Archive for April, 2009

Is the Amazon Kindle ready for college use

Friday, April 24th, 2009

I would love to buy an amazon kindle. But at the moment with my current load of school text books it would seem impractical to carry both a kindle and my text books. Ideally the kindle should be able to be my only book so to speak. So why is it the manufacturers of school text books do not see the enormous potential that this will have for students worldwide. My belief is that the manufacturers are afraid it will increase the amount of pirated books since it is not a physical book. It would much easier to duplicate books. Much like the iPod’s popularity has increased the amount of pirated mp3’s. The record industry has suffered for it. That is until record labels partnered with apple and began to sell affordable mp3’s. Now if only a similar partnership with amazon could be created to make school text books affordable and downloadable on the kindle. The stress from carrying many books or even forgetting books will be alleviated with this one device. But to be honest pirating books sounds like a harmless act. Why stop people from wanting to learn. Why not just allow people to become smarter for free. Well…to answer this free doesn’t pay the bills. Schools are a business and if they wanted people to truly be smart..well schools would be free. There is a price for everything. Many people (including students) would be willing to pay that price if it brings added comfort and convenience.

Turn your iphone or ipod touch into a wifi phone with siphon

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Parsing through the app store recently I went looking for good reliable VOIP/SIP applications. I have found my fair share of applications which allow you to use voip for making phone calls over wifi. But whether or not these applications were any good was questionable. Fring and icall to name a few are sort of good. But I had to turn outside of the app store to find something that truly satisfied me. Cydia has an application (not approved by apple) called siphon, probably a play on the words SIP and Phone. This app does everything you would want it to do with a few minor bugs.

Such bugs are listed below. (more…)