Tricks for Kindle Users

My family got together this last Christmas and gave me one gift – a Kindle. (well, two – they included a case for it as well)  Now some of you out there (like my high school English teacher) are saying, “Wait, I didn’t know Courtney could read!?!”  It’s true, I don’t normally read novels or classics like Shakespeare or Judy Blume however I do do a lot of research reading.  I’m constantly having to read this whitepaper about a technology or a book about discipleship and I’m an avid reader of a special book known as the Bible and because I’m on the go a lot, a Kindle is a great way for me to carry a lot of different books and articles without having a pile of papers or a hernia.

Now if you want to know why I wanted a Kindle over an iPad or reading this stuff on my phone or laptop, just ask but here I’m going to show you some of the tricks I found very useful in making the most out of using a Kindle or just because I like to be different.

The Key:  The “Manage Your Kindle” page on Amazon
Go to Amazon.com and login.  Then click on “Your Account” and scroll down to “Digital Content” and there you will see a link to “Manage Your Kindle”.  On this page you’ll see a lot of info about what you’ve ordered (so if you remove a book from your Kindle, you can always re-download it without paying because it stays listed on this page).  Let me draw your attention to a couple of places:

Under your Kindle, you see the name of your Kindle along with a space called “Kindle Email Address”.  Make note of that address – add it to your Address Book with the name “Kindle Uploads” or something you can easily remember.

Now this email address allows you to send PDFs (as an attachment) to your Kindle.  This makes it very easy to get that white-paper or eBook (in PDF) onto your Kindle to read later.  If your Kindle has 3G capabilities, be mindful that this feature can cost you money so if you want to make sure its free, change the email address to be “@FREE.kindle.com”.  While it won’t automatically download until you are on a WiFi network, you can save a few cents.  If you have a WiFi only Kindle then don’t worry which email address you send it to as it automatically processes it under the “free” way.

Now this only works if you are sending it from a registered email address.  So scroll down to “Your Kindle Approved Email List” and make sure you have every email account you might send stuff from.  Maybe you add your spouse’s email address so that they can easily send you stuff that they find and think you might want to read.

If you are worried about doing this and having charges because you forgot to send it to the free address, then scroll down to the “Your Personal Document Charge Limit” area.  Set this to zero.  It’s the “Just in case” way to be safe there especially if you’re never going to receive personal files through the 3G connection.

Making my own screensaver
Personally, I couldn’t handle having all those author screen savers.  I feel really stupid with those super minds being shown to me repeatedly.  Plus, I wanted to make my Kindle my own.  That’s why I used this hack that allows me to use my own pictures as screen savers.  While this hack has no warrantee and could void your warranty from Amazon, it seems to work flawlessly for me (I was even able to seamlessly do an Amazon update recently with no negative affects or problems).  Follow the instructions closely and know that there’s two parts – first a hack to be able to install hacks and then a hack to replace screen savers –> http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kindle_Screen_Saver_Hack_for_all_2.x_and_3.x_Kindles#How_to_Update_the_Screen_Saver_Hack

Web Articles to your Kindle
I read a lot of websites and sometimes there’s articles that I want to read later.  The Chrome plugin makes doing that real easy.  Basically, when you use Chrome as your browser and have this loaded, you can be on a website – click a button and it formats and send the file to your Kindle.  Real easy.  Its not a screen shot and clears out a lot of the “stuff” on the website but you’ll get the content which is what you wanted in the first place.  Check it out at LifeHacker –>  http://lifehacker.com/#!5736907/send-to-kindle-pushes-web-articles-from-chrome-to-your-kindle

Search the Amazon Store
I have a problem with impulse buying.  When I’m in a book store, I’m like – oh, I gotta get this and this and this.  Not good for the wallet or for my suitcases when I’m having to lug all that around.  Here’s some ways to help with that:

• Samples:  Many of the books in the Amazon store allow you to download a sample of the book and read it.  Sometimes its a chapter – sometimes its more.  I’ve been looking for a good book on Android development and I’ve looked at probably 8 or 9 book samples before purchasing just one.  But I know I got the right one.
• Free collections: If you go to the Kindle eBooks area of the website and look at the list on the left, you’ll see a link for “Free eBook Collections”.  Basically there’s two of them – one is the “Kindle Popular Classics” area which are books like Sherlock Holmes, Pride & Prejudice, etc where the copyright for them has expired so foundations have put them into electronic format for all to have.  The other collection is “Limited Time Promotional Offers”.  This is the area where you want to periodically check as there can be some real gems in there.  I’ve found leadership books by top leadership development people, language helper books, educational resources, the Bible, and many others things in there.  I’ve probably ordered most of my books from this area.  [WARNING:  This area also has a lot of smut books. - I really wish they would remove those but apparently they sell]
• Check out the Newspapers, Blogs and Magazines that you can get automatically sent to your Kindle whenever there’s an update or new edition.  They’re fairly cheap and it saves trees going this route.

Outside  Amazon Resources for Books
There’s a lot of books out there being formated for the Kindle by various foundations like Project Gutenberg. Many of the books are similar to the ones found in Amazon’s “Kindle Popular Classics” but not all of them.  Doing a Google search for “Kindle books free” will give you a lot of places to explore.

Other than read books, what can a Kindle do?
There are many things the Kindle can do:

• If the book is formated for it, you can have the Kindle read the book to you.  Great for car drives – just get a cassette adapter (if you car has a stereo that can play cassettes) and it makes for a great way to listen to a “book on tape” only from your Kindle.
• You can also load some MP3s on it and listen to music while you read.  You just load the files while the Kindle is connected via USB into the proper folder and then you’re good to go.
• Did you know it has a web browser?  While not the greatest (I much prefer my Android phone over the Kindle for web surfing), if you ain’t got something else, it works!
• Synchronize your reading across platforms – I’m assuming you know that there’s Kindle Reader apps for Windows, Mac, iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, Blackberry, etc.  You can have books loaded on multiple platforms and haven them synchronize where you are so that when you stop reading on your Kindle and then later pick up your cell phone and open up the book there – it opens to right where you left off on the Kindle.  Nice, huh?

Ok, I’m not a Kindle freak (well, maybe a little) and I’m not paid by Amazon for this post but several people were asking me a lot of questions about Kindles so I thought I would post this.  I’m also not advocating a Kindle over other eReaders out there as they’ve got a lot of plus over the Kindle (and some minuses) so to each his/her own.  I have a Kindle and it works really good for me.

Got other ideas for how to use the Kindle even more effectively?  Comment.

Cool Android Roll Out [Video]

Smartphones are increasing throughout the world.  Here’s a cool video that shows a timeline of how many Androids got activated over the last two years on a pretty cool wire map.  Very fascinating.  To a geek like me, I see each of the spikes throughout this video as people who now have one more avenue to which we can connect and disciple them with the Gospel.

Be sure to check out starting at 2:04 when it shows the activations in Europe.  Wow, what potential.

Social Media & Influx

(Don't see the video above, go here to view it on YouTube.com)

Social Media:
We’ve all heard it said that information is power.  We’ve just recently seen that played out in the multiple uprisings in North Africa.  We’ve seen where the power of information, communicated via social networking websites and mobile phone technologies, empowered the people so much so that the governments felt the need to turn off the conduits of information – the Internet and mobile phones networks – to put a stop to it.  We can see first hand how the Internet and technology has the ability to move the power from the traditional heads now to the common people.

This isn’t a new concept – the Printing Press.  Before the printing press, information was kept to the elite few who knew how to read and had access to the parchments/scrolls.  When the printing press came about, information contained only in one or two places was replicated and sent out to a multitude of locations.  The printing press enabled more and more people to learn how to read and write so not only were more and more people gaining access to information but they could actually use it.

Now today we’re seeing the Internet as the new version of the printing press.  The “common” people are now able to communicate with people outside their normal spheres and learn about new ideas and concepts.  They are then able to use the various technologies within the Internet to be able to examine and think through these concepts with those in their everyday lives and determine for themselves how they want to act on them.  Movements that are changing their whole paradigms are happening as the power  (information) is now shifting to the people.  Think what could happen if the Gospel were introduced to them in this way?  What movements could happen then?

Influx:
Here in Greater Europe Mission, we’ve been preparing and we continue to prepare (at a faster rate now) for the influx of refugees that will be coming from North Africa into Europe.  Some estimates say that 3/4 of a million people will arrive in Europe from Libya alone.  Millions more from other area of North Africa and the Middle East as they seek places of peace and stability for their families.

This is a huge opportunity for relationships to be built and for the Gospel to be LIVED out (notice not preached or told but LIVED).  These immigrants and refugees will need help both physically and socially as they move into the European cultures.  In the above video of GEM’s president, Henry Deneen, he talks about the preparations we’ve been making and continue to do to be ready to meet the needs that are now coming upon us.  To read more and maybe even see how you can be a part of this – check out the North Africa Crisis Response.

Internet Cafe fighting Alcoholism?

The WHO released a report this last week that shows how much alcohol the world drinks.  As one interpretation of the report said, “Europeans drink a lot of booze, and the Arab-Islamic world does not.”  Also, according to the report, Moldovans drink the most with over 18 liters person per year with a majority of that being “home brews” which is scary since many of these brews can be damaging to people’s health.  It’s estimated that this leads to 2.5 million deaths per year world wide.  It’s estimated that 1 in 5 male deaths in Russia and the former satellite states is caused by alcohol.

With eDOT, I got the privilege of spending some time in Moldova, the small country nestled between Ukraine and Romania.  Moldova, a former Soviet state, is the poorest country in Europe with 4.3 million people.  We worked on a project to increase the abilities of a small internet cafe in a village called Antoneşti.  (You can check out more at their website – Communitas.md)

So how does an Internet Cafe fight alcoholism?  Well, I have to say, it wasn’t something that we were intentional about.  To improve this internet cafe, we purchased more computers and then I went to help install some Internet Cafe software along with Internet filtering and some other things to raise the bar of how the Internet cafe was being run.  Before I showed up, the Internet Cafe worked by the process of when a person came in to use a computer, the Cafe operator would mark on a piece of paper what time the person began using the computer and when they were done.  Then they would go to the operator who then figured out how much time they used and would charge them for the time at a hourly rate.  It’s called a post-pay method and is fairly standard in Eastern Europe.  With the Internet Cafe software we installed, it made it so that people would have accounts and the system would handle monitoring how much time people spent on the computers and would automatically deduct it from their accounts.  This is called a pre-pay method and is used in the Western world a lot as a way to increase business and customer retention.  It was this pre-pay that changed how people were spending their money in the community.

So up until this point, people would receive their paychecks and spend it on what they want/needed at the time – food, clothes, alcohol, etc.  There are no banks and with inflation like it is, you don’t just save money for later – you spend it.  However, the people of this village would end up needing to go to the Internet Cafe so that they could create things for their businesses, check on weather reports and crop prices, etc but would find themselves without the money to do so.  Now with the pre-pay system, people started thinking ahead with their paychecks.  They knew that they would need to visit the Internet cafe later but that they had the money now so they would go in and put money on their accounts.  Some even started putting extra money in their accounts that they knew they would need as cash later but storing their money at the Internet Cafe was safer (due to the security and safe the Internet Cafe had) than keeping it in their homes.  One of the directors of Communitas announced to me that he felt like the banker for the community.

So how does this relate to lower alcoholism?  Well, because people were starting to plan out what their paychecks would pay for and had a way to save for it safely, they slowed their impulse buying of liquors (and materials to make “home brews”) effectively reducing their alcohol consumption according to Igor, executive director of Communitas.  While we haven’t done a study or anything to determine how much reduction has happened, any dent to getting people to move from a dependence on alcohol and to seeing their need for a relationship with God is a positive.

Fortune Cookies & Purpose

Ok, sometimes freaky things happen.  Yesterday, Krista and I were having a date lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and were having a wonderful time.  At the end, the usual occurred where the server gave us our check with two fortune cookies.  Krista and I like to have fun with the fortune cookie sayings just because sometimes they seem to be so generic that they could apply to anyone in any situation.  Anyways, mine read “You would do well in the field of computer technology.”  Freaky right?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now, I’m living my dream job.  While its not easy and it has parts that I don’t really like at times, it is my dream job to impact people so that they can come to a better understanding of God and Jesus Christ using technology to that end.  This is what I was meant to do.  I can look back to when I first started taking apart telephones as an elementary student trying to figure out how they worked as the beginning for my love of all things technology [Note: Just want to say sorry Mom & Dad & Sis that I couldn't get the phones back to working order after I figured out how they worked] My first computer was a TI-994a that I pulled out of the trash – cleaned it up and redid some of the soldering and presto – it worked!  Now I’m a technology junkie.  I almost drool when I walk through places like Best Buy and the Apple Store.

But my technology is all with a purpose. I took apart the telephones because I wanted to understand how they allowed people to talk with one another.  I scrambled to get a 300 baud modem for my Tandy 1000EX so that I could connect with people on electronic bulletin boards (before the days of the Internet).  I started to learn HTML in 1996 (and started the original version of this website) as I could see how the Internet was already connecting colleges and it was seeping into the business world.  I was amazed with the first VGA monitors that had such vivid colors (previously, I just had “green screens” or 8 color screens) as I knew we were moving more and more into everyday life being intertwined with technology. Today I drool as I watch the competition in the smart-phone arenas – why? because these new technologies allow us to be more and more creative in how we can connect with people.  The connection and collaboration of the Internet is now sitting on people’s hips, pockets and purses.  While I love being geeky and exploring new technologies – it’s always in the forefront of my mine that it’s about connecting with people through these technologies that I’m passionate about.

So what should your fortune cookie say to you?

[side note fun:  A friend of mine said that it's really not that freaky about the fortune cookie - watch this video by clicking here]

Scare Tactics in the US

Ok, I’m going to try to keep this short but honestly, I feel like I’ve got to say something.  Since being in the US, I’ve seen a lot of “news” articles and even billboards that seem to have this scare tactic approach about Islam in America (and in other Western nations).  I’m not denying that there’s an increase in the amount of Muslims living in western countries as it’s something we see daily in Europe however I really have to question the whole use of ‘scare’ tactics.  When you use scare tactics, what is the result?  Yes, some people may never look at the reality of what’s going on without these methods (hence the reason the nightly news almost always has a teaser of something like “What have you touched today that will surely kill you?”) however when people come to an understanding of the what is going, what will their response be when you use scare tactics?  Usually something not productive.  It wasn’t so long ago in US history that we heard similar rhetoric about Communists and we even had “witch hunts” for communists within our government.  The response wasn’t an end to the situation but a 40 year “Cold” war.  The reality is that most Western thinkers do not understand how those in the Muslim world think and most in the Muslim world do not understand how Westerners think.  Using scare tactics is not going to help us understand one another but is only going to drive an even larger separation between us.  Since most people that read my blog are Christians, let me say to you — If you seriously want to understand what is going on, talk to and befriend a Muslim.  To help you get some perspective, I recommend going to the website –>  Why Do You Fear Me?

On another note, as a Christian, I believe that if we give into or promote these scare tactics then we are denying that Muslims have the right to see the Gospel lived out which the Bible repeatedly says otherwise.  No one is to be denied this right.  I love the following video and believe this should be our response in light of what is going on these days:

Friends from Lava Lamp Productions on Vimeo.

Learning without a Queen

While I was at The Anchorage Project, we talked a lot about living incarnationally and missionally as a form of church planting.  You see, in the end, The Anchorage Project is about planting churches whose people are about living transformed lives rather than just having their ideas changed about God.  As we talked, Joe (the director) told me a story that someone else had told him last year:

When young children are showing the aptitude to become chess masters, they sit them down and show them all the chess pieces, where they sit on the board and how they move.  All the pieces except the Queen (if you don’t know chess, the queen is a very powerful piece that can move in all sorts of ways).  As they play people and learn the strategies of chess, no one gets to play with a queen.  They learn all about chess and develop strategies using the full abilities of all the different pieces without being dependent on the queen.  Once they have come to a point of mastering these strategies, they are thrown for a loop when their next opponent comes in and has a queen and they still don’t.  They must continue to play without a queen while their opponent gets to use this very powerful piece.  They must continue to play until they develop an understanding of how to use all the other pieces strategically to still win the game – even against their opponent’s queen.  It’s only until they continue to play other players who have a queen and win repeatedly that they are awarded a queen to then play with.

In the church planting context – you might consider the Queen to be Sunday Morning.  In the past, many churches have started with a Sunday morning only to be try and make Sunday morning do everything – build community, discipleship, worship, etc.  Sunday is weighed down and if there’s something wrong with Sundays, then the church doesn’t make it.  But what if in our church planting strategies, we start out not dependent on Sunday mornings.  While Sunday mornings can create numbers quickly, many sitting there are only keeping the pews warm.  What if we instead concentrate on the different aspects of church and only introduce Sunday mornings once these other things are in place?  What kind of life transformation would happen then? Anybody out there seen this lived out and would like to comment?