Search Results for: Amazon

I gotta say, I was pretty amazed to find this article over at XKCD that attempts to answer the question “How many unique English tweets are possible?” This is interesting, primarily because I’m just coming off a very brief but intense fling with information and communication theory.  In the span of three weeks, I read [...]

The other day, I complained about this: If you buy a book, shouldn’t you get the audiobook for free? Buy paper book, get ebook? What are we buying: the content, or the medium? I was taking a drive, and I had scads of books on my Kindle, but no audiobooks.  I briefly considered buying the [...]

When your Axure prototypes are too good: Molly talks about a problem I’ve seen more than once: is what I’m looking at a high-fidelity wireframe, or a really crappy design? I’ve built or helped to build very high-fidelity prototypes, both from a visual and interactive perspective. They could easily be mistaken for actual web sites, [...]

I’m reading Personal History, the autobiography of Katherine Graham. She was the famous editor owner of the Washington Post for more than two decades. In it, she prints this excerpt from a letter she wrote to her father while she was visiting Europe as a pre-teen. I love it. I suppose Mother has told you [...]

So, I have one productivity hack I need to share (I’ve been inspired by Scott Hanselman’s awesome talk on ignoring stuff). I’m not great at managing productivity, but there is one little thing I’ve done that’s really enabled me to get a handle on my email, and my workload in general.  I’ve been doing it [...]

You can loan books on your Kindle.  Here are the rules: Kindle books can be loaned to another reader for a period of 14 days. […] it is up to the publisher or rights holder to determine which titles are eligible for lending. The lender will not be able to read the book during the [...]

Lessons learned from the Amazon Web Services outage: This is a good post about what we should have learned from the recent AWS outage.  In particular, these two lessons are the most important. The stress of failure will trigger a cascade of other failures. […] What started as a small issue affecting one Northern Virginia [...]

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts.  This is an anthology of writings about the work of the professional librarian (“MLIS” refers to a Masters of Library and Information Science – the standard degree for a librarian). This book has introduced me to the Code of Ethics [...]

I was a early adopter of the Kindle.  I bought one of the original first generation devices back in early 2008 (when they were fully $400).  I was convinced that ebooks were the answer to the prayers of a devoted reader, and equally convinced I’d be in love with my Kindle forever. A few months [...]

Computer Crime, Then and Now: Here’s a good post from Jeff Atwood that lays bare a simple truth: Social engineering is the most reliable and evergreen hacking technique ever devised. It will outlive us all. […]  If you want to engage in computer crime, don’t waste your time developing ninja level hacking skills, because computers [...]