Some early thoughts on the Kindle Scribe

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Amazon recently announced the Kindle Scribe, a new 10″ Kindle that comes with a pen. It’s very much like a Kindle meets a reMarkable, and I’m very excited about what that could mean.

If you’ve not seen it, here is the official announcement video from Amazon:

The video doesn’t show a lot of how it works, but you get a pretty good idea. It’s a big Kindle that includes a pen to write on the screen. If the software is solid, this will become one of my favorite devices.

I love my Kindle and I love my reMarkable, but they both have shortcomings that the other could fix.

  • The Kindle allows me to highlight text, but not easily leave any commentary in my notes.
  • The reMarkable is great for note-taking and marking up documents, but the lack of books and the lack of a backlight are rough.

In theory, the Kindle Scribe will be the perfect combination to solve those woes.

Pricing

At first glance, the price seems pretty high at $339. The Kindle Paperwhite is a great reading device and it starts at just $99. That’s a big jump!

However, I think you also need to compare this device to the reMarkable and others in that genre. The reMarkable starts at $279, but that doesn’t include a pen, which is essential to the product. The pen is another $79 (or $129 for the “marker plus), making the total $358, or about $20 more than the Kindle Scribe. Plus, reMarkable essentially requires their “connect” service for some of the features you need, which is another $3/mo. It’s not much, but it’s more than the $0/mo service for the Kindle Scribe.

So, the Kindle Scribe isn’t cheap by any means, but it’s priced very well compared to the writing tablet competition.

Features

I mentioned some of the features above, and those are really the two that I’m excited about.

I’ve been taking more and more notes as I read, but it’s difficult to do on the Kindle Paperwhite. I create a lot of highlights, but can’t easily add further thoughts to them. With the Kindle Scribe, I presumably can.

With the reMarkable, the screen is not lit at all and requires a bright room or sunlight to read. This is by design, as it allows the tip of the pen to be a tiny bit closer to the surface to help further mimic the feeling of writing on paper. It does an amazing job with that, but I think I’d be ok with a small gap there in order to get some light. I frequently find myself in my office trying to read a document on the reMarkable and struggling due to low light. With the Kindle Paperwhite (and therefore the Kindle Scribe), that is never a problem. The E ink screen works great in bright sunlight or in a dark room.

Why not an iPad?

The main pushback against the reMarkable (and will be against the Kindle Scribe) is “why not just use an iPad?”. It’s a reasonable question, and for many people I’d agree that they just should. The iPad is an amazing device and can serve many of these needs. I find benefit in the reMarkable/Scribe in four ways:

  • Read it outside. E ink is fantastic outside, whereas an iPad is often unusable. It’s a world of difference.
  • Related, E ink is far easier on your eyes for reading, even in ideal lighting conditions. If you’ve ever tried to read a book from an iPad and from a Kindle, you know that the Kindle is a much better experience.
  • The lack of notifications. This is kind of a bogus answer, using a shortcoming as a benefit, but it’s true. As I shared a few years ago about the reMarkable, it’s great to use in church and meetings and places where an iPad might be a little less acceptable.
  • Battery life. The reMarkable can last for weeks, while the iPad can last for hours. The Kindle Scribe should be close to the reMarkable in terms of battery life, which is excellent. It may be a smidge less due to the lit screen, but it’ll still be a device that doesn’t need to be plugged in every night.

Should I get it?

I can’t begin to answer that for you, but hopefully the info about gave you some solid ideas. If you’re a Kindle fan and you were intrigued by the reMarkable, this could be a great device. There are two caveats, though:

  1. As of now, I’ve not seen a real review of the device. I hope Amazon starts pushing a few out to reviewers soon, but nothing yet.
  2. This is a first-generation device. The first reMarkable was good, but the second was far better. Any first-generation device will have some odd shortcomings, and the Kindle Scribe won’t be perfect. Amazon’s history and experience with Kindle should help, but no doubt the “Kindle Scribe 2” that comes out in a few years will be much better.

The Kindle Scribe will be released on November 30, 2022. You can pre-order now if you’re interested.

I’ll share more once I get my hands on it, which I’m quite excited to do!

A brilliant “paper” calendar on a digital device

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Over the years I’ve tried various ways to handle my daily scheduling. While my official calendar lives in Google Calendar (and that’s not likely to change anytime soon), I’ve tried various ways of really processing and following my schedule throughout the day.

A few years ago I picked up the Full Focus Planner, and it was excellent. In terms of daily work, you essentially copied your digital appointments over to the paper planner, which seems kind of silly but really offers some great advantages. I touched a bit on that in a post later that same year when I was doing my manual planning in Notion instead, how making weekly previews intentionally inefficient can be a good thing.

For the past 18 months or so, I’ve essentially been using Roam Research to handle that side of things. Roam is an amazing tool (and another that’s not likely to change anytime soon), but this week I discovered a little wrinkle with another device that might change my direction again.

reMarkable

I picked up a reMarkable tablet about a year ago, and have been using it more and more lately. This week, though, I discovered something that might increase my usage of it a lot more, and it’s ultimately just a PDF.

Voja Dimitrijevic is a popular YouTuber and runs the “My Deep Guide” channel, mostly digging into products like the reMarkable. He released a product called “My Daily Organizer” that is, well, remarkable!

As I mentioned above, it’s really just a PDF, but it’s a very creative one! Each year is a separate PDF of around 1700 pages — various daily pages, weekly views, quarterly views, etc. What makes it magic is the linking between pages so you can just tap around to get exactly where you need to go in the document. A recent update to reMarkable allows it to support internal links in a PDF, and Voja has made fantastic use of that with this product. It’s kind of hard to explain, but he’s created a very in-depth video to show it off. I don’t expect you to watch the entire thing (it’s nearly 50 minutes long), but I encourage you to scrub through it a bit to see what he’s put together:

I’ve given it a good test for the past week or so, and it’s bringing me back to my Full Focus Planner days. Being able to use a device like this more often, with it’s intentional lack of apps and notifications, is a great way to focus.

This “My Deep Guide” PDF not only works on reMarkable, but works on some Boox tablets and Supernote products as well, so it’s available for most people.

Whether I use Voja’s product long-term remains to be seen, but it’s a very creative use of the old PDF and I appreciate him bringing it to market.

Reducing and syncing notifications

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’ve talked a good bit about smartwatches on here over the years, from my first Google-vs-Apple post back in 2015, to recurring posts about how Pebble stuck around longer than we thought it might.

I recently picked up a Galaxy Watch4, and it’s excellent. As I’ve been getting things set up, though, it’s helped me rethink how I manage my phone.

For me, the best thing about a smartwatch is notifications. The other apps on the watch can be helpful at times, but I want to quickly glance down and see who is calling or texting without having to get my phone out. It’s great! The growing annoyance for me, though, was when I’d hear my phone buzz but then nothing would come through to my watch so I wouldn’t know what the notification was for. This was by design, as I didn’t want my watch buzzing for every little notification, but the disconnect between them wasn’t good.

I figured I had two options to get them to sync:

  1. Enable all notifications on my watch.
  2. Eliminate the other notifications from my phone.

Option 2 sounded great, so that’s what I’ve done. The easy win, and something I should have done a while ago, was to remove social media notifications. When I hop on Facebook or Twitter, there will always be notifications waiting for me, so having them ping my phone/watch every time was silly.

buy reglan online cheap pharmacy

Beyond that, it was just cleaning up some of the random ones that were left over. I went through the full list of allowed notifications on my phone and turned off almost all of them. Most were infrequent (HBO Max, Spotify, etc), so I disabled almost everything.

Now I’m seeing far fewer notifications on my phone, but I can see all of them on my watch. It’s a good setup, and I hope to continue to trim them down on both devices over time.

The Freedom Phone is asking for trouble

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There’s a new phone on the market called the “Freedom Phone”, and the basic idea behind it is solid. It’s a phone that gives you more privacy and less of the tracking from companies like Google and Apple, and I think most of us can agree that’s a good thing. The problem is that the phone simply doesn’t do that.

First, it’s still running a version of Google’s Android operating system. It’s hard to build a new phone operating system from scratch, for sure, but using Google’s is a tough angle to start from if you’re trying to show how bad Google is. Plus, you still need to get service through Verizon or AT&T or similar. Those folks are essentially impossible to escape when it comes to mobile phones, but they can still watch everything you do.

Taking it further, though, this phone is just the UMIDIGI A9 Pro, rebranded as the “Freedom Phone” with some different apps preloaded, and being sold for 4x the cost. (note: it’s been confirmed that it’s a UMIDIGI phone, though whether it’s the exact same specs as the A9 Pro is still being uncovered). If you want privacy, buying a cheap phone from a Chinese manufacturer isn’t likely the best way to go.

The App Store

Perhaps of greater concern is the app store on the phone, and their hard push to make it completely uncensored. This means it will likely find plenty of spam and malware in the store soon, but we’ll see what happens.

You can find plenty of articles about this phone, but here are two good ones to start with:

So what to do?

If you’re wanting privacy, and the Freedom Phone isn’t a good solution, what should you do? You have a few good choices.

First, you can replicate pretty much all of the privacy-focused features on your own phone in a matter of minutes. Use Signal for messaging, DuckDuckGo for search, and Brave for browsing. Those apps are very privacy focused, and available to all Android and iPhone users already.

If the “censored” apps are a concern (like when Parler was removed from the Google Play Store), every Android phone allows you to sideload apps, so you’re never limited anyhow. Sideloading comes with risks, though, so be careful if you go down that road.

If you really want to be secure, you can use a PinePhone instead. It uses a custom Linux-based operating system (not a trace of Google or Apple in there), and is likely the best bet for privacy-minded folks. With that custom OS and privacy comes some big downsides, though. In particular, most of your apps aren’t available on there — that’s the cost you need to be willing to pay.

Our diminishing privacy online is a major problem, and something that needs to be continually addressed, but this new phone is certainly not the answer.

5G has a chance

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I wrote last year about some of the issues facing 5G, the biggest being the lack of reach, as 5G signals just don’t travel nearly as far as 4G signals do, and they never will.

As I mentioned back then, if your phone shows you have a “5G” signal, you almost certainly don’t. It’s pure marketing, and it’s really just a solid 4G connection. It’s probably a good signal, but it’s not “5G” in any sense of the word.

buy prevacid online cheap pharmacy

However, at a recent Braves game I noticed that my phone showed a “5GUW” signal (with “UW” short for ultra-wideband, which is what real 5G is) so I did a quick speed test. I was impressed!

Beyond the very healthy 286Mpbs download speed (which is faster than most homes in the US can get), the initial speeds in the test were hitting as much as 1.5Gbps, which is faster than most fiber connections! I was stunned.

That said, my concerns from before still hold true. Ultra-wideband can deliver huge numbers, but the signal just can’t travel very far, or penetrate walls or humans very well. It’s never going to be the solution for everyone nationwide. 6G is probably a decade or so away, so I suspect many of us will be using 4G long into the future in the areas that 5G just can’t reach.

5G is going to be great if you’re in an urban area or at an event like a baseball game. Speeds like in my screenshot above are just silly, and should allow you to do anything you want with your phone.

The rest of your life will be full of 4G for at least the next few years, even if your phone shows a fake “5G” signal. That’s ok too, since high-end 4G towers are more than adequate for whatever we need, but it’ll be interesting to see how things shake out in the coming years as the 6G standard starts being developed.

Some good news on robocalls

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: < 1 minute

We all get them, and we all hate them. Robocalls. Fortunately, the FCC is finally going to do something about it. More accurately, they’re going to force wireless carriers to do something about it, and it’s good news for us.

The FCC has created a new database that all voice providers need to use to track the work they’re doing to stop robocalls. Specifically, any carrier doesn’t make it onto the list by September won’t be able to send calls to other carriers.

Spoofing

This is great because it should help stop spoofing, where spammers can pretend to be calling from any number they want when making their calls, which makes them quite difficult for us to stop. Blocking a spam number doesn’t help if they can call from a different number every time.

In my case lately, it’s even worse. My number seems to be one that spammers are spoofing and pretending to use a lot, so then regular folks are calling me “back”, quite upset about the robocall they just got from “me”. It’s chaos.

Since most major carriers are doing things to help prevent spoofing, any carrier that doesn’t won’t make it into the database — and spoofing should be just about over.

Engadget has some details if you want to read more, but this September should hopefully see the volume of robocalls drop off by quite a lot.

Use URL shorteners for better QR codes

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 3 minutes

With the “don’t touch anything” approach to handling COVID, particularly at restaurants, we’re seeing a bit of a resurgence with QR codes. Couple that with the fact that iPhone and Android both read QR codes from the main camera app (instead of needing a separate app) means that they’ll likely stick around to some degree.

QR codes > Bar codes

QR codes are more amazing than you might realize. With most “codes”, like bar codes on products, it simply references a number that the system needs to go back to someone’s database in order to figure out what it means. For example, you might scan a gallon of milk and get the number 123456789, which the system then tracks back to see what “123456789” really means.

QR codes are different. Rather than needing to rely on a database somewhere to translate them for you, the full content of what you want to share is literally in the code itself. It’s a bit complicated how they do it, but when you scan a QR code and it gives you a website address to visit, that website address is literally in that QR code, made up of the various modules — the dots that make up the code itself.

Open = Good

As you might have guessed, I love that approach. I’m a big believer of owning your own content to the extent possible, and no one can ever own the database behind QR codes — because there isn’t one! Every QR code stands on its own, and no one can stop that. It’s excellent.

The downside

This also leads to a pretty big downside. With a gallon of milk, that “123456789” barcode can lead to a database with a ton of information about what you scanned. With a QR code, you’ve got to jam all of that information into the code itself. They can hold quite a bit of information, but the more you put into one, the smaller the modules get and the harder it is to read.

For example, the link to this post is:
https://www.mickmel.com/qr-codes/

That can be show using this QR code:

Really, that one isn’t too bad. However, what if I wanted to put a tracking URL on it? Maybe I add some tracking data to the end, and have a link like this:
https://www.mickmel.com/qr-codes/?utm_source=mickmelblog&utm_medium=website_post&utm_campaign=qr_code_blog_post

Now the QR code uses much smaller dots, and could potentially be harder to read (especially on a greasy menu at a restaurant):

To do it right, though, I can put it through a URL shortener (like bit.ly) to make it super short. Here’s short URL for this post: http://gmm.to/qr

The result? A super clean QR code with nice big modules.

That’s what you want to produce. Using a short URL offers a few great advantages:

  1. As you see, it makes for a much simpler QR code.
  2. Depending on the shortening tool you use, you can change the destination of the link. Back to to the restaurant example, you might start using a different online menu system and need to update those links. You can reprint all of the menus with a new QR code — or just change where your shortener points! That’s often only available with paid plans on shortening tools, but it’s worth considering.

Next time you need to make a QR code for something, take an extra 30 seconds to shorten your link and make it work better.

Also, I used https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/ to create those QR codes, and it’s a pretty simple and solid tool to use.

Side note: I saw this while watching a basketball game last night. Not only are the modules tiny and hard to scan, but they barely left it on the screen long enough to snap a quick photo of it. This strikes as a rather poorly thought-out plan.

What’s your system for disposable notes?

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I don’t necessarily like having too many separate systems for your notes and ideas, but I have one that is becoming particularly invaluable — a place for temporary, disposable notes.

About five years ago, I heard David Allen mention that “you should only think about cat food once“. You can read this post for more info, but the basic idea is that if you remember that you need cat food, you should put that into a trusted system to get it out of your mind.

Trusted Systems

Nearly 12 years ago, I wrote about the idea of a “trusted system” for your notes. The idea is that you need a system that you really trust, deep down, or else your mind won’t be able to let go of what it’s holding.

Further, you need a system that you know you’ll get back to in time. If you just throw “get cat food” into Evernote with your 10,000 other notes, there’s a good chance it’ll get lost. I think the solution is a disposable notes system.

Disposable Notes

This is really pretty simple; everyone should have a place to take quick notes that does not also hold long-term notes. This system should be completely emptied as frequently as possible. Your notes from there become items for your grocery list, or events on your calendar, or whatever they need to be. Deal with them properly, and get them out of that system.

Personally, I use Google Keep for my disposable notes. It’s easy to access and easy to keep clean, and frankly, isn’t great for long-term storage anyhow. I have a widget on my phone for quick notes, I can speak it in my car (“hey google… take a note…”), and then I have desktop widgets for it. Stuff goes in it constantly, and then comes back out when I have a chance to sit down.

You can use whatever you want for it. Other good options could be Apple Notes or Simplenote or one of dozens of others. Even a small paper notebook could work great.

Tools like Evernote, Notion, and Roam Research are better solutions for long-term notes — those are very important too, but not really for what we’re talking about today.

Ultimately, my advice is to keep those notes somewhere that you won’t forget about them and where the notes won’t get buried, so you can really trust stuff that you put into it and won’t have to think about cat food twice.

Zwifting along

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I’m sharing this largely because I wish I had known about it a few years ago, so maybe I can save someone else from that.

In short, Zwift is an app that puts you in a virtual world connected to your treadmill or your stationary bike. It’s kind of like being in “Second Life”, in a virtual world with virtual characters.

There are various ways to watch it while you run, but I just run it from my iPad and the iPad sits on my treadmill.

Here’s a promo video they made for it when it first launched in 2015 (when it was only for cycling):

A few things make it pretty neat:

Matched Speed: It can connect to your treadmill (or you can buy sensors if you have an older treadmill) and your character in the game paces at exactly your speed. With that, you can move through the world and it’ll track your pace, distance, etc.

Real people: While you’re exercising, the world is filled with other real people in the app at the same time. Zwift started as a biking app, so there are more bikes than runners, but having all of these people moving around helps to bring the world to life. They even do events like virtual 5K races at specific times, and you’ll see a bunch of virtual people lined up at the starting line.

Training plans: They have a few training plans to help get you started. They’ll tell you when to speed up, when to slow down, and encourage you as you go. It seems that they don’t have very many, but it’s a great way to help get started.

Gamification: As you exercise more, you earn points and levels and the kinds of things you get from a game. I don’t fully understand this yet, but I’m earning a lot of points!

All of that said, it doesn’t do much — just watching your character run can get boring after a while, even with the goodies I mentioned above. That’s ok, though. While the game has some ambient sounds, it doesn’t make much noise. As a result, you can still listen to music/books or watch TV while you work out, but have the added bonus of an interactive world in front of you instead of an LCD panel that is always creeping to higher numbers. 🙂

If you have a treadmill or stationary bike that you work out with, give Zwift a try. They have a seven day trial to play with it, and then it’s $15/mo after that.

Leadership isn’t about who goes first

by Leave a Comment

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I consider Andy Stanley to be a leader in every sense of the word. If you’re not familiar with Andy, he’s the senior pastor of North Point Community Church, speaker, author, podcaster and much more. If you ask someone that knows Andy if they consider him a leader, they’ll almost certainly say yes.

Andy’s churches see weekly attendance of more than 40,000 people during non-COVID times, so you think he’d want to be a “leader” and reopen as soon as possible. You’d be wrong. They announced months ago that they’d be staying closed until at least the end of 2020, perhaps longer. In their eyes, the safety of their congregation comes first, and unnecessarily putting them at risk isn’t leadership of any kind.

They’re certainly doing a ton to support their congregation through virtual events, and much could be learned from that, but they don’t think that leadership means going first.

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of businesses and organizations in your area that are doing the opposite. They’re “leading the way” to reopen or to host their event, even if it might not be a smart move. It’s a tricky thing to navigate, particularly for businesses, so I’m not sure what the right answer is. However, I don’t think that opening quickly necessarily equates to leadership.

Verizon is leading the way with 5G

5G is going to be great — someday. We’re still a long way from that. However, if you listen to some companies you’ll be led to believe that being first is all that matters.

Take Verizon in Atlanta, for example. On July 31, 2019, Verizon launched their first 5G towers in Atlanta. They’re first — they’re leaders!

That was more than 15 months ago. As of now, their true 5G covers about six square miles. Six. And that’s only on some streets, and only works if you’re outside. For comparison, the metro Atlanta area is considered to be 8,376 square miles, and the state of Georgia is 59,425 square miles. They cover 6.

6 vs 8,376 vs 59,425. It’s a joke. Are they leaders in 5G because they were first?

Side note: To help confuse you, Verizon has now renamed much of their old 4G network as kind of a fake 5G, like AT&T has done. When looking at this data, be sure to look at their coverage for “5G Ultra Wideband” to see what they really have.

Leaders can be first

This isn’t to say that being first means you’re not a leader. There are plenty of examples of leaders being trailblazers into a new industry or idea, and that should always be celebrated.

It just seems to be that being first to something is now being treated like a crown, while being first is only part of being a true leader.