Hasta La Gadget!

You love your Kindle, but you hate the DRM. What do you do? Well, if you like, we’ll tell you how to strip the copy-protection from your e-books, leaving a plain, vanilla e-book file in the format of your choice. This doesn’t just work for Kindle book, either. The method, detailed by Apprentice Alf, will also remove DRM from Mobipocket, Barnes and Noble, Adobe Digital Editions and Fictionwise books, making these stores much more attractive to buyers.

For the meat of the how-to, you should visit Apprentice Alf’s blog post, which is both straightforward and detailed. I managed to get it up and running in a couple minutes. For a quick version – focussing on the Kindle, read on.

First, get a copy of the free e-book manager, Calibre. This catalogs and converts your e-books from format to format. With a couple of plugins, it will also strip all DRM from them.

Next, you need those plugins, also linked from Alf’s post. Depending on what kind of books you want to fix-up, you may have to configure these plugins. For the Kindle, you need only install it in the right place.

Then download Kindle for Mac or Window, and from there download the books you have already bought and want cracked. Then locate the downloaded files on your hard-drive. Mac users will find them in a folder called My Kindle Content, inside the documents folder. These are titled with non-human-friendly names like “B002AU7MEK_EBOK.azw”, so just pick anything that seems to be a big enough file for an e-book (500k-plus). Then drag these files into Calibre.

That’s it. Your files are now DRM-free, and you can use Calibre to convert then to any format. EPUB is the one you need for the iPad or iPhone, but you can choose pretty much anything.

Oddly, since I tried this over the weekend, Kindle books have become a lot more attractive to me. Previously I was buying novels and things I might read once only. Now I’m looking at cookbooks and reference books, pricier purchases that I didn’t make before in case one day I stopped using the Kindle, or if Amazon decided to revoke my ownership of a book like it did, infamously, with Orwell’s 1984. Now, with my books safely converted, I can buy anything, and use it anywhere.

Ebook Formats, DRM and You — A Guide for the Perplexed [Apprentice Alf]

See Also:

• Kindle For PC Could Trigger E-Book Piracy
• Kindle DRM Hacked to Allow Mobi Files
• How to Do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle 3

Your office chair isn’t doing you any favors. It might feel comforting to sink into its leathery depths, or to suspend yourself on a futuristic, breathable netting, but your back knows otherwise, and all that lounging will eventually trouble your spine. Standing desks are great, if you like varicose veins, so what can you do?

Try the Wigli, a Dutch stool which, well, wiggles. It has a three-legged milking-stool design, and the round seat wobbles. This offers support for your office-bloated body, but you have to steady yourself with those rarely-used muscles in your lower back and abdomen, which strengthens your core and stops you getting back pain. It’s kind of the grown-up version of sitting on a ginat rubber ball.

The seat of the chair is covered with a thick layer of rubber, for grip and warmth, and the hinge is also rubber, claimed to be indestructible. You can buy the Wigli is two sizes – 45 cm and 48 cm (17.7 and 18.9-inches) high, for €300.

Wigli product page [Wigli. Thanks, Alphons!]

See Also:

• Cushionless Stool Perfect for Lazy Launderers
• Ikea Hack: Plywood Stool Becomes Bedtime Laptop Movie Stand …
• Fold-Flat Office Chair for At-Desk Siestas
• GymyGym: Office Chair with Built-In Gymnasium

Finally, we find a market that is truly enthusiastic about 3D. Tokyo-based researchers BCN, cited by CrunchGear, report that a cool 57 percent of all Blu-ray recorders sold in Japan last month had 3D playback functionality built in, while 23 percent of all 40-inch-plus TVs sold had the ability to relay stereoscopic imagery. Both those numbers are major leaps in popularity within the nation itself and also easily dwarf penetration rates for 3D hardware in other parts of the world. 3D has apparently grown a lot more affordable in Japan, but lest you think these data are just a symptom of people upgrading their equipment without regard to its third-dimension skills, word is that there’s still a chunky 30 percent premium associated with adding 3D to your BR recorder purchase. So, it would seem the trendsetting Japanese are leading from the front on this one — awkward, unstylish glasses be damned!

Japan loves its 3D: more than half of all Blu-ray recorders sold last month had 3D, 3DTVs popular too originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 06:09:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toyota’s not too pleased with the general scarcity of rare earth minerals and China’s near-monopolistic grip on the world’s supply, so it’s decided to act before it’s too late. A company spokesman has been cited as saying the Prius maker is hard at work on a new electric motor design that should dramatically reduce (though seemingly not eliminate) the need for rare earths in its production. Aside from being made of less price-volatile materials, the new electric ticker is expected to be generally cheaper to manufacture. Further details aren’t yet available, but we hope this turns into a classic case of necessity breeding innovation — that Prius C concept deserves a set of internals that can keep up with its bodacious exterior.

Toyota developing new type of electric motor in an effort to escape dependency on rare earth metals originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 04:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s proprietary dock connector may keep would-be peripheral manufacturers at bay, but if you want to build your own iOS companion devices, there’s another way. You might have noticed that the Square credit card reader uses Apple’s 3.5mm headset jack to transmit power and data at once, and gadgeteers at the University of Michigan are busy open-sourcing the same technique for all the DIY contraptions you can dream of. Project HiJack has already figured out how to pull 7.4 milliwatts out of a 22kHz audio tone, and built a series of prototype boards (including working EKG, temperature, humidity and motion sensors) that transmit data to and from an iOS app at up to 8.82 kbaud — using just $2.34 worth of electronic components. See the basic principles at work in the video above, and — as soon as the team updates Google Code — find out how to build your own at the links below.

iPhone headset socket hijacked to power DIY peripherals (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Jan 2011 02:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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