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Sharing thoughts and ideas on business, security and photographyWhich Kindle to buy as a South African (updated May 2012)
Posted on June 30, 2011I have posted a few times in the last little while around my challenges in buying ebooks from Kalahari, then on converting ebooks for use on the Kindle, and more generally on buying ebooks in South Africa.
In response to one of these posts I received a question from Henriet van Rhyn, covering the most obvious question which I hadn’t covered : “Please advise which Kindle to buy, seeing that there are so many versions available on Amazon these days. ”
I answered in the the comments to the post where Henriet posted the question, and after some thought decided it makes more sense to convert this into a full blown post. So below I repeat what I had put into the comments, with a few minor adjustments and ammendments.
Looking at Amazon on 29 June 2011 (Updated 25 May 2012) (as a South African), there are 5 (were 3) different Kindles to choose from. I don’t bother listed local re-sellers as I haven’t found any of them to be competitive and Amazon just make it so easy to order from them.
- Kindle (WiFi) = $109 (6″ screen) (was $139)
- Kindle Touch (WiFi) = $139 (6″ screen) (newly available)
- Kindle Touch 3G = $189 (6″ screen) (newly available)
- Kindle Keyboard (3G+WiFi) = $189 (6″ screen) (unchanged price)
- Kindle DX (3G+WiFi) = $379 (9.7″ screen)
- Kindle Fire is still not available in South Africa
As a USA resident you would also have the option of buying an advert subsidised Kindle for $114. This model is pretty much the same as the WiFi version ($139) but with adverts displayed at various points. Since this is not an international version and can’t be purchased here in SA I don’t cover this any further.
Nokia Ovi Music now DRM free in South Africa – and it works really well!
Posted on September 09, 2010Nokia Ovi Music has been around for a while, but to be honest, after signing up and finding out that it was all DRM’d music in WMA format that was the end of my experience.
Today I saw a few tweets saying that it had now been relaunched as DRM free. A quick visit to the Nokia website and … after a few minutes of wandering around to various pages saying lots and nothing I gave up and googled “Ovi Music” and ended up on the Music Store at : Music.Ovi.Com.
I logged in, and was pleased to see that it still had all my details from the Ovi Store account I had created on my Nokia E71 a few months ago. I dived straight into the music looking for the new Liquideep album, Fabrics of the Heart (link here), which I had been struggling to find on the on-line stores (Exclusive books etc) and was pleasantly surprised to see that they had the album for a very reasonable R80 for 14 songs.
Blackberry Data useage numbers in SA using DAVID #in
Posted on August 08, 2010I have been curious about Blackberry data useage for a while. The Blackberry contracts (BIS/BES) are around R65/month and include unlimited data for on-device browsing, email, IM, etc. I do a fair amount of browsing on my Blackberry (rather than my Nokia) largely because of the data. I have a small (30 Meg) data bundle on the Nokia and I regularly go over the limit. Not difficult to do given that some web pages (even on the mobile device) take a few hundred K, making it every easy to use a Meg or two reading just a few sites.
The other factor is that Blackberry is said to use a fair degree of compression through the use of their own data proxies and their own services. So how much value for money do I really get out of the Blackberry service?
I looked around for a tool to monitor the useage, and came across a few, but only one seemed as though it would be up to the task, so I downloaded “David” from the blackberry appstore. It is a 60 day trial version, but is more than adequate for monitoring a few days useage.
After 2 days, here is how it’s looking :
Two days useage +- 18 Meg (and after the 1st day it was around 9 Meg).
That includes Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, downloading some apps, browsing the net, BB Messenger etc. I am really impressed with the relatively low data useage given my patterns of useage. Anyhow, some very quick sums and it would be around 270 megabytes of data per month. For the price paid for the BIS/BES useage, that is really good value for money.
I’m probably an outlier on useage, though perhaps not in the top 2% of users. Still, for anybody looking to make decent useage of their mobile device and not to have to worry about crazy high bills, the Blackberry with “uncapped” data useage is a really good deal. BB Messenger also works a good deal better than MXit, they way its integrated into the device and has message delivery and read statuses. No more messages lost in the ether.
I’m interested in hearing about other people’s useage patterns and their thoughts on the Blackberry data bundle and value for money.
ZaCon II Call For Papers
Posted on May 28, 2010Date : 9 October 2010.
Location : University of Joburg. Joburg.
Cost : The goal is to hit breakeven on the costs, so an entry fee (if charged) will be low.
Many other conferences exist to cater either to the strictly Academic or Professional individual. We want a simple community based forum that is completely free of corporate affiliation (or shilling). The intention behind this is that the passion for the field or of sharing knowledge should be the primary motivation of attending or speaking at this conference.
We aim to fulfill these objectives:
* Provide a platform for publication of infosec research
* Showcase free locally-developed infosec tools
* Support the interaction of industry, academia and the interested public
* Encourage discussion on infosec / hackery / sec-related-geekery at large
* Build the ZA infosec community
* Provide a platform to up-n-coming talent
Closing date for submissions is 20 August 2010.
Contacts
* Site: http://zacon.org.za
* Abstracts: abstracts AT zacon org za
* Organisers: people AT zacon org za
* IRC: #zacon on irc.atrum.org
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