“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”Jean Rhys

OK everyone knows about the Kindle by now. If not the Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader. Because I love technology everyone has been asking me if I am excited about the device. I personally like a lot of the features like the ability to pluck a book from the air using a wireless connection and the readability and the low battery use but no I am not crazy about this thing. The idea of carrying another device that has a specialty is abhorrent to me. If it were up to me everything I wanted would be in one device. The iPhone is close to this idea. A phone, a mini computer, MP3 Player, and other functions make up the current iPhone. However the size is lacking and so it would not be great for a book reader and people do complain about the eye strain because of the back lighting. Many companies are talking about a new device in-between the size of a phone and a laptop. If I had something the size of a paperback that did it all I would be thrilled. Now all that being said I still like to hang out and read a book but I also still use my VCR too. Books will be around for a long time and the death of them is premature but that does not mean I, we will not be using many different media at the same time. Every report seems to pit the book against tech. This is nonsense! People still attend live concerts when they could just download an MP3 that has better quality. It comes down to this for each moment we have different moods and wants. Sometimes I want a quick recipe from a computer, other times I want to read through an old cookbook. To wrap this up you better make more room on your shelves for a mix of stuff because in every form reading is here to stay.

Rarely So Simple!

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a way of staying on top of what is new on a web page. This could be news or when there are new recipes added, anything really. Let’s say that you are interested in a web page and it’s contents but you are sick of going to the site and pulling it up and then finding that there is nothing new. Now enter RSS, this is a bit of computer code that can be used to let a piece of software called a reader to, well read the code and deliver then new news. Many people confuse email and RSS feeds. E-mail you get and if you do not read it it stays there filling up your inbox while RSS feeds can be looked at or not. There is no pressure with an RSS feed; you read or don’t. So far this sounds complicated but it is easy. You need a reader. There are many but I think Feedreader is the easiest and it is free. This one is for windows only. I will test a bunch for MAC as soon as I can. OK now that you have downloaded it and installed it you can start looking for either the orange letters that say RSS or you can just subscribe to it. To do so, go to the webpage and then open Feedreader and then add it using the button “new”. Now you can play with all the features but while the Feedreader is open it pops up with a window that shows anything new on your selected pages. Give it a try with this page.