Okay, so my earlier story about how Amazon is messing with International Kindle users made a bit of a splash. Quite a few things came up in my investigations before and after the story, but the basic fact remains: Amazon will add a fixed $2.00 surcharge to most items (which may or may not be a "roaming charge") if you're an international customer, even if you're using a WiFi-only device.

But I've now discovered something interesting enough to warrant a follow-up: It turns out that if you go to Amazon's Manage My Kindle page, you can simply set your country.

I think you must specify a valid address in your destination country (I supplied a valid one in Canada), but Amazon then simply takes your word for it.

As soon as I switched my country from Israel to Canada, the extra $2.00 per book simply disappeared. I could also suddenly subscribe to the NYT. I didn't actually try to do it, but it appears to be possible. Another side-effect was that Michael Pollan's Food Rules was suddenly unavailable, whereas before I was actually to buy the title for $7.20 (when my location was listed as "Israel").

What's interesting is that in talking to four different Amazon reps, not a single one has mentioned this option. Also, Amazon can easily verify your actual location in two different ways – IP address or billing address. Yet, for some interesting reason, they choose to let you specify the address manually, and then take your word for it.

To me, this feels like a legal work-around they've had to take due to content restrictions and distributors insisting on various deals. Could it be that this shifts the legal responsibility to the customer rather than leave it with Amazon? Maybe I'm completely off-base here, but I think such weird complications are often lawyer-induced.

Note that I still don't have the device itself, so I can't fully guarantee that this works, and for all I know, they might plug this hole tomorrow. What I can tell you is that right now it does change the pricing and availability of many Kindle items.

Despite what you may have heard in the last two weeks, Digg is not dead. It is, however, a very different service than when it started. What used to be a great place to find interesting links and hilarious commentary has become, for almost all intents and purposes, a Twitter clone.

Digg isn't about to shut its doors, but I do get the feeling that regular, loyal Diggers are looking to take their custom elsewhere. Judging by the 'Reddit incident' on Monday, where Digg users revolted in favor of Reddit, it looks like a mass exodus might already have begun.

So, if you're a disenfranchised Digger, or if you're just looking for the best of the rest when it comes to social news aggregators and content discovery, take a look at this list of alternatives!

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If we're to believe this new job posting over at Valve, reports of Steam for Linux's death may have been greatly exaggerated. As you can see, Valve is on the hunt for a senior engineer who can port Windows games to Linux.

If you recall VP Doug Lombardi's actual words, he never said Steam for Linux was dead -- only that they weren't currently working on it. Maybe that's because they just hadn't found the right man or woman for the job yet. As Sebastian pointed out to me, this doesn't necessarily mean "Steam for desktop Linux" -- it could just as easily have to do with embedded gaming.

Whatever the case may be, the news is certainly a bit more encouraging than Lombardi's interview.

[via Tech Drive-In]

update: as Kaushik points out (as do a few of our friends at Reddit) this one's a tad on the old-and-moldy side. Linux gamers, return to your pining...

I recently went on a search to find a good color picker for Windows that was both portable and fast so that I could stop making the trip to Photoshop whenever I needed to find a color value.

After trying a number of different applications, I was delighted to find ColorPix (an app from ColorSchemer, who is the developer behind the previously mentioned ColorSchemer Studio 2).

ColorPix has an interesting lock and unlock mechanic for selecting the color that you want to find. While the application is active, hitting any key will unlock the picker, which you can then move anywhere on your screen. Once you've found the color, hitting any key again will lock it in so that you don't accidentally nudge the mouse while clicking to make your selection. It also includes a magnifier window to help with pixel precession at several different levels of zoom.

Once you've locked in a color, you can click anywhere on the RGB, HEX, HSB, or CMYK values and copy the individual color for the mode that you're working in directly to the clipboard. If you want the HEX value, you can use the Ctrl+C shortcut to get it even faster.

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First, let me disclaim that I do not read comics, nor manga, and I'm not a huge fan of anime. In fact, the only drawn-art medium that I really like is hentai. But enough about me! Today I've had the pleasure of using ComicRack, an eComics reader and manager.

I don't have anything to compare it to, but according to my friends it's the best comic reader out there. I can't really tell you if it'll make your comics more exciting or enjoyable, but I can tell you that it's a joy to use. Just drag an archive of images into ComicRack, and off you go! It supports every popular archive format -- ZIP (CBZ), RAR (CBR), TAR (CBT), 7Z (CB7) -- and even PDFs, with a little hackery. If you prefer a more organized approach (and I'm pretty sure most comic collectors like to keep things organized), you can create a folder for each genre, or each series, or whatever tentacles tickles your fancy!

Once you've imported a few archives, it's time to read some comics. ComicRack's reader is truly lovely. You can view comics inside the main 'library' view, but really you want to use the full-screen viewer. Then it's just a matter of sitting back, scrolling your mouse wheel, and reading. There's a particularly nice page transition, too.

Best of all, ComicRack is free to download, has an active forum community -- and there are even add-ons!