Posted by timothy on Friday January 29, @08:34PM
from the toward-marginal-cost dept.

Charbax writes "The Android laptops are coming. Thanks to cheap ARM-powered laptops made in China, and the latest, most optimized Android software, we can soon buy usable $100 laptops in all the supermarkets. In this video, I test the web browsing speed on the new Rockchip rk2808 ARM9-based PWS700CA laptop by Shenzhen-based Hivision Co Ltd. Web browsing on AJAX-heavy websites is surprisingly snappy, and could only be even faster if ARM11, ARM Cortex A8 or A9 processors were used and if it was configured with slightly more than 128MB RAM. How soon will Google release the $100 Google laptop?"

The Amazon store now has more than 360,000 books that you can download and read on your Kindle e-book reader.

Read Kindle Books without the Kindle Reader

If you don’t have the Kindle device, you can still enjoy any of these Kindle books on your Windows computer using the free Kindle for PC application. Amazon is also working on a Mac version of Kindle Desktop but until that happens, you can download the free Kindle app from iTunes store and read books on the move using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Find and Download Free Books for Kindle

While most eBooks available on the Amazon Kindle store are paid, here are some simple ways by which you can find and download free books for reading on your Kindle Reader or your Kindle Desktop application.

# 1. Google Books on your Kindle

Project Gutenberg, Google Books and FeedBooks are some popular sites that offer a large collection of public domain books in the standard ePUB format.

The Kindle for PC application cannot read ePUB files directly but you can use the excellent Stanza program (from Amazon itself) to convert these public domain books from .epub into .mobi format that you can then import into Kindle Desktop for reading*. That means you now have millions of out-of-copyright books for your Kindle for free.

You can also use Stanza to convert PDFs, HTML web pages and other Office documents into .mobi format for reading inside the Kindle App but I see little reason why would anyone want to do so since the reading experience is not all that great.

# 2. Find Free Kindle Books on Amazon.com

Before your proceed, please log-in to your Amazon account, choose “Manage your Kindle” and change the country associated with your Kindle account to “United States”. This is important because most “free” content on the Kindle Bookstore is currently restricted to North America.

OK, now let’s explore ways to find free Kindle books:

# 2.1 Big Deals – This is more of an official listing of Kindle books that are currently available as a free download on Amazon.com to Kindle users. You should also check the Bestsellers category on Kindle Store as it again lists quite a good number of free titles.

# 2.2 Sort by Price – When you search for a Kindle book (or any other item) on Amazon.com, it displays search results by relevance.

If you change this default sort order from “Relevance” to “Price: Low to High”, you’ll get a list of all Kindle books that match your search keywords and are available as a free download. For instance, here’s a list of Kindle books that are related to “India” but cost exactly $0.00.

# 2.3 Listmania - This is another resource where you can discover Kindle books that are available for free.
Listmania Lists are basically a list of products compiled by Amazon users. You can use search phrases like “free kindle books”, “kindle freebie”, “penny kindle book”, etc. to discover lists that may free books you are looking for. For instance, here’s one Listmania List of 27 classic books for Kindle that are absolutely free and here’s another one that also includes copyrighted books.

# 2.4 Use Google – Here’s an unofficial method to help you find Kindle books that are available for free on Amazon.com.

You can use the following search query in Google to search the Amazon store for free Kindle books – just replace the search-phrase in green with the name of the book, author, book category, etc.

intitle:kindle site:amazon.com "you save * (100%)" search-phrase

For instance, here’s a list of free Kindle books related to Abraham Lincoln while here’s a list of Kindle books on Shakespeare that are again free.

Note: Kindle Pricing for International users

If the cost of a Kindle book is mentioned as $0.00 on the Amazon Store, it will still show up as $2.00 for you if the country associated with your Kindle is something other than United States. This is because Amazon charges a $2 roaming fee for “international downloads”.

You can either temporarily change your Kindle country to US or use the “Transfer via Computer” option when buying a book and you won’t be charged that extra $2 fees. Thanks Dhamini Ratnam.

What’s the first thing that you do when you are back from a vacation or from a family wedding? You probably connect the digital camera to your computer and transfer the photographs (a better word would be "memories") from the camera to your hard-drive.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

# 1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

# 2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

# 3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

# 4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).
Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.

If you looking for an online service that will let you write and publish your own ebook in a format that is compatible with most ebook readers (including Sony Reader, Nook and Amazon’s Kindle), check out Adobe Buzzword at the new Acrobat.com.

Adobe Buzzword, if you are new, is an online word processor (like Google Docs but "more beautiful") that you may use to create and edit documents in any web browser. The service supports collaborative editing so multiple authors can work simultaneously on the same document from their respective location.

Now if you are looking to write an ebook in the browser, Buzzword can be a great choice as the service can export documents directly as EPUB files, a format that is supported by all popular ebook readers including apps like Stanza that let you read ebook on a mobile. Simply compose a document inside Buzzword, export it as an ePUB file and then import it in your ebook reader.

Other than creating new ebooks from scratch, you may also use the Buzzword application to convert your existing Word (.doc and .doc), or Open Office (.odt) documents into the ePUB format without requiring any desktop applications.

PicPick is an useful Windows utility that includes a decent screen capture program, a Paint like image editing software and a whiteboard tool to help you draw freehand on the desktop using your mouse (handy when you are giving presentations).

During screen capture, you can select the "Capture Window Control" mode and capture objects that extend multiple screens (like a long Word document or a lengthy web page). And like SnagIt, PicPick can send screenshot images directly to another programs after capture or it can automatically upload them to an FTP server.

Portable Image Editor

The image editor included with PicPick sports an Office 2007/2010 like ribbon interface and supports tabs so you can edit multiple screenshot images / photographs from the same window.

If you are a web designer, you can use the built-in crosshair tool to determine the coordinates of any point on the desktop screen or for capturing the exact dimensions of an object (in pixels).

And since the software doesn’t require installation, you can put it on a USB drive and use it on any computer.

Let’s assume you have two computers at home and you want to connect them together so that you can easily share an internet connection between the two machines or transfer photos, music and other files from one computer to another. How do you do this?

Connect Two Computers Directly

There are two options – you can either buy a router or, if you are looking for something more simple and don’t want to spend money on new networking hardware, you can connect the two computers using a commonly-available cable. The latter method doesn’t involve any complicated network settings and you will still be able to share files, internet connection, and even printers between computers.

Things you need:
To set up this basic wired home network, all you need is an inexpensive Ethernet crossover cable and the other requirement is that network cards* (also known as LAN or Ethernet cards) should be installed on each of you computers.

This should not be an issue because network cards are available on most newer machines by default but if you are working with a very old computer, you can either attach an internal LAN card to your computer’s motherboard or go for a USB Network adapter that will turn a USB port into an Ethernet (RJ45) port.

An Ethernet crossover cable looks like a standard Ethernet cable but the internal wiring is a little different. You can purchase crossover cables at Amazon.com or from your local computer store. If you have trouble finding them, you can purchase an inexpensive crossover adaptor and that will let you use any standard Ethernet cable as a crossover cable.

Connect Computers with an Ethernet Crossover Cable

Before connecting the two computers with a physical cable, make sure that both machine are using the same workgroup*. Here is step-by-step guide that explains how you can change the workgroup of your computers.
Changing workgroup in Windows XP – From the Start menu, right-click “My Computer.” Select Properties in the drop-down menu, and then select the second tab that says “Computer Name” from the System Properties window. Now click the “Change…” button, enter a unique Workgroup name and reboot your computer.

Changing workgroup in Windows 7 or Vista – Open the Control Panel, type “Workgroup” in the search box, and select the entry that says “Change Workgroup Name.” Click the “Change…” button, enter a Workgroup name and restart the computer. Windows 7 users can skip one step; simply type “Workgroup” in the search box in the start menu, and select the first entry, then proceed as above.

Now that the workgroups are same for both computers, connect the two computers together using the Ethernet crossover cable. Simply plug-in one end of the crossover cable into the network adapter of Computer A and connect the other end of the cable to the network adapter of Computer B.
Windows will automatically recognize the new network, and you can now easily view files and folder that the other computer has shared. Simply open Networks from the Start Menu (or the Control Panel), and you should see the other computer by its name. You can then browse any shared files on the other computer, and can even utilize shared printers.

Troubleshooting – If you do not see the other computer under Networks, you probably have a prompt at the top of your Network window saying that Network discovery is turned off (screenshots below). Select “Turn on Network Discovery and File Sharing.” In the next prompt, select “No, make the network I am connected to a private network.” Now you should see the other computer on the home network.

While it is possible to share files between two computers connected with a crossover cable without making them part of the same workgroup, the method will only work if both computers have this network set as a private network, and may still cause problems. It is therefore advisable to have both computers on the same workgroup before sharing files and printers.

Share an Internet Connection Between Two Computers

There are scenarios where you may want to share the same internet connection between two computers. For instance:

Situation A - You have setup a Wi-Fi network at home but your old desktop computer doesn’t have a wireless network card. In that case, you can use the laptop to connect to the internet wirelessly and then share that same connection with the desktop over a crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation B – You have a netbook with a built-in cellular data connection. You can share that connection with any another computer at home through the crossover Ethernet cable.

Situation C – You use a (slow) Wireless USB modem with your laptop computer while your desktop is connected to an ADSL Broadband line and there’s no router at home. For any bandwidth intensive tasks, like when you want to backup photos from your laptop to an online service, you can connect the laptop to the desktop and things will happen much faster.

OK, let’s look at the steps required for sharing an Internet connection.
First, if you only wish to share internet connection and not files, both computers need not belong to the same workgroup. All you need to do is to connect the two computers with the Ethernet crossover cable, and then turn on Internet connection sharing in the computer that already has an Internet connection. The instructions vary for different versions of Windows:

For Windows XP – Select “Network and Internet Connections” from the Control Panel and click “Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (the one connected to the internet), select Properties, click on the “Advanced” tab, and then check the box that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the second computer that you have connected to this computer with the Crossover Cable should have internet access now.

For Windows 7 and Vista – Open Control Panel, enter “network connections” in the search box on the top right and select “View Network Connections.”

Right-click on the network connection you wish to share (this must be the one connected to the internet) and select Properties. Select the "Sharing" tab and then check the option that says “Allow other network users to connect through this computer’s Internet connection.” Click OK, and the other computer you have connected to this Windows 7 or Vista computer should have internet access now.

What’s the first thing that you do when you are back from a vacation or from a family wedding? You probably connect the digital camera to your computer and transfer the photographs (a better word would be "memories") from the camera to your hard-drive.

You’ve following this routine for quite some time and, as a result, a few hundred thousand photographs reside on your computer now neatly tagged and arranged in folders. But wait, do you have a backup plan for these "priceless" digital photos?

How to Backup your Digital Photos

There are basically four ways by which you can backup your photos at home:

1. Backup your photos on CDs and DVDs – This is a cheap and easy option but please remember that disks have a finite shelf life so pictures that you burn today on to a DVD disk may not be accessible after few years.

2. Use an external hard drive – You can get a portable 500 GB drive for less than $100, they connect to your computer via USB (or Firewire) ports but again, you can’t expect an external hard drive to last forever.

3. Use Network Storage – If you have pictures across multiple computers, you can use a network attached storage (NAS) device like HP’s MediaSmart Home Server* or Apple’s Time Capsule to automatically backup all your digital content in one place.

The HP device can transfer files to Amazon S3 so you have an added layer of protection.

4. Use an online backup services – You can use photo-sharing websites (like Flickr) or an online backup service (like Mozy) to put your photos on to the "cloud" and access them from any other computer.

For most users, the best option for preserving digital photographs is often "online backup" because it doesn’t require you to burn DVDs (which are unreliable anyway), you don’t have to invest in any new hardware and your photos are likely to last forever as long as you pay the yearly bills.

Online Backup for your Digital Photos

There are again four different routes for online backup:

# 1. Online backup services like Mozy that offer unlimited storage and allow not just photographs but files of all types.

# 2. Photo-sharing services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums that allow you to store both photographs and video clips online.

# 3. File-synchronization services like Dropbox, SugarSync or Windows Live Mesh.

# 4. Online storage services like Amazon S3 or Windows Live SkyDrive.

What should you use?

Well, photo-sharing sites allow you to visually browse pictures in the web browser itself while a backup service like Mozy will first require you to download the photos on to the computer before you can show them to your visiting grand-parents.

File-synchronization services like Live Mesh not only provide online backup but they also save a copy of your digital files (pictures in this case) on to your other computers so even if your main hard-drive suffers a crash, you can quickly retrieve files from the other computers.

The Cost of Online Storage for Digital Photos

If you only have a few hundred photos on your computer that occupy anywhere between 1-2 GB of storage space, you can enjoy any of above backup services for free but if your storage requirements are slightly more, you probably need to for a paid version.

Now here’s a visual graph that compares the storage cost of various online backup services where you can safely store your priceless photos.

Flickr Pro costs around $25 an year and you can store unlimited number of pictures here though the maximum size of individual pictures should not exceed 20 MB (bad for professional photographs who shoot in RAW – see comments).
Picasa Web Albums on the other hand lets you purchase storage on-demand so you only pay $5 per year for 20 GB of online storage but end-up paying $100 for 400 GB of storage. Like Flickr, images uploaded to Picasa Web Albums can be no larger than 20MB and are restricted to 50 megapixels or less.
Live Skydrive is the best online storage service – it offers 25 GB of free space (50 MB limit for individual files) and that should be enough for most home users. You can upload picture libraries from your desktop to Windows Live SkyDrive using the free Windows Live Photo Gallery client though it’s only available for Windows.
Online backup services like Mozy cost around $60 per year respectively but here you get unlimited storage, your files are automatically backed up (in the background) and there are no restrictions on file-size.
SmugMug, another popular photo-sharing site, offers a service called SmugVault that uses Amazon S3 to backup your photos, videos and all other file-types that you can imagine. They have a relaxed 600 MB per file limit and you pay the normal Amazon S3 rent for files that are not photos.
Amazon S3, where you pay only for what you use, is very reliable (their SLA promises 99.9% uptime) turns out to be very expensive if your yearly storage requirement exceeds 10 GB.

Here’s another representation of the same graph – Yearly costs (in $) vs. storage offered (in GB).
Windows Live SkyDrive offers 25 GB of online storage space for your pictures for free though there’s no option to purchase extra storage. In paid services, Google’s Picasa offers the best value for money if your photo collection can fit in 20 GB else a Flickr Pro account probably makes more sense.

Picasa desktop software makes it easy for you to upload and download photos from Picasa Web Albums. Flickr provides an uploading utility but you need to rely on a third-party hacks to download the original (full-resolution) albums from Flickr.

Read Kindle Books without the Kindle Reader

If you don’t have the Kindle device, you can still enjoy any of these Kindle books on your Windows computer using the free Kindle for PC application. Amazon is also working on a Mac version of Kindle Desktop but until that happens, you can download the free Kindle app from iTunes store and read books on the move using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Find and Download Free Books for Kindle

While most eBooks available on the Amazon Kindle store are paid, here are some simple ways by which you can find and download free books for reading on your Kindle Reader or your Kindle Desktop application.

# 1. Google Books on your Kindle

Project Gutenberg, Google Books and FeedBooks are some popular sites that offer a large collection of public domain books in the standard ePUB format.

The Kindle for PC application cannot read ePUB files directly but you can use the excellent Stanza program (from Amazon itself) to convert these public domain books from .epub into .mobi format that you can then import into Kindle Desktop for reading*. That means you now have millions of out-of-copyright books for your Kindle for free.

You can also use Stanza to convert PDFs, HTML web pages and other Office documents into .mobi format for reading inside the Kindle App but I see little reason why would anyone want to do so since the reading experience is not all that great.

# 2. Find Free Kindle Books on Amazon.com

Before your proceed, please log-in to your Amazon account, choose “Manage your Kindle” and change the country associated with your Kindle account to “United States”. This is important because most “free” content on the Kindle Bookstore is currently restricted to North America.

OK, now let’s explore ways to find free Kindle books:

# 2.1 Big Deals – This is more of an official listing of Kindle books that are currently available as a free download on Amazon.com to Kindle users. You should also check the Bestsellers category on Kindle Store as it again lists quite a good number of free titles.

Read more: http://petnol.blogspot.com/2009/12/download-free-books-for-your-kindle.html#ixzz0buzKAgQQ
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution

# 2.2 Sort by Price – When you search for a Kindle book (or any other item) on Amazon.com, it displays search results by relevance.

If you change this default sort order from “Relevance” to “Price: Low to High”, you’ll get a list of all Kindle books that match your search keywords and are available as a free download. For instance, here’s a list of Kindle books that are related to “India” but cost exactly $0.00.

# 2.3 Listmania - This is another resource where you can discover Kindle books that are available for free.
Listmania Lists are basically a list of products compiled by Amazon users. You can use search phrases like “free kindle books”, “kindle freebie”, “penny kindle book”, etc. to discover lists that may free books you are looking for. For instance, here’s one Listmania List of 27 classic books for Kindle that are absolutely free and here’s another one that also includes copyrighted books.

# 2.4 Use Google – Here’s an unofficial method to help you find Kindle books that are available for free on Amazon.com.

You can use the following search query in Google to search the Amazon store for free Kindle books – just replace the search-phrase in green with the name of the book, author, book category, etc.

intitle:kindle site:amazon.com "you save * (100%)" search-phrase

For instance, here’s a list of free Kindle books related to Abraham Lincoln while here’s a list of Kindle books on Shakespeare that are again free.

Note: Kindle Pricing for International users

If the cost of a Kindle book is mentioned as $0.00 on the Amazon Store, it will still show up as $2.00 for you if the country associated with your Kindle is something other than United States. This is because Amazon charges a $2 roaming fee for “international downloads”.

You can either temporarily change your Kindle country to US or use the “Transfer via Computer” option when buying a book and you won’t be charged that extra $2 fees. Thanks Dhamini Ratnam.

Read more: http://petnol.blogspot.com/2009/12/download-free-books-for-your-kindle.html#ixzz0buzD61Nk
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution