the destination folder that doesn’t exist from the source (the Kindle).

Conclusion

Once you organized all your books and backed them up safely, then now you can sit back, relax, and start reading your favorite book without worrying where you placed in or if it dissapears.

How the Kindle Made Reading Enjoyable

2012-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Before I ever started reading on a Kindle, I hated reading books.

It wasn’t the reading part that I hated, but more about how uncomfortable holding books got after about an hour of so. Anything larger than standard sized paperback novel became awkward to hold after 30 minutes of reading, and no matter which way I hold the book (sitting down, lying on a bed, upside down, etc.) it just never felt right.

The part I really hated was how inconvenient it is to carry books around. Any book bigger than a paperback couldn’t fit in my pockets, and in a school backpack it has a tendency to be easily damaged due to it being shuffled around a lot in daily usage.

Procuring books was also a hassle because library books you could only borrow for a certain amount of time (I prefer owning books), and the nearest bookstore was on the other side of the town.

Then came the Kindle

My parents bought me a Kindle Touch the summer right before my junior year of high school after I convinced them it would really help me out a lot at school. Once I unboxed it I was amazed at how different the device was, considering I never owned a e-reader before. The screen felt magical because it looked and felt more like paper than a digital screen.

I configured the Kindle with my Amazon account, and loaded it up with a whole bunch a books I procured from all around the internets; I love how there’s so many classic, public domain books available out there, and the massive collection of books available for sale on the Amazon Kindle store. Ever since then I started reading a whole lot of books just for the fun of it, and it made reading school-related books much easier with its built in note-taking feature and instant Wikipedia lookup.

A cool feature that I like a lot on the Kindle was how you can tap a word in the book for a few seconds and it brings up the definition of the word in a pop-up window. To me this was a mind-blowing feature that forever changed the way I read anything that I physically hold in my hands; sometimes I have a habit of doing this in a real book or a newspaper.

The best part about a Kindle, or any other e-reader in the market, is how it can store so many books in something the size of a paperback novel. I fits comfortably in the tiny second compartment in my backpack, and in some cases I have actually managed to fit it in my pocket (sitting down comfortably with it in my pocket is another matter).

The Kindle Touch has 4GB of storage, 3GB being usable, which means that I can hold around 3,500 books in there if I wanted to – more than I could ever carry in my backpack.

It’s all about the content, not the physical medium

I find it weird when people talk about how they prefer paper books over e-readers due to the particular “feel” that only paper books have. I understand that people have their own preferences, which is completely fine, but when people say that they prefer the reading experience to include “the smell of classical parchment with a touch of hickory”, I find it completely ridiculous.

To me, all I care about when I’m reading is the content of the books being displayed right in front of me how I want it, when-and-wherever I want it.

That, is the reason why I enjoy reading on the Kindle.

Today is my 18th Birthday

2012-09-14T00:00:00-04:00

I love how there’s so many things I can legally do now.

Is it strange that I have the urge to write my own living will so soon already?

The Obligatory Jekyll Post

2012-09-10T00:00:00-04:00

This is the post where a person, after switching from their previous bloated CMS to the new lightweight hotness that is Jekyll, would write about how awesome it was to do so, and how they liken it to having switched from a Ford Model T to a Tesla Roadster (that may be a slight exaggeration).

For me it was absolutely like that; before I discovered Jekyll, I used Wordpress. I spent around one whole summer to manually install Wordpress, deal with php_safe_mode, find the right themes/plugins, and make sure the whole thing was secure before I decided I absolutely don’t want to deal with all of that just to blog.

Then Came Jekyll

The first post I remember about Jekyll that I consciously came across was Paul Stamatiou’s “How To: WordPress to Jekyll” post – that was the post convinced me to switch to Jekyll. Since he’s a much better writer than me, I’ll let him describe in detail about what it was like to switch to jekyll and the many benefits of switching to it.

Instead, I’ll write down the steps that I took to convert my website to Jekyll.

The Process

Try out Wordpress
Get frustrated at Wordpress
Switch to a single one page HTML site
Try to add more pages while synchronizing HTML structure
NOPE
Discover Jekyll
Discover Git
Fork off Zach Holman’s beautifully designed site
Wrote my first post
Put off website for a year due to life events
Become inspired to blog again
Discover Bootstrap by Twitter
Add Bootstrap to site
Add final layout changes – make things look real good
Write out this post
???????
PROFIT!!! (Not really)

That’s about it.

Hello World!

2011-06-15T00:00:00-04:00

echo Hello World!

This is my first Jekyll powered post!

This was a triumph. I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS!