Places to Get Ebooks

Amazon specific search - This search removes all the public domain books and sorts price from low to high.
Amazon Special Offers - All the Kindle special offers on Amazon
Manybooks - Kindle format for downloads. Foreign language books as well. Has public domain books too.
Manybooks (Kindle edition) - Access through the Kindle web browser to download directly to Kindle. Choose Mobipocket format.
Feedbooks - Kindle format for downloads. Has public domain books too and I think others.
Project Gutenberg - Multiple languages. Seems to be in HTML or Text format (download text for the Kindle)
Free Kindle Books - a bunch of Project Gutenberg books in Kindle format.
Fictionwise - .mobi format. Some books free, some not, but some sales as well on the non-free ones.
World Public Library - all PDFs. Cost is $8.95/year. Over 400,000 classic titles.
Fictionpress - mostly original works, in Text format.

Conversion Software

Calibre - converts to/from a bunch of different formats including PDF and Kindle. Works on Windows, Mac, Linux.
MobiPocket - converts from PDF/Word/Text to .prc which can be read by the Kindle. Works on Windows.
Stanza - export stuff to Kindle format. Probably others, but not sure which. Works on Windows, Mac.

Circuit City is closing down all stores! They opened up the doors yesterday (Saturday) for their "big" liquidation sale, figuring there could be some great deals, I arrived around noon. But man, was I disappointed! Most of the items carry only a 10% discount, come on, that barely covers the sales taxes. I examine a few items I was interested in, and even with the 10% off, and not taking any taxes into consideration, each and everyone of them would be cheaper buying on-line. And I only checked one on-line retailer, Amazon.

There are two exceptions here:

• All cables are 30% off, which can turn out to be a good deal on some higher end cable. I ended up buying a 7ft Monster 800HD HDMI cable for about $60, which at least seemed like a decent deal (it was listed at $80 on amazon).
• All DVDs are 20% off. This can become a reasonable deal, but I'd still check every DVD against Amazon (or other on-line retailers) before buying them. I ended up buying the 30th Anniversary Blazing Saddles DVD, for $8.

The checkout lines were huge, and some people were stockpiling on all sort of expensive computer and A/V gear, neither of which carried any particularly good prices. I don't know why people wouldn't do at least a little background checks on an item, instead they all assumed it must be a good deal, because it's a liquidation sale.

To make things worse, all discounts were added on manually, and I actually had to remind the cashier that my items (I bought two things) both should have discounted prices (20% and 30% respectively). I can only assume a number of people didn't even get any discounts at all, which seems borderline criminal. I'd definitely recommend anyone to check their receipts when they get home, and go back and demand the discount if you didn't get it.

This will probably surprise you, but we've been using a Foodsaver vacuum sealer for many, many years. Yesterday, we decided it was time to upgrade to the new model. OMG, this thing rocks on so many levels, here's what it now looks like:

What makes this superior to the older models? Well, here's a few highlights:

• It's form factor is much better, making it fit into your kitchen more easily. We now keep ours out all the time, nicely ticked up against the wall.
• The roll of plastic is integrated with the Foodsaver now (on top of the vacuum unit), so there's no extra holders to keep around. It's really easy to extract and cut a bag to size from the roll.
• It is much easier to use, as soon as you enter the plastic "bag", it'll detect this, automatically position it into the vacuum chamber, and start.
• The attachment hose for vacuum sealing containers is built in to the unit, and is nicely retractable. This probably means we'll be using vacuum sealable containers and lids more often.

The new Foodsaver also have a bunch of options when using the device, for sealing sensitive items, or for marinating meat etc. All in all, I'm really happy with this "upgrade", well worth spending the $150 on it even though our old Foodsaver (10 years old) was still working fine.

Yesterday my new Roku (http://www.roku.com) device arrived. For those of you living in a cave somewhere, the Roku player is a movie player device, which works together with your Netflix account. Netflix lets you watch some of their movies using a streaming video service, and the Roku is built to be used for this only. I figured, for $99, how bad could it be?

Well, this is just a short "review", but the short story is this: The Roku Rocks! First off, the device is tiny, and comes with a minimalistic remote:

The setup was super easy, since it supports HDMI I simply hooked that up to my receiver, and a CAT5 network cable, and that was it. Once booted up, the Roku takes you through a few simple setup steps. The only "snag" here was that network only seems to support DHCP, there is no way (as far as I can tell) to statically configure the IP, network mask and rout information.

Once the Roku was up on the network, I went through the software upgrade process, since I knew there was an update available (from reading the forums). This new version supports some HD content (720p), and has a new menu layout. The software upgrade went very smoothly, and very fast, and the Roku was up with the new features in minutes. A quick reconfigure now allowed me to specify that my TV is an HDTV capable system, and voila, we got HD!

Using the Roku is very easy, you simply pick a movie from your Netflix Instant Playlist. This is both good, and bad. The good part is that it's really easy to navigate and select movies (or episodes from a TV show). The bad news is, there's no way to add a new movie selection from the Roku GUI itself. This is quite disappointing, since you can't just search for a movie by name on the Roku, you'll have to bring your laptop to the TV room (or walk back to your office). I'm hoping / assuming that some future version of the Roku software will allow me to search and/or add movies to my Netflix Instant play list from the comfort of my Lazyboy (without having to drag my Powerbook over there).

Now, what about the quality? I've only watched a few movies so far, the quality differs a bit depending on the movie (like, Excalibur is pretty blurry for some reason). The HD content (like 30 Rock) looks fantastic on my 52" Plasma TV, and so did the SD version of Meet the Robinsons. Overall, I'm definitely more than happy with the quality of the Roku movies.

All in all, I truly love the Roku. My only concern is if Netflix changes their service to be less useful at some time later. I hope not, because this is definitely a big carrot for me to stick with Netflix (instead of say Blockbuster). In any case, I'm just about ready to order my second Roku unit, for another TV room.

I just went on a dirk biking trip to Moab, and just in time for the trip, my new [http://www.findmespot.com/en/ Spot] device arrived. I'm not gonna write a full review here, but so far, I've been incredibly impressed with it. I used it for 3 days straight, in the "tracker" mode where it sends a location message every 10 minutes. I don't think it missed more than one message the whole trip. The cost is not horrible ($150 for basic + unlimited tracking service). Here's an example of what the tracking would look like, this is from our last ride on the Poison Spider trail:

[Image:http://www.ogre.com/files/ogre.com/screenshots/spotme.jpg|center|Spotme map from Poison Spider]]

Our friend Andy Ihnatko was in town last week, and we met up at the Pancacke House in Boulder. Geeks as they are, Michelle and Andy started taking photos of each other, turned out to be a pretty cool picture: