I’d like to use it more for other things, but the web browser is limited. One cool feature is that since every Kindle has an Internet connection and an email address you can email yourself documents that will be converted and sent to the Kindle for 10 cents (unsure on why the cost unless it’s to throttle network-crippling usage). Also, your Kindle will only receive messages sent from a sender whitelist, so you should not receive spam. Unfortunately, this means you have to add various friends and colleagues to your Kindle whitelist if you want to receive documents from them on your Kindle. If you have a lot of friends or colleagues this is a pain in the butt and will require ongoing management. There’s an easy way to liberalize access, which should still prevent spam:

1. Allow your email account to send to your Kindle from your settings at Amazon.
2. Create an email filter to forward specific messages to your Kindle. For example, inform your network that if they wish to submit documents directly to your Kindle, attach the document to the email and use “[kindle delivery]” somewhere in the subject line. Then just filter your messages by this subject line and if they have an attachment then have them redirected to your Kindle email address from your whitelisted email account. In Gmail, this would be: subject:([kindle delivery]) has:attachment
3. Each email to your Kindle (name@kindle.com) costs 10 cents per conversion, so if you anticipate a lot of senders and want to save some money, you can have documents sent to name@free.kindle.com, which will convert the documents for you but will not deliver to the Kindle. Using this method you can transfer the converted documents over the USB connection.

This could be useful for anyone who runs through a lot of PDF’s or lengthy Word documents from different people. I’m thinking of publishing agents, editorial staff, lawyers, college professors, corporate managers, etc. If you encounter abuse, you simply alter the filter or change the subject line. You could set up multiple filters with some documents converted and delivered and other documents converted but not delivered.

Anyway, most WSJ articles are available in full via Google News. In other words, the WSJ wants traffic and attention from Google so that the full content is indexed, but they want to promote the subscription model to their own users. To view the Google News results for the WSJ, simply use the search operator: "site:online.wsj.com". This will give you a results page full of links to the full articles.

One thing you’ll notice is that if you look at the URL for the full article, you’ll see something like: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121375354814283081.html?mod=googlenews_wsj .

The little parameter at the end (?mod=googlenews_wsj) triggers the display of the full article, rather than the short preview version with the subscription prompt you would normally see as a non-subscriber. However, you’ll also notice that if you drop this URL into a new browser session you will get the preview version of the article. Clearly, some referrer checking is going on. If you are referred by Google AND your URL possesses the Google News parameter, you get the full text. If you just use the URL without Google News being the referrer, you get the preview. Argh.

So, how do you get Google News to be the referrer for ANY article on the WSJ site? I don’t know that this can be done. But, you CAN use Google as the referrer by creating a link somewhere within Google’s many services. I tried this with Gmail and Google Notebook, both of which are located at the google.com domain, but for some reason this did not work. But, if you drop the link into a document at Google Docs it will work and WSJ will detect Google as the referrer. It’s a hassle, but if you really need to see the full text of an article and can’t find it in Google News, just drop the URL into a Google Doc, add the “?mod=googlenews_wsj” parameter to the end, and it should work.

One of my goals is to reduce my material possessions to the absolute minimum. Like many people I no longer own CD’s for music (having sold them several years ago), but I have also been scanning in all paper records and photos and have sold a lot of furniture and junk on Craigslist. I would eventually like to get to the point where my possessions consist of: a car, some clothing, computing tools, and a few personal effects.

We should welcome the transition to digital books. With digital books, no book has to go out of print and we can further remove the obstacles for authorship. When books are not printed on dead trees, anyone can be an author and publisher.

Anything that is essentially information: video, audio, text, etc. should be freed from its physical prison, like a soul from the body. We should focus on creating better output devices to display words. The Kindle is a step in the right direction and it makes me excited for the future.

In an age of mass production and cheap materialism, we are seeing a trend of devaluing mass-produced items while growing to appreciate true artifacts. In the near future, wealth will be measured in freedom rather than material accumulation, so it will be less important to own things, especially now that most things are cheap. Our lives are becoming cluttered with crap because crap has become cheap and commonplace. We ship bales of used clothing to Africa because we simply have no desire or need for it.

Through the wonder of market capitalism, the average American has more material wealth than the wealthiest individual one hundred years ago. Think: air conditioning, cheap food, transportation, television, cheap textiles, etc. As things have become cheaper, they have become less important. We will declutter by transitioning to digital formats and by focusing on durable items of high quality or items that are high in artifact value.

As usual, I digress. I started this entry to show you how to find free ebooks using Google. For any title or author, including for works currently unavailable on the Kindle, do a Google search like so: “fountainhead filetype:pdf” or “allinurl:dune frank herbert filetype:txt”

If anyone has uploaded any of the books you are looking for to a web-accessible directory, chances are, Google knows about it. To get the book onto your Kindle, just email the file to your Kindle device email address and Amazon will convert it to the Kindle format and download to your Kindle.

A few weeks ago, the folks at Remember the Milk were nice enough to build a new Blackberry app to sync your RtM tasks with your Blackberry. MilkSync effectively costs $25 a year since you have to have a pro membership to use the app. It’s worth it.

Now the only thing missing is Exchange-less over-the-air syncing of your Blackberry contacts. You can get contact data if your contacts are in Gmail using the Gmail mobile app, but it doesn’t sync with the Blackberry Address Book. Hopefully, Google will release a tool to do this.

Google will sell a lot of phones if they release similar tools for the Android platform.