A combination of the AUD nearing parity with the American Dollar and the low price finally made me bite the bullet and order a Kindle 3 with a lighted cover.^I A mere four days later I had my hands on my first real eBook reader.^II

There’s already more than enough unboxing photos, videos and reviews of the Kindle so I thought instead I’d take a few photos of the dead-tree killer with a microscope^III so anybody curious could get a better look of it (and the official Amazon cover) much closer than they see with their own eyes.

Note: The following images lead you to larger versions on Flickr

For anybody interested in removing the Amazon logo,^IV it seems to me to be the type of printing that you can remove with sugar.

If you couldn’t already tell, I decided on the burnt orange cover. At the last minute I decided on the light and am surprised at just how often I rely on it. It’s not the cheapest cover by any means but it’s certainly the most functional and minimal cover you can buy.

Also I thought I ought to provide a quick followup to my previous venture into eReaders, covered in The Pico-Life W960 and How I Almost Owned One, specifically comparing the two:

The Kindle tackles almost every shortcoming of the W960, including; Two dictionaries with easy lookup, both proper English and American. Full WiFi functionality with WPA2 support. A matte black finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. Simple navigation with no accidental button presses. A range of covers that protect the device, as well as third party covers. Multiple fonts with scaled sizing and spacing.

The single best difference between the two is a real UI crafted especially for reading. Awake the Kindle and you’re greeted not with the base menu with a list of choices – just the last page you read. Simple things like that make it almost incomparably good for reading.

The only downside I can see is the always lamented lack of ePub support, which is easily solved by using the simple and powerful Calibre^V to convert and upload any ePub books you have. Calibre will even send books to your Kindle email address if you don’t want to drop them onto the device via USB.

I’m happy to have returned the W960 and happier yet to be reading on the Kindle, I’m already devouring books faster than I ever have.

1. I didn’t see the point of paying an extra $50 for 3G and opted for the cheaper WiFi only model.
2. Which has to be the single best postage time from USA > Oz I’ve ever experienced.
3. Not a real microscope mind you; a cheap glorified webcam 2MP USB gadget that mimics a microscope, and takes photos that are more detailed than our eyes can see.
4. It doesn’t bug me enough to worry about, some people have complained on forums about it’s “intrusiveness”.
5. Which is  open source too, so there’s no excuse!

It was humid as all hell yesterday morning, the first day of the year whereby everybody on the Gold Coast is reminded the weather will be hot for the remainder. What I’d forgotten was the almost tropical summers of years ago, where we’d have unbearable humidity in the morning, followed by a thunderstorm that would hurtle in and leave as fast, cooling down everything for a couple hours until old Sol came out again. We haven’t had that sort of weather now for at least five years, so today I was surprised to see the same thing happen again. If I remember, it’s nicer than the humid, energy sucking heat during summer we’ve had over the last few years. Here’s hoping it keeps up.

Looking North-East towards the ocean.

I also haven’t posted any photos of my “new” place^II yet, so this can serve as a first for that as well. Looking at them today it’s hard to believe there’s hardly any post processing, they are basically straight-out-of-the-lens shots.^III

Our pool, with Coolangatta and Razorback (hill) in the background.

1. It’s great to see they’ve improved geotagging, which was painful when I last tried.
2. I did move in just before the end of last year, so I’m almost due for the first anniversary.
3. Aside from minor sharpening and some exposure compensation for the weather.

Not all are so historic nor serious. Photos from the early days show a ramshackle and borderline-amateur organisation. Here’s the original Launch Control:

There’s nothing like the safety of a tin shed with sandbags to hold the roof down. Or the Langley Aerodrome, taking it’s final, ridiculous voyage:

As you’d guess, it didn’t end well for the Aerodrome.

Shortly after this photo was taken, the December 8, 1903, manned tests of the Aerodrome ended abruptly in failure, as it fell into the Potomac River

Shocking.

A great majority of the photos are of NASA pioneers and staff and of not great interest to everybody, but there’s enough good stuff to merit a browse-through.

1. They’ve been available elsewhere for a few years now

When you see advertising for CPL filters there’s the stereotypical before+after of sky or Koi in a pond; I was all outta’ Koi. The before photo is on the left, and the second photo has the CPL filter attached. No, I didn’t get these around the wrong way, the CPL filter I bought is actually just smoked glass. The end result drains the natural colour from the photo and darkens shadows into obscurity, resulting in some awfully muted skies.

The guilty party; a Made In USA^III quality Fotodiox, that famous optical company everybody has been telling you about. Nothing is outwardly wrong with the case or the filter, the screw thread is perfect and the case looks more modern than most other brnads, but as the photos show it’s a worthless piece of glass. There’s nobody I hate enough to give this to, so I guess I’ll hold onto it in the case that it finds a use. Needless to say, a $40 Hoya CPL is on it’s way, my lesson fully learned.

For the m4/3 readers: you can actually use a regular linear PL as there’s no phase detection AF to cause trouble, but for the cost of finding a multi-coated PL, it’s cheaper and easier to source a good quality circular.

1. a 400D, which I’ve only had since October 2007
2. UV filters do not count.
3. Lens/case/cardboard made in China, Sticker made in China but applied by an illegal immigrant in USA.

Since it’s right on Moreton Bay^I I got up every morning to catch the sunrise, but was thwarted by clouds every single morning. These are from the one morning where the sun wasn’t completely hidden.

1. Which is so wide that it looks like the ocean, without the waves and swell.

The catalyst for change was the Flickr app on my Blackberry, and the recommendation of a few friends that their photos really do get noticed. Before plunking down the $25 a year for a pro account^II I decided to post three sets to test the waters. One being my visit to Alcatraz (which was the most popular on Picasaweb), and two that I thought would only be of interest to a minority of people, so that I’d get a good gauge of traffic.

I really didn’t expect how well received three sets, completely unpromoted, were in the short time I’ve had them up. With a fair few comments, a request for a group addition and plenty of hits, the icing on the cake was a message from self-tour startup Schmap letting me know that one of my Alcatraz photos would be in the sixth edition of their guide to San Francisco. They might not be Lonely Planet, but it’s something that wouldn’t have happened if I were still using my old solutions. It’s a strange pick (and was taken with my tiny p&s whilst standing on a Segway) but I guess they liked it.

Hopefully soon I’ll migrate all the other photos over and succumb my twenty five bucks to Yahoo.

1. Which is no doubt now quite good.
2. Which amounts to a normal account, as the free account is seriously crippled.

Here’s an email I received two days ago:

Dear Chris!I am writing with regards to your article "Living the high life" in Sydney magazin Easternsuburbsliving.Thank you for comments and advices it is very usefull.I am very excited to read about your rich professional property experience!I would appreciate it if you could send me information on your course in Sydney.Please let me know any information about it.Also your photos here so professional to,i like it!Yours sincerely, xx.

I’ll gladly take the compliment regarding the photos, but I did have to correct them with my correct namesake, Chris Gray FCCA, who’s reportedly a “Property Mentor” for Channel 9. Time to update my photo, perhaps?

The second one was a little stranger, yet surprisingly welcome. Turns out there’s a Chris Gray who designs and builds custom furniture for a living, and I can only assume he found me through my sketchup furniture design post. From what I can tell^I it’s seriously high-end furniture, so even if I did live near Maine^II I don’t think I’d be able to compensate him for his work. Or that I’d have a practical (nor blokey) use for that awesome demi-lune table featured on the site.

1. Which isn’t much, aside from a few things picked up on Antiques Roadshow and ABC’s Collectors I’ve no hope at spotting quality furniture.
2. And yes, Maine USA

To my exasperation, after logging in the map data disappeared and I was unable to affix my photos, after which I spent a frustrating half hour looking further into it. The What’s New page also changed dramatically, but I noticed a country in the URL. It turns out^I that having GB^II set as your default language renders all photo mapping functionality void, and all traces of it vanish completely. Simply switching back to USA fixes the problem.

As yet you can’t view a nice fullscreen map and none of the pins are clickable, but for the now the small zoomable window is a cool enough addition. It also makes me realise I really should start planning the next holiday.

1. for the moment at least, until Google adds it worldwide.
2. Great Britain, also known as International English for those not living in the USA.

• Constitution Dock – Walking around the dock at Hobart.
• Mount Wellington – A drive to the summit of Mount Wellington.
• Tahune Airwalk and The Shot Tower – An elevated walk through the forest and a visit to Australia’s first lead Shot Tower.
• Cenotaph – The Hobart Cenotaph.
• Hobart at Dusk – Taken from outside the Waterfront Hotel.
• Botanical Gardens, Hobart – A walk through the Gardens.
• Richmond – A trip through Richmond, the bridge, jail and church.
• Tasman Bridge and Whitebeach – The Tasman Bridge in Hobart, Tasmania. Also our holiday house in Whitebeach.
• Port Arthur, Part I – Our first trip to the Port Arthur ruins, and a quick stop by Remarkable Cave
• Coal Mines Historic Site – A visit to the amazingly ignored and unmaintained Coal Mines ruins.

I split the Port Arthur photos considering we were there two separate days.^III Those and the rest of the photos should appear this month sometime. In the meantime enjoy the photos.

1. See my blatant yet minimal WiFi thievery at Clermont.
2. Heavily captioned throughout to explain.
3. And we still didn’t see everything! We paid the extra ten dollars for three year passes, so we’ve an extra reason to return to Tasmania now.