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Filed under: Business

International Kindle users: change your country to avoid additional fees

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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.

Filed under: Features, Social Software, web 2.0, Lists

5 great content discovery sites which aren't Digg

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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Filed under: Games, Linux

Renewed hope for Steam on Linux: Valve job boards looking for engineer to port Windows games

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...

Filed under: Design

ColorPix is a fast, free Windows color picker

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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Filed under: Fun, Utilities, Windows

ComicRack, eComic reader and library management

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!

Digg exposes its monthly website traffic -- turns out Reddit might be bigger

In a truly epic Reddit thread, kicked off by an infographic from its lead programmer Chris Slowe, it has emerged that Reddit actually serves more page views than Digg. Reddit, with over 300 million page views in August, would seem to dwarf Digg's '200+ million'. Page views aren't everything, though. Reddit's 'forum' style (and lighter format) is conducive to fast, frantic communication -- ...

Google Chrome 6 goes stable, 2nd birthday celebration brings extension and autofill sync

It's Chrome's second birthday today, and in addition to posting some fancy-schmancy images to celebrate Google Chrome's stable channel has been bumped to version 6. For those of you still keeping tabs on version changes, it's only been four months since Chrome 5 went stable. The update means that all Chrome users can now take advantage of extension and autofill sync -- both important parts of ...

Google's "Things to do" helps you show the power of Google to non-techies

For most people, "Google" has become synonymous with "search". Heck, Cambridge dictionary lists it as a verb. But as we all know, Google can do lots more than just search. You've got Gmail, and YouTube, and Maps, and the calculator, and a whole bunch of other Web properties. While Gmail is enormously popular, not all Google projects fare so well (cough Wave cough). Even most of the search ...

August browser stats show Android, Chrome on the rise

It's the beginning of the month again, and that means it's time for the big analytics guns to release their browsing snapshots once again. While there's not a lot of movement to report on for August of 2010, Google is no doubt pleased with the way things played out. Android made a fairly major jump last month, climbing more than a full point -- from 7.91 to 9.22%. That gain came mostly at the ...

iTunes 10 now available to download

Just a quick note to say that the wait is over: iTunes 10 is now available to download. If the iTunes page shows the old logo, hit Ctrl+F5 to refresh the page. For more details, check Jay's post -- or indeed, just peruse the Apple site! There seems to be a lot of fallout over the 99-cent TV episodes, and the complete lack of Facebook integration in iTunes Ping -- we'll try to cover it in ...
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The Illusionist's Dream is a simple platformer; you play as a magician who needs to get through each level by transforming into any number of animals that you encounter along the way. Each animal can do different things; the butterfly can obviously fly, but if it encounters a frog, the frog eats it, and you have to start over again. There's also a fox that runs fast and leaps far, but it eats any rabbits that cross its path. That means that, if you may need to be a rabbit later on, you need to take that into account ...

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