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Archives for September 2011

Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire

Amazon released today the Kindle Fire at a mere $199. A recent trip to Apple’s website and at the Apple Store in San Francisco just confirmed to me how the iPad is out of reach to so many people including me. At least to the ones that are on a tight budget. Priced at $199, the Kindle Fire seems much more palatable to normal people like you and me.

Aside from the standard of reading a book, the Kindle Fire can also play movies, run applications, games, play music, and it comes with a revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser called Silk. You’ll have access to over 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books. The application and games will be sold from the Amazon Appstore.

In addition to all the goodies so far, you also get free cloud storage for all your Amazon content. I really like this feature. If you fill up your memory, you can always retrieve it from the cloud. The Kindle Fire comes with a vibrant color touchscreen with extra-wide viewing angle. That’s neat. It’s also powered by a fast powerful dual-core processor.

If you’re a Amazon Prime member, you will have access to unlimited, instant streaming of over 10,000 popular movies and TV shows.

Ok. I’m sold! I want one. Check out the promo video here.

Firefox 7 Is Out

Firefox 7 was just released. Update your browser or download the latest from Mozilla.

New features:

  • Drastically improved memory handling for certain use cases
  • Added a new rendering backend to speed up Canvas operations on Windows systems
  • Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync
  • The ‘http://’ URL prefix is now hidden by default
  • Added support for text-overflow: ellipsis
  • Added support for the Web Timing specification
  • Enhanced support for MathML
  • The WebSocket protocol has been updated from version 7 to version 8
  • Added an opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox
  • Fixed several stability issues
  • Fixed several security issues

Playing DVDs on Ubuntu

I recently tried to run a Netflix DVD on my Ubuntu desktop only to see this annoying little message, “Could not read DVD. This may be because the DVD is encrypted and a DVD decryption library is not installed.” What’s going on? I already installed “ubuntu restricted extras, libdvdread2 and libdvdread4.” Why is it still not working?

Here are 3 little steps to get the Netflix DVD’s to play on my Ubuntu desktop. I included the installs for “ubuntu restricted extras” and “libdvdread4” just to be absolutely sure the steps work in all versions of Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

The last step of running the install is the most crucial. Well, enjoy the movies.