There’s something I didn’t anticipate before I actually started to heavily use the Kindle. Although it seems obvious at first, the implications of books on demand are quite amazing. The thing is, it actually takes less than 5 minutes between the time you decide that you want to buy a book – to the time you can start reading it. Without an e-reader, you are dependent on your local store’s stock, or have to wait for 2 weeks for your book to arrive by mail (at least here, to Israel). But, once we don’t need to move atoms in order to read books – suddenly the access to knowledge drastically improves. I’ve noticed that in the past I’ve compromised about the books I read. It now feels like in any given moment – I’m reading the exact book that I want to read the most in the whole world. This is a very empowering feeling, that I didn’t hear people talk about when discussing e-readers.

Getting the Kindle to work in Israel

I’ve received so many good recommendations about the Kindle, that I couldn’t resist it. When Tal told me he’ll be in NY, after some deliberation over the Sony eReader – I decided to go for it with Amazon’s Kindle 2.
Buying it was easy. Payed with my Israeli Visa, got it shipped to Tal’s place in NY, and a week later less $330 in the bank – I got to grab this weird piece of new technology. All in all – it certainly delivers. I already had a great time reading from it a couple of books at once, and even finishing some of them.
Eran told me that I can’t just buy Any book as a first one. So buying “Free” by Chris Anderson seemed like a fun way to start . Little did I know.

To test the buying process, I first tried to “buy” a free classic by Oscar Wilde.

We are sorry...

 We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

 We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

What???
Ok. No problem. Probably a DRM thingy, I’ll just run a machine from the US (on Amazon’s servers ) – and bypass this stupid IP filter.
Nope. Same result.
Tried to buy 5 other books. None of them agreed to get purchased. Even those that cost moer than $0.00.
A phone call to the customer support pointed me to item 12 in the FAQ:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200316870&#intl

They say that you shouldn’t buy a Kindle if you live outside the US…

Hmmmm…

At this point I practically had a brick in my hand. It can display its own user’s manual, and show book covers, but I have nothing to do with it…
Luckily I have some relatives with bank accounts in the US that agreed to help. So, an hour and a half later, and after 2 more phone-calls to support, and a refund for a book I mistakenly bought – I found out how I can pay for books. My relatives’ credit card had to be linked to the “Click Once” button. And I now buy myself gift cards from my Israeli credit card in order to pay for my books without charging my relatives.

Oh well.

Some experiences

1) Although it is “wireless”, Amazon chose to use Sprint’s cellular network instead of WiFi. So the Kindle is dumbed down in Israel. Nu shoin.
2) The reading experience is awesome. The print looks so good, that it feels like touching the future.
3) Now that I turned off the inactive wireless connection, it seems that I won’t need to charge it in the coming weeks
4) The internal dictionary is very powerful. I can now read classics written in 200 years old English.
5) I want Headup on my Kindle. When I read about Seattle, I want its pictures. My business-connections to Microsoft, right where it is mentioned. And an interview with Jeff Bezos – right on the screen. Is it too much to ask for?
6) I also want to share a paragraph every now and then with a friend. This paragraph could be exactly what he needs, when he needs it, and having the ability to discuss it with him – right from my Kindle – could be soooo neat.
7) Amazon’s library contains about 350,000 titles for Kindle. So far, I’ve found there every book I wanted to read. No more waiting for books! Hurray! No shipping, no delivery burdens, fun fun fun!!! The ability to think of “The Singularity is Near” – and start reading it less than 5 minutes later – is game changing.

A note about books vs. the web

For a reason I still can’t explain, reading books is a totally different experience from reading a text online. The concentration and focus are much deeper with a book. Your thoughts merge with the book instead if wondering “what else am I missing while I’m reading this paragraph”. I know you’re thinking about other things if and while you read these words
So, the ability to get access to great thinkers. And not a superficial access as you get on the net – but a focused and immersive access as you get from books or good movies – all of this instantly, within minutes – is the biggest benefit of this device.

Kudos to Amazon, and this very neat technology.

What looked at first like a simple task – turned out to cost me hours of trial and error.

Some of the problems I’ve encountered:

• Cygwin’s SSHd, OpenSSH and CopSSH all work great on Windows EC2 instances. Until you try to bundle an instance. After you launch a bundled instance – the SSHd service wouldn’t run, because of permissions problems – and throws weird error messages in the different logs.
• It turned out that Sysprep was responsible for this – mangling the permissions of the SSHd users.
• Turning Sysprep off as suggested in some places sounds like a recipe for problems down the road.
• Couldn’t find the source code of an SSHd implemented in Java, and FreeSSHd. Wouldn’t be smart to use closed-source applications for this, security wise…
• Couldn’t find any other SSHd client, or a full solution for this specific problem.

I Googled everywhere, until I assembled the solution which consists of:

• Installing Cygwin’s SSHd (thank you LifeHacker).
• AutoExNT service is used to run a batch file right after the machine’s launch (Thank you Microsoft).
• Update_Cygwin solved the permissions problem (Thank you VCL).

So, the steps to SSH into a Windows machine on Amazon EC2 are these:

• Install Cygwin, make sure you include the OpenSSH package.
• chmod +r /etc/passwd
• chmod +r /etc/group
• chmod 755 /var
• ssh-host-config
• Choose root as the name of the privileged account.
• Copy your public key into the authorized_keys file of the account you’d like to log-in with.
• Install the AutoExNT service.
• Run the update_cygwin script right after each instance launch.
• Don’t forget to open the SSH port on the security group of the instance.

I still don’t understand:

1. How come Windows doesn’t come pre-configured with an SSHd service. What do people use in order to administer Windows Server machines? Unsecure Telnet? Do they all use Remote Desktop for this?? Very weird…
2. How come there’s no solution for this already on Amazon EC2 forums? Saw lots of people run into this problem, and it seems like pretty basic stuff. I guess that Windows Server administration still isn’t that popular…

Thanks for everybody on the forum that saved me valuable time getting this problem behind me…

Now for the real work

Tainted Money?

What if we started tracing how money moves around in our economy, in an open and transparent way?

Hypothetically, Practically (see below(!)), I can start voluntarily taint money that goes through me. Publicize how much money I got from who, and to who do I give it. An extreme way of “voting” with every economic transaction I make. What if organizations started to do this in a standardized way?

Could this make some money worth more than other money?

Could this make our economy more “compassionate”, as Daniel Goleman would put it?

Technically, we can very easily start doing some things in this direction. Open a free account, and start logging our transactions over the net.

Decide that the money I got from here, is going in this direction – and see how it goes (or get stuck) from there on…

A proper meta-data would allow us to ask some interesting questions.

Was a shady business involved in the sources I got this money from?

How is my donation being used?

Did the government just “taint” 1 trillion USD last month??

“I only accept money from vegetarians…”

Stuff like that

Sounds easy to implement, and could be tons of fun, don’t you think?

Disclaimer:

<Transaction>

<id>1</id>

<source>http://www.semantinet.com</source>

<target>http://www.eburcat.com</target>

<amount>12</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Salary</comment>

</transaction>

<transaction>

<id>2</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.istockphoto.com</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>April 16th, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>That photo you see up there </comment>

</transaction>

Update: a more appropriate representations…

<Transaction>

<id>3</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.gov.il</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Income tax…</comment>

</transaction>

If you haven’t already seen Steve Job’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech – this is one of the most inspiring talks I’ve ever seen:

Another inspiring piece I’ve encountered thanks to PodCasts – is this one:

And just today, I’ve come to learn that MIT is using FM Clickers in their classes – as an enabler for active and more powerful learning experience – from this ITConversatinos talk.

http://hayeruka-meimad.org.il/

RentPA - The fastest way to rent in Tel-Aviv

I’m quite sure it’s possible to find my next place for rent with an investment of about 6 hours, and a month’s worth of rent. The plan is this:

• 40 minutes interview over Skype with MyRentPA ™.
• Scan through videos of appropriate appartments – ~5mins x 8 videos.
• A deeper look into the top 3 appartments: 10 mins x 2.
• ~3 meetings x 1.5 hours.

The only problem is that MyRentPA doesn’t really exist. Yet. I wish they opened a branch in Tel-Aviv already.

Do you think it’s possible for a Real Estate agent to video tape his candidate appartments, make a bit of a story out of each one, have a short interview with the owners, some easy editing, and put it all on a plain and effective website?

I think it could save everybody’s time, both the owners and the people who rent the place… It sure doesn’t sound like a big effort… Maybe it could be a nice income for a starting comedian…

I bet that if the system is tuned up properly, it’s possible to make a month’s worth of rent out of each video… Am I missing something .

Thanks, Tal, for the inspiration…