Day 2 of 1000
One of the last things I did before I left Oregon this summer was to buy a Nook Color from the Washington Square Barnes and Noble Bookstore. We bought it for two reasons: 1) It is a very inexpensive Android tablet computer that Christian and I plan to learn how to program and 2) We thought it would be good for the kids textbooks. We are still excited about programming the Nook. It might be good for textbooks, too, but we still have one or two books the kids need to read on their laptops with Kindle PC Software while the rest are real paper books. We like the Nook a lot. Christian plays Angry Birds on it every now and then, but I probably use it more than anyone. I bought a James Mills author (I wish he would write a lot more books–great author) to read on the plane flight home and have been hooked ever since.
I bought my first Andrew Klavan mystery, Empire of Lies, to read on the treadmill at the YMCA. The book was a pretty rough but an excellent read; I will get more. The thing that was awesome about the Nook was that when I finished the book, I just connected to the YMCA wireless network and downloaded a new book without missing a beat on my workout. The book I downloaded is William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith. I love the book and will talk more about it in another post as I get further into the book.
The main reason we chose the Nook Color over any of the Kindles was the low price coupled with the ability to easily hack the Nook Color into a full blown Android Tablet, not just the limited version of Android provided by Barnes and Noble. There is even a Kindle app for the Nook so you can read Amazon books as well as Barnes and Noble books. How much better does it get than that. There are two things we would really like to have on the Nook Color that are not there: a camera and a microphone. A little bit of searching showed that some people appear to have been able to hook cameras, keyboards, and mice, but no one has done the work required to hook up a bluetooth microphone for VOIP calls. We expect it will happen.
In the meantime, I have downloaded the Nook Color SDK, have a project in mind that involves work I am doing at GaugeCam. We want to control a remote, cell-phone enable Arduino, micro-controller to turn stuff on and off from both an iPhone and an Android tablet. My buddy, Andrew will do the iPhone programming. I will do the Android tablet.