This won't hurt much…

The eSlick

The free PDF reader market had to be a lead-in to something else. Foxit has been in the business of PDF based readers and editors for awhile. I am a long time fan of their bare bones editor and their reader is the fastest I have ever seen. Now they are entering the eReader Wars with the new eSlick, but without Steve Jobs and a name worse than the iPad. I simply received an email otherwise this might not have ever come to my attention.

Hardware wise it looks like they use the same E-ink screens as the Kindle, which is a positive. They also put in an easily accessible SD card adapter which many Kindle owners bemoan the loss of in the newer Kindle models. I did not see anything about the battery being replaceable. The device specs suggest it is fairly thin and light weight too.

It looks like the embedded Linux OS is open source so it’s likely to be customizable. It also supports EPUB/PDB (as well as the usual TXT/PDF, etc) which almost all readers (including Kindle Docs) can be converted to with free utilities. If memory serves me Kindle docs can be turned into Mobi files by simply changing the name, and once done they can be converted to PDF via any number of applications, including a Foxit application. Fictionwise, which is a part of Barnes and Noble,  is running their book site which only boasts about 60,000 books at this time.

I think they are making a mistake on matching the Kindle prices though. They should really try to undercut their market instead of competing head on, especially since they are not offering wireless delivery and a ready available library of millions of books.

Book 8?

But it says something about their market if this is a featured book. Book 8? This probably didn’t need to be done once. I am also a little confused about the Evanesence tie in on the marketing videos, but what do I know.

I am curious to see if this device actually takes off and gains some market share. They need to send me one to evaluate!

A few years ago I spent many hours ripping all my music into MP3s and then setting up a web server to scan all the tags and catalogue them. While it eventually was a complete waste of time I came to appreciate what a pain it must be to set up such a thing on a  large scale.  Alongside this I have been involved in a few similar efforts for work, creating, migrating and cataloguing 2 terabytes of music files.

For my personal use I used to listen to LaunchCast from Yahoo. It was not the highest quality but they had a decent sized collection and the intelligence behind it seemed fairly good at offering me enough fresh material mixed in with things I actually liked. I had categorized and ranked over 18,000 songs, albums and artists on the service before they recently sold it off to CBS. This move may make sense for the service since they will always be advertisement based but it was bad for listeners who like me paid annual subscriptions to be able to skip as many songs as we wanted and to never hear an ad.

Recently I found my new music listening replacement: Pandora.

Pandora is part of the Music Genome Project, which is attempting to categorize all music across a large set of criteria to somehow create a “taxonomy of musical information.” So what does that mean to you? It means you can create a playlist for “Danzig” and pretty much anything related will start being streamed to you. You can the customize the list (I usually changed the name or started with a Genre) and seed the list with other bands or songs, etc.

The player then uses your “QuickMix,” which is just a set of playlists you choose to combine. Now mine is a bit ecclectic but it mixes them up very nicely.  Then I used one of the excellent ad ons they have which is the Windows Vista Sidebar add on. I use a 64 bit system so had to manually run the 32 bit sidebar because Flash does not support 64 bit applications (this can be run from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe” and you can easily put a desktop shortcut to manually launch the sidebar).

All in all a great and simple service that doesn’t assault you with a bunch of ads and is fairly simple to use. I really recommend this service if you need a little background music while you work.

This is a mod for CPG Dragonfly CMS.

You can follow these directions or download it: CPG Multiranks (297).

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