Kindling

excessor gave me a Kindle (version 2 - the small one) for my birthday. So far I've bought one book (The Temporal Void, Peter F. Hamilton) which I'm about a third of the way through. I've also converted my friend Lou's second novel into Kindle format so I can read it there; you do this by emailing it as an attachment (in this case Word format, but they accept most others, and PDFs) to an address at Amazon, and they email back a URL pointing to a downloadable file, which you can either download and move to the device yourself, or pay a nominal fee ($0.10) to download via the Kindle's cellular data connection. (Which fee seems somewhat silly, since you can browse the Web on this Kindle for free.)

It took awhile to get used to reading it; one thing I wish for is blacker type. The 6" screen is a greenish gray and the type is dark but not really black, so the contrast is a little low.

One thing that sold me on it was the iPhone app for reading the same content and keeping track of where you are in the book no matter which device you're reading, but it was disappointing that you have to manually tell the device to set the bookmark or it won't be known by the other device. Which is stupid -- you'd have to remember every time you quit reading to finish by setting the bookmark. It should be set automatically whenever you turn off the device.

One nifty detail: the E-Ink screen uses no power, so they have included 100s of pictures and woodcuts of authors and literary topics to fill the screen while it's off.

Space Station Underwear Endurance Test

"I wore it for about a month and my station crewmembers never complained for that month, so I think the experiment went fine," Wakata told the Associated Press Thursday in a televised interview.