Hi Niva,

You'll be getting the next generation of Kindle for Christmas: it looks really good! (I bought mine when they dropped the price a few months ago, just before introducing the new one.)

I have a bit of a win with Rob! Today he conceded that the iPad is 'not a bad piece of equipment'... high praise for a tech toy.

Cheers
Marg

Hi Marg
Very interested in the Kindle idea for when we travel as the wife is an avid reader and it would save carrying all those books, not counting the cost of buying them.
Is your Kindle the WI-FI version or the 3G version.

have a great trip we are following your adventure with great interest.

Hi Marg
What's the safest way , in your opinion, to store digital photos .
I admit that i got a bit of a phobia about photos . I'm afraid to lose any , my computers are full, my SD cards are full, I got them on cd's. I used to get them printed and i still think that's the best way (Very old fashioned I know)
I have today got a Samsung G3 external hard drive 1 TB ( For fathers day ) How good are they . I know everyone tells me you got to have a external hard drive , but can't they breakdown as well ?
I'll value your opinion and everybody else.
Thank you.

Hi Big Bob,

What a guy, looking after your wife's reading needs! Your blood deserves bottling.

My Kindle operates via the 3G phone network, but I don't have to subscribe or have a phone plan or anything to browse Amazon or buy books. Amazon do it all through their 'Whispernet' service, available through the 3G network all over Australia. (Since they're selling books, they're happy to make it easy for us.) It all happens when I switch on the Kindle.

The one I bought was being superseded by the new model, which is why I bought it... they lowered the price! However, I WAS thinking about getting the larger Kindle because of the bigger viewing area. (Better for reading, but not as compact to carry in a handbag.)

I ordered an Australian power adapter to charge it, and a Kindle cover, at the time of purchase. I'd recommend you do the same.

Be aware that there are a few problems with ordering books for the Kindle (not enough to make me stop using it and go back to a stack of paperbacks to lug around with me in the van, though!) I did get a bit frustrated a month or so ago when I wanted to order the latest Jeffery Deaver (which was available in paperback at Big W) but found the Kindle eBook version wasn't available to Australian readers at that time. (It is now... I bought it this morning and I'm reading it right now.) Publishing law forbids Amazon from making their entire eBook library available to buyers outside of the US. I believe that Amazon is working with publishers to address this problem.

The price of books varies quite a bit: I've bought books from $2.99 USD to $14.99 (the Jeffery Deaver I bought today.)

There are other eBook readers available: Dymocks are investigating them; Barnes and Noble have the Nook, Borders has the Kobo, and Samsung are bringing out a new eBook reader this year too. The competition is hotting up... and of course, Apple are well and truly in there with their iPad ready to take on all comers. (But you can't read the iPad in bright sunlight like eBook readers that use e-ink.)

So... yep, there's the Kindle, but there's lots more coming! (I couldn't wait. I've got the Kindle for now... I'll probably upgrade next year when eBook readers with e-ink show colour; although I think the Nook does that now.)

Finally, you can go here to get a Kindle User's Guide which might give you a bit more of an overview (not sure how current it is):

https://kindle.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle%20User%E2%80%99s%20Guide%2C%202nd%20Ed.-%20English.pdf

Cheers
Marg

Hi A'van,

An external hard drive: what a great Father's Day present! (I don't know anything about the brand you mention, but I'd imagine it's as reliable as most.)

I share your phobia. I don't know that there is a 'safest way' to back up digital photos, just a paranoid, don't-ever-fully-trust-technology way!

My computer hard drive was filling up fast, so I now have store mine on a 250 gb external Western Digital hard drive. Then I back them up again onto my 1.5 terabyte hard drive.

That's two backups.... but every so often I'd recommend also burning them to a CD and storing them somewhere. Or even burning them to disc TWICE and keeping one safe with you, and another with a family member. (Told you I was paranoid.)

There's never any guarantee that any one method will be safe (and most storage media deteriorates over time anyway).

So the answer? BACK UP MORE THAN ONCE!

Now you've got me feeling guilty, so excuse me while I go dig out my 1.5 terabyte drive and back up that last lot of photos... and jot a note to myself to burn them to disk tomorrow too...

Marg

Good to see Geek Girl doing what she knows best.

As a techo I am also paranoid about digital file storage. Don't place too much faith in CDs or DVDs. Most common ones have a limited life and the worst ones may fail in months rather than years. There are a few expensive (dollars each disc) higher quality 100 year claimed DVDs but I've not investigated them. If you use a CD/DVD store the burnt copies in a steady dark environment and don't fiddle with them. Every year or so copy them to a new disc. A bit of a pain, but better to be sure. An intact digital file/photo may be copied a million times without degradation, unlike analogue stuff.

I have more faith in a magnetic recording on a hard drive. Even if the hard drive ultimately fails though use, and they eventually will, the data can be recovered. Despite this I would never rely upon a single copy. A virus or other mapping issue could corrupt files even if the drive was mechanically fine.

I have all of my important stuff on a daily accessed 1TB drive in my primary poota. I also have a second internal 1TB drive used solely to back up the first. I run some DOS batch files to copy only the new or changed files so it is only a small task rather than copy the whole lot. Thirdly I back it up again on an external drive that I store outside of the house i.e. physically isolated in case of fire.

Over time your collection of photos will grow so much that a 1TB drive will not cope. Hopefully technology will continue to expand drive capacity. It helps immensely if you rigorously edit and delete all of the rubbish photos that many of us still keep. If you don't then your collection may outgrow your capacity to store.

Finally, if you don't have the ability to store off-site then your most precious stuff can be uploaded to a free gmail email account. I think the present limit is 5 gigs. No doubt there are also commercial data upload/storage services at a cost.

Long term digital data storage is a problem for the world. Data is accumulated at an exponential rate so there must come a time when a 1 TB capacity is laughably tiny or we will run out of space. A reminder that in simple terms 1 terabyte is 1000 gigs, 1 million megs or a billion kilobytes. My first poota hard drive was 10 megs. In 1973 I maintained a main-frame real-time message handling system had a hard drive the volume of a refrigerator and its capacity was just under 2 megs. The system had only 32 kilobytes of ram. At the time it was impressive.

Our iPod just died. It was a 3-year-old iPod classic, and we used it in the van and in the car. We've been having trouble with it for a few weeks, then... nothing.

Much to my astonishment, ROB actually suggested that we needed to go out and buy a new iPod. After I picked myself up off the floor, I hustled him out the door before he changed his mind.

We had been thinking of just getting a Nano, but after we saw the size of it we decided that ageing eyes and fingers would find it annoying, so we switched to an iPod Touch.

Imagine my delight when I found out that we had timed it perfectly - the 4th generation iPod Touch was just out! Target here in Broome had a good supply, so we snapped up a 32 gb model and it's loaded with music and podcasts and operating.

Bonus: I can log on to my BigPond wireless connection and download podcasts straight to the iPod instead of going through iTunes on my computer. (I download heaps of the Richard Fidler Conversation Hours, because he has such interesting interviews to while away the driving hours.) The operating system, apps etc for the iPod Touch are very similar to my iPad, so the learning curve is relatively easy. I have yet to play with the camera and video applications... such joys in store.

I SO LOVE TECHNOLOGY!!!!

Cheers
Marg

What is the round 'point' beside the bigpond thing?
How do you power your laptop when you are not on mains power?