This proved not to be so easy as the Roku didn’t seem to fit into any of the existing categories of Television, Amplifier, Cable/Satellite Box, Video Recorder, DVD, Music Player, Game Console, Mini System, Computer, Home Automation, or More Device Types. Well, I thought it fit into Mini System or Home Device Types, but those two categories were comprised of Mini System (DVD, CD, Radio), Mini System (CD, Radio, Cassette), and Mini System (DVD, VCR, Radio), and Tape Deck, Minidisc Player, and DAT, respectively. After some playing around I finally found it. Apparently, the Roku is a DVD Player! Or at least that’s what Logitech says.

Inside the Logitech Harmony Remote Software (I have version 7.7.0), do the following:

1. Go to Devices
2. Click Add Device
3. From the first dropdown, select DVD as the category and DVD as the subcategory
4. Select Roku as the Manufacturer
5. Enter your model (mine is an N1100, the example is N1000)
6. Click Next
7. It will show your device, then click Next again
8. Scroll through your list of devices and click Settings on the one named DVD (this is your Roku’s default name)
9. Select Rename this device from the list
10. Click Next
11. Enter the new name (i.e. “Roku” or “Roku HD”)
12. Click Save
13. Click Done

Congrats! You now have your Roku player associated with your Logitech Remote. Now you can add it to any activities you like or create new ones.

The Screen – I never really thought of the screen on the Kindle 2 as “pale”, but looking at the K2 and K3 side by side, text on the K3 is much darker.  Amazon says the screen contrast has been up’ed by 50%, and I’ve got no way to prove that – but it does look much nicer.  They also made the screen flips faster.  I’m not sure how much faster, maybe another 50% faster.  Needless to say it is very fast and shouldn’t be problem unless you’re stabbing the page button as fast as you can.

Size and Weight – Amazon says the K3 is 21% smaller and 15% lighter than the K2.  This is obvious right off the bat; as soon as you pick up the device you will feel the difference. At this point, the weight of the device only makes a difference for long reading sessions, but I know the K3 will be nicer to hold in the longer run.  As for the size, if you take off the top bar and right bar of the K2, you’ve got the size of the K3.  The one thing I will note, the K2 and K3 are exactly the same thickness, so nothing has changed there.

The Exterior – Everyone knows the Kindle 1 was not exactly a sleek device.  The K2 definitely fixed that issue.  The K3 improves yet again upon the sleekness.  First off, they moved the speakers to the top (back) of the K3, so your hands aren’t covering it.  Second, they moved the power button, headphone jack, and volume control to the bottom of the device.  I do mean the absolute bottom, on the same line as the power charger (which is still Micro-USB, thankfully).  Lastly, One very nice and unexpected change was the case itself.  They made the entire unit one type of plastic (no more brushed metal back).  This (what I am assuming is a new) material also has been given a slight rubbery feel.  It isn’t so much that it feels like you are holding a tire, but just enough so the Kindle 3 doesn’t feel so slippery.  Plus you can prop it up on a slippery surface (like a hard plastic palm rest of a keyboard) and it is much less likely to slide.

The Speakers – While the Text-to-Speech feature on the Kindle is nifty, I rarely use it.  Generally, when I want to read, I want to actually read.  That being said, I’ve been known to load up a few MP3s on my Kindle 2 so I can listen to some tunes as I read.  Just for fun, I loaded up the same MP3 on the K2 and the K3 and I’ve got to say, the Kindle 3 sounds much better. The Kindle isn’t going to win any awards as an MP3 player, but the speakers do play a fairly good rendition of the music.  They are much less prone to clipping on the high volumes, and possess a much more balanced tonal range.  Heck, I can even feel the slightest hint of bass coming from the unit on the drum beats.  Sure, it isn’t going to blow out any windows, but for an eBook reader, it is impressive.

The Page Buttons – So the Kindle 1 had HUGE buttons that were way to easy to accidentally press.  In the refined Kindle 2, the buttons were much smaller, but still had a tendency for accidental activation.  For me they were a problem after longer reading sessions where I ended up wanting to hold the K2 almost on top of the button because that was most comfortable for me.  In the K3, the buttons are tiny.  The K2′s buttons measure 1/2″ in width, the K3′s measure in at about 3/16′s of an inch (that’s less than half the size).  Effectively, the K3′s buttons are just the edge of the unit.  They’ve also changed up the layout a bit so Next Page and Previous Page are on both sides, while Home, Menu, Back, and the direction pad have been moved to keyboard.

The Keyboard – With the exception of the addition of the Menu, Home, and Back keys, the keyboard doesn’t look much different.  They did remove all the numbers (they now appear after clicking the Symbols button) and the forward slash.  With the shrinkage of the case, the keyboard also takes up less real estate.  The keys themselves are the same size, but the space in between them is greatly reduced.  I haven’t done much typing yet, but the keyboard seems to be much of the same.  The new direction pad, on the other hand, is quite nice.  It is smooth and integrated.  Most importantly, the K3′s direction pad doesn’t stick out like the K2′s joystick.

The Reading Interface – Most of the Kindle 3′s interface is just like it is on the Kindle 2 (nothing major enough to worth noting), but they made a number of changes to the reading interface which are quite nice.  First off, once you are into a book, the title bar (containing title, time, etc) disappears.  If you press the menu button, it reappears to tell you the book title, time, wifi status, 3g status, and battery status. The only difference from the K2 is the fact that the K3 no longer shows you the amount of free space.  Note: this is only when reading a book; when you are at the home screen, pressing Menu will still show you the free space.  The second change was to get rid of the bottom “bar” of empty space that you had in the K2.  In the K3, the location bar is now directly flush against the bottom of the screen.  These two changes combine to give you 3-4 more lines of reading space out of the same screen (on the smaller font settings).  The third change is the addition of new options in the font settings.  In the Kindle 2 you could change only the font size and “Words per line”.  In the Kindle 3 they have also added “Typeface” which gives you the options of “regular”, “condensed” and “sans serif”.  You also have “Line Spacing” with the options of “small”, “medium”, and “large” which reduces the amount of vertical space between lines (the “large” option is the default, and the size the Kindle 2 used).

In conclusion: If you don’t already have a Kindle and have been thinking about it, go buy a Kindle 3.
As for whether it is worth the upgrade, to me it definitely is, heck I thought it was worth it when I first heard about them, which is why mine arrived yesterday (Editor’s note: Jon preordered THE moment he heard about it.).
The question you should be asking yourself is: Are there any items in this list that I really wish I had on my Kindle?

Since the iPhone burst onto the scene in 2007 with its “game changing” multi-touching, nothing has been the same. There have also been numerous articles as of late on how mobile devices are outselling PCs. Some of them are fairly vague as to what exactly is a mobile device (i.e. do Laptops count as PCs or mobiles?). Irregardless, it does go to show that there are a LOT of mobiles selling, and that will continue to be a big market in the future.

Linux has been predominantly server-only as far as operating systems go. Sure, you can use Linux on your desktop, and I had as far back as Red Hat 6.0 in the 90s, but it wasn’t an end-user friendly experience. Canonical and Ubuntu have been slowly but surely changing this, with their “For humans” drive. They’ve even gone as far as releasing Ubuntu Netbook Remix (which I’ve covered a number of times here) which is rather slick as far as netbook OSes go.

If Ubuntu can get GUI software projects to include multi-touch support in their applications, the game for larger mobile devices, tablets and netbooks, could change radically. A true and proper operating system (that can do more than just watch videos and punch out email, like the iPad), with great touch support could potentially put a serious hurt on the iPad. Sure, part of the iPad’s appeal is the hardware, and no arguing that is nice (for what it is), but hardware is easy to replicate.

One of the biggest challenges for Linux adoption has been the fact that it isn’t Windows or Mac. Simply the lack of ability to run your favorite applications is the biggest drawback for most people. On the mobile/tablet device market, no one cares. Windows Mobile, Android, Blackberry, iOS… all of them are custom made for their devices (cell phones) and form factors, and no one cares. For Tablets you choices are only iOS (on the iPad) and Windows 7 (for everything else). While Win 7 for Tablets is the same OS, people don’t care nearly as much. The tasks you want to accomplish on a Tablet are different than those on a desktop or notebook.

As much as I’d like to hope for it, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverik) isn’t going to drastically change the game. It will show us the potential of Open Source Multi-Touch, but in a limited fashion. After all, the release is only 2 months off. Ubuntu 11.04 (P) will probably refine muti-touch nicely and add support from a number of applications. One (specifically this OSS nerd) can only hope that the rest of the Linux community will adopt the same standards, if not the same code base. Fragmentation of this new “basic input” would be lethal.

Like a good Open Source nerd, I Google’d about and found a potential answer. You need to:

• Boot into Grub (hold down shift after the BIOS finishes, and before the Ubuntu logo comes up)
• Select your default boot option, hit “e” (For Edit)
• Change the launch line (which starts with ‘linux’) and append “forceversa i905.mode=0″.

Except in my case, that was already there. So I tried removing this. Now the computer booted (heard the Ubuntu startup noise), but the screen was still dead. I had caught a line somewhere that someone had a similar issue and that it was simply the machine redirecting all graphical output to the external display. I plugged in an external LCD and confirmed I was getting output.

Since I had a semi-functional machine at this point, I hoped that doing an apt-get update / apt-get dist-upgrade would solve the problem. The machine was a clean install, so it needed 250 some updates, including a new kernel. New kernels are always promising in my book. After waiting for several hours (slow internet), the update completed and I rebooted the machine. No dice. The latest Kernel for 10.04 Lucid, does nothing.

Eventually I found this bug entry, which I believe is the issue. The last comment, from just about a few days prior to my fix attempt, indicated this will be resolved in 10.04.2. This is great news, except for the fact that .2 isn’t scheduled to be out until late January 2011. But that at least gave me hope that there was a fix in the works.  I decided to take shot in the dark and tried installing the kernel daily build.  The kernel I installed was from 2010-07-27 and works.  By works I mean the machine boots normally AND the screen displays properly.

So, if you have this issue and don’t want to wait, use a daily build kernel.  Now, I really dislike using a non-tested kernel like this for a standard user’s machine (if it was for myself, it wouldn’t be a big deal), but there isn’t much of a choice.  Without the new kernel, there aren’t many other options, other than telling the user “Sorry, you can’t use this computer” – and that tends to go over poorly.  So, new kernel = good (fixed), but can add some risk.  Let’s just hope the user doesn’t dist-upgrade to a new (older) re-broken kernel.

The instructions listed below are “shortcuts” to completely nuke the Cisco 2600/2800/3600/3800 routers back to default.  If you want to keep the configuration, but reset the password, it is just a few more steps.  You can find the official documentation for the 2600/2800 series and the 3600/3800 series on Cisco’s site.  Though the steps are exactly the same for both.

Before you start, you’re going to need to connect to the serial (Console) port on the routers.  If you don’t have the cables already, I like the StarTech RJ45 to DB9 cable, and the Startech USB to Serial DB9 adapter, since none of my computers have serial ports any more.  Once you’ve got both of those, the fix is easy:

• Plug your computer into the console port
• Launch your terminal of choice (I like PuTTY)
• Turn on the router
• Right as the boot process starts, Press Ctrl+Break
• You will be dumped into “rommon”, type in: confreg 0×2142
• reset
• When it reboots and asks “Would you like to enter the initial configuration dialog? [yes/no]:” enter “no“
• enable
• To verify the router is blank: show running-config
• configure terminal
• config-register 0×2102
• exit
• write mem

As soon as you enter “write mem”, the blank configuration will be written to the flash (as is Cisco standard behavior).  You can now reconfigure the routers as you see fit.  You can set a new enable password, should you like.  In my test environment, I leave them without password (one less thing to forget and need to reset – AGAIN).

I think SanDisk has slowly gotten this message as they’ve now got a fairly easy to find instruction page on how to remove U3.  It is quite simple now too:

• Download the “U3 Removal Tool“
• Open the zip file
• Execute launchpadremoval.exe
• Follow the instructions, and it will nuke your USB drive of U3

Easy.  But SanDisk could make it a step or two easier.  How about you just NOT INSTALL U3 in the first place?  Yea, I know, good idea.

Unlike the DX, the Kindle 3 will still be available in the classic white along with the new graphite.

According to Amazon here’s the benefits of the new model, along with my thoughts:

1. 21% smaller body, same 6″ reading area – Nice to have, better fit into pockets, although this means my existing case won’t work for it
2. 15% lighter – Wasn’t very heavy to begin with
3. 50% improved screen contrast – This and the next item will help enhance readability
4. Crisper, darker fonts
5. Double the storage – The Kindle 2 had 2 GB of storage (well 1.5 GB really). I wasn’t in danger of filling it up, but I do know some who had, definitely a plus.
6. Faster, quieter page turns – Faster page refresh is great, this means that the eInk technology is continuing to get better. Quieter probably has to do with changes to the buttons.
7. Built-in Wi-Fi – Woohoo! Wi-Fi is something that many people have been asking for, especially those who live somewhere that cell reception is… spotty at best, and/or where 3G coverage is a joke.
8. Enhanced PDF reader – The last firmware update added support for a PDF reader, but it still seemed to show a full page on the 6″ screen. I’m eager to see what this will look like.
9. Soft-touch textured back
10. New WebKit-based browser – I’ve never had too many problems with the existing browser, but I don’t use it that much.
11. Voice Guide read-to-me menus – I don’t have the Kindle read to me, but if you do, then I guess this is a great new feature.

Along with all these spiffy new features, Amazon has released a new model, the Kindle 3 Wi-Fi only. I’m not particularly interested in a Wi-Fi only model, and since the price difference is only $50… I wouldn’t particularly recommend it over the full 3G model. The way I see it, you are paying $50 more to be able to get new books (and possibly more importantly, have internet access) wherever you have a cell signal. However, given that it is starting out at $139, once they start having refurbs we will see a Kindle under the mystical $100 price point. And given that woot.com is now owned by Amazon, I would be willing to bet we will see them with it first. You will have to act quick, since the $149 kindle sale lasted less than 8.5 Hours before they sold out.

Now to the burning question: Should existing Kindle owners upgrade and/or is now the time to finally get a Kindle?
If you don’t already have a Kindle, then yes, you should be buying a Kindle 3. Of course, I am biased and think everyone should have a kindle. Jon and I both love our kindles and have no qualms about espousing our delights.
As for upgrades… it really depends on your situation. If you are a Kindle 1 user or someone who is constantly having to shuffle books around, you might want to make the move. On the other hand, if you have the Kindle 2 (either USA or International version), and aren’t having space issues, you might not need to make the move.

Jon has already preordered the new kindle, along with the spiffy new case which has a light that actually draws power from the Kindle. I am still slightly on the fence about it all, but I will probably be giving in; it looks like a nice set of improvements I must say.

Lastly, I looked over an old post Jon wrote Wishlist for a “Kindle 3″. The only item from Jon’s list that made it was “Better sorting/folders”, but that was added in a firmware release earlier this year. The “Crisper, darker fonts” might be indicative of a “Higher DPI screen (200-300 DPI)”, but we’ll have to wait and see about that.

The only real differences I’ve noticed off hand are:

• My lock screen image is now my wallpaper image.
• The home screen now has “dots” to indicate which screen your on.
• There are folders
  • The system is fairly intuitive and generally picks a fairly useful name
  • You are limited to 12 applications in one folder, which I dislike. Not even enough to fit all the system applications
  • The small app icons are a little fuzzy, but generally good enough
• Some of the system icons got slightly revamped
• The unified mail inbox
• Faux Multi-Tasking
  • Ok, it does actually “multitask” but extremely limited API is still … unfriendly.
  • I launched Pandora, and clicked “Home” and still had music playing, simple enough.
  • If another app played a sound, it faded out Pandora, played the sound, and faded it back in – fairly normal.
  • Double clicking the home button “raised” any current screen I was on and brought up the task manager
  • Task manager lists the last 4 apps you were on, even if they aren’t multitasking compatible (to the best I can tell).

All in all, it doesn’t feel like a major change from the previous version. Not as big of a change as some of the previous upgrades. It is nice that Apple has finally “figured out” (::cough:: stopped screwing over ::cough::) how to give the updates to the iPod Touch owners without charge. I don’t think there is enough new in the release of iOS to warrant paying $5 (or whatever the last upgrade price was). For as much as this release was hyped, I’m totally underwhelmed.

UPDATE: I went to stop playing music on the iPhone, and generally shut it down (I dont use it much) and it picked up a new trick: “Screeching” – best I can define it.  It is almost like a feedback loop.  I went into the task manager and exited all the applications, but that didn’t fix it.  The only way to stop this was to reboot the phone and hope it doesn’t happen again.  I shot a video of it (With my Nexus One) to demonstrate how it happens and what is sounds like – you may want to turn your volume down.

Barnes and Nobles also offers a WiFi only version for $149 which has given credence to the (as yet unsubstantiated) rumors that Amazon is working on a WiFi only version of the Kindle.

Since Jon and I are both big Kindle lovers/supporters/fanboys we will keep you updated as new information is released.

The original complaint was that the desktop couldn’t recognize a multimedia card reader (she was trying to offload some photos), which my netbook had no problem with. Next, I tried plugging in her iPod Nano (1G) which both iTunes and Windows also claimed were not formatted correctly. Then I tried my iPod Touch (2G), which worked without a problem. Finally, I decided to unplug the working USB mouse and use its port to plug in “not formatted” devices. No dice, and when I plugged the mouse back in, it didn’t work any more. At this point, the only functioning USB device I had was the keyboard. So I rebooted, which gave me the mouse back, but still no luck on the other devices.

Solution:

1. Boot the machine with Windows 7 install disk
2. Click ok/next on the first screen (asking about language and such)
3. At the next screen, instead of clicking Install, select Repair.
4. It will look for your install, once it finds it click Next then launch a command prompt.
5. Plug in the USB device
6. Navigate to it via command prompt (just keep trying drive letters till you find it).
7. Once you are there, give it a dir
8. If that works, try any other malfunctioning devices (I just did the card reader, didn’t try the iPod).
9. Reboot.

Once Windows 7 boots back up, the devices (including the iPod) worked again. Huzah!

It seems that INFCACHE.1 may have been the culprit, I couldn’t find it to delete it while in Windows (it is supposed to be in C:\WINDOWS\inf), but I saw it from the recovery console and figured that it might be the cache generated by the recovery process, which was in fact working, so I left it on there (rather than deleting it, which was my first instinct) and now things are working great.