My Family of Kindles: From Work to Fun to Ghost Hunting

by Jon
(Shingle Springs, Ca.)

I am a Kindle fan and now have four of them. And I do use them all!

I started off with the Kindle 3g and still take that venerable unit on trips with me. I was curious about the whole e-book market and once I tried it, I was hooked.

I ended up downloading a few apps for my PC to let me publish and convert PDFs and other text documents straight to my Kindle with Calibre. I still use this tool for popping my own documents onto a Kindle for later reading and it works great.

The thing I love about my original keyboard 3g was I could use it ANYWHERE and download books as long as I could get a cell signal.

Just for ducks, I ended up getting a Kindle Touch, WIFI only and I love that little unit for just tossing into a briefcase and forgetting it until I want to read a book. Very lightweight and I like to use it in my car with the text to speech and a little amplified speaker to read books to me as I drive.

The thing with these two models is the battery life. They just go on and on and on. lol

I figured I was done getting Kindles. Wrong. The Fire changed all of that. I ended up getting mine shortly after they arrived on the market and I fell in love with it. A completely amazing technology and the colors and graphics along with video was just stunning. I use this Kindle every single day and it has been my goto box for all sorts of tasks.

My primary use of this Kindle these days is for my technical reference books. I work in IT and this little wonder holds all of my support guides and has saved my tail countless times with quick lookups and searches for just the right bit of information.

I was a bit concerned about there being no thumb drive port on the new unit, but, over time, I learned it really wasn't needed. I do occasionally hook my USB cable up and tool around in the Fire to do a thing or two. I think the one thing that really could have been a great addition to the Fire would have been a microphone and Skype connectivity. That would have been a killer combination.

Oddly enough, Kindle was there for me when my father was sick and I can recall sooooo many times that my trusty Kindle kept me company while waiting in the emergency room waiting for news. My Dad since has passed on and I had it with me to notify family and to stay in touch via Facebook during that difficult time. To say my little rectangular friend has been my sidekick would be an understatement.

The other cool feature of my Fire is the browser. I use the hell out of it. The biggest test of our internet application development work is to test our creations on multiple device types and I use the Fire as part of a test to see if a site is displaying properly. Also, it is a good way to check on external sites you are monitoring and I cannot tell you the amount of times it has come in handy for just that purpose.

Of course, I do love the movies from Prime and watch them while on trips. Amazon Prime rocks ;>)

Alas, I recently noted the battery on my Fire was discharging faster and decided it was time to put it out to pasture and to use it for casual uses. I'll still use it, but it will be treated with honor and many thanks for all of the memories that go with it. Yes, I'm sentimental ;>)

As of this morning, my new Kindle Fire HD is on the way to me. I'm eager to give the new model a workout and introduce it to my other family of Kindles who still see regular use.

I'm most excited to get the Skype connectivity and to be able to forward phone calls to it. The audio improvements with the speakers should be interesting to see and I'm very curious to see what other video and audio capable apps it can support.

I'd love to try some audio recording tools with it and to be able to edit and enhance audio for my paranormal field research work. Yes, I'm a ghost hunter and I've been doing that work for many years now. So, my hope is my Fire HD will be a portable EVP recorder and allow me to do on-the-spot audio enhancements to check for EVPs in the field.

The other thing will be for me to use my private cloud to host evidence files from and play them through the Fire for clients. So, I do have some pretty big plans for the new device and can't wait for it to show up.

Jon