My New Toys

I recently succumbed to the lure of the Amazon Kindle Fire. I'm glad I did. I love it. This is my first Kindle so I have nothing to compare it to, but so far I'm happy. Although I love all things Mac, I passed over the iPad and opted for the Kindle Fire at less than half the price. It doesn't have all the options of the iPad, but I didn't think I wanted all the fancy stuff. I also liked the slightly smaller size. Among other reasons, I wanted one of these so I could download my newest book which recently became available for Kindle. I wanted to see how it looks. It looks great. There were two poems with one bad break each due to line lengths. I simply reduced the size of the font and the lines became just right. I'd noticed earlier when I added a book sample to Amazon's free desktop reader that the table of contents consisted of all blue links except the links were inactive. In the actual Kindle book, those links are active. Click on a title and you're immediately taken to that poem.

I haven't loaded on any additional books yet, but I plan to. In the meantime, I've been using my new toy to check email and hop onto the internet. Very convenient—and fast. Another feature I find very fantastic is Amazon Prime which I recently signed up for. You get a free month with Kindle, but I'd already signed up for it. At $79 per year, it strikes me as a huge bargain. Any book I order now comes with free shipping and two-day delivery. No more waiting until I have enough books to equal $25 so I qualify for free shipping. I get instant gratification, something I'm quite fond of.

Now with Amazon Prime, I can get one free Kindle book per month. I can get magazines and a good selection of movies—for free! I can't see myself watching movies on a reader, but it's nice to know that I can if I want to.

Now for my second toy, the Roku. A month or so ago I missed an episode of "Boardwalk Empire." I missed my weekly dose of violence, so I signed up for HBO GO. That enables me to get all HBO shows and movies on my computer. Since I have a big screen, watching on the computer is very comfortable. I get a weekly email now from HBO listing all the shows. In one of those newsletters, they had an offer for Roku. It's a game box, very small, about 3" x 3". You hook it up to your TV—with a USB cable for standard definition or an HDMI cable for HD. Either one is a very easy, fast setup. Once that was set up, the Roku screen appeared and took me through all the free offerings. For each one that I wanted, I had to go online, put in a code, and bingo, the channel was activated. We can get all the HBO shows, Amazon movies—again, many for free now that I'm a Prime subscriber—and a few other movie channels. I don't watch a ton of movies, but now that I can get so many for free instead of paying $5 each with FIOS, maybe I'll watch more. Of course, there's all kinds of stuff I could pay for, but for now I'm resisting any more temptation.