Updates from March, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • Brian Sawyer 11:10 pm on November 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Kindle Fire: Out of the Box 

    Got a Kindle Fire? Check out my new 75-page ebook (also available in the Kindle store) to get up and running in no time!

    When you open the box for your brand-new Kindle Fire, you’ll find the hottest 7-inch tablet to hit the market, a power adapter, and a “Quick Start Guide” that tells you how to turn it on. But to really take advantage of all the content and features the device has to offer, you’ll need a little more. Kindle Fire: Out of the Box gets you up and running beyond the first “Slide to unlock” screen to unlock all of your media from the cloud in the palm of your hand.
    Whether your media library lives in Amazon Cloud Drive or on your device, the Fire gives you immediate access to all of it, wherever you are, as long as you know where to find it and how to consume it. With Kindle Fire: Out of the Box, you’ll jump right in to reading full-color magazines, newspapers, newly enhanced ebooks, and your own personal documents. Quickly download music from your Amazon Cloud Drive or new music from the Amazon MP3 store to listen offline, and get instant, unlimited access to streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows. And go beyond your own media to experience integrated email, games, Android apps from the Amazon App Store, and ultra-fast web browsing with the revolutionary, cloud-accelerated Silk browser.

    This intuitive, easy-to-follow ebook opens the world of possibilities made possible by the Kindle Fire, right out of the box.

    Next up: NOOK Tablet: Out of the Box.

     

  • Brian Sawyer 12:17 pm on October 3, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Cooking for Geeks, Japanese Edition 

    I didn’t think it was possible for the Japanese edition of Cooking for Geeks to be more beautiful than the original, but, well …

    Cooking for Geeks, Japanese EditionCooking for Geeks, Japanese Edition
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  • Brian Sawyer 10:50 am on August 11, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Amazon Cloud Reader Is Indeed a Death Blow to Apple’s iBooks, but Not for the Reasons You Might Think 

    Everyone is calling Amazon’s Cloud Reader primarily a play to get in-app purchases on the iPad, but it’s much more than that. It means ubiquity of the Kindle platform across any new device that comes along, without requiring any additional app development. Amazon’s going to win the battle for the ebook space by being everywhere. (More …)

     

  • Brian Sawyer 9:53 am on August 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Cooking for Geeks Anniversary Contest 

    Though it’s a little hard to believe, Jeff Potter pointed out to me that today marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of his book, Cooking for Geeks (which I edited). To commemorate the occasion, I’ll be running a contest throughout the day, based on BookScan data I’ve collected for the past 52 weeks. The questions will involve demographic details of point-of-sale purchases of the book in the United States, not the book’s content. For example, which geographic region bought the most copies of the book? Urban or rural? Did your city buy more copies than mine?

    Because it’s not as fun to see everyone’s answers in the comments, I’m going to conduct the contest on Twitter, though I’ll use this post for the questions, because it gives me a little more room to breathe. Here’s how it will work: for each question I ask (in a tweet) the first person to follow me on Twitter (so I can DM you) and reply (on Twitter, not on this post) with the correct answer gets a free copy of the book. Make sense?

    Stay tuned. The first question will be revealed presently … (More …)

     

  • Brian Sawyer 9:38 pm on July 15, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Bind This Ebook 

    The biggest source of traffic (by far) to my humble blog has been the expanded version of my DIY Bookbinding article, which originally appeared in Make magazine, Volume 5. If you’ve seen it here before, I hope you’ve found it useful. Given its popularity, I decided it was time to finish what I’d always had in mind for it: to make it look nice in InDesign and distribute it as an ebook. My employer thought it was a good idea too, and now my baby is all growed up. It is finally available at a reasonable price as a pretty 32-page PDF, an intentionally convenient length (32 pages is an even signature) suitable for printing and binding on your own.

    I’m actually not sure if I’m going to keep the content up on this site forever, because I like the finished ebook so much, but I also want people to use it, even if they don’t want to pay for it. I’m going to put off that decision indefinitely, but in the meantime, the same content lives here on my blog. If you want a more professional-looking version, something to print and bind yourself, or just a way to show me how much you’ve enjoyed it, you can drop five bucks in the tip jar and download away.

     

  • Brian Sawyer 8:13 am on March 3, 2011 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    My Geek Culture Picks for O’Reilly’s Ebook Deal of the Day 

    O’Reilly Media gave me the opportunity to offer today’s Ebook Deal of the Day. I picked my favorite geek culture books to be 50% off today only. O'Reilly Ebook Deal of the Day Geek Culture Picks (More …)

     

  • Brian Sawyer 11:42 am on October 25, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Split Hitter Android App for Runners 

    UPDATE: Split Hitter is now available for download on a “pay what you like” donation basis, all proceeds to benefit DFMC.

    My wife is a running coach. Because I get her services for free, I thought I’d give something back by creating something that might make her job a little easier for her work with paying clients. One of the tools she uses is as useful to her as it is cumbersome to handle. It’s a collection of running data that begins with men’s world record times at the following distances:

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  • Brian Sawyer 10:02 pm on September 22, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    My Devil’s Publishing Dictionary Android App 

    Readers of this blog will likely know that I have an Android phone, which I’ve used to help train for marathons, broadcast a relay race, tether to my iPad, and coauthor a book on the best apps you can put on it. Well, lately, not content with what’s already available for my phone, I’ve gotten interested in creating my own apps for it.

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    • jon 4:27 am on February 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      is there a tutorial for making the dictionary??

    • Brian Sawyer 11:01 am on February 9, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      I originally meant to working up a tutorial for the dictionary, but I never got around to it. I might still do it, but now the details have become a little fuzzy.

  • Brian Sawyer 1:25 pm on April 13, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    David Foster Wallace on the iPad? 

    I’m thinking of the potential for one of my favorite books as an app, when it’s available for the iPad* (and when I actually own an iPad UPDATE 4/15: I got an iPad yesterday). I’d expect the capabilities of the device to enhance the already amazing experience I already had with the printed book, minus the few drawbacks of the medium in which I consumed it.

    When I read Infinite Jest, the 1,100-page book required two bookmarks to read: one for the body text and one for the 100+ pages of end notes, which actually advanced the plot and were not considered supplemental to the text. I would have loved to have a more convenient way to access these endnotes where they occurred in the main narrative, popping them open to read them and collapsing back to the main text when finished. And the end notes were in a tiny font, which I would have loved to increase to read more easily. And the book weighed more than an iPad, so reduced weight would also be a feature, not to mention an easier form factor (have you ever tried to hold open a 1,100-page book for reading over an extended period of time)?

    With regard to the endnotes, I could see many different ways of handling the content in ways much in the spirit of DFW’s intent. Here’s one approach that The Atlantic took for an online version “Host,” a print story by DFW that included heavy footnotes (linked as pop-ups on the page).

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  • Brian Sawyer 5:43 pm on March 12, 2010 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment  

    Google Navigation: Free Garmin Replacement 

    Best Android Apps Book

    Note: I’ve coauthored a book on Best Android Apps. I’m running this post simultaneously on my support blog for the book and at O’Reilly’s Answers site.

    Last night, I needed my Garmin to get somewhere important, but when I reached for it in the glove box, I remembered I’d loaned it out to the other car in our family and hadn’t gotten it back yet. What to do?

    No Garmin in the glove box, but I did have my G1 on me, and the directions on Google Maps had saved me on numerous occasions, so I fired it up and plugged in my destination:

    Google Navigation

    That Navigate option was new to me. I’d remembered hearing about Google Navigation coming to phones running versions of Android below 2.0 (my G1 is running Android 1.6, but note that Navigation is still not available for my Motorola Cliq, which is still back on Android 1.5), but I hadn’t had the chance to look into it yet. So, here was my chance. I pressed Navigate …

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