The Kindle arrives in Switzerland and Calibre is for free

Yes, I have been waiting for this a long time and finally it arrived. The Kindle from Amazon. My first impression was more then bad. No Wireless (I mean the Kindle can not connect to my Wireless Network in my office or in my home). I was thinking WTF. Books seem as expensive as if you buy them directly from Amazon. The Browser has been disabled for all Non-US Customers. Again WTF. Why does Amazon not put a Wireless card into the Kindle so I can at least surf and receive Email while I am on my own broadband Network. That I do not understand.

BUT

I discovered Calibre and that just about makes the Kindle a good buy. Without this piece of Software the Kindle would be as Scam. A big Scam. The iPhone would be much better still for reading articles (and for surfing). But once you get a hand on Calibre and you have your copy of Der Spiegel, Wall Street Journal and The Economist on your Kindle, what else do you need? Well it would be nice if the Kindle would integrate with the Google Reader. That would be very nice. But obviously that is not yet possible for a Swiss customer. Leider. But Calibre is just one great piece of Software if you are a Kindle owner and use Linux and Mac. Although it will also run on Windows.

Remark: The Software Amazon is about to release will only run on Windows ;( again. WTF. But Calibre it shall be!

Oh!: And thanks for the USD 20 refund, Amazon. That was fair!

Swisscom iPhone Prices are out

http://www.swisscom.com/GHQ/content/Media/Medienmitteilungen/2008/20080701_02_iPhone.htm

Content Similarity Equalizer

As a follow-up to my recent post about creating document families of any give Google-Search-Result I want to publish an additional idea:

The Content Similarity Equalizer

Now what is this? Well as mentioned in my post above it often happens that a product is released via a press release and then gets discussed in several blogs and news-sites. Most of the blogs and news-sites will basically just copy the press release and add a few words and a bit of there own spin – and that’s it. A few will take their time and do an in depth and personal analysis of the product.

Here the Content Similarity Equalizer comes to play

Having a Content-Similarity-Equalizer is like having different sieves when you dig for gold. If you scrape for gold you can always have different sieves depending on the size of the gold nuggets you are scraping for. So if you tell your Content-Similarity-Equalizer (CSE) to find all documents that are 90% or more similar you will only find documents of the same version (you will have more document families with less documents in them) . If you tell your CSE that you want to find all documents that are 40% similar then your documents families will get bigger and the documents that are really unique (nuggets) will start surfacing. In my example this would then be the document talking about the specific features of the iPhone-CPU, versus all the other documents that were basically just covering the Apple-Press-Release of the iPhone and not really adding anything special or “own” to their blog-post or news-site.

StealthSIM, NextSIM, “Bladox”-SIM, Which one works with Baseband 04.03.13_G

I am seeing different postings on EBAY of people selling SuperSIM and NexSIM cards that claim they can get a signal with Phones that have the iPhone modem Firmware-Version 04.03.13_G (1.1.3) – can anybody confirm these rumors?

Thank you for your Feedback.

Sync your iPhone with Linux – who has done that?

Hi

Is there anybody out there who as synced his iPhone with Linux? I am looking for a tool similar to jpilot for Palm. So far I have not found a software that will sync the content (specially Address Book and Calendar) with my Gentoo-Linux .

Any help is greatly appreciated.