Kindle Voyage Reviews

I find the Kindle a pretty fascinating product. I owned one for a little while (the 3rd generation kindle keyboard), but eventually concluded that it was mostly redundant with my iPad (3rd Generation), and decided it made sense to give to my mom (who loves it).

Recently (well a couple months ago), Amazon launched the Kindle Voyage. This looked like an attempt to provide a high-end user experience on a kindle device. Historically, Kindle devices were set at low-as-possible price points and were meant to be primarily a vehicle for online book sales.

In the last little while, I've seen a handful of reviews of this device. Some people seem to like it a fair bit. Others, not so much. Some own every kindle ever, along with some reasoned thoughts on the new one. Some said it was a relatively minor improvement, but some hated it so much they even sent it back and switched to iBooks.

I still believe that my iPad is a "good enough" reading device, but I remain pretty intrigued. The new Kindle appears to be pretty polarising amongst the tech geeks I follow. On the one hand, the Kindle is a monster of a device in the e-reader market, and in my mind benefits from some of the best features of both physical books (crisp text to read and lack of glowing screen to reduce eye fatigue) and ebooks (thin-ness, light-ness and capability to store thousands of books at a time). However, Amazon's lack of attention to detail and their recent penchant of releasing badly thought out products doesn't instil confidence in their future direction for hardware.

For now, I plan on staying on the sidelines. But the last little while has been pretty interesting for someone sitting in the peanut gallery.

Teens React to Megaman

One of my absolute favourite game series was the Megaman games. They were notoriously difficult, but they were also brilliant once you got good enough to get through the level.

I found this episode hilarious. One candidate for quote of the video is "It's just death at every corner". Also good in the series was Teens React to Nintendo (although on a different YouTube channel), which stars the girl who plays Arya Stark on the Game of Thrones TV show.

How to do Action Comedy

One of the recent YouTube channels I'm enamoured with is Every Frame a Painting. They had a fantastic piece on "Who wins the scene" from the Silence of the Lambs.

The most recent video from these guys is one talking about Jackie Chan and how he does action comedy so well. Here's that video:

Nice. One part of the video that resonated with me was the desire to repeat things until perfect. The "little details" that the narrator calls out really do have an impact - and you don't think about how many times that would've taken to actually happen.

There's so much to movie making that I don't see or don't notice. This channel is doing a good job of telling me stuff that I find fascinating now.

The Alinea Project

Alinea is one of the world-famous restaurants on my to-visit list. It keeps coming up in various unexpectedly ways including the excellent Spinning Plates documentary as well as a new and cool way to do restaurant reservations.

Today I watched a short documentary about a guy who has cooked every recipe in the Alinea cookbook. The style of food cooked at Alinea is notoriously challenging - with many of the techniques more resembling lab science than cooking. The food geek and photographer in me is totally geeking out over his webpage. For example, here's the post on the last item in the book that he made. Amazing.

Space Probe Lands on Comet

A story 10 years in the making, a space probe named Philae landed on a comet today. Incredibly, the probe was launched in 2004 which makes for a pretty impressive story. This Flickr Gallery of photos is incredible viewing.

Comet 67P on 4 November - NAVCAM

The internet is kind of abuzz with this story, so there's lots of places to read about it. Here's one story from the Guardian.

Update: the always wonderful Oatmeal also weighs in on the event.