Posts by Alex Wilson 29 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Apr 2009
I rediscovered the joys of 6X in the dank depths of a Birmingham Goth Club a couple of years ago, wonderful beer (that I thought had disappeared in the 80's at some point!)... Great to see the homebrew crowd making beer with flavour instead of insipid lagers these days!
When a robo-barman offers the same sympathetic head nodding and budget therapy my regular bar jockeys provide I'll pay attention.
My dad read me Aldiss, Asimov, Blish, Norton and many others as a small child, so when I learned to read for myself I voraciously devoured all the scifi I could get my grubby little hands on... as a 10 year old I read everything EE Doc Smith wrote and begged borrowed (and even stole!) to complete my collection.
I'm a fast reader so I've always struggled to find enough to read, even now I still read up to a book a day (thank god for ebooks!).
I mostly swing between Fantasy/urban fantasy and military scifi these days but still sample freely across the whole spectrum of modern scifi, I rarely re-read or re-watch anything... there's always something newer and shinier in scifi!
But its Asimov and Clarke that really formed my tastes and I'm eternally grateful to them for the things they taught me, the sense of wonder, wanting to know everything...
Pretty sure people are misreading this 'free for the first year' thing. All they mean is you wont get a free upgrade after the first year.
The subscription model applies to features like Onedrive and Office 365 etc that aren't part of the OS but they'd like us to treat them as if they were...
note*
Other Cloud storage systems and Office products ARE available!
Have to say that from the information available (so far!) I'm looking forward to it.
I tried a selection of both free and paid for start button replacement programs, so far I've found 'Start Menu 8' (from iObit iirc) to be the nicest to use and has the added bonus of being free:)
It takes a while to get it configured (ie get rid of metro etc) but I'm rather enjoying Windows 8 for the moment...
Or any of the Greg Mandel series....based in the UK...post apocalyptic....fun science...what's not to like?:)
Failing that there's still a goldmine of lesser known comics to pillage, just about any Garth Ennis stuff like Preacher(post apocalyptic western chaos) or Gravel (SAS combat magician...awesome series!)....or the mini he did about the british getting all the german scientists post WW2 and winning the space race...that was amazing!
You forgot possibly the most useful feature!
If you have an existing library of ebooks/word documents etc, the Kindle comes with its own email address that you can send stuff to in various formats....which then quite miraculously arrives on your Kindle in a readable format! I found this incredibly handy as I had around 300 books floating around my PC in various formats.
I did have to download a 3rd party converter to convert .lit files to .HTML or .doc format before sending them in batches to the email address, and there's still no easy way to convert epub format books so there's still plenty of room for improvements.
Another niggle is the 'collections' method of organising your books, it can only be done manually on the Kindle which (with a large number of books) is VERY time consuming! Surely there must be a way to sort this out from the PC?
Overall I'm really happy with the Kindle 3, it's a pleasure to use once its fully set up and so far I've actually been reading more than usual, lets hope that lasts!
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