Amazon Archives

Here’s what Amazon sell as “new” these days

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Remember how I was so thrilled about that new Blue Yeti microphone in my previous post, and how this thing sold out so quickly? Well it arrived… and I’m less than pleased with the service I’ve received from online giant Amazon.

What they’ve sent me as the correct item, but it was not a new item. It showed heavy signs of usage. Let me show you some pictures below, anon about that hilarious chat I had with their customer services agent.

Grab a coffee and read a funny story of how Amazon may have lost their edge in Customer Satisfaction.

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My Audiobook Narration Setup for Audible, Amazon and iTunes

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When I decided to narrate my book BROKEN BOWELS for publication through ACX, I had several ideas for the workflow.

In essence, and after many tests as to what would yield the best quality, I did the following:

  • record to my Mac using Quicktime
  • transcode the resulting native AIFC files into Apple Lossless M4A using Finder
  • edit in Adobe Premiere
  • bulk-transcode to MP3 files with ACX specifications using Adobe Media Encoder

I’ve tried various other workflows, but the above seems to work great for me.

Let me share my reasoning and experiment with you here.

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How to fix “download was unsuccessful” on Kindle Keyboard and Kindle DX

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This morning I got a notification from Amazon that Jerry’s new book had been released. I had pre-ordered it a few weeks ago and was eager to start reading it. Having a long journey across town from Miami Beach to Sunset ahead of me, Jerry’s Book of Sin would be a great accompaniment.

My trusty old Kindle Keyboard 3G was all charged up, I was ready to leave, but the book had not been downloaded. “Hm”, I thought, “this should have happened automatically”. Was I signed into the correct account?

Yes I was, and to my surprise, the book was showing up correctly under Archived Items. But when I tried to download it manually, all I got was an error message stating that “The download was unsuccessful. Please try again later”.

Several tries later, and without any luck, I remembered a solution that did the trick: fully rebooting my Kindle Keyboard. This trick also works on the DX and other models, even on Kindle Fire devices. Let me tell you how to do it. 

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How to print a PDF File with CreateSpace

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Last month I’ve printed three books I had a (shady) PDF version of. They were all old Commodore computer books full of good knowledge and have sadly been out of print for decades.

My first attempt at getting hard copies from those was at a local copy shop, who were kind enough to print and bind the files onto US Letter paper for me. While the result looks great, the size of such a document is rather huge. Imagine a 500 page book: it consists of 250 pages printed double-sided, comb-bound on the left. The total cost was $60. Yikes!

Amazon’s CreateSpace service on the other hand can print a book of that size for about $5 plus shipping, depending on the amount of pages of course. I’ve used the service successfully for my book LAMP Stack for Humans and thought perhaps the same principle could be used to print a PDF. 

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Kindle DX

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IMG_3559We have a total of 6 Kindles in our household, that’s between two people. I know this sounds excessive, but believe me every single one of them has their specific purpose.

Recently I added a lightly used Kindle DX to my arsenal, making up the 6th one. I’ve had a few weeks to play with it now so let me tell you what I think of it – and why I think it’s extremely sad that Amazon aren’t making the Kindle DX anymore.

It feels weird to write a review of technology that has just been taken off the market – but looking at several message boards this device has a cult following – myself included. I can understand why people love it so much.

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Dear Amazon Kindle Support

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Today Amazon have released a new version of their Kindle for iOS App (3.0.1). This must be a direct response to some feedback I have sent over after the last update (3.0 for Retina and Amazon Cloud Integration). The previous update didn’t show new content after I had purchased it.

I love my Kindle, and I love my content. And I love the Kindle App on all my other devices: I can read on anything I happen to have with me: Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Laptop. That rocks!

Here’s a slightly annoying email thread I had with Amazon’s low level support who clearly didn’t understand the issue I was bringing up – from one developer to another.

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