Sunday, August 07, 2011
Carrying my manuals with me
I recently bought a Kindle K3 from Amazon after debating with myself for a long time about spending the money on one. The tipping point came when I ordered my last two hard cover books from Amazon and the day they arrived I found two additional ones that I wanted. The book shelves in my living room are bulging at the seams and I was going to have to start thinking about occupying another wall. This pleased my wife about as much as my wanting to put a 50' flag pole in the front yard to string antennas from.
So I looked at the Kindle which has a six inch diagonal screen, is not as thick as a number 2 pencil and will hold over 3000 books. Now I won't go into a complete review of the Kindle here but I will say that so far I love it. I wasn't sure I would like reading on the device especially since I like the feel of a new book in my hands. Again, that is another story.
After I had my Kindle set up and had purchased a few books from the Kindle store I started exploring other aspects of this little gem. The first thing to catch my eye was that it would display documents in PDF format. In addition you are given an email address when you purchase your Kindle to which you can email files that they will then transfer to your device via WiFi or what they call "Whisper Net" which is just a 3G connection by way of the cellular network. I haven't tried it yet but you can also link with USB to Kindle and load PDF files that way.
Needless to say all of my ham gear manuals from Icom and Yaesu are available in PDF format. There is a trend now days to supply manuals only in digital form leaving it to the end user to decide if he or she needs a "dead tree" version. So now when I'm mobile if I want to look up some obscure function on my FT-7800-R dual band mobile I just need to take out my Kindle and RTFM. Yet another small way that computers are wedging their way into the shack.
Labels: Kindle manuals PDF portable use
