Kindle Fire – Trials and Tribulations

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I received a Kindle Fire for Christmas this year!  Very neat device, with a sleek form factor, in my opinion.

The awesomeness of receiving a gift like this wore off quickly, after I unboxed it and powered it up for the first time.  I had one of the units that displayed symptoms of having a defective touch screen!  The screen was non-responsive to touch at times, and using the on-screen keyboard was next to impossible.

Every time I’d try to use the on-screen keyboard, I would get “extra” characters, like an “ñ” instead of a regular “n”, or instead of an “e” I would get a “3″.  It was as if I was holding down the key, to bring up the extra characters, and selecting the first character in that list, even though I was attempting to type as fast as I could.

Searching around on the internet, I found Amazon had released a firmware update for the Kindle Fire, so I figured out how to get that downloaded to the device, and rebooted.  The 6.2 firmware did nothing to fix my problems with the keyboard.

In the middle of trying to fix the keyboard, I did manage to get the Kindle Fire online, and downloaded a couple apps, and some free books.  I also did a device reset, and for the life of me could not figure out how to get the books I just downloaded to the Kindle Fire back onto the Kindle Fire!

Fast forward a few days, and I’m searching for anything new about these Kindle Fire problems, and if any solutions exist.  I manage to locate a post in the Amazon support forums about how to force power-off the Kindle Fire, which consists of holding the power button for 20 seconds.  Sure enough, that put the Kindle Fire into a coma-like state, which took a few minutes for it to come out of after I plugged the charger in and held the power button for 5 seconds to bring it back to life.

After the forced power-off procedure, and bringing the Kindle Fire back to life, the keyboard problems are gone!  The screen is perfectly responsive, and all the apps seem to work just fine.  Woo!

As for getting my previously purchased books back to the Kindle Fire, you have to log into your Amazon account through a browser, click on “Your Account”, then click on “View Your Kindle Orders” under “Order History”.

At this point, you should see a list of all the items you have purchased for your Kindle Fire.  Find the book you want to load onto your Kindle Fire, and click on the “Actions” button.  Select “Deliver to my…”, pick your Kindle Fire from the device list, and then click “Deliver” (you can do this for more than one book).

Once you have all the books you wish to download to your Kindle selected, go to the Kindle Fire and perform a “Sync”.  Your Kindle will pull down the content you selected on the Amazon web site.

I’ve had the Kindle Fire for about a week now, with it functioning perfectly for less than one hour.  I like the form factor, I like the screen, and the audio is good as well.  Now that the touch screen is working like it should, I can use the device with a much lower level of frustration, and get the most out of it.  More reviews to follow!  :-)

PuTTY 0.62 released

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PuTTY is a lightweight suite of utilities for Windows machines that can perform SSH, SCP, and SFTP functions.  I’ve used these utilities quite a bit over the years, so I figured I’d give this project a little press after I learned there was a new version out.

Last Saturday, a new version was released, containing some security and bug fixes:  http://lists.tartarus.org/pipermail/putty-announce/2011/000017.html

It’s recommended that all current users of PuTTY upgrade to the latest version.

Derp.

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ServerUnderground had a bit of downtime over this last weekend due to a fried power supply.  We’re back online after dropping in a replacement power supply, and checking the disks for sanity.

EDIT:  Looks like the motherboard may have been affected as well.  Moved the hard drive over to a different (newer) chassis, and things seem to be working much better.  Time to add another pile of circuitry to the recycling pile.  :-(

Woo, updates!

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I took a look at Google Analytics for this site today, and decided I needed to make a few changes.  One thing led to another, and now the site is running with an updated theme (Twentyeleven, from WordPress), some tweaked W3 Total Cache settings, and some new header graphics that I shot this evening in the basement.

The Google ads have been temporarily removed, while I rework that whole mess.  Sadly, the ads slow down the site quite a bit, so I don’t know if I want to keep them or not.  I think I may try to only show ads when you view individual stories/posts.  Removing ads from the front page will keep things looking sharp, and running fast.

In tech related news, I finally got around to installing NetBSD (hpcmips) 5.1 on a 4GB CF card on an IBM Workpad z/50 system.  It’s a little netbook-ish type laptop that ran Windows CE years before netbooks got popular.  Yes, it’s the “hipster-book”.  While a fun project, it is very limited by the 16MB of RAM, so there’s not a lot I can do with it at the moment.

This evening also saw the i-Opener go under the knife to get a hard drive upgrade, and NetBSD (i386) 5.1 loaded as well.  I need to find a USB network adapter to make this system useable.  This i-Opener has been upgraded to 128MB of RAM, a 30GB internal 2.5″ IDE drive, and an IDT WinChip 200Mhz processor (passively cooled).  The only moving part on this machine is the hard drive’s internals.

That’s all for now.  More updates to come as I upgrade another machine this week in preparation for Windows 7 and some new games.  :-)

EDIT:  Well, the Google Ads are back after screwing around with some of the AdSense plugins for WordPress.  We’re back in business!

Zip, zilch, nadda!

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Not much to report on the home front these days.  This time of year is super busy where I work, and the hours have been long.

I recently traveled to San Francisco, CA for work.  The weather wasn’t great (by SF standards), but I managed to do a decent amount of walking around the city.  Met some interesting folks, and got a lot of work done.

Getting ready for Black Friday site traffic, and the usual pilgrimage to Fry’s early in the morning on Black Friday for more computer crap I don’t need at home.  ’Tis the season!

Enter the Mikrotik

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Tonight I swapped out the trusty Linksys WRT54G that was flashed with DD-WRT with a new Routerboard RB751U-2HnD (wow, that’s one hell of a model number) router running the fabulous Mikrotik OS, version 5.7!  My home network has never has it so good.  :-)

Personally, I prefer to deal with routers that have a serial console port of some type, so I can wipe the default config completely and build a config up from the bare metal.  These smaller SOHO units don’t have that luxury, so it took a bit of jumping around on different ports to get the “clean” configuration I wanted this evening.

If you deal with routers for a living, and haven’t heard of Mikrotik, check out the two links above.  These routers and associated hardware have a lot of features and flexibility, and pack a lot of power into some pretty impressive form factors.  You can also get a license for X86 hardware, and build your own power-house router!

Ubuntu 11.10!

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This evening I finally took apart two of the systems I put together last year, and stuffed the guts into a couple smaller computer cases.  Now I have my two full-size ATX chassis ready for some fresh hardware after this year’s Black Friday sales.  :-)

After migrating the hardware, I didn’t know what to load for an operating system.  These machines are going to be used by the kids for games, educational software, and internet access.  After messing around with Windows XP on one of the systems, I decided to start over and load the latest version of Ubuntu, which is now at version 11.10.

Both systems loaded just fine from my USB DVD drive (no internal removable media on either system), and the latest version of Ubuntu recognizes all of the hardware just fine.  I’ve previously had issues with Ubuntu and the onboard ATI 4350 video chipset on both of these systems, so I was pleased to see everything work “out of the box” on the first try, with the open source drivers.

Now it’s time to clean off some desks, and set up some space for the kids to use their new systems!