Kindle Fire 7"

My wife has an iPad mini that she uses constantly.  It's a lot easier to on the eyes than browsing and using apps on a smartphone is.  Yet it's lighter and not much bigger than a book.  True, it's not as portable as a smartphone is, and I wouldn't give up my dedicated Kindle Paperwhite for one.  But for indoor use with WiFi, you can't beat it.

I was suffering from tablet envy, but I couldn't bring myself to spending another several hundred dollars for even a cheaper Android tablet.  Then a few months ago, Amazon came out with this.

$50?  Are you kidding me?  At that price it's practically disposable.  Even if it doesn't do everything I wanted it to do, if it's still useful, I'd live with it.  I figured that I'd probably get frustrated with its limitations pretty quickly, especially being used recent generation iPads.  But for $50, I'd give it a try.

Folks, it's worth it, and then some.    OK, it has low res front and rear cameras.  The fact that it has any cameras at all is rather amazing.  Not that I even bother using them.  Yeah, it only has 8 GB of internal memory, but most of my programs and all of my pictures, videos, and music are on a 32 GB microSD card I sprung for it ($10).  I now have just about every app I would want on it, and still have some room on board for more.

OK, it's a loss leader for Amazon, runs on their stripped down version of Android that some apps won't run on, and is a generation behind the curve on performance.  But it works amazingly well.  They did a good job of making it reasonably snappy and it uses a reasonably modern quad core processor with graphics acceleration.  OK, its resolution isn't even 720p, but at 7 inches diagonal, movies run smoothly and they look good enough.  There's no mistaking the text resolution as competing with an Apple "retina display" on their devices, but it's readable enough with small fonts.  OK, maybe it's not nearly as readable as reading a book on a Paperwhite Kindle is, but it's OK.

$10 for a decent case and another $10 for a 32 GB microSD card, and you're done.  But wait, there's more.  They offered it for $35 during Thanksgiving week, so I bought two more as gifts.  I should have bought more.  Never lacking for being cheeky, Amazon also sells them in six packs (buy five, get one free).

Do I recommend it?  YES!  Especially if you're an Amazon Prime member (it's great for shopping, reading Kindle books, and using it with Prime Video and Music).  It's certainly not a high end tablet, but you are getting a lot more than you paid for it.  And for 90% of what you'd want a tablet for, this gets the job done.

Amazon Fire 7", 8GB, WiFi only

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 2

What's a Raspberry Pi?  It's a small $35 computer board that works like a full sized computer.  There are a lot of similarly priced microprocessor hobby boards out there, but you have to program them down to bare metal to do anything with them.  By "bare metal" I mean they don't have an operating system that does the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to use keyboards, mice, monitors, storage, and other devices without having to write drivers to do anything useful.  This thing couldn't be simpler.  Power it using a simple cell-phone charger into the microUSB port and uses a small microSD card for storage after you simply download and copy the operating system onto the card, and plug it in. Plug an Ethernet cable into it, the HDMI output into an existing monitor or HDTV, and borrow a USB keyboard and mouse to get started.  Once you're up and going, you can set it up with a WiFi adapter into one of the USB ports and remote into it (running it "headless"), not tying up a monitor, TV, keyboard, or mouse thereafter.

Why, you might ask?  Think about all the software and projects you'd like to try that you don't want to mess up your primary machine up with.   And wouldn't it be nice to have a computer that only uses a few watts, and with no moving parts, that can be left on 27/4, indefinitely?   OK, it will set you back a few bucks if you don't have a spare reasonably powerful cell phone charger, and you'll probably want to sink $5-$15 into a case for it.  And $10 for a WiFi USB nub, if you don't have an old one around you can't spare.  But that's it.  With a WiFi nub installed, you could hide it in your sock drawer with only a USB cable hanging out.  Hell, run it from one of those USB cell phone charger battery packs, and you won't have even a cable poking out from your sock drawer.

So what do you get for $35?  How about a quad core 900 MHz floating point ARM processor with an integral 1080p graphics coprocessor, 4 USB ports, and an Ethernet port.  Audio and several discrete and serial I/O lines, if that's what you're into.  Yes it can stream HD video and it can be used as media server.  It can be a web server, TOR relay, and Email client or server.  Or in my case, a radio controller and signal decoder.  Or a surveillance camera appliance, detecting motion from a webcam and uploading it to your Dropbox account.  Yes, you can surf the web with it.  The default operating system even comes with a Microsoft Office clone (LibreOffice), a couple of programming languages, a nice desktop GUI, and even a few over the top programs: Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.  Download more programs if you like, or modify others written for bigger machines, using on-line tutorials and videos.

With its default operating system (Raspian) it's a robust Debian Linux general purpose desktop using cheap cell phone chips and technologies.  You can do a lot more with it than you can with Windows 10 (which you can load onto it by the way, but please don't).

I have an original Pi (single core, half the memory, only 2 USB ports) that I've dedicated to a single purpose, and I recently bought the version 2, described above, still at the same $35 price for general learning and amusement.  They even sell a $5 stripped down version that you can embed in your projects.

For more information, go to:  https://www.raspberrypi.org/

Starting New

Yeah, it's been a few years.  I decided to separate my personal stuff (gmail, google plus, Facebook, etc.) from my technical posts so I don't bore the heck out of my non-technical friends, and don't bore people interested in technical stuff with my personal and family posts.

Stand by as I will probably reformat it.  For now, I've left the old posts there, but I might choose to update them and remove the stale ones.

Smartphone Security (General)

Yeah, it's been a long time since I've posted anything. I have some time now and I thought I'd talk about my favorite things when it comes to computer security. The more I learn, the most frightening this subject becomes.

We'll cover some basics in this post, then talk about specific tools that can be used to help secure one's security and privacy. Let's first talk about smartphone security. The phone itself can be pretty secure if you lock it with a password (assuming you use a good password). Using a pattern lock instead of a password is a good idea if you don't like having to remember a strong password. Locking with facial recognition or a short PIN code is better than nothing, but if someone gets hold of your phone and is determined to try hard enough, they'll probably get in.

Once in, the E-mail you've downloaded onto your phone can be a rich source of information. It's likely that you've casually mentioned something in your mail somewhere that might be of use to a hacker or identity thief. It's best to not keep much old mail on the phone and to erase sensitive E-mails right after you read them. Some mail apps support E-mail encryption/decryption. You should use encryption for at least sensitive E-mails if you can get the people you exchange those E-mails with to use it also.

I worry about how insecure banking and brokerage firm apps are, and avoid using them. Consider using the “incognito” (memoryless) feature on your phone's browser, or switch to a browser that supports that feature. Having your browser remember your history and passwords might be convenient for you, but it's also very useful for anyone who gets a hold of your phone.

There are several privacy apps and features available for smartphones. We'll cover them separately. With Android phones, you can encrypt your micro-SD card. Later versions of Android support “Android Device Management” over the web, allowing you to locate and ring your phone if it's lost. More importantly, it allows you to immediately lock your phone remotely with a new passcode. You can even wipe it remotely, if you feel you need to. Several apps were available to do this, but it's now available for free, built into the operating system itself.

Be aware that if someone finds your phone, all they need to do is to turn the phone off and leave it off until they can get away from or shielded from cell phone service. There, they can turn the phone back on and put it in airplane more, locking you out from remote access. Even if the phone isn't really completely off, they can wrap the phone in aluminum foil or put it in a small metal box to completely block GPS and cell signals.

If you need to store sensitive information on your phone, use a password manager or file encryption tools. Don't leave anything sensitive on your phone in plain text, and trust apps with sensitive information only if they are generally accepted as being very secure. There are only a few apps I trust that much. I'll mention them later.

Android Phones

Last post for the night... I've always used the simplest free cell phone I could get. No fancy features, no data plans. But a few months ago, my wife started to bug me about getting a smart phone. Strange, because she's not a techy person, but she is always on E-mail or the web at home. Buying her a smart phone means I have to buy the same model for myself, because I'll have to teach her how to use the darn thing, and I'll be the one to have to fix things when they go wrong.

So, if I'm going to have a smart phone, it might as well get a good one. Since I'm a Sprint customer (I get a good company discount there) and their data plans are cheaper than most the other guys, I bought the two of us HTC EVOs.

Yeah, if you play too much with it, the battery life sucks. But after the novelty wore off a little, I haven't had any problem making it through the day. OK... I have a charger at work and in the car, and if I remember, I plug in.

Very clever apps! I'll list my favorites another time. Yeah, the iPhone was first and inspired the whole idea and many of the apps, but there's more than enough Android apps out there to avoid iPhone envy.

Using Calibre with a Kindle

Right... we'd spell it caliber in the US (is in size of ammo). This is an free open source multi-platform (Windows, Linux, and Mac) program that translates various formats into various E-book formats. Useful enough, I suppose, but what's really cool about it is that you can schedule it to go out and get any one of many magazines and newspapers, or your favorite blogs at a specific time, format it for your Kindle, and E-mail it to your Kindle account so when you wake up in the morning, it's already there. It works great and it has ready made canned recipes for lots of lots of different sources.

All I have to do is to leave it running when I'm gone and my subscribed Wall Street Journal (the recipe has a place to put your username and password), Orlando Sentinel, magazines, and my favorite blogs will show up in the morning at the hotel, free while I'm away, as long as they have WiFi. That also gives me plenty to read on the airplane also.

I find that I don't read many books, because I rarely have time to finish time them in a timely fashion. But I ravenously read newspapers, magazines, and blogs all the time, so this is great! So while I'm off trying to read more books, this is a great way to stay informed on the road.

Kindle

I received a Kindle for Christmas (3G, WiFi only). I've read several E-books both on my laptop and Palm TX, but I was never happy with having to be rushed because the battery is going to be dead in a couple of hours. And, of course, I didn't have much battery left to do other things besides read. Plus, it's hard to read for a long period of time with the back lit screen shining in your face through fuzzy fonts.

The first time I saw a Kindle in the store, I thought it was a dummy model. The display looked like it was a paper overlay with the text and images on the surface, instead if behind it. I liked the idea of having a long enough battery life to not have to worry about it, but they were expensive and only had a couple GB of memory (though that probably would have been more than enough).

The latest version is smaller, lighter, with twice the memory, better contrast, longer battery life, and cheaper. Plus it's as easy to hold as a paperback for long periods of time. OK... so I put it on my Christmas list.

So far, I like it. For reading, black and white is just fine, thank you. And images render nicely in black and white, so I'm more than happy to have the e-paper display than a back lit LCD. It's nice to just leave it on, have it go to screen save, and pick it up days later, reading for hours on end without hardly making a dent in the battery charge.

The operating system, such as it is, is pretty primitive, and though it can browse the web in a pinch and does a decent enough job for casual use, you wouldn't want to surf the web much with it. But for just reading books, it's perfect. If I want to do something else, I'll drag out the laptop.