• There were many reasons for the change of the site software, the biggest was security. The age of the old software also meant no server updates for certain programs. There are many benefits to the new software, one of the biggest is the mobile functionality. Ill fix up some stuff in the coming days, we'll also try to get some of the old addons back or the data imported back into the site like the garage. To create a thread or to reply with a post is basically the same as it was in the prior software. The default style of the site is light colored, but i temporarily added a darker colored style, to change you can find a link at the bottom of the site.

Random thought for the day


Readers.JPG

Latest project worked out very well. On the left is my old digital reader. It is an older Kindle Fire Tablet with about a 7 inch screen on it. It was on sale for about half price when a got it long time ago.It had all the apps a tablet has. It would operate as a smart phone and play music as well as a fairly nice digital reader for E-books.The older versions of wifi and bluetooth from back then were more trouble to pair up than they were worth. Has a decent camera and plenty of battery life. Got a port for mini-SD chips and got a 256 gig chip in it. It worked great for many years, but had a lot of things I did not like. Never had a phone plan on it and only hooked it to the web a few times to update the OS. I got a flip phone and had no use for a phone on the tablet. I bought it mainly for the reader. Got around 4 to 5 thousand digital books in my personal library that I been collecting ever since E-books became a thing. What I did not like about it was that it only opened books in MOBI format which is the Amazon exclusive digital format and everything they sell is in MOBI. I have Calibre Library on the desktop Nano computer in the house, so it was never a problem to convert any of the books to MOBI format and load them on the Fire Tablet to read when waiting for doctor appointment or traveling. MOBI works OK for the text, but for other books, like digital shop manuals or parts manuals and such stuff, the MOBI format is not that great on books that have combined text and pictures. I usually download the owner manuals for any tools or devices I buy even if they came with a paper hard-copy manual. The paper hard-copy manual goes in an old file cabinet and the digital manuals I download go on the reader chip. Too much trouble digging through a file cabinet drawer full of manuals with greasy fingerprints on them. Easier to just pull up the digital copy to find some part number or see what the replacement battery is.

On the right side of the picture is my new reader. Didn't even have a reader app on it when I bought it. It was just over a year old model that had not sold and the company put a big coating of rubber armor on it. They were selling it as a kid's toy. The tablets are obsolete now soon as the next version number hits the market, and the old version number in the warehouse is half price or less. The gimmick was to cover the earlier version of the tablet in heavy armor and sell it for kids to drop on the floor after they got tired of playing games on it. It was a pretty nice 10 inch Android 14 tablet, Nice big screen for reading and looking up stuff in the manuals. Got good camera and after I cut away the armor over it there was a slot that would take up to a one terabyte SD card. Battery rechargeable with plenty of battery life to read or listen to music all day or night. Android is a wide open OS compared to the Kindle Fire OS. The Android system can be cleaned out and anything you don't use deleted or compressed and pushed into a corner. It has 5G WIFI and 5.0 Bluetooth for trouble free pairing and instant reconnects. Built in GPS, AM, and FM radio that will operate using the wires of ear buds as the antenna, good reception, and very good long range reception at night.

Since the Android 14 device did not come with an E-book reader, and that was the main reason I bought it, I was free to do the research and choose the best (not the newest or most flashy) E-book reader to load on it. Did a good bit of research and completely ignored all the "top ten", "best of the year", "you gotta get this". Decided on a system named Pocket Book Reader. It is an older reader, meaning not so many bells and whistles, but the major bugs have already been worked out of it. It is a free download from the Google Play Store and comes with ZERO advertisements popping up or even on the title screen. The Pocket Book Reader, like Android is wide open. It does not confine itself to only the big corporation private formats. It reads 26 different digital book and audio book formats, including the big monopolies own private formats. It also opens and reads PDF, TXT, HTML, DOC, CBR, CBZ, and more universal office and printed formats. It can open books that were locked with Adobe. It has database style sorting by title, author, genre, etc. This is important if you have several thousand books and manuals on an SD chip. Two night reading modes, allows changing of font style, font size, line spacing, and margin size. Has nice page turning animation. It appears on screen as if you are holding a book and flipping the pages with your finger, either forward or backward to the previous pages. It will switch to single page per screen with larger type. Automatic screen re-alignment if you turn the device on the side or straight up in portrait mode. Easy to use bookmarks, put in or take out. Allows you to add notes in the margins or your own footnotes. Has everything you could want in a reader, but is not cluttered or hard to set up. You have to decide you want to change something and go to the menu. It does not push things in front of your face. Maybe they will come out with something better in the future, but for now the reader paired with the large screen, rubber armor, and huge storage capacity of the Android 14 device is as close to perfect as I could ask for.
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