I’ve said in my previous Twimbow posts, I’ve never been a “Twitter” person, well, I said Twit. I’ve been staring at Twimbow all day. Now that I know about lists I feel comfortable because I’m not pressured to look at 50 tweets a second.
I’m also learning color coding. See the image below, the colored boxes above all the tweets. That is an awesome feature because now I can give each group of celebrities (and friends) a certain color. Like all the Bravo people have Orange, all the E! people have purple, all the SyFy people have lime green… Friend tweets are all yellow. But this will allow me to filter who I want to look at as far as celebrities and friends go.
I’m having way more fun than any person should with Twitter lol.
I started reading Night Mare which is the 6th book in the Xanth series on Wednesday, hoping it would only take me 2 days if I read half one day and half the next. Unfortunately it did take me 4 days. I read as much as I could in the time that I had allowed myself since I am a devoted viewer of certain tv shows that are on every night. After my shows I tried reading a chapter or 2 so I was able to continue trying to meet my ridiculous quota lol.
As with all Xanth novels I loved it. It certainly was difficult considering it was all about war. I had to keep telling myself that it would all work out in the end and all the lost kings would not be lost forever and everyone will live happily ever after until the next book. That did help.
The book did indeed have a happy ending, ok not that kind of happy ending… you know what I mean.
My next book is Dragon on a Pedestal, Xanth novel #7. I’ll start it tomorrow and hope that I haven’t burned myself out on reading, or reading Xanth novels for that matter.
Well I have finally figured it out. I guess because I don’t use Twitter that often I never learned that there are lists that you can add people to. Twimbow allows you to use your middle column to view only people in a list that you choose. DUH! So naturally I am making a list and only putting in people I really want to follow, friends and celebrities.
So, I can stop blocking people, which I stopped doing when I learned that blocking equals unfollowing followers. A huge Oops.
Also the 3rd column in the Twimbow website is a search window. Notice the magnifying glass? The search area above that allows you to type a specific persons name to look at all their tweets and mentions.
Notice the column on the left (which is the middle column in the website) says Celebrities, that’s my new Celeb list. And notice the magnifying glass in the column on the right that says Twimbow? I get it now.
Now that I have this new information I will be a very happy Twimbow user. I’m very excited because I finally get it now. What can I say, I guess I get stupid in my old age but I learn… eventually.
A few days ago I was searching for something that had to do with rainbows, I think I was looking for an image. I really don’t remember but in my Google search I found Twimbow. It said it was in pre-Alpha so in order for me to use Twinbow I had to sign up and wait for approval. Well, I got an email today with my approval.
When I found it on Google I read that it was a new Twitter application so I thought what the heck, I could always use a new way to go on twitter. I’m not really much of a twit er wait no that came out wrong… or did it? I don’t get into twittering as much as a lot of people do so I don’t really use it. The problem with Twitter is that I am following so many people and I look away for 5 seconds and there are 20 more tweets. I look away for 5 minutes and there are 500 new tweets. It’s overwhelming so I don’t use Twitter as much as I would like to.
Twimbow is a bit different in the respect that you can choose what tweets you want to look at. Look at this image, this is the main page. The left column has direct messages, your mentions and people mentioning you, all color coded. The middle column are everyone’s tweets that you are following and the right column are the Twimbow mentions.
What I would love to see happen next is being able to either block certain people’s tweets or only show certain people’s tweets. That way you can block out all the spam tweets from people you really don’t know who you follow that advertise a lot.
The problem is, I follow everyone who follows me whether I know them or not. So because of that my twitter page is overwhelmed with tons of new tweets. I don’t want to unfollow those people but I don’t want to read their spam tweets either lol. And some of the people I follow are speaking in Russian. I can’t even read their tweets.
I said earlier that you can choose what tweets you see, this is what I mean. In the image above you might have noticed at the bottom it said Monitor. Well, if you click that you can type in some key words or phrases and anyone who tweets those words or phrases will show up under that word.
For this example I typed in 4 words, Nook, Kindle, Ebook and Gay. So every time someone says those words I will know it. You can also move those boxes around. When I typed them all out they were all vertical on the left side, I moved them so they are horizontal to see the tweets in them.
You could also type in certain people’s names like if I only want to look at Kathy Griffins tweets or any time someone said her name then those will be the only tweets I see. I typed Xanapus and my last tweet came up but because nobody ever says my name 😦 that won’t have any new tweets.
I would like to only follow certain people’s tweets like I said Kathy Griffin but also Alyssa Milano, Bethany, BravoAndy, hello Ross and a few other celebrities. I only want to look at friend tweets and celebrity tweets.
I like Twimbow because their site looks way cooler than Twitters does. Hopefully they will have ways of blocking or only allowing certain people so I can enjoy it even more.
Amazon has finally lowered the price on their latest Kindle. This is the wi-fi Kindle with 4GB of memory, you can delete your books and they will stay in your amazon account. This new Kindle is 21% smaller and 17% lighter, according to Amazon. This is an exciting feature, the battery will last for 1 month with the wi-fi turned off. How about that? The e-ink is darker making it easier to read and you can browse the web (beta) over your existing wi-fi connection.
The new wi-fi Kindle is $139 but if you want the wi-fi + 3G Kindle it’s $189. It’s the same thing but you get 3G which for $50 I can do without.
These new Kindles will be released on August 27th 2010 with free 2 day shipping.
They also have the Kindle DX for $379, I don’t remember its original price but $379 is still expensive to me so I’ll pass on that one.
I was excited about the Nook dropping in price to $149 and this being only $10 less is tempting but I’ll have to see what happens by Christmas. Who knows, maybe the Nook will go down to $100 lol. Keep going guys, you’re almost at my price range.
U Pack Moving is a website that helps make moving much easier. They sell single moving boxes and moving bundles . You could buy 1 small box for $1.95 or you could buy a bundle of 25 and save $10.
As a person who moved for a living I know how expensive boxes can get every time you moved, especially if you moved around a lot. So it’s nice to see a company offering boxes so cheap. They sell small, medium and large U-Pack boxes, Wardrobe boxes, Dish pack boxes and storage file boxes all at low prices.
They are in Arkansas but they have a shipping map which shows a map of the United States and all areas are color coded to let you know how long it would take to reach you. I saw that it would take 3 days to reach me on the map but I typed in my zip code anyway and it confirmed that it would take 3 days.
They don’t just offer boxes though, they also sell bubble wrap, furniture pads, rope etc. All the things that you need for moving they sell. They will also move you. You can get a free moving quote. You just gotta pack it all yourself then they come and get you and your boxes and bring you to your new home.
Please read the above article for more information.
Ok well, I’m really just stunned by this. You really have to read the article in the link provided at the top and watch the videos that are in that article.
This guy who holds these hate signs is very uneducated. He seriously thinks that god is going to destroy us much like he destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. If that were true then Canada and Britain would be gone because they allow gay marriage. God hasn’t destroyed them.
He also seems to think that being gay is a choice and that he has been tempted and knew it was wrong so he chose not to act on it. … I don’t even know what to say to that. First of all, I don’t know any gay men or even any straight women who would be attracted to that. Pahleez ! Barf!
By making this sign he has threatened the lives of every LGBT person alive. Is that what god wants? Does god want people that he allegedly “created” to be hung because this guy doesn’t agree with how they live their lives?
He says in the video that it’s the same thing with people who have artificial insemination. So, women who have to have their husbands sperm artificially inseminated because their sex is not working to make them pregnant, despite the fact that they are straight are no better than gay people? Should they be hung too?
Him making and holding that sign makes him no better than a terrorist. That is indeed a terrorist threat. Isn’t this something that the cop standing behind him should be thinking about rather than guarding him? That cop needs to arrest him for making terrorist threats against people. People who are just doing what nature has told them to do, be themselves.
When I started to type this out I was speechless, I guess not.
I’ve finally figured out how to turn my PSP into an eBook reader. I’ve googled the term “PSPebook reader” before with bad results. You know, those homebrew programs. Yeah, that’s a bad result. I refuse to brick up my PSP just so I can see if I can read an e-book on it.
In my google search I did find a message board where they talked about a PSP e-book reader so I checked out a couple of ideas, this is one of them.
NIMS PSP Ebook Reader . This is a little different although not quite better. If you google the title you may find that it is found in homebrew websites. However, it does not need a homebrewed PSP to work. It does work with a regular PSP because all you are doing is loading an html file in your web browser as your reader then putting your e-book files in another folder.
It has a dos program that you run where it will convert PDF files. I tried it and the output was terrible. It wasn’t what I had hoped it would have been. It’s supposed to convert your pdf e-book file into html files along with some other files I don’t know. Anyway, it wasn’t good.
I did take their index file though and made my own little version of an e-book reader. I changed the text and gave it a background so it looks snazzy but it works better.
Ok here is what you do. File: PSP_ebook.zip This is safe, scan the file with your virus software, all it is, is a zip file with 2 files in it. 1) index.html file and 2) the background image. You unzip the files and put them in your PSP in the folder – PSP/books. You have to create that books folder. I did that to make it easier to find the file in your browser so you don’t have to type too much to find it.
When you buy ebooks you might be able to buy them in pdf format, if you can here is a sweet utility that will convert them to html. If the e-book store offers an html version then all the better for you because you won’t have to worry about converting anything.
When you have your html files of your ebooks you put them in your PSP in the folder – PSP/COMMON/books. You will have to create that books folder. When you open an e-book file you cannot choose to find them in the same location as the index file, they have to be in a higher folder like Common.
Now here is what you do. Go into the browser of your PSP, type this in the address bar:
file:/PSP/books/index.html
Now bookmark that so you don’t have to type it in every time. Now just click Browse, scroll down to /PSP/COMMON/books and click that then find the name of the book you uploaded into the PSP and click it and viola, your PSP is now an e-book reader.
There is a downside, you won’t be able to bookmark at all. Fortunately when you leave the browser, once you go back into it you will be right back where you left off. That is if you didn’t load an actual website which would close the point you stopped reading. If you did that then you would have to scroll down to where you left off at.
If your PDF had chapters with links then you can use those links to find the chapter you were on.
I give the NIMS program a 1 out of 5 for the fact that the e-book I chose to convert looked terrible as an e-book in my PSP. I give my conversion of their program a 4 out of 5 because it has no bookmarking ability but it works better than their idea.
I’ve finally figured out how to turn my PSP into an eBook reader. I’ve googled the term “PSP e-book reader” before with bad results. You know, those homebrew programs. Yeah, that’s a bad result. I refuse to brick up my PSP just so I can see if I can read an ebook on it.
In my google search I did find a message board where they talked about a PSP e-book reader so I checked out a couple of ideas, this is one of them.
“ PSP eBook Creator ” which is actually not a bad program. What you do is click File then open a “.txt” file, you can change it from portrait to landscape, change the background color or give it an image, change the text color, change the font, font size and make it bold or regular then create an output folder then build your e-book files. Once all the images are made all you need to do is upload the folder to your PSP Picture folder, turn it on and start reading.
What it does though is it creates an image for every page of the e-book . If this is a long e-book, this process will take a long time and the size of the entire book might be huge especially if you are running low on space. Not to mention that you won’t have a book cover image to look at since all the files were taken from a text file.
Since it only uses text files you will have to figure out a way to convert your e-book to text format with Calibre.
Here is a sample of what one of the pages will look like in text format as a .jpg file.
It’s not a bad image to look at although you will see some boxes here and there (as seen before Cover Photo Credit…). I read this book from beginning to end last night on my PSP just to see if it would hurt my eyes at all and even though it’s not that long of a book my eyes were ok for a while. But if it were a 400 page novel I’m sure that reading on a PSP would start to hurt your eyes after an hour unlike e-Ink.
If I were to make some changes to make it easier on the eyes I would probably put in a dark background image, make the text white, bold and bigger. For this test I made the font Comic Sans regular size 12. Default is regular (non bold), size 10 but I don’t know what the default font is.
You don’t have to worry about a bookmark since all you have to do is leave the image part of the PSP. Once you go back into it you will be right back on the last page (or image) you were on. That is unless you turned the PSP all the way off, then you would have to find where you were again.
If I were to give this a rating I would give it a 3 out of 5.
I’m having a nightmare, or really, I’m about to start reading Night Mare, the 6th installment in the Xanth series by Piers Anthony.
This next book begins with a character that was in the previous book, Ogre, Ogre. Mare Imbrium along with 2 other night mares rode the trio out of the Void and took her payment of a half soul. Here is the synopsis from the back of the book.
“The Nextwave of barbarian warriors was invading Xanth from the north, ravaging and destroying as they advanced. But Mare Imbrium had her own problems. Ever since she had gained the half soul, the night mare had begun to mishandle her job of delivering bad dreams. Now the Night Stallion dismissed her, exiling her to the day world with a message for King Trent: “Beware the Horseman!” She had no idea of what that meant. But that was the way with prophetic warnings, nobody could understand them until it was too late. Then she met the Horseman. And she discovered that one who would ride a night mare was a master of bit and spur, and not a man to surrender her. For the night mare, it began to be all a horrible nightmare!”
When I read the previous Xanth books, I read them little by little over time, some days I only read 1 chapter per day and other days I skipped reading. I was into the books but not that much apparently because they made me sleepy. But when I read Ogre, Ogre I was able to commit myself to reading more than 1 chapter per day. In fact, I read the first chapter maybe in February then gave up until recently when I read the entire book in 3 days.
If I can read the entire book in 3 days then I have a feeling that maybe I can read half of the next book today and the other half tomorrow.
I only have 4 more Xanth novels in my queue, although there are 32 available for sale, I don’t own any of them so they are not all in my book queue. I do plan on buying more but for now I have other books to read.
If you have not read the Xanth novels you are missing out on some great adventures.
Xanapus` Lair 