The Fire is pretty awesome for $199. But it lacks several features that I think would put it right over the edge. I also have an older Nook Color. It has the one thing that I wish the Kindle did. An external MicroSD slot. 

The Kindle actually has MORE memory for media/apps than a Nook Color does by default however. The Nook only allows 1GB of its 8GB of memory to be used for user loaded content. The Fire has about 6GB for Amazon or user loaded content.

With the whole "cloud" thing, as long as you have a network connection, you really don't need much storage so its a nit picky thing.

The fact that it will be the best selling Android tablet guarantees that it will have great support in the modding community. I'm 100% positive that Cyanogenmod will create an Android OS install for it. As long as I can still do all the Amazon Prime streaming with a modded OS I'm game!

I've already "rooted" it and side loaded the Google Market and some Google apps. Its not perfect yet, but new tweaks and hacks are coming out everyday for it.

The bottom line is that if you are already an Amazon customer (especially if you are already a Prime user) the Kindle is spectacular.

If you have nothing invested in the Amazon eco system than it is cheap enough at $199 to make you want to be invested in it.

Kindle Fire... Rooted from my Mac using http://blog.actlocalmedia.com/2011/11/developing-on-kindle-fire.html and http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1296916.

You need to have the Android SDK installed. To do that, go download the SDK at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. Unzip it and install it to a location in your home directory. I put at ~/android-sdk-macosx.

Then you need to update the SDK by running the following command: 

~/android-sdk-macosx/tools/android update sdk --no-ui

That update can take quite some time. Sit back and relax while you watch a free Amazon Prime streaming TV show like Serenity or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

You can add the path to the adb command by editing your ~/.bash_profile and adding a path statement like the following.

export PATH=${PATH}:~/android-sdk-macosx/platform-tools

Edit the ~./android/adb_usb.ini and add a line at the end with "0x1949". Then plug in the Fire (you have to have your own mini usb cable to plug it into your workstation). Then tell the Kindle to "Disconnect" so it is no longer sharing files over USB. Then run "adb kill-server" on the mac to to restart things. Once that is done you can check to see if you are able to see the device by running "adb devices". If a device is listed you are good to go!

Just hit the road for a quick 1.5 mile jaunt. Knees are yelling at me and my sinuses are mad, but it felt great to expand those lungs!

I listened to TWIT: Windows Weekly while I walked with my newly improved Jawbone Hero. I read about how you can fit a Jabra eargel over the Jawbone's small rubber ear piece and get a great fit and improve the listening volume.

Wow does that work! The Jawbone's ear pieces generally suck. They don't fit well and always require the over the ear hook which even when worn doesn't always keep the ear piece from flinging itself across the room if you spin around too quickly.

The Jabra ear gels are very secure and comfortable. I don't need to wear the ear hook with it. It also directs the sound from the speaker farther into my ear so I can hear the ear piece much better than before. Brilliant!

I can wear the Jawbone all day long now.

Synergy is a great and free way to replace a KVM switch (kind of). It doesn't do video, but it does keyboard and mouse control across multiple networked workstations awesomely.

I was having issues with high CPU utilization on Mac OS X with Synergy. I am using Ubuntu 11.04 as the Synergy server and Mac OS X as the client.

The Synergy project has gone through some changes over the last year or so. It was forked a while back to a new project called Synergy-Plus. But now things have come back together and the projects have merged to be one again. This is generally a good thing and one of the reasons why open source is so great.

A fork is sometimes subversive (heck maybe all the time), but it also allows the project and the technology to continue to grow and mature, even if the original project isn't on board with the changes. In the best case scenario, everyone can literally patch up their differences and merge a fork of a project back with the original and keep the ball rolling full steam ahead.

I had a mix of older Synergy Plus versions going between Ubuntu and OS X. I was noticing a huge load on my Mac CPU just by moving my mouse around in circles.

Synergy is normally a very low overhead app. This was not normal at all. So I upgraded all of my workstations to the latest version (1.44 beta). It is not available in the Ubuntu repos so I had to download and install the .deb manually.

Once I got everything on the same and newest version, OS X zips along like usual. Synergy is one of my most favorite applications. I use it every day at work, and frankly could not do my job without it. Go check it out!

Update:

I ran into a weird problem with 1.4.4. Double-clicking on Mac OS X stopped working. So I dropped back to version 1.3.5 which is referenced in the bug report and both my CPU and my double-clicking are happy now :).

I am teaching my Drupal 101 and Drupal 201 classes starting tomorrow night. It will be the third time teaching the classes. I keep thinking that once I get my slides set that teaching the next time will be much easier to prep for. But I'm always wrong.

The reason this time is that I've decided to move to using Drupal 7 for the class. when I taught it last winter it was just way too soon after Drupal 7 came out. I think it was released literally the week before class started. Now I think Drupal 7 is ready for primetime. I've got a few sites that I've already upgraded to 7 so I feel pretty comfortable with it now.

I'll be teaching these classes again in the winter and spring terms as well. If you live in the Chicago area go check it out!

I am so impressed with TweekDeck. First of all, their regular apps are great. Forget all those other social media apps. If you have a smartphone, TweetDeck is the best there is. It is also great on the desktop, but their HTML5 application in Chrome is amazing! I think I actually like it better than their desktop client. Having it available everwhere I have Chrome installed is really nice. The interface is dead simple to use. Without TweetDeck, I would loose so much information and be completely clueless about half the people that contact me in Twitter, Facebook, etc...Great job TweetDeckers! Keep up the great work. 

I just went through some fun (you can replace fun with eye gouging pain) figuring out how to automatically install iPrint printers on Mac OS X.

The first thing I found out is that any version lower than 5.00 from Novell is totally broken and useless in every way. So if you are using iPrint from Novell, you should definately download that and install it on all your Macs.

Once you get that done you have a lovely iprntcmd utility that you can use for all kinds of useful stuff (we'll get into that later), but you still can't upload Mac drivers with a Mac. How difficult would it be to just make iManager work across platforms for Printing Novell? Hmmmm?

So now you have to... gasp... use Windows XP. Its easy enough to just load up VirtualBox and run a session right on your Mac. You are going to need access to all the print drivers on your Mac anyways so copying the ones you need to your home directory and sharing them out to your VirtualBox VM is pretty easy and useful. If you don't run it in a VM on your Mac, then you will need to share or copy whatever print drivers you will need to upload to your iPrint servers so you can get to them from a Windows XP box of some type.

So upload the drivers already (RTFM on Novell's website if you don't know how to upload and assign drivers for iPrint). I'm really putting this up here so I can remember it anyways and I already know how to do that! :)

Now the fun begins.

To install a printer just type:

iprntcmd -a ipp://iprintserverhere/pathtoqueue

I can't think of a much crappier install than Pinnacle Studio 12 for automated deployments other than perhaps some Adobe stuff. Their msi gives you absolutely no way of filling in the information ahead of time for your serial number and registration information. I wonder if the folks at Pinnacle have heard of a little thing called large friggin workstation deployments! I started down the horrible nightmarish road of having to use AutoIt to manually pump keystrokes into the registration dialogue box. Oh man did I hate that! OK rant over. All that being said, I kind of stumbled upon a solution.Here is how I got it working.First I ran the install and manually went through the registration process. Evidently this creates a bunch of files in "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle\Pixie". If these files exist before you start the install process on a workstation, the registration information will already be setup in the registration dialogue. Hmmm fascinating!  So basically I just setup a little pre distribution script that copies those files down before I start the silent install of the MSI. xcopy /y/e/s/i/q/r "\\Network Location\pinnacle-studio-12\Pinnacle" "c:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Pinnacle"The network location is the "Pinnacle" directory that goes under "Application Data"

I have been a huge fan of Leo Laporte for a really long time. The man really knows technology. He is one of the few tech broadcasters that really seems to get it. He has really driven "podcasting" to new levels. I've half stolen his Twit.tv model for my own podcast that I run at Lords of Tyr (a gaming group that I am a member of). Someday maybe I'll be the Leo Laporte of D&D podcasting? I can only dream!

Leo is forever young, which is perhaps why he is so darn relevant. Actually I think he is beyond relevant. He is a pioneer. He was at the Diggnation taping the other day. He broadcasted is live over his Twit.TV network and what did he do? He crowd surfed while filming it! He is the man. End of story!