It’s hard to explain … I have big hard disks to store all the photos, and of course good software to manipulate / view / backup the photos. However, I still like to print the photos out, and then look at them, touch them, smell them … So here is it, my second photo book – Mirror with memory (this link works for iPad as well).

This photo book is a collection of my travel photos in the past 3 years with Olympus E-510 and E-P1.

Enjoy some samples below (for non-iPad browser only) !!

There are 6 models of Kindle you can buy now from Amazon.com, the Kindle DX (with white or graphite colors, in different prices), the Kindle with Free 3G + Wi-Fi, and the Kindle with Wi-Fi only (both with white or graphite colors). Each of these Kindles is good device to read, but which Kindle shall you buy ?

To answer this question, I draw up the following flowchart and hope you will find it useful.

Don’t miss all the other Kindle blog posts !!

I learnt this proverb for quite sometime, but not really appreciate the meaning behind it until three years ago … In year 2007 today I started the 49 days treatment of a serious heart disease, and every now and then I still ask myself whether it was just a dream or something really happened (for those who are fans of the movie Inception, you understand what I’m talking about).

Guess it will probably take me ages to accept such event really has taken place, even though I can see the 10-inches scar on my chest every day. And it will also take me a long time to complete the self-healing, in other words, to truely believe that I have recovered – such that I shall not treat myself as a patience / victim anymore.

The self-healing process has taken such a long time, I reckon, is probably because the six, seven weeks of treatment in the hospital was so painful, so disturbing and so discouraging that I wondered it would never end. However, with the support from family members, friends, colleagues and of course the doctors, nurses and staff in the hospital; I managed to complete the treatment in seven weeks.

Granted, it was painful, but I also learnt that suffering was optional – you need a positive mindset to go thru all the hurdles in life. So, be thankful to every sunrise, sunset and live your life to its fullest.

I have my Kindle 2 for over a year now and since the launch of iPad in April, people keep asking me a boring question, that is – “Why Kindle ?”. And of course, the question always follow by another equally boring one, that is – “Why not iPad ?”. In most cases, I answer the two questions with another question – “How many books have you read in the past 12 months ?”.

“Errh … may be one or two.” is the typical answer. And I think they answer their own questions.

Late last month, Amazon launched the Kindle 3 and Jeff Bezos was interviewed by the acclaimed interviewer and broadcast journalist, Charlie Rose. And now I know, what’s the best answer to these questions.

Straight from Jeff Bezos:

“I would say something though like we’re trying to get out of the way.  We’re not trying to create an experience.  We want the author to create the experience.  You know, if you’re going to read Nabokov or Hemmingway or we want us creating the experience for.  That’s not our job.  Our job is to provide the convenience.  That you can get books in 60 seconds, that you can carry your whole library with you so that you don’t get hand strain, so the device doesn’t get hot in your hands, so that it doesn’t cause eye strain, so that the battery life lasts a month, so you never get battery anxiety …

Now people say why don’t you add a touch screen?  Well, the reason we don’t want a touch screen is if we’re going down that decision path, we say, okay, a touch screen and the current technology for touch screens — it’s called capacitive touch — it’s a layer that goes on top of that display.
 It adds glare.  The first thing that you do when you add a touch display is that you add a little extra layer of glass or plastic and a little bit of glare.  So it’s very easy from an engineering point of view to add a touch screen but it’s not the right thing if you’re making no compromises and that’s our point of view on this.  We want a device that’s for uncompromised reading and guess what?  Our approach is working.”

Yes, if you read lots of books a year, in long-form reading style, then you need Kindle. Period.

So you have decided to go for the iPhone 4 after all the reviews of exciting features (if you are an Apple fanboy) and news / blogs about the antennagate (and you really don’t care). Here are the steps you need to do to migrate your trusty iPhone 3G / 3GS to the iPhone 4.

1. Make sure your old iPhone has performed a complete backup via the iTunes
2. If you’re using Kindle for iPhone, deregister the device (from within the application).
3. Make sure you have Internet connection, such that iTunes can access iTunes store. Connect your new iPhone 4 to your PC running iTunes and register your new iPhone 4, with your Apple ID.
4. Since your iPhone 4 come with iOS 4.0 only, download and install the iOS 4.0.1, thru the iTunes (so pretty much automatically)
5. Restore the content / applications / setting from the iTunes backup image to your new phone
6. Check all the settings to see things are in good order. Check all the email accounts / applications, by running each of the applications once and enter application-dependent password again (if neccessary).
7. If your old phone has upgraded to iOS 4.x and you have created folders. Bad news, you have to organize the folders and applications in your new iPhone again. Somehow the restoration will migrate the folders but not moving the applications to the right folder as set up in your old phone.
8. Install the iPhone case program application to your iPhone. Run the application with appropriate Apple ID password, and pick the case you like. For review and photos of the cases, here is a good resource.
9. Erase the iPhone 3G content via Settings / General / Reset / “Erase all content and settings”, confirm two times and it’s done (it will take long time to finish the erase, however). Now you can pass the phone to your friends or family members.
10. Very last step, install some good looking wallpapers like I did in the new iPhone 4:

Oh, 16 months after my Kindle 2, the new generation of Kindle is announced today (Kindle 3). Available from 27th August (in over 140 countries), the new Kindle is 21 percent smaller, 17 percent lighter, more memory (4GB), better battery life (up to a month without wireless) and equiped with a better contrast, 20 percent faster refresh rate on its screen. Same as the DX, now it comes in two colors (graphite, and white). Unlike the Kindle 2, there will be two connection / pricing configurations: a $139 WiFi only version, and a $189 3G version (I guess it’s the same for International version). The screen however will remain the same 6-inch size.

From the look of this new device, the most notable change is the relocation of the direction pad to next to the keyboard. I bet the keyboard is still very difficult to use, however. Software-wise, the big thing to me is the enhanced PDF Reader – with dictionary lookup, notes, and highlights. Lastly, a new WebKit-Based browser, that I really want to try out.

So, how the new one compares to the Kindle 2, side by side ?

Some more pictures of the new Kindle:

Made a career talk to a group of university students recently and some of the key ideas interested them a lot (e.g. how to build their personal branding on the web). On the other hand, not many of them asked follow-up questions. It’s not a big surprise though, as most of the youngsters nowadays simply don’t care about asking questions, instead they care about their “images” – i.e. they think asking question is stupid and they don’t want to look stupid. They also somehow believe they can find all the answers to all the questions on earth from their peers and Google …

It reminds me one phrase from Chinese about the word “Knowledge” -

This phrase composed of two Chinese characters … basically, the first character means “learn”, and the second character means “ask”. In essence, “Knowledge” in Chinese is “Learn to ask”. So … when will our students learn / know how to ask ?

Update 1: (2010-July-16) The slide is just featured as one of the slidedecks in Slideshare.com’s career channel !!

Anyway, here is the slidedeck …

Competition is good, I guess. The success of Apple iPad makes Amazon works harder and harder to roll out new and exciting stuff. One of the key advantages of Kindle “platform” is you can access your Kindle library anywhere and have your reading synchronized across Kindle devices and multiple smartphones. And this platform compose of Kindle 2, Kindle 3,  Kindle DX, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, PC, and now Android-powered phones.

As far as I can tell, the features in this Kindle for Andriod is more or less the same as other devices’ applications. However, the screen that shows your book library looks a little bit different.

Another exciting news is the embedded video and audio clips in Kindle books on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. Not as crazy as the Alice for the iPad I bet, but still it is the right direction to introduce multimedia to ebooks. Since it is the new new stuff, I just checked and there are only 13 ebooks with audio / video in US store and only 7 available in Asia store.

No, I am not talking about purchasing a ticket of the subway in Hong Kong, as you know the system and the vending machines here are really among the best in the world. Instead, I would like to share with you from the experience I had in the Washington DC trip last month.

In fact, I am not the only one get frustrated by the subway ticketing system (they call it “Metro”), there is even a presentation prepared on why there is a need to redesign the Metro ticket vending machine. Following is a picture of the vending machine and according to the official site of Metro, you need to follow these steps to purchase a ticket (they call it farecard):

To buy farecard, you need to:

Select B (single farecard) or C (multiple farecards). If buying more than one, select the quantity you want.

Use the (+) or (-) button to choose the value.

Press C to view your selection.

Press C again to confirm your selection.

Insert money and/or farecard.

Please note that the buttons “A”, “B”, “C” are the tiny buttons next to the big orange color circle labeled “1″. In fact before step 1, you need to search around the ticketing lobby to find the up-to-date map / poster for the correct fare, also check the time as the fare is based on the time of day (!!) and destination.

And for step 2, instead of key in the fare amount (the vending machine is not that smart …), you have to use the (+) and (-) buttons to choose the dollars AND the cents – yes there are two (+) buttons and two (-) buttons underneath the tiny screen in the middle, one for the dollar amount and one for cent amount.

And can you see how confusing of step 5 ? In summary, very very poor user interface and therefore user experience of just buying a cheap subway ticket !!

And talking about User Experience, how can you miss the UX Conference in Hong Kong (UXHK) early next year ? Check out the office site – www.uxhongkong.com for details and register now. Great stuff !!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Six years after using Gmail, my Gmail is getting full … according to the line in the footer of Gmail, I have only 400 MB of free space.

You are currently using 7003 MB (93%) of your 7467 MB.

So, how can I delete the large emails from Gmail ? In other words, how can I delete the large attachments ? Unfortunately, you cannot sort your emails in Gmail by mail size, and you cannot filter the large emails from your inbox as well (so much for a software from the search giant …). I searched the net and the Gmail help center for a few days, and concluded that there are many people have the same problem, but there is no solution from Gmail.

I guess some solutions are on the way from Google but not much time I can wait. I have tried the IMAPsize but it is just too unstable. So I finally settled with the only possible way – use an email client to download the mails from Gmail via IMAP, and manage the large mails from there.

I decided to use Thunderbird and here are the steps …

1. Download and install Thurderbird – it is straightforward;
2. First-time start up will ask for your email login information – enter your Gmail email address and the password, Thunderbird will then smart enough to detect the correct IMAP and SMTP server names and ports.
3. Thunderbird will next start downloading the message headers to your PC. In my case it took a few minutes for over 40,000 emails.
4. The default view of Thunderbird will not show the email size, add the email size column by clicking the “column” icon in the upper right corner (see the picture below).
5. Now you can sort the emails by size and determine which emails you want to delete.
6. Since the Thunderbird only download the message header but not the content, if you want to check the content before you delete the mail then you can click the connection icon in the lower right corner such that it can download the emails (see the picture below). But of course, it will take some time and use up your computer disk space if you have many emails like me.
7. Now your selected mails are deleted, but those are actually moved to Gmail Trash folder only.
8. So, logon to your Gmail again, go to the Trash folder and empty it to reclaim the space.

About an hour later, I reclaimed some 600 MB of space already. Not bad !!

Update 1: After some of these exercises, I decided to give myself a break / treat – just purchased 20 GB additional storage for US$ 5 a year. No more worry …