gadgetboy.org

Once again, Santa was good to me. I'm grateful that my family is so thoughtful and generous.

So, what gadgetry was under the tree for me this year? 

iHome iP9BR Clock Radio & Audio System for iPhone & iPod, Black

This is the one that works with the iPhone and allows for incoming calls. Previous models did not. I set it up so that I wake to an episode of The Bigg Success Show each morning.

Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, 2 GB

The day that my Mom asked me what I wanted for Christmas was the day that LiveScribe released the beta of the Mac desktop software for their Pulse Smartpen, so I added it to the list. (My Mom picks one or two things off my lengthy gadget list each year, as her budget allows...)

I'm looking forward to putting it through its paces. If you haven't seen it in action, be sure to check out these videos:

• LiveScribe CEO showing off the product at the DEMO conference
• LiveScribe student demo

The Pulse comes with a single-subject spiral-bound notebook which is better suited for students than business use. I ordered a set of Moleskine-like journals that should be here in a couple of days. 

Of course, in a pinch, you can also print your own LiveScribe Pulse-compatible paper.

Freehands Fleece Gloves for the iPhone

Before you judge the geekiness of these gloves, try using an iPhone in the dead of winter. Not practical.

The thumbs and pointer fingers flip open (and stay open thanks to the magnets that are sewn-in) so that you can use the touch screen on the iPhone. They are perfectly suited to the task at hand. (Pun intended)

Mini Espresso Maker

Those of you who follow me on twitter know about my addiction obsession affection for espresso. It's tough to find the elixir of life when you travel to, say, the boonies of western Pennsylvania. To help with my search for the perfect shot on-the-go, my wife gave me a Mini Espresso Maker from Restoration Hardware which should work just great. I haven't tested it yet but will give it a try over the holidays, just to make sure I know how to use it properly when traveling.

Or should that be "Krack?" ;)

Sarah Cofer introduced me to FeedBooks, a site with thousands of free ebooks that you can read on your Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone/iPod Touch, Cybook Gen3, iRex iLiad and other smartphones/PDA's.

There's a good mix of classics along with copyright-lapsed, public domain books, but also a bunch of newer works licensed under Creative Commons from Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig and others.

I downloaded a bunch of Cory's science fiction and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" and have them queued up for reading over the holidays.

Another interesting feature is the ability to "create your own newspaper" based on tags that you enter into the FeedBooks system. Like the books, your "newspaper" can be downloaded to your computer and copied to your device. You can subscribe to your newspaper using any RSS reader that supports enclosures. (iTunes will work for this.)

I'm in the process of setting up my newspaper, but I doubt it will replace Google Reader on my desktop, netbook or iPhone. More to come on this.

Visit FeedBooks and create an account, then share your recommendations and newspapers with me. I'm gadgetboy. (of course.)

The Kindle doesn't natively support PDF documents, which was a real disappointment for me. I wanted to be able to take the many PDF's that I receive on a daily basis and read them on my Kindle - and save a few trees in the process.

As it turns out, PDF support is considered experimental on the Kindle and the documents can be loaded onto the device if you use Amazon's document conversion service.

Here's a perfect example:

Today, I discovered that the authors of Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion are making a version of the book available for download under a Creative Commons license from their web site. While this is certainly great news, I wasn't about to print the PDF, nor read it on my computer screen.

Enter Amazon's document conversion service. Each Kindle comes with an email address. If you send a document that you'd like converted and loaded onto your Kindle, to this address, you're pretty much done. Depending on the complexity of the document's formatting, it should be available on your Kindle no later than twenty minutes from when it's received.

Because the PDF for Blown to Bits is so large - about 22 megabytes - I first had to overcome a delivery challenge: Gmail won't allow me to send attachments larger than 20 megabytes.

Apple to the rescue.

I opened the document in Preview on my MacBook, selected "Save As..." and was given the option to save the document with a reduced file size. When the process was complete, the resulting PDF was only 6.3 megabytes. Cool.

I then emailed the document to Amazon and waited. About 15 minutes later, it was ready for loading onto my Kindle.

Other than some funky formatting of the table fo contents, the formatting of the book is nearly perfect (although I haven't encountered any diagrams or exhibits, yet).

I'm going to try this with some longer blog posts soon, too. That said, HTML is supported natively so I should be able to just copy a document to the device using a USB cable and avoid the 10 cent fee that Amazon charges for using the document conversion service.

Do you have a Canon LiDE 30 without drivers for OS X Leopard? What about Vista?

Yeah, I thought so.

I've had a very nice, very functional LiDE 30 for a few years now and after upgrading to Leopard, it either worked poorly or not at all. So, I Googled for a solution and found VueScan from Hamrick Software.

It's pathetic when you consider that ginormous corporations can't upgrade their drivers and software to work properly with OS upgrades, yet lil' ol' Hamrick can support 1200 of them. Yes, you read that right. This five megabyte download has support for more than 1200 flatbed and film scanners, multi-language support and a full-fledged scanning environment - no Photoshop or other image editing software needed in order to acquire your scanned image.

If you've ever purchased a version of VueScan in the past, there's good news for you: in celebration of their 10th anniversary, anyone who has ever purchased any version of VueScan can upgrade to version 8.5 for free.

Either way, consider yourself lucky to get your old doorstop of a scanner working again.

[Hamrick Software]