I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

This is an old page from Rod Begbie's blog.

It only exists in an attempt to prevent linkrot. No new content will be added to this site, and links and images are liable to be broken. Check out begbie.com to find where I'm posting stuff these days.

Entries for Thursday, December 30, 2010

December 30, 2010

The Best Tech Writing of 2010

Gentlemen, start your Instapapers!

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Lending Kindle Books

Just launched, Amazon now let you “lend” Kindle books. A fab feature, but sadly crippled in this (initial?) form.

1) You need to initiate the process from Amazon.com — you can’t do it from a Kindle
2) Publishers have the right to disable lending, and a quick scan through my Kindle purchases show that most large publishers have blanket blocks in place.
3) Loans are currently limited to 14 days, and you can lend a book once and only once. Publishers currently cannot adjust these limits.

Despite these gripes, this is clearly a big step in the right direction. Hopefully this is just Amazon’s first stab at shifting the digital-media-lending Overton window.

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CIO update: Post-mortem on the Skype outage

Interesting post-mortem on the Skype downtime last week. Due to a bug in the client version used by 50% of their users (which had already been patched in a newer release), a small server overload feedbacklooped into taking out their entire P2P system.

An increasing number of services are forcibly updating their users clients (most notably, Google Chrome, which pushes releases to users without notification or interaction). How long until we reach a point that this is the norm?

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About This Site

This is an archive of groovmother.com, the old blog run by Rod Begbie — A Scottish geek who lives in San Francisco, CA.

I'm the co-founder of Sōsh, your handy-dandy guide for things to do in San Francisco this weekend.