Apparently I’m an iPad video hoarder. Going through and deleting stuff was grueling. But I need to have Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog at my fingertips. And I need to carry Mamma Mia around with me.

Sadly, they had to go to make room for season three of The Real Housewives of New Jersey. (Do they not sell ATV helmets in New Jersey?)

Every once in a while, I pause and wonder at technology. I remember the first show we watched in color (Buck Rogers in the 25th Century). I remember needing to round up three guys to carry in our first big TV. I remember being amused I can lift our current, even bigger TV all by myself. Being able to carry a TV show with me from room to room, and then to my car to watch in the school pick-up line boggles the mind.

If you got one, do you love it?

I bought my mom the Kindle Touch 3G and it was delivered yesterday. It’s pretty awesome! (Of course I had to play with it. I can’t show Mom how to use it if I don’t know how, right?) (Although it’s hands-down the most simple-to-use device I’ve ever seen in my life.) I get to keep it until Thanksgiving, when she comes to visit.

So many new gadgets just before Christmas. Anything you’ve got your eye on?

Calibre is one of the best things to ever happen to digital reading. It’s a fabulous ebook management system and conversion tool. My Calibre library is stored in my Dropbox account (another service I couldn’t live my life without). I pull up the Dropbox folder on my iPhone, navigate to the ePub book I want and open it in iBooks. Done.

But what if you don’t have Calibre or Dropbox and you’re sitting there saying “ohmigod, Shan, I have no idea what you’re talking about!“? If you have an iGadget, you have iTunes, so here’s how to get your Carina Press books from the Carina Press site to your iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad without knowing what I’m talking about…

(If you don’t already have the iBooks app on your device, grab it from the app store. It’s free.)

1) Once you’ve completed the transaction on the Carina Press site, you can click on the big “downloads” button. There you’ll find your books and you can save them to your computer.

2) Open iTunes. Under the File tab, choose “Add to Library”. Navigate to where you saved your ebooks (I always download mine right to my desktop) and click to add.

3) The next time you sync your iThing, go to the device’s sync screen, then choose “books”. (On the device’s sync screen, not from the main menu down the left.) Check “sync books” and you can either sync all the books or you can choose “sync selected books” and check the ones you want in iBooks on your device.”

4) Sync. After you’ve disconnected and open the iBooks app, your Carina Press titles should be displayed on that pretty iBookshelf, like mine in the photo. That’s it!

ETA: As Fiona Lowe pointed out in the comments, after you save your book to your computer, you can just attach it to an email to yourself. Open the email on your iGadget and open the attached epub file in iBooks. I tend to buy books in binges and don’t read them right away, but that’s definitely another easy option!

How about you guys? Anybody Kindle shopping?

And, yes, I know there’s an iPhone 5 announcement imminent. First of all, you can chase technology’s tail forever. By the time everybody gets their iPhone 5, there will be rumors of the iPhone 6. And one of the most common iPhone 5 rumors is that it will have a larger screen. After six months with the Droid X, I don’t want a larger screen. I’ll be perfectly happy with the iPhone 4.

Now I’m prowling, awaiting the Fedex guy. Unfortunately, there are a lot of utility trucks in the neighborhood today and they sound a lot like the Fedex truck. I’ve gotten in a month’s worth of exercise already this morning, running to my back door.

The regular K3 has an author on the screensaver. The KSO has an ad:

The home screen of the K3 lists the books. The home screen of the KSO lists the books and has a small banner ad across the bottom:

A close-up of the ad:

That’s it. Those are the only differences. There are no ads inserted into the books themselves.

I could have bought a plain Kindle 3. I chose to buy the KSO because I’d already seen several Special Offers I would have taken advantage of. If I was going to buy a second Kindle for the household, why not buy the one that’s cheaper and will offer me bargains in the future? Now, if they change the rules in the future and decide they’re going to put ads IN the books somehow, or an ad will display every 20 pages or something, then I might chuck it. I don’t want commercials in my books. But, as of right now, the Special Offers are unobtrusive and sometimes possibly lucrative.

If you’re interested in seeing previous Special Offers, you can check them out at Books on the Knob, an awesome blog that highlights free and bargain digital books (and more). (That link will take you to the entries tagged “KSO”, by the way.)

And if you get a Kindle, with Special Offers or not, don’t forget the Kindle Lighted Cover because it’s perfect for the Kindle and worth every penny.

Now that I’ve been using it a couple of days, my thoughts… (I’ll put them after the jump in case you’re not interested.) (Unless you’re reading this in your RSS feed and you won’t see the jump, but I tried.)

Here we have them side by side. The Capsule (left) very obviously isn’t any smaller than my Macbook (the other left). But it has the vanity cut-out, of course, because everybody has to know you have an Apple product. (The guitar pick-shaped white spot is just a reflection. It was directly under a recessed can.)

And open…

There was little-to-no adjustment to the keyboard, really. They didn’t squash keys or remove some to make the keyboard smaller. It’s very similar to the Macbook keyboard, actually. (Portable here means it has a handle, not that it folds up and fits into the side pocket of your purse.) The keyboard takes two AA batteries and goes to sleep in approximately one minute and, upon tapping a key, it takes approximately 4.5 seconds to wake up. I wish the sleep time was adjustable. I’d sacrifice a few batteries to have it stay awake while I give the blinking cursor the thousand-yard stare.

(To add to my fun, I sit at the Macbook and poke at the screen, which does nothing because it’s not a touchscreen. Then I move to the Capsule and run my finger around the wrist rest, which does nothing because there’s no trackpad. Crazy stuff.)

Sitting on the couch with it on my lap, it’s not really much different than the Macbook. But I tried sitting with it on my lap in a kitchen chair to simulate a conference-type chair and the lid, with the iPad in it, is heavier than the keyboard. If you don’t hold it down with your wrists, it’s going port over teakettle off your lap.

You have to take the iPad’s case off to nest it in the Capsule and that’s a pain in the butt. Putting the iPad into the case I have now is like trying to put a human’s condom on a horse’s…well, you get the picture. (And good luck shaking it.) So I bought a slip-on silicone jacket for when it’s not in the Capsule. (Although, to be honest, it wasn’t much easier to get on.) (And it added another $30 to the cost. I keep waiting for iPad1 accessories to drop in price. So far…not so much.) There is a notch on the base if you want to prop it against the lid in portrait mode for a bit, in which case I wouldn’t have to take the silicone jacket off, but I use my iPad in landscape probably 95% of the time. Especially if I’m writing.

So my intended usage: Working at the counter this summer when the Short Kid has absconded with my Macbook because it’s the only way he can tend his Webkinz and watch TV at the same time. And/or working at camp. (The reason I chose it over the bluetooth Apple keyboard is that I’d then have no way to prop up the iPad.) I love that the iPad slips into my purse so I didn’t have to lug the Macbook to camp, so I didn’t really want to lug a keyboard. If I find myself not using it at home (if I use the crappy desktop instead), I’ll leave the Capsule at camp and just carry the iPad back and forth.

I think it’s great for what I’m going to use it for (it essentially makes the iPad into a laptop), but if you’re looking for real portability, this might not be your beast.

I’d been curled up on the couch waiting an episode of Grey’s Anatomy on my iPad because SK was watching something on the TV. Then it was time to take the dog out so she could spend a half-hour sniffing every single square centimeter of mushy, freshly snow-free yard before doing her business, so I pulled up the Netflix app on my iPod Touch and continued watching it while she sniffed. Then the Short Kid went to bed, so I fired up Netflix on the PS3 and finished the episode on the big TV.

Every once in a while my mind is just blown by the amazing things our gadgets can do nowadays. I remember my family’s first color television. (How old am I again?) I remember when we got a Betamax VCR. (Yup, we had one of those.) I remember the VHS VCR we got because the Betamax was obsolete after like thirty-six hours. The Atari. The Commodore VIC-20. The wonders of the Sony Walkman (with real cassette tapes you’d have to occasionally wind back in with a pencil).

When my husband and I first got married, he had a pager. If I needed to talk to him, I had to call it and then wait until he could find a phone and call me back. Now, besides these newfangled cellphones, when he goes snowmobiling, he has this little gadget that, when he pushes a button, sends a text message to my phone saying “Okay” along with his latitude and longitude, as well as sending me an email with a link to his location on Google maps. (The same device, with a different button, will also send a 9-1-1 alert to a monitoring company who will give his coordinates to local search and rescue and call me. He sleds in the northern part of the state, much of which doesn’t have cell coverage. At $99 per year, it’s a lot cheaper than a satellite phone.)

It all reminds me of a trip the kids and I took to Staples last year. While I was looking at pens because I always do, the Short Kid started investigating the display and asked what correction tape was for. When I told him it was for typewriters, he gave me a say what look. While I was explaining to him what typewriters were, I was internally freaking out that my son didn’t know what a typewriter was. It broke my heart a little, to be honest.

An older woman who’d also been looking at pens joined the conversation and told my sons that when she was a teenager, she’d volunteered to babysit her neighbor’s children because they had a radio and she could listen to the stories. Needless to say, my children (who think being tethered by USB cord to a charger is torture) could barely wrap their minds around such a thing. They’re barely out of bed before they’ve got their iPod apps up and running, SK checking his weather app and TK scanning the CNN app.

I can’t even imagine what amazing gadgets my grandchildren will have. But I’m still holding out for Rosie the Robot, to be honest.

When I pointed out how much SK used mine, how adept he was with it, and how careful he was with it, Dad started wavering. Then I started nagging about the fact SK getting his own meant I could have mine back. Dad relented and Santa brought SK an iPod Touch for Christmas.

In the year-plus since, the Short Kid has never been far from his Touch. Every morning, he pulls up his weather app to check the temperature. If it’s over ten degrees, he knows they’ll have recess and he needs his snowpants. He reads the news apps and Wikipedia. He loves the Dictionary app and Word Warp and the GeoBee. Oh, and Angry Birds.

Toward the end of last summer, some friends of ours stayed at the campground and their son had a Nintendo DS with a Mario game. SK came away from that weekend convinced that he had to have a DS and, of course, that he was the only child on the whole planet who didn’t have one. When November rolled around and he was still asking, we bought him a Nintendo DSi XL for his birthday.

After a frustratingly brief honeymoon period, that was the end of that. I’m not sure he even knows where it is right now. Despite the cost of the DS, this doesn’t break my heart. Why? The games. Buying a decent game for the DS will set me back $30-40 or more and it might hold his attention for two weeks. Most of his iPod games were free or 99 cents. And there’s often a lite version which lets him try before we buy. He’s got a couple of pricier ($10?) flight simulators, and I think I paid $5 for Civ Rev and Oregon Trail, but I knew those were solid games he wouldn’t lose interest in. I think all of his games (except the simulators) might add up to less than the cost of a newly released DS game.

And it sure makes it easier when family members ask what my boys want for their birthdays or Christmas. Give SK a $10 iTunes gift card and he’s in present heaven. That’ll get him a few games and a couple of songs, or maybe a more expensive app Mom’s too cheap to buy him. (TK knows the iTunes password, but SK doesn’t. He brings it to me for purchases and updates.)

Because I decided not to upgrade their 2nd & 3rd gen devices to iOS4 after doing so to my 2nd gen resulted in massive battery nomming, we’re starting to find apps his Touch can’t run (and iTunes tells us so) so he has a few games on my new Touch and the iPad. And, even though they’re pricey, TK will probably get a new one in July and SK for Christmas. With all the things the Touches do, from games to educational apps to…anything and everything, I can’t see us buying a dedicated handheld gaming system ever again.

But I thought maybe I’d hooked the Short Kid. He’s been devouring the Artemis Fowl series and he finished the third book after school on Friday. He was antsy to read the next and the library was closed, so voila! Mom made The Opal Deception magically appear in the Kindle app on the iPad.

And he was happily reading. Even when we went out for dinner.

On Monday he talked to his teacher and explained the lack of proper page numbers for his reading log (although I guess the iThings Kindle app update that just released has page numbers) and they came up with a way for him to track how much he’d read. All systems go.

Guess which book he brought home from the school library yesterday? He was relieved that now he could read it “properly”. And I can’t pass on the Kindle book I paid for and he read half of to anybody else’s kid.

I give up.