How do I stop my Firestick from optimizing?

Well, the other day I noticed that my USB charging cable for my Amazon Fire Stick was broken. So I just dug into my USB cable carton and get the next best USB micro charger and replaced the broken one.
Done.

I thought.

A couple of days later I found the stick busy  "Optimizing systems storage and applications...", letting me know "This will take approximately 10 minutes to complete.".
Fair enough... You do your thing then...

Well, it never completed, Even rebooting did not help.



So I googled, and found a bunch of useless videos, that show you the stuck message for minutes and complain about the stick being stuck... and that not even Alexa would work.  No sh$t, Sherlock.


Oddly enough, the cause (as those google searches revealed) was related to me changing the power supply/cable. Shouldn't have picked the cheapest one.
Went back to the USB cable box, took a more expensive looking cable, and - voila - after completing the optimization the stick is now back running as it should.

And I just saved you half an hour of your life watching those not-really-helping videos.
You're welcome.

Public Ads for the Amazon Store

In Android-Land the amazon app store is this mythical creature... romoured to exist, but not a lot of people have actually seen it ... except - of course - if you are a Fire user. An even rarer and more mythical creature then :)

So I was quite surprised last week on the London tube to see Amazon being advertised for an app right next to the Apple App Store and Google play.

Something's odd here

In tablets we currently observe two business models:

The Apple model -  make money on the hardware, therefore lock users in,  and make sure that there's enough content available for iOS to do so

The Amazon model - get consumers to buy content and stuff from Amazon,  and make sure they have a device for this.

What is odd here,  is that the Apple model,  which depends on globally availability and distribution of a physical goods (the iPad) is more scalable than the distribution of purely electric or virtual goods (content) in the Amazon model, because Amazon is (still) limited by availability of said content in each country and has to negotiate it...

Sick.

My Kindle Experience So Far

I have read a couple of books on my Kindle so far. Here's what I found out:

1. The Kindle is an excellent reading device. The e-ink display has the perfect contrast for reading... Once you started reading on a Kindle (or just looking at it) you'll never ever consider reading a book on the iPad again. Trust me.
   Not surprisingly, the display/e-ink quality was my reason for buying a Kindle:
   My actual craving for this device started on the tube in London, when I first got a glimpse at a kindle of a fellow passenger. My first thought was "This is a mockup". Honestly. I really thought someone just glued some paper on some dark carton, before I realized this was the real thing. (Well, the real kindle... not real paper).
2. Buying books for the Kindle is - of course - even more instant than buying a paper-book on Amazon (which is still amazingly simple). It's a matter of seconds.
3. That said, I still browse for books and buy them from my PC/Laptop. I do this very rarely on the Kindle directly. The userinterface and "browser" speed there is simply not suitable for this. It's a reading device after all. Not a tablet or a PDA.
4. Sharing books - forget it.
   With my wife working in a book store, we share a lot of books. It was quite common that I picked up a book which she just had finished (reading). Well, it's different now on the kindle, because I would have to share the device with her..
   So while I'm reading book A (on the Kindle) she of course cannot read book B (on the same Kindle). This used to work pretty well with real books :)
   Maybe she should get her own Kindle[1].
5. Privacy
   When you read a book - say - on the underground, everyone can see what you're reading. This could be embarrassing... depending on your choice of books. With a Kindle, no one knows what you read.
6. Publicity
   As I just said, with a Kindle, no one knows what you read.There's no visible/public bookshelf - in your home. So you cannot brag with your library. Most of us judge people by their library, in a way. And really, browsing the backs of the books on a friend's bookshelf sometimes gives excellent conversations and recommendations. This will have to work differently with a Kindle. You will have to ...
7. ... share
   So if you want to have the publicity about your reading habits, about your library, you'll have to do this actively, like in a blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Google+, on Goodreads. You'll even have a bigger audience there.
8. As for the act and experience of reading itself. NO DIFFERENCE.
   We'll maybe for books with illustrations :-)
   But when it comes to being able to concentrate, or (not) getting distracted, or getting tired... no difference to a real book. I came to prefer the Kindle over books when it comes to the shape and how you hold the thing... it's lighter (in most cases), there's no clumsy page turning (as with thick books), ...

Don't get me wrong; I still LOVE real books. And I still read them... (see the problem with sharing above). But there is nothing to be said against the Kindle. 

--

[1] yeah right... like booksellers would buy a Kindle...

The Amazon Kindle tablet

I'm pretty sure that the details MG Siegler provided on the roumored Amazon Tablet - allegedly to be called Kindle like the ebook reader - are accurate.

So it will be a 7" Android device, without any of that Google stuff, a less sophisticated multitouch, but full Amazon store integration.

The ultimate Amazon shopping device.
The perfect media consumption device, that does not even pretend to be for work and all the enterprisy stuff.

Calling this an Android tablet is probably wrong - even if technically correct - and misleading for both, this gadget and all the other "real" Android tablets.

Its a multimedia kindle.

Recommendations

I do enjoy "digital" recommendations, both Amazon-style (with just pattern matching on clicks and orders) and the social way, i.e. recommendations you get from your social networks via Facebook, Twitter and co.

But it's also really nice to see the old-fashioned analog recommendation at work, like two weeks ago in London.

As is almost mandatory we were a Foyles.. most probably the best book store in the world.
With the best Jazz (and world-music) department... (at least for a book-store).

While I was browsing their Jazz CD titles there, sorting through the Keith Jarretts... I noticed the excellent music they were playing in the background... So I asked the guy at the counter, he smiled, pointed to the "Currently Playing" display right next to him, looked at the two Keith Jarrett albums I was about to buy and added something in the lines of "You will love this if you like Keith Jarrett", and then went to shelf to get the CD for me.

The artist is Gwilym Simcock ... a jazz and classical piano player I have to admit I have never heard of, and the album in question is Good Days at Schloss Elmau. Now part of my CD collection.

Maybe Amazon could have done this as well... it would definitely fit my buying pattern there... but this analog recommendation was a nice experience and flash-back into the eighties. When "social" was still something you experienced in person.

BTW: this reminds me of the early days of digital recommendations some 10+ years ago, when we were discussing locations based services(LBS) and restaurant recommendations (based on location). We were talking so some providers of LBS and ranting about the quality problems of such recommendations, when one of their managers said "You can't even get a decent restaurant recommendation out of a human being."

True.

Cloud rants

With the outage of the Amazon S3 storage about two weeks ago  and the downtime of the Playstation Network (PSN) due to security problems, the cloud sceptics are on the rise again.

The usual “we told you so” and “the cloud is not safe”... etc etc.

Two thoughts on this

1. Show me one internal IT operation that has an availability or up-time like S3.
2. If people would only spend the right amount of money on the cloud services and subscribe to the full package with proper redundancies, etc etc this would probably not happen.
   Well, the single outage at one Amazon site will still happen, but not the same net effect on all the other services.

I guess one of the reasons is, that IT managers or CxOs compare the cheapest price they find on the brochures for the cloud services with their internal (total) cost. And then tend to buy only the cheapest flavor of whatever cloud service they want, without any consideration regarding availability (don't even get me started on security).

Like at least one IT manager who I heard complaining how expansive 1 TB of storage is in an enterprise grade storage box (or even in a SAN) when they can get 1TB for roughly 50€ as a USB disk...

When recommandation engines start to bug...

Amazon for instance keeps recommending Freedom TM to me[1], although I marked it as "I own it" ("Gehört mir" on amazon.de) and also rated it... the very edition, they keep recommending to me... for weeks now...

And as if this was not annoying enough, Facebook today started recommending that I like Black Books (the hilarious UK TV series), although I liked it on Facebook months ago...[2]

So could you guys please all go back to your desks and fix your recommendation engines... they bug me.
Thank you.
--
[1] OK, I sort of keep recommending it to you guys as well, but that's beside the point.
[2] I just noticed that the verb "[facebook] like" works a bit different than "[real-world] like"

Great Fun with Amazon images

Abusing Amazon images:

"Amazon.com feeds out a lot of product images, putting out the same book cover (say) in a variety of sizes and formats. By experimentation, I found that they don't actually have all the sizes and formats stored. Instead, they have a system that generates each requested image. The details of size and format are built into the image's URL."

great details on the URL structure of Amazon images.

Read it, learn it, live it.

What I Read - II

Finally, you regular readers of my blog (thank you, btw) may have noticed that there was some activity in the right column here (->).
Apart from having an Upcoming box, I finally automated the What I Read widget as I mentioned earlier.
Basically it's a tiny, tiny database ("databasette") that holds the data, a (localhost only) web application for me to maintain it, e.g. search the title/author/isbn on amazon, put it into the database, attach my "reading" data to it.

The data is then published as a javascript file at my (static!!) webspace. When I say "published"... well, its just a little script that wgets the data locally and ftps them to my webspace account. But hey, it works.
The javascript is "widget-ready" to be included in my blog.

New and improved: there is now also an Atom feed for it.
It is good for google reader, but the feed widget on blogger fails to display the images... so I stick with the javascript version there.

What I Read

In the right column of this blog you may have noticed a new little feature called "What I read"...
Basically this is a little javascript to embed that lists the books I am currently reading (and nicely links to Amazon, of course).

Amazing what you can do with a little jscript...

Currently this is a manually created thing, but I'm working on a nice little Java (web) application at home that will help me create and upload this jscript file automatically, e.g. search title from amazon (using the amazon webservices) and fill in the author and ISBN details, etc, etc.

Stay tuned.

ISBN cross referencing

A couple of weeks ago, m³ posted a rant, on how Amazon webservices don't have a consistent ASIN accross amazon stores. He gave a book example, where I retorted in my comment on this blog, that this was not Amazon's fault, but simply the fact, that different editions of the very „same“ book simply have to have different ISBN (and Amazon relies on the ISBN for book, and I'm glad they do).

Now I just discovered a service, that cross-links the various ISBNs for what we consider the „same“ book:

OCLC Openly Informatics

xISBN

The service is quite simple – you pass in an ISBN and get a list of ISBNs that reflect related editions of this book. There's a nice FAQ ( pdf) for it.

Try this link for the latest (and hopefully last) Harry Potter.

It is not a total solution to m³'s problem, but seems to be an incredible useful service by the OCLC – the Online Computer Library Center.

User Generated Content ?

I dislike the term "User Generated Content" for various reasons... I for example, when I blog, do not consider myself as a "content creating user"... much less a generator...
To me, it is not "content" what I produce/write/publish/"generate"... just thoughts, rants, bits and pieces of information ... "Content" is too generic a term to apply to ones own ... eh ... things.

As a consequence, I usually like to mock the term as "Useless, generated content" (fully aware that it of course can be applied to my own blabber here).

But just a few minutes ago, I learned what "useless, generated content" really is: just browse the "Books starting at 2.98 EUR" section at Amazon... the number of totally useless and pointless books you can find there... wow...

Amazon supports RSS web feeds

Finally amazon.com (not .de or .at, mind you) supports RSS feeds based on product tags.
RSS web feeds for tagged products (syndication)

So you can have all the newly available (or upcoming) products in your RSS reader, provided you find the right tags.
Unfortunately they do no allow combinations of tags, so you can search for e.g. "Seinfeld" but not for "Seinfeld + DVD"; neither a "+" (a.k.a. urlencoded space) nor %2B nor %26 (+ and & respectively) do work. Concatenating the tags like /seinfeld/dvd/... doesn't work either.

Well, as long as they don't have it in an amazon near me (i.e. .de or .at) it doesn't really bother me that much.