Kindling good…

I got a Kindle!!! Hooray!

Benji counterscooped my mum and got me a shiny new Kindle as a pre-birthday present! Curiously enough it arrived on my nameday! That worked out perfectly!

The Kindle is great! In the end I decided to go for the simple and cheap one, when I realised it did have a keyboard option after all. Not a touch one to be sure, it’s a 5-way controller, but the comments option is there and the keyboard isn’t and that is all I wanted. Also it is much less hassle and money than importing it from the States. Kindle Touch was also meant to be more sluggish.
The report and comparison of the three Kindles, that helped me in my decision, can be found here.

Kat’s Kindle looks like the pages are printed and getting books off the internet is really easy! It can be done from the Kindle itself, or I could just be browsing the net at work getting things and when I get home and turn my Kindle on they automatically get downloaded onto it, usually within a few seconds! I could probably do the same from my iPhone app but I have yet to figure that out.

And one of the most amazing things, to a dandelion mind like mine, is the way the screensaver is always on! You switch the kindle off and a picture materialises (yes, from ink material) on the screen. It’s usually an artsy-fartsy image of pens, pencils, printing press letters, typewriters… I heard a crazy theory that once you’ve got some books downloaded onto it, the front covers of those can also become screensavers but it hasn’t happened yet. Either way, the screensaver mode consumes no battery and it lovely and this fascinates me!

I have downloaded a few books and a fantasy magazine and the reading has begun. The first magazine referred me to some new fantasy books that I now want to download as well. I just need to make sure I don’t start spending crazy amounts of money now!

In other news, the Halftone and Photoshop pictures of things other than cats are now online and running. You can find them here.
Again, they are “crafts”. How sad!

There’s a few submission deadlines for Aevelynn Frost this Wednesday, and a new story on the way, but I doubt it will be done by then, or within the word limit.

The Kattery’s very own LOLCats section…

Finally, here comes what everyone has been waiting for… the Homemade Cats.

The Kattery presents to you an album of cats the way they really are… with speech bubbles and evil intentions. Muggles may find this interesting as our reports say they cannot see either! Here’s a few pictures I took with my camera (but without the Muggle filter on) in the last year or so. Hope you all enjoy them!

I’m grinding my teeth as I’m putting this in the category of Arts and Crafts and Architecture.

A brand new album of cat-less yet fun images including Thor All Randy and Boat Envy coming soon!

Kindle contemplations

I’m getting a Kindle! Hooray!

The only problem is that I need to decide which one. And to buy it. It’s a present from my mum, after she successfully scooped my friend Benji and gave me precious Euros for one.

I have looked up comparison charts and here’s one of the simple ones:

Amazon offers the second and the third but the ones that are listed as US only can apparently be ordered from there anyway.

Personally I like the fourth one, Kindle Touch, the most, I like the idea of a keyboard because I want to be able to take notes (I probably won’t but I’d like to have the option) and a physical keyboard seems to be a thing of the past. (Yes, I now have an iPhone and I actively despise Blackberries, I think they are the shame of modern phoneworld and should really be downgraded not to the category ‘phones’ but to ‘stupidphones’. They have had the audacity to take one of my favourite berries as their patron and made me boycott them in my cheesecakes. They should be dipped in tar and rolled over in feathers. They make me angry!)

Anyway. Physical keyboard (the waste of space that could be used by the screen) however small its Kindle ratio to the screen is (as opposed to Blackberry ratio) is rubbing me the wrong way. The touch screen one is what I would prefer and the price is also more acceptable, however I think I can expect a steeper delivery fee.
The thing that concerns me, and this is only because I have never used one before, is that I don’t know how much the americanisation will show on a Kindle. Will it be in imperial? In Fahrenheit? A Kindle is not an iPhone and I don’t suppose there are actual apps that would operate with these units. But should there be anything like that, it would annoy me no end. American movies are set to a different region to the European ones. I guess this is also not something a Kindle owner should concern himself with but what if there’s another such technological atrocity that I am missing or that I don’t know about???

Am I just being stupidly OCD? Any feedback welcome…

This and That Two

I have severely neglected my blog in the last week. This is due to a short trip back home to Slovakia and the fact that I couldn’t directly upload a ‘Picture of the Week’ from my new iPhone. Yes, that’s right… iPhone! I feel cool! And technologically challenged, but thats beside the point.

Even now, I am still unable to find the iPhone pics through my work Mac but if I do figure it out I will add the picture in question for the reminder on the week. The lit up centre of my hometown Zilina.
Since this blog is introduced as ‘Kat’s blog of cats (and other less important things) and marsupials’ I will add an album of cats! I took a lot of pictures of three cats on my last trip home but I’ll just upload one of each, which will be tough! You will find them here!

In other news, I finally got a hold of one of my possible distant relatives in the United States, well I guess that was a few weeks back.
First I got a reply from Cathy Micik, daughter of Emil and she referred me to Susan Micik, daughter of William.
I had also previously tracked down Mildred Micik Zamfino, who is still alive and just turned 104 last week but her grandson has not yet replied to me, Facebook fail methinks.
Also, my suspicion that John is Adolph and that Jean is Mary have proved correct, yet still no sign of Kathryn.

My grandma (above) said that there was another Micik family in Parnica in her time, but I believe that they were probably distantly related anyway. I guess we will, or not, find out after January 24th when my mum and her cousin Eva are scheduled to visit the National Archive. Exciting!

Bill Bailey rocks! Dandelion mind…

The QR…

I am now a self-employed architect / artist in the cruel world of recession, I have finally registered with the HM Revenue Office and am waiting for them to get back to me with a cool taxpayer’s number.

As such I need a cool way of advertising my stuff and I was thinking of ordering a stamp with a logo of my very own. Originally I wanted a stamp for things that I have crafted myself but then a friend Benji gave me a lightbulb and I decided to make it a more global one.
We then spent a day researching QR codes and photoshopping my kitten Whiski into one.

The result:

Why do I think this is absolutely amazing?
Today everyone (but me) walks around with smartphones. If QR codes are not that omnipresent yet it’s only a matter of time. Already most people can read them if they know that that’s what they are supposed to do.
The code itself is very generic. Without a reader, its just a bunch of black and white pixels, four + squares and nothing else but I find the design very attractive. Achromatic, random but not random at all. It can go unnoticed or stand out depending on how you use it.
With the reader it turns into a very unique code that stores specific information. It can lead you to a website, provide contact information, events, texts, etc.

You might wonder why a kitten would be a good logo for an architect, well, it’s not… but unless you know Whiski in person, the picture is just a generic cat… Kat McNabb maybe?
I don’t have a good enough justification but I think it secretly adds a personal touch to an otherwise unspecific barcode. Something to identify it by even without a reader, if you know where to look…

Now I think I need to create one with more information, one I will be perfectly happy using years from now…

Maybe like this one:

 

Presenting…

When I started this blog, it was so I can occasionally post about things that get me crazy excited. This doesn’t happen regularly but I have felt the need to keep the blog going with at least one new post and one new picture every week. So far it has worked, even though a couple of times I have to actively search for material to post instead of writing out of excitement.

Now things are different… I really want to write a post about something but I can’t lest I ruin a surprise! Here are some clues: coffee, McGonagall, 12 and baked goods!

Chew on that now…

MWAHAHAHAHAHA!