Honest Ed’s – A Toronto Landmark
Photo taken almost a year ago today, December 2008 – Toronto. Honest Ed’s is a must see maze of bargains. It was certainly worth the long walk.
I’m starting a new weekly post here, at apeman.org. Every friday, I am going to post on of my favorite photos. I have thousands of images sitting on my servers spinning around on disk platters so I figured I’d share some of my favorites with a bit of background.
Vancouver After Dark
Now that I have had a week or so to get acquainted with my Kindle 2, I thought I’d share my initial perceptions of the device as it pertains to its functionality in Canada.
First off, the first thing you notice with the Kindle is just how nice the screen is. Amazon designed the kindle so that it would disappear in your hands as you are readying and that is certainly true. The screen is clear, crisp, and renders detail in photos exceptionally well considering it only has 16 shades of gray to work with.
Whisper net seems to deliver books as fast as I would expect it to, purchasing a book from amazon.com on my computer, then turning to my kindle a few minutes later and the book was showing in my list already. Wireless delivery is very handy as I don’t have to search for the USB cable and copy the books manually.
Starting with Version 2.3, the Kindle now supports native PDF reading without the need to convert. There is a catch however, and that is you cannot zoom the text. Most of the PDF files that I read are formatted to fit an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper, not a 6″ screen. You can rotate the PDF and hold your Kindle horizontally, but this only goes so far, as some PDF authors seem to be using 6 and 8 point font as standard text. The solution is to use an application such as “Calibre” (http://calibre-ebook.com/) which is free. Once I converted my PDF files to .mobi, I can zoom the text and read them comfortably.
The Faster Times has a great article discussing the Canadian TV tax being considered by the CRTC (otherwise known as “Fee For Carriage”). Since I live in Canada, I am being bombarded with “Support Local TV” messages via the Global and CTV owned newspapers and news casts.
If you havn’t sent a letter to the CRTC yet, please do so, you can use the automated form at: http://www.stopthetvtax.ca/email-the-crtc/ as it only takes a minute to voice your opinion.
As of this writing, there are only six days left to provide your feedback to the CRTC! Say no to a tax payer funded bailout of CTV and Global.
With all of the recent changes on the Canadian television landscape, its hard to tell what is currently going on. On September 1st, the CRTC ruled that Cable, Satellite and IPTV services would have to remit a 1.5% fee to the new “Local Programming Improvement Fund”. At the same time, the CRTC also opened the door for “fee for carriage” which basically translates to around $6/month per household to pay for the channels that currently, and will continue to show commercials! So the recap, you will be paying more money per month for television service in Canada, but you will not bet getting anything in return.
Keep reading after the jump….
Hot on the heels of the 1.5% tax that consumers will have to pay to the Local Programming Improvement Fund, and fee for carriage that is sure to see our Cable and Satellite bills ballon even further, the CRTC has stuck it to the consumer once again. Effective September 1st, Canadian broadcasters are now allowed to air as many commercials as they want, previously, broadcasters were limited to 15 minutes per hour of advertising. I have a feeling that this slipped past the media as two of the Canadian broadcasters, Global and CTV own the newspaper and TV news outlets.
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