Do you buy Amazon Kindle books a lot? I love them, not only do they have a great price usually but its the instant gratification of knowing you’ll be reading it within seconds of buying it wherever you are. Many of you might have a Kindle Device but what if you also got an iPad for reading?

If you have an iPad, I’m 99.9% sure you most likely already downloaded the Kindle app and iBooks app for it by now. It was great at first, until I started to realize one small ever-growing problem. That I will eventually have TWO sets of digital book libraries on my iPad. Not good! So how to resolve this problem?

First, I had to decide which app I was more comfortable reading in. For mainly aesthetic reasons I chose iBooks over the Kindle app because of the fancy page turning graphics as well as the built-in store behind it if I ever did want to buy a book on the spot. (As opposed to going to a browser from the Kindle app) The *only* thing I would like to see iBooks do that Kindle does is the ability to choose a black background for night reading. Although the lowest brightness setting within iBooks does just fine for me.

So, my journey began like all journeys now’a days – with Google. Searching and reading up on how I can get my books from the Kindle app to my iBooks app. There were a lot of different helpful websites but none really had all the information I needed in one place, hence this blogpost for you.

For now I will be focusing on iPad users, and how to get the Kindle books from the Kindle app to your iBooks, and NOT Kindle Device users specifically (however with a little know-how you can use this same guide anyway without much changes to the later instructions)

Formats

First let’s start out with what you need to know – iBooks uses a format called .ePub which is basically a text document that can have re-flowable content (which means you can make text larger/smaller, etc) has embedded metadata, inline raster and vector images along with CSS and XML functionality. And yes, it also unfortunately supports DRM.

Another format you need to be aware of is .PRC which is a format that the Kindle devices and Palm eReaders are familiar with. For those Kindle device/Palm users out there you might also recognize this format as .MOBI, it is the same exact thing.

One last format to note is the .AZW format which is a Amazon Kindle specific format for the ebook. Note that all of these formats can be converted assuming that they do NOT have DRM on them. There ARE ways around the DRM but that is NOT what I will be discussing on this post. You will have to find out how to do that yourself.

Software You’ll Need to Convert:

Thankfully, this is a post I don’t have to spend too much time talking about the programs you’ll need for various Operating Systems. “Calibre” is a multi-platform program that allows you to convert many ebook and text documents to another format with a few clicks of a button. You can download it here.

METHOD 1:

With your jailbroken iPad (or iPhone/iPad – whatever your using for the Kindle app) your going to need to sFTP into it and locate the Kindle folder within the Applications folder. Usually, its not named “Kindle” but rather a long string of numbers. My Kindle folder is located in

/private/var/mobile/Applications/

If you don’t feel like sitting there and going through every single folder to find out which one holds the Kindle.app, a quick workaround is to delete the app from the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and then go to the AppStore and re-download it. This way, when you go back to your FTP program you can sort the Applications folder by “Modified Date” and the newest modified folder should be the Kindle.app folder. (You might need to open the Kindle app first)

Once the Kindle folder is found, you will want to navigate to:

/Documents/eBooks/

In this folder you will see a bunch of paired files with the same name twice, for now your only interested in the .PRC and .AZW files. Go ahead and copy them to your desktop (or wherever you want on your computer) and you can close out the FTP program once finished.

Method 2:
But what if you don’t have a jailbroken iPad/iPhone/iPod touch to do this? Well, where there’s a will theres a way. Basically your going to need to extract the contents of your back-up’s from iTunes. To do this you’ll need special software:

Windows users can use – Reincubate Download Here
Mac OSX users can use – iPhone Backup Extractor Download here

Once you’ve extracted the Kindle folder to your desktop look for the eBooks folder with your .PRC, and .AZW files inside. From here you can continue to the instructions below using Calibre.

Converting the Files

Now that you have the PRC and AZW files, you’ll want to open up Calibre. If you need some help configuring Calibre you can watch the below YouTube video the developer made which helps guide you through the process.

Simply drag the PRC files into Calibre and select the ones you wish to convert. Select “Convert e-Books” at the top panel and you will be able to edit the Metadata if you desire.

Make sure the output format on the top right is set to “EPUB”. If all the settings are set to how you wish (I chose the default setup) click on “OK” in the bottom right.

It shouldn’t take very long and after Calibre finishes, it will place the new EPUB version of the eBook in the folder you specified Calibre save them to. Now, its time to open up iTunes and drag n’ drop that ePub file into the “Books” section of iTunes.

You are now ready to sync those books up and they will “magically” appear on your iPad iBooks app!

One last note: There are .PRC and .AZW files out there that have DRM locking it down, making Calibre unable to convert it. There are ways around this but that is not what this post is about. If you really truly want to get that nasty DRM off, I will say that Google, is your best friend as always.

Enjoy reading your books!

I finally got my hands on an Eye-Fi X2 Pro 8GB SD Card and was extremely excited to see the possibilities it would allow me to do. If you haven’t heard, Eye-Fi creates SD cards with Wi-Fi chips embedded inside them allowing you to take pictures with your SD card compatible camera (point-and-shoot or DSLR) and instantly have it uploaded to a social media or photo sharing website of your choice. In the beginning the only drawback was that your computer and camera both had to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Over time, Eye-Fi came out with different SD cards that allowed more flexibility. The recent release of its “X2 Pro” gives people the most options when trying to upload pictures on the go.

For about $150, you get an 8GB SDHC card that has 802.11n built-in. An “endless memory” mode, letting you take pictures continuously, and since your uploading the pictures as you take them once you have no more space the SD card immediately starts deleting the first pictures you started with to make room for new ones. (It will not delete any if it hasn’t safely delivered it online.)

You also get a year access to AT&T hotspots (Starbucks, McDonalds, Hotels, Restaurants, etc) for uploading pictures with your camera if your Internet-less, and free lifetime Geotagging of your photos. The X2 Pro supports RAW formats too! (.CRW, .CR2, .NEF, .NRW, .DNG, .PTX, .PEF, .RAW, .RW2, .MPO) You of course can always upload JPGs only if you wish have speedy uploads for your picture sharing websites.

So, what did I have in mind for the Eye-Fi card? With the X2 Pro, you now also have the ability to connect to Ad-Hoc networks. Perfect for those iPhone and iPads that have been jailbroken and have an app that creates a portable Wi-Fi spot. I use one called MiWi with WEP security so others don’t hop on and steal bandwidth if they happen to be in the area.

A few minutes of setting up the network and privacy settings in the Eye-Fi Control Panel and I’m good to go. Now with the 3G data connection as my Internet source, and the iPhone Wi-Fi network for my Eye-Fi card, I can start shooting! I can leave the netbook and laptop at home and completely bypass SD card adapters all together. No more stopping what Im doing, transferring pictures, reformatting the SD card and wasting precious shooting time. I turn my WiFi network on the iPhone and set my Canon DSLR to take both RAW pictures at high quality and JPGs at medium quality giving me the most flexibility later on. I set Eye-Fi up so that it only uploads JPGs that I choose and ignore RAW files when Im on my personal iPhone WiFi network. That way, I can share what Im shooting and if I want to edit the picture later in RAW I can do that when I get home.

There are plenty of picture sites you can choose to upload to.

Its not listed in the photo services above, but in the Control Panel you can set up your Twitter account for instant tweets once a photo is uploaded. (Although I’m not sure how this will work in the next few months once Twitter goes all in with OAuth forcing 3rd party services to use that as a means to connect to Twitter.) I love the fact that you can choose FTP as an option too, giving people true freedom to do what they want with their pictures once uploaded if other social media sites fail to do what the user wants.

After testing it, I found that a 3088 x 2056 JPG (shown above in a thumbnail) takes about 20-25 seconds on a 3G connection. Not – bad – at – all! Considering thats a “medium” setting on my Canon XSi, I can choose to even bump that down to a “Small” setting and uploading something on the scale of a 1024×682 for even faster uploads. (Probably around 5-10 seconds per picture!) Still perfectly viewable for sharing.

I can’t wait to put this thing to the test this weekend and take batches of pictures at a time, without lugging around a netbook/laptop I feel Eye-Fi has given me more freedom to do what I want creatively as a Photographer.

For even more creative ways to Eye-Fi on the go, check out ShutterSnitch app for both iPhone and iPad. It allows you to create rules for Eye-Fi pictures in case you wanted to upload only certain types of JPGs (like ISO specific shots, etc).

I predict this will be a big hit with iPads since the only way at the moment to currently import pictures is to have them already on your desktop and sync them, or to buy the iPad Camera Connection Kit for $30.

I hope this helps any photographers who want another option to wirelessly share pictures while on the go, if you have any questions tweet me or comment below. Thanks!

Sure I’ve overlooked it this far, but I think its come time to tackle this problem once and for all. I’ve tried a couple different applications out there for the Mac OSX that helps resolve issues of scaling the resolution correctly to fit your flatscreen pixel to pixel, but have found that SwitchResX is the best out of them all, considering it has a lot of fluid options to control both the entire desktop when loading at startup as well as individual applications when launched.

For many of you that have experienced this problem with your Mac’s, you know that it can be a very aggravating experience to fix the timing and resolution settings to be in perfect sync for your monitor to recognize correctly. I had a Powerbook G4 that was quite often hooked up to my Sharp Aquos model LCD that with a few hours of tinkering with SwitchResX, was able to get it going — with the help of Sharps menu within the its control panel to “fit” and “scale” the picture to be either “dot by dot” or “letterbox”, etc. etc.

With the Sharp (non-Aquos) LC-47SB57UT model I have, it lacks that same menu to choose a “dot by dot” setting which makes things much more difficult because usually, that along with checking “Overscan” within the System Preferences > Display > Options pane does the trick. Not so this time around!

So in I dove with SwitchResX and reading all the tutorials, posts, and blogs out there about others frustrations with getting their custom resolution settings correct. Im just going to come out and say it, I need help! To those who know their way around SwitchResX and timing definitions I would be most appreciative if you could send a little help my way. The following is my EDID info for my Sharp LC-47SB57UT I have:

(Download the full EDID here)

Monitor Description blocks:

—————————

Descriptor #0 – Timing definition:

Mode = 1920 x 1080 @ 60.000Hz

Pixel Clock…………. 148.50 MHz            Non-Interlaced

	Horizontal	Vertical
Active………………	1920 pixels	1080 lines
Front Porch………….	88 pixels	5 lines
Sync Width…………..	44 pixels	36 lines
Back Porch…………..	148 pixels	36 lines
Blanking…………….	280 pixels	45 lines
Total……………….	2200 pixels	1125 lines
Scan Rate……………	67.500 kHz	60.000 Hz
Image Size…………..	1039 mm	584 mm
Border………………	0 pixels	0 lines

Sync: Digital separate with

* Positive vertical polarity

* Positive horizontal polarity

My Display Settings when going to System Preferences are as follows:

And finally, when I open SwitchResX and add a Custom Resolution setting, the defaulted settings that are currently in use are pre-loaded as seen below:

But after days, and now weeks of trying to tinker with the right timing settings and (probably) doing incorrect math to make sure I don’t blank out my monitor, I cant avoid the fact that I need help. So if you’ve read this and can understand my frustrations send me a little help in the comments. Or tweet me, Im going to solve this one way or another but I really don’t see why I should go it alone. Any and all help is GREATLY appreciated and will be properly honored.

UPDATE: In case you also, have a similar problem like myself I found SwitchResX’s User Guide floating around online, its not the current version but it may help some of you grasp the concept of how/why SwitchResX works, as well as some tips on what to do in certain situations.

SwitchResX User Guide

In case you were living under a rock my previous “Do A Barrel Roll” derives from “Star Fox 64″ a Nintendo 64 game that came out in 1997. It was an instant classic, but over the years the characters “voices” were chuckled at because of how they sounded whenever they talked. When a character did talk, a message of their words would appear on screen displaying what it was. Needless to say, one of these phrases would make it into Internet meme history. Peppy, one of Fox McCloud’s wingmen mentions to “Do A Barrel Roll!” when teaching the player how to fly the arwing craft used in the game to deflect enemy fire. But anyway, I decided to phase that out as I was getting quite bored with it.

I figured I might as well give a tip of the hat to one of the greatest Internet memes of all time. I won’t give it away but those who are wise will know automatically just from looking at the picture below what meme I decided to go with this time.

(photoshopped the license number out)

Direct link: http://bit.ly/RR

This app is a real time saver and can come in real handy if you want to receive notifications of (almost) anything online. One great example to make use of it would be to configure it to watch NOAA’s Tsunami Watch website for any warnings you will need to know about. (@usoceangov on Twitter) First head over to the App Store and get this free app (as of this posting) by clicking here.

Once installed and opened, tap on the “Catalog” tab on the bottom. Next, tap the “Webpage” icon, and in the URL put in the correct NOAA Tsunami watch webpage for your region.

For West Coast & Alaska:

http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/

For Hawaii:

http://www.scd.state.hi.us/

After inputting the site, make sure the following settings look like the snapshot above. “Look At” should be set to the “Part of Page”, and Sensitivity set to “At Least 1% Different”. For the Part of Page setting make sure you tap the area in which you want to continually “watch”. So for this example we will want to watch the banner that would change if there is a Tsunami warning. Tapping in that area will “highlight” it and your ready to go back to the Edit Subscription menu and tape “Save”. Example below:

(Side note: if you tap an area that LetMeKnow gives you an error from like a dynamic item on the page, simply select a larger region of that site to encapsulate the content you want to watch. I needed to do this and the snapshot above represents the area I needed to highlight in order for the app to recognize the item.)

After a few minutes from saving it, your LetMeKnow app will be ready to notify you the moment NOAA gives any sort of warning on its website! Let’s hope we never get any notifications from NOAA by using this app because we’ll know what that means, but if so at least you’ll be one of the first to know to get to higher ground.

There are plenty of other uses for this app, but I think this by far represents one of the coolest uses for it. At least, until the NOAA puts out an official iPhone app that does Push notifications for Tsunami and weather alerts.