Hello, I thought I’d give you an update into my adventures in the Amazon Echo and home automation. I’m still really enjoying my virtual assistant. Since my last post I’ve added a few more items to my home automation setup. My home now includes two Philips Hue Bloom lights, a Philips Hue Go (thank you, employer, for your rewards program 😀 ) a Harmony hub and a second Amazon Echo Dot for our bedroom. My husband prefers more tried and true methods of controlling our home, but even he has occasionally tried having Alexa control stuff. It certainly amuses him when Alexa doesn’t quite… perform as expected shall we say. The part of my home automation setup I love the most is my Philips Hue lights. Being able to play around with them is awesome and they can make such a difference to my room. I think I’ve just about resolved my issue with being able to set scenes with Alexa – you do need to be quite particular with the syntax you use unfortunately. Once I got that down it was much easier. The addition of the Harmony hub made combining routines much easier. Now I can say Alexa,…
Hello all. For something a little different today, I thought I’d share with you my first impressions of the Amazon Echo Dot and its pairing with the Philips Hue lighting system. I’ve been thinking about a an intelligent speaker for a while. I regularly use Apple’s Siri on my iPhone to set alarms, timers etc and I was interested in having an always-on assistant in the home. At the time of writing, there are three contenders in this market; the Amazon Echo, Google Home and the new Apple HomePod. I was anxiously watching the Apple Keynote to see what kind of product Apple would announce. While the HomePod looks interesting, its price was beyond my budget and also the emphasis seems to be on the Bluetooth speaker rather than the smart assistant integration. The ability to play my Apple Music would have been nice though. The Google Home was also of interest, but the Amazon Echo’s ability to play Audible audiobooks as well as the low price point of the Echo Dot were the deciding factors for me. Our apartment is pretty small, and I only play music with a headset, so I couldn’t justify the extra expense for…
Recently at work I won an iPad Mini (non Retina display) in a raffle. I never win anything so I was ecstatic – my coworkers joked that I was like a kid at Christmas. I FELT like a kid at Christmas! Now, I already have a much loved Kindle Fire HDX and iPad 3, so I knew I was going to rehome one of them. It’s an understatement to say I read a lot and listen to audiobooks a lot, for which the Fire is perfect, so it was the iPad 3 or the new Mini. I was very surprised when my mother expressed an interest in the iPad and going online. My parents did have internet access several years ago, but let it lapse because of slowness and lack of use. Since then, better broadband coverage has come to their area of Scotland, so I hope slowness will no longer be an issue. My father doesn’t seem as enthusiastic about the internet at this point. I suspect my mother was always the more interested, but previously the internet was connected to the computer my father uses for video editing and she was always too nervous to use it in…
As expected, Amazon launched its new Amazon Fire Phone last week. I watched the launch video and have a few thoughts on the device. Like the Kindle Fire tablets, the Fire phone is geared towards those who are already heavily invested in the Amazon ecosystem. Bezos made a point of stating that one year of Amazon Prime will be included with the purchase of the phone. The two defining features of the Fire phone are Firefly and dynamic perspective. I understand from various other reviews that the hardware specs are middle of the road for smartphones. Firefly does actually seem quite useful. The phone uses its camera to match real life objects with the Amazon (and third parties’) databases to bring up additional information on the object and – naturally – to allow you to purchase it from Amazon. It can recognise objects, sounds, movies and TV shows. Examples shown by Bezos include identifying a hard copy book and linking to buy from Amazon, recognising a song playing and matching it to the IheartMusic database for streaming, picking up the X-ray for Movies from an episode of Game of Thrones and bringing up details on a piece of art….
Good morning readers. I have just spent a very frustrating morning and am hoping my experiences will help some of you save some time and irritation. A few days ago, I borrowed an ebook from the library, via Overdrive. Overdrive uses Adobe DRM (digital rights management) as its system to prevent your copying/sharing the books you’ve borrowed. What it means, essentially, is that you must go through the Adobe Digital Editions software to transfer your books to your ereader. The process goes something like this: Download Adobe Digital Editions to your PC or Mac Authorise ADE with an Adobe account (on the Mac it’s under the Help menu) – you may need to set one up if you don’t have one In ADE authorize each device you wish to use (it’s one of the right click menu items) When you borrow (or in some cases buy) a book it will download an ACSM file which when clicked will open the book in ADE. Transfer the book via ADE to your device via USB. Once it’s set up, in future steps 4 and 5 are all that are needed to read the book on your device. Anyway, when I borrowed the book…
Good morning readers. I have just spent a very frustrating morning and am hoping my experiences will help some of you save some time and irritation. A few days ago, I borrowed an ebook from the library, via Overdrive. Overdrive uses Adobe DRM (digital rights management) as its system to prevent your copying/sharing the books you’ve borrowed. What it means, essentially, is that you must go through the Adobe Digital Editions software to transfer your books to your ereader. The process goes something like this: Download Adobe Digital Editions to your PC or Mac Authorise ADE with an Adobe account (on the Mac it’s under the Help menu) – you may need to set one up if you don’t have one In ADE authorize each device you wish to use (it’s one of the right click menu items) When you borrow (or in some cases buy) a book it will download an ACSM file which when clicked will open the book in ADE. Transfer the book via ADE to your device via USB. Once it’s set up, in future steps 4 and 5 are all that are needed to read the book on your device. Anyway, when I borrowed the book…
Amazon and GoodReads have just announced the release of the Kindle Fire OS 3.1 which brings GoodReads integration, Cloud Collections and other features to the new Kindle Fire HDX and HD second gen. It can be downloaded from the Amazon updates page or you can wait a couple of weeks for it to hit your device automatically. GoodReads also has an article on its blog about the update. Unfortunately I won’t be able to review this for you until next week when my Kindle Fire HDX is due to ship to Canada – I currently have the first gen HD for which the update isn’t yet available. There is no mention yet of the update for the Kindle Paperwhite first or second gen, which is also supposed to get a GoodReads update. I am very excited about this update as I love both Kindle and GoodReads. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they can do together.
Amazon and GoodReads have just announced the release of the Kindle Fire OS 3.1 which brings GoodReads integration, Cloud Collections and other features to the new Kindle Fire HDX and HD second gen. It can be downloaded from the Amazon updates page or you can wait a couple of weeks for it to hit your device automatically. GoodReads also has an article on its blog about the update. Unfortunately I won’t be able to review this for you until next week when my Kindle Fire HDX is due to ship to Canada – I currently have the first gen HD for which the update isn’t yet available. There is no mention yet of the update for the Kindle Paperwhite first or second gen, which is also supposed to get a GoodReads update. I am very excited about this update as I love both Kindle and GoodReads. I’m really looking forward to seeing what they can do together.
This evening when I went to download my latest Audible read to my Canadian Kindle Fire, I got a big surprise. A message popped up advising me that I could now listen to and shop for audiobooks natively from my Kindle Fire and that I should uninstall the Audible app. I did so and found that my audiobook played in a new, integrated player. I also noticed that individual Audible audiobooks now appear in my carousel and can be added individually to the Favourites drawer rather than just the Audible app itself. Being a Kindle, of course they’re trying to sell you things, and I see that when I view an audiobook in the carousel, I now get recommendations for other audiobooks. Searching the Kindle is now integrated with my Audible library. Searching for an audiobook will find it in your Audible library ready for downloading. It seems that they’re not quite there yet with the integration though. Audiobooks doesn’t appear in the top menu bar, and clicking on one of the audiobook recommendations doesn’t take you anywhere yet. Clicking on Shop still only shows three options available to Canadians: Books, Games and Apps. At this point Audible books are…
Today the Kindle Fire launched in multiple countries including Canada, and one was delivered to my door for your reviewing pleasure. My initial impression is that, although the device is nice, for Canadians it is still very, very limited. It is a lovely device, but the Amazon services which distinguish it from the other tablets out there are sadly missing. There is still no support for Amazon’s music or movie store or Amazon Instant Video for Canada. iTunes movies will not play on the Kindle Fire due to DRM. Through the movies for Flixter though you can view any movies you have on your UV account. They do not have the cool X-Ray for Movies feature that gives you details of the actors in a movie when you hit pause. For the last few years, iTunes music has been sold without DRM so can easily be copied to the music folder and will be available in the music section of the Kindle Fire. For me, personally, I was very disappointed that the Audible integration is missing for Canadians. The whole Audiobooks section is missing from the top menu, and although Whispersync for Voice continues to work, immersion reading is not available….