“Your Credit Score” by Liz Pulliam Weston

Price: $0.00

Summary:

MSN Money/L.A. Times personal finance columnist Liz Pulliam Weston has updated her best-selling book on credit scores to show how you can maximize your score right now—and save yourself a fortune!

Weston reveals the tough new realities of borrowing and credit scoring, and shows why they aren’t going to change any time soon. She rips away the mystery surrounding credit scoring, including the FICO 08 overhaul, and tells you exactly how to use the new system to maximize your score.

It’s true! If you’ve got some tech/geek skills, a little patience, $150, and a Bed Bath & Beyond nearby, you too can become the proud owner of a color touch screen Wi-Fi enabled Amazon Kindle!

Sort of.

Last week, several awesome people posted instructions on how to hack the new Pandigital Novel 7″ eReader, a somewhat janky, low-budget ebook reader that just came out. Emboldened by boredom and my own stupidity (the two things that usually embolden me, to be honest), I decided to try it out for myself.

Several hours later–I’m going to say six, because I was interrupted by dinner, TV, and sleep–I now have a portable Wi-Fi tablet running Kindle for Android.

So yes, it does indeed work, and no, you don’t have to be brilliant to pull it off. But I have lots of mixed feelings about it.

First, here is a summary of what I did.

Step 1: Register a new email address at bedbathandbeyond.com so that you can receive a 20% off coupon. You’ll need to print this coupon and bring it to the store with you.

Step 2: While you’re on the site, go to the product page and download the Pandigital $20 Mail In Rebate form (PDF) for later.

Step 3: Now get dressed and go to a physical Bed Bath & Beyond. (Yes, I know you were in your underwear at home.) Don’t bother looking for the device; it’s almost certainly in the back, because Pandigital had to pull all the inventory and issue a firmware upgrade a couple of weeks ago right after they first went on sale. (I told you the device was janky.) Just go to customer service and ask for it there.

The device retails at BB&B for $170, but with your 20% off coupon you can get it with tax for under $150. After the mail-in-rebate, it’s theoretically possible to get the price down to $130–hence the headline of this post. But some companies are notorious for abusing mail-in-rebate rules to deny valid rebates, and I don’t have any experience with Pandigital to know whether to expect them to come through. Buyer beware and all that.

Step 4: Bring home your new halfwitted Pandigital Novel, plug it in so it can charge, and turn it on. Now marvel at the slow, unresponsive interface! Seriously, I suspect nobody at Pandigital actually tried using this device before shipping it. It’s more or less unusable in its factory-fresh state, which is sad.

(On the other hand, if you’d rather use the Barnes & Noble ebook store for all your reading, you can stop right here and just use it as is. You’re probably better off buying a Nook, though.)

Step 5: Make sure there’s enough juice in the battery, then go to this page and follow this guy’s instructions. He’ll walk you through a multi-step process that will:

• install a special driver on your Windows PC so it can talk to the Pandigital Novel via USB cable
• install a software hack that will turn the volume up/down buttons on the Pandigital into “Menu” and “Back” buttons
• install a user-friendly replacement home screen that you will use instead of the heavily restricted default one

I think I followed the instructions precisely, but I have to say things didn’t unfold exactly as written. I never saw any “Success” or “Reboot the Novel” messages on the PC or the device, and I was worried that things weren’t working. It all turned out okay in the end, however.

Also: the instructions explain that you can now install other Android apps–for example, Kindle for Android. If you know your way around a command line interface (really you just need to know the commands DIR and CD) it’s easy. If not, you can open the web browser on the device and install Amazon for Kindle directly via this link, which goes to a public Dropbox account hosting the apk installer.

When you finally get everything working, you’ll be able to fire up the Kindle for Android app, download your purchases, and start reading.

Now a whole slew of warnings. Why so many? Because after playing around with this thing for the past several hours I’ve got a lot of misgivings about it.

• Hardware issues (yes, there are a lot)
  • I think it’s a nice size, but it’s heavy.
  • The touchscreen layer buckles in the center slightly on my model (you can’t see it, but you can feel it when pressing).
  • It’s a resistive touchscreen, not capacitive, so that means no multitouch and you have to press fairly hard (compared to an iPhone or iPad) to register a touch.
  • It’s sloooowwww; it seems like Pandigital took a page from Nokia’s playbook and deliberately underpowered the poor thing, probably to save money and battery life.
  • Even the included plastic stand is badly designed, so that the power cable falls out and you have to use both hands to insert the device when you want to use it.
• Software and firmware issues
  • It freezes up frequently. Sometimes it starts working again after several minutes, and sometimes you have to reboot.
  • There seems to be a bug with the Wi-Fi connection so that when you return from sleep mode, it refuses to scan for wireless networks. Fiddling with it via various setting screens and/or removing the SD card sometimes works, but not always. Reboot!
  • As a result of cutting corners on the processor, there’s not a single aspect of the device that you can call “snappy” or “responsive”–you will need to get used to pressing, waiting, and sometimes pressing again.
  • The on-screen keyboard is slow and frequently reads your press for the wrong key, resulting in an estimated one hundred million typos per typing session.
  • There are some issues with the auto-rotation–different issues depending on which launcher you install and/or which app you’re using at the time.

In general, I’d say this is sort of the electronic equivalent of an old car you keep around because you like to tinker with it; it will run sometimes, but other times you’ll have to open the hood and start messing with things.

As to whether I’ll keep it, I haven’t decided yet. I can’t say enough bad things about Pandigital after today, and I can confidently say that without discounts, the Pandigital Novel is insanely overpriced considering it’s almost unusable fresh out of the box.

Even so, I might keep it because I do like the size of it–not too big or too small–and I like that I can access not just my Kindle ebooks and personal ePub library, but also comics. That’s a great thing to have for less than a third of the price of the cheapest iPad.

But just to be clear, this is a poor man’s iPad in every aspect: speed, touchscreen technology, memory, battery life, connectivity, and materials.

If you can live with all that, and if you don’t mind troubleshooting a device on a regular basis, good luck. Maybe I’ll see you around on the slatedroid.com Pandigital forums.

If you’re not using Calibre on your computer to manage your ever-growing library of ebooks, why not? It’s free, it runs on OS X, Windows, and Linux systems, and it will let you manage your entire library easily. It’s also just been upgraded to version 0.7, and packs a lot of incredibly useful new features to help readers manage their libraries.

Why do you need Calibre?

I’ve described it in the past as the equivalent of iTunes for ebook libraries, and that’s probably the easiest way to think of it. It even has its own version of coverflow, the imaged-based scrolling interface that Apple loves so much:

But that’s not all it does. Here’s why anyone with an ebook library of more than a dozen titles will want to use it:

1. You can organize all of your ebooks, not just your Kindle purchases. Now every ebook in your library–including all those free titles that I hope you’re getting from Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg–can be in one location. This makes it easier to find things, easier to make backups, and easier to load/unload files to your Kindle.

2. You can use it to add things like summaries, genres, and ratings to your Kindle books so that you can more easily sort them.
3. When you connect your Kindle to your computer, you can see the device in Calibre and see what files are already on it, then add or remove books.
4. (This one is pretty cool.) You can create a catalog of all of your ebooks and send that catalog to your Kindle. This way, you can quickly see a full list of everything you have stored on your PC, so you can decide what book to buy next, or what to move over to your Kindle the next time you connect it to your computer.

New features: custom categories and adjustable interface

The reason I’m writing about this today is that version 0.7 has just been released, and it’s definitely worth downloading.

The resizable interface windows and the snappier overall speed are probably the most visible improvements. However, version 0.7 also comes with a vastly improved search functionality, a tag browser, the ability to create custom metadata fields, and more.

• You can create your own categories. Say you want to create a column titled “Illustrated” with a simple yes/no value. Now you can create that category and add that value to every ebook, then sort by that column if you choose. You’re not limited to binary values; you can also use numerical or text strings, it’s all up to you.

• Regular expressions and relational operators can now be used for power searches.
• There’s a new Tag Browser pane, similar to the labels that Google Gmail uses to help sort email. You can use the default ones and create your own, and you can use them to restrict searches to subsets of your larger library.
• You can retrieve metadata from Amazon in addition to Google Books and isbndb.com.
• Comparing your Kindle to your library is easier, thanks to new “on device” and “in library” columns that appear when your Kindle is connected.

Where to get it

If you’d like to test drive Calibre before installing it, you can watch a video tour first. If you’re ready to download, here’s where to go:

http://calibre-ebook.com/download

And finally, a quick warning. Please note that if you already use Calibre, there are a couple of changes that will make reverting back to a 0.6 version of the software difficult, so be sure to read up on everything at the Calibre site. (See “Incompatible changes” at the bottom of this page.) Also, version 0.7 no longer supports older SONY PRS 500 devices that haven’t been upgraded–but if you’re reading this you almost certainly are using a Kindle and shouldn’t have to worry about that.

I wrote earlier about the needless concern over Amazon’s new “Popular Highlights” service, which anonymously collects highlights from customers’ Kindle ebooks and combines them into one giant pool for everyone to browse. I still say that in the world of online privacy, this is harmless; if you’re really concerned about a website keeping data on you, you shouldn’t be using an Amazon Kindle in the first place. (I’m not being a smart-aleck; seriously, you shouldn’t.)

But if you disagree with me, take heart; there’s an easy way to turn off participation in the program, and in fact to turn off Amazon’s automatic backup of your notes, bookmarks, and highlights completely. You can do it directly from your Kindle:

• On your Kindle, press the Menu button.
• In the pop-up menu, scroll down and select Settings.
• You’ll see your “Settings & Device Information” screen with your Registration info, Device Name, etc. Click the Menu button again.
• In the pop-up menu, scroll down to “Disable Annotations Backup” and click it.
• Now your bookmarks, notes, and highlights won’t be stored on Amazon’s servers.

Amazon says this option to turn off the service will be included in future versions of Kindle App software, but for now you can only turn it off via your Kindle device.

(Photo: Håvar og Solveig)

Part 4 of 4: Tips and tricks

* If you own a Kindle device, add Feedbooks to your device for easy, DRM-free access to thousands of classics and modern works.

* If you own a Kindle 1 device (it was the original wedge-shaped one), here are some keyboard shortcuts for you.

* If you own a Kindle 2 or Kindle DX, here are some shortcuts for you as well.

* For all Kindle owners, did you know you can replace the screensaver images with custom images?

* There are lots of places to help you find free ebooks.

FAQ

Q: Do I have to make backups?
A: Nope. You can let Amazon take care of all of that. However, if you want access to your full library even when you’re not able to connect to Amazon’s servers, you’ll need to either keep everything on your device all the time, or you’ll need to keep your own backup library on your computer.

 
Q: Do I have to re-purchase Kindle books for other devices?
A: No. Buy it once, and you can read it on any Kindle-ready device. However, there’s a limit to how many devices you can have connected to your account. Usually that limit is six, but sometimes a publisher sets it lower.

If you’ve exhausted your limit because you’ve changed devices, you can contact Amazon and ask them to reset the limit for you.

 
Q: If I delete a book, do I have to buy it again?
A: No. You deleted it from your device, but it’s still stored on Amazon’s servers, and you can re-download it again at any point in the future.

 
Q: If I sell my Kindle to someone else, will they have access to my purchases?
A: Only if you want them to. Before selling the Kindle, go into your account management page at kindle.amazon.com (click “account management” at the top of the page after you log in) and deregister the device from your account. Then make sure you deregister device is able to connect to Amazon’s servers so that it can receive the news that it’s no longer connected, and it will remove all of your information and return to its blank initial state.

If you don’t deregister the Kindle before selling it, the person who buys it could access your Kindle library and buy more books under your account, costing you money.

Fortunately, you can deregister a Kindle even after you no longer have it in your possession — all the magic happens on the Amazon website.

 
Q: Does the Kindle device display PDF files?
A: Sort of. Not very well. Well, sometimes. It depends? On the smaller model, the screen is okay if the text in the PDF file isn’t too tiny. You can change the screen orientation so the file is displayed sideways, which gives you a little more screen width. In general I haven’t had much success reading PDFs on the Kindle.

If you have the large-format Kindle DX, this isn’t a problem, and most PDF files will display just fine.

You can also email PDF files to Amazon and they’ll convert the file to a different format and either send it back to you via email, which is free, or send it directly to your Kindle, which costs 15-99 cents depending on whether you’re a U.S. customer in the United States at the time. In my tests, conversion results vary in quality.

More information:

If you’re reading Kindle books on any other device, the question is moot because the Kindle software won’t display PDFs. Just use whatever you’ve always used to read PDFs on that platform.

 
Q: What file formats can I read on the Kindle?
A: The answer depends on what device you’re using. If you bought a Kindle, here are the accepted formats. If you have something in a different format than what’s on that list, you can try sending the document to Amazon to see if they can convert it for you, or you can try one of the solutions mentioned on our Converting Stuff page.

 
Q: Can I share Kindle purchases with other Kindle owners?
A: You can’t lend, sell, or give away Kindle ebooks, but you can register up to six devices on a single account, and every one of those devices will be able to access your full library.

 
Useful Amazon links

• Transferring, Downloading, and Sending Files to Kindle
• User Guides
• Your Kindle Account Page

Hey! Be sure to check out the complete Kindle 101 page for the most current version of this guide.

Part 3 of 4: How it all works

I made flowcharts!

You can register up to 6 devices to one account and manually select the destination. If you have just one device, Amazon sends it there by default.

Not every book you buy has to be stored on every device — it’s up to you. You can download just what you want to read and leave the other titles stored on Amazon’s servers if you like.

If more than one person is reading the same book on your account, she can elect to turn off syncing so you don’t interfere with each other’s bookmarks.

Hey! Be sure to check out the complete Kindle 101 page for the most current version of this guide.

Part 2 of 4: Getting started

So you’ve decided you want to get started, but have no idea what to do? There are two basic things you need:

Let’s look at these two requirements.

1. An Amazon account.

If you don’t already have one, you can open an Amazon account without having to provide any personal banking information.

However, to buy Kindle books, you’ll need one of the following attached to it:

Why? Because when you buy a Kindle ebook, there’s no normal Amazon check-out process. Instead, the retailer uses its “1-Click” payment option to streamline the purchase. (Don’t worry, if you buy an ebook by mistake you can get a refund for the purchase.)

In order to use 1-Click, you have to provide a default billing address on your Amazon account and manually activate the 1-Click setting.

The gift card option is your solution if you don’t want to add a credit card or debit card to your account. You’ll still have to provide a default billing address, but instead of a credit or debit card number you can enter the code on a gift card and the available balance will be used each time you make a 1-Click purchase.

Here are more details directly from Amazon on how to set up the 1-Click payment method or redeem a gift card:

Here’s where to buy Amazon gift cards from physical stores, if you don’t want to buy them online:

 
2. One of the following devices:

If you buy a Kindle device, you don’t need any other software. The device automatically connects over a built-in (free) cellular network without needing any configuration from you.

For all the other devices, you’ll have to install some free software that Amazon provides. This software serves as your ebook library–it’s where you’ll store your purchases as well as read them.

So that’s it. Get your account set up, install the right software, and you’re ready to start buying and reading Kindle ebooks.

Hey! Be sure to check out the complete Kindle 101 page for the most current version of this guide.

Every week the ebook market seems to grow more confusing, so I thought it might be a good idea to provide the most basic of introductions to the Kindle — the sort of stuff that Kindle vets take for granted but that newcomers would like to know, like how it all works and what you need to get started.

I’ve collected it all under a new section called Kindle 101, but I’m also carving it into four easy-to-read chunks this week for greater access.

Tomorrow and the day after I’ll talk about how to get started with the Kindle, but today I want to focus on why you should, or if you should at all.

Part 1 of 4: Pros and cons of the Kindle

Here are three things you might want to consider before trying out any ebook system, not just the Amazon Kindle.

CON – “They’re not real books!”
PRO – The convenience outweighs the lack of a printed copy for a lot of titles.

A lot of readers love the look, feel, and smell of an old book, and it’s true that you lose all of that with an ebook. You can’t put an ebook on your shelf at home, or be interrupted by a stranger in a coffee shop who wants to ask you about what you’re reading. You can’t write in the margins.

If you read a lot, though, you might quickly discover two benefits of ebooks:

1. They tend to cost less than new printed books.
2. When you get absorbed into a book, the thing you’re reading it from tends to disappear.

At the very least, you can save money by going “e” for those books you want to read but don’t want to keep forever–you know, those massmarket paperbacks you take on the train, or to the pool or beach.

 
CON – “I don’t own the ebook outright!”
PRO – Uhh… it’s complicated?

This is a weird issue because everyone is still trying to figure it all out. Here’s the short answer, and if you want to know more you can open the long answer below.

The Short Answer: It’s true, you don’t. What you own is a perpetual license to read the book, which is what every major ebook retailer (Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Apple) offers. The license is enforced with something called DRM, which locks that particular copy to your account.

As far as backups, Amazon lets you download copies of the ebook whenever and as often as you want. It also keeps a copy for you on its servers, which is how it syncs your bookmarks across devices (more on that below). And as far as worrying about Amazon honoring the agreement, it all depends on how much you trust a large company.

 
CON – “It’s cheaper to go to used book stores and the library.”
PRO – For public domain books, going digital can be both cheaper and more convenient.

First the bad news. Prices have jumped up for new releases and lots of older titles thanks to new pricing agreements that publishers forced through earlier this year. The “(almost) everything is $9.99!” era of the Kindle store is over.

Now the good news. You can find lots of classics and indie-published work for free or for just a few dollars. In addition, lots of publishers like to make certain titles temporarily free for short periods for marketing purposes. Some recent examples of completely free ebooks on the Amazon Kindle store: a Sookie Stackhouse novel, a Twilight novel, the first in Charlie Huston’s vampire detective series, and 10 of the 13 Lemony Snicket books.

Whether the Kindle system will save you money depends a lot on your current reading and purchasing habits. If you use the library or used book store for newer releases, and use the Kindle for older works or promotional offers, you might find it actually extends your book budget.

Hey! Be sure to check out the complete Kindle 101 page for the most current version of this guide.

Time to get your carpenter on: Evenfall Studios (www.evenfallstudios.com) has a collection of 175 old public domain woodworking books, mostly scanned via Google’s book scanning project, that cover everything from carving, to upholstery, to using hand and machine tools. Most are rather old and might be more interesting as historical records, but here are three from the military that were published recently:

Carpentry I (PDF)
Carpentry II (PDF)
Use and Care of Hand Tools and Measuring Tools (PDF)

All of the books are in either HTML and PDF, so you might have to convert some of them before they’re readable on your Kindle. Check out our Formats page for help on which formats work natively. If you do want to convert them to a Kindle-friendly format, as always I suggest Calibre, the free software that lets you manage non-Amazon ebooks using an iTunes-like interface.

“Woodworks Library” [Evenfall Studios via OpenMaterials.org via MAKE]

The problem is that Amazon hasn’t yet made an “international” flavor of its Kindle app available, so if you live in Great Britain and just grabbed a Kindle, you still can’t take advantage of the awesome syncing capabilities of having the same books on your iPhone.

Except actually, reports Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, you can!

Thanks to the iTunes Store option to choose “none” as a payment method, you can sign up for a US iTunes account with nothing more than an e-mail address (not the one you normally use), a real address and a cellphone number. Any free applications are then available to download, and best of all, when you hook up your iPhone or iPod Touch the application just syncs.

Gadget Lab vouches for the workaround, saying it downloaded books just fine and synced perfectly. You’ll log in to your Kindle account from within the app by using the same info as you use on your Kindle, so there’s no conflict with the dupe account you created in iTunes.

So there you go–until Amazon gets up to speed on an international Kindle app, this is an easy way for you to keep reading even when you don’t have your Kindle with you.

(Works for iPod Touch too, obviously.)

“How To Get the iPhone Kindle App Outside the U.S.” [Wired]
(Photo: Graphic Spirit)