Today, I have had my iRiver Story ebook reader for 1 week. I have read 3 short books on it. I think it is time I should share my experience with it.

Here is some spec of it:

• 6″ e-ink screen
• qwerty keyboard
• 2GB internal storage
• support SD card up to 32G
• 3.5mm headphone jack and external speaker for mp3

For photos, visit my flickr. It looks like an Amazon Kindle.

I always like to find what I can do more with things, like what I done to my ASUS router. I few searching online, I found it runs Linux, yeah! With busybox and uses cairo for drawing vectors. It is listed on Openinkpot as work in progress, so I don’t think it will take long to have a working rom.

I mainly using this reader for reading book in Chinese, that includes books in epub, PDF and txt format. It does a good job with epub and txt. Especially for txt format, text font can be customized by uploading .ttf font files. However, it does not go well with PDF format. It can zoom in to user defined part of the PDF document and reorganize paragraphs, but the font of the PDF document is usually not dark and bold enough for reading. There are a few online book/comic sources provides PDF documents that is formated for 6″ readers, these document works really well.

Furthermore, there are few things I don’t like about it. Firstly, I would say it is impossible to read magazines on this reader. It only has 8 levels of greyscale. The pictures looks ugly and 6″ is not big enough for magazine. If you wanna read magazine, get an iPad. Secondly, battery lifetime is not as good as they advertised, 7000 pages turns. Mine only takes around 3000 to 3500 pages. I don’t know whether it is because the battery need couple more cycles to do a batter job, or because my books are stored on SD card. Thirdly, the list of books is listed  in a single list and display 7 of them in each page(just for book, it does put comic into different list), which make it really hard to find a book. It requires to flip through multiple pages to find a book. It needs a better way of listing book or a search functionality. Finally, the slowness of turning page. I think this is the comment problem for e-ink readers.

In conclusion, I am happy with the hardware, and couple of tweaks on the system would make it a great reading device. I think it worth the money I paid for it (~ NZ$375). For those of you want to buy it, WAIT!!! They are working on a new version that includes WIFI.

For more information, here are some links people that want to know more about iRiver Story:

http://www.gennard.net/blog/tag/iriver-story/

http://vanderwijk.info/

http://openinkpot.org/wiki/Device/Story

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My new laptop stand just arrived today. It looks like this

It is made by Rain an accessories company that makes awesome gears for Apple products. Check them out at http://www.raindesigninc.com/ . I couldn’t find any sale agent in NZ, so I bought it from sella, a trademe type auction site.

Inside the box, there is only the stand and an ad about their product. The stand looks like this

The aluminum material makes it perfect for putting my Macbook pro on top of it. The first impression is the bottom half looks like the old Apply cinema display. I believe the rain drop in the middle is only for showing their company logo. And it has nothing to do with reducing heat. 6 soft pad around the top surface give a nice grip and touch on my MBP and it will not left any scratch on the laptop.

From the back of the stand, there is a hole. It allows cables to be routed through it and give a tidier working environment. However, I found this hole is a little bit smaller to allow my dvi head to go through it.

A photo with my MBP on top of it.

Overall, I find it is good to have a laptop stand like this one. It lifts my laptop to my eye level. Now,  i can look at my monitor and laptop screen without looking down which helps a lot on my neck and eye. Haven’t found anything wrong with it so far (Just had it for 4 hours). Will update if I found something wrong with it.

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