Yesterday, following a gentle, short 20″ fall to a carpeted floor, my Kindle 2′s display went bonkers. I have included a couple of photos below. I tried resetting the device by holding the power switch in the right-most position for 30 seconds, twice, without affect. I called Amazon’s customer service. Megan was both apologetic and extremely helpful. She is overnighting a replacement unit and provided me with both an RMA label and a free UPS shipping label to return the defective device. Wow! The new machine should arrive later today.
Until then, here are the two photos of the busted screen, in standby and showing the Kindle’s table of contents. Note the garbled area at the top of the screen. Note the vertical lines. Note the dark cast over the lower 80% of the screen.
Kindle 2 defective screen in standby mode
Kindle 2 defective screen, device TOC.
Sometimes all we want to do is read the content on a web page. This can be frustrating when the page is cluttered with images, text, navigation tools and flash objects.
The Readability bookmarklet is a way to deal with this clutter. It is easy to install and use. Once installed it is used by simply clicking on the new shortcut in your Bookmarks/Links Toolbar. The web page you are viewing will be transformed into easy-to-read a text-only view.
Readability page before
Readability page after
Install it by going to http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
- Select your settings for Style, Size and Margin.
- If you use Firefox, Google Chrome or Apple Safari drag the Readability button to the bookmarks toolbar.
- If you use Internet Explorer 7 or IE8 right click on the Readability button and select Add to Favorites…
- A warning message “You are adding a favorite that might not be safe…” will appear. Click on the Yes button.
- Select “Create In” the Links folder and then click the Add button.