Ah well (
backstory).
A combination of getting kicked in the nads at work, and the sheer unable-to-contain-myself-any-more-ness, led to me breaking out my brand spanking new Kindle 3 Wifi about 24 hours before I had planned to.
(Also, there's not much of a Christmas celebration where I am, which means the eve is any other Friday night - i.e. get totally tonked and spend Saturday attempting to recover from the shenanigans of the previous night)
The graphite goodness was paired up with this -
http://www.speckproducts.com/kindle/...ustjacket.html (has anyone used this? I didn't find any review in the Amazon page, but
prima facie seems nice enough..)
I was dreading working with Calibre, because all the mentions of it online were usually along the lines of "a necessary evil, but it works", but I found it surprisingly easy to set up and figure out.
After dropping in a couple of Mobi ebooks that I had, it was finally time to flex some serious Calibre conversion muscle. Imagine my surprise when I realised that it could handle compressed files also! No need to decompress all of my collection in order to move them across to the K3 - whatay joy! This part of my mucking around was made significantly easier due to my general OCD in file organisation. Not having filenames like 'rdtgd103.pdf' helped immensely.
I messed around with miscellaneous features of Calibre for a bit then scurried away to test out the 'experimental browser' (a major reading activity of mine is long-form posts on Google Reader). This was cumbersome, having to move the hand pointer around with the 5-way thingy, but once into a post, "Article Mode" did the trick very nicely indeed. All that needs doing now is setting up Instapaper and a few custom news sources in Calibre, and I'm golden!
A loud shout out to you folks here at MR for helping me through the buying process, and for all the uber-useful advice and sticky posts!
Once I get more comfortable with the device I'm going to have to start using the Dev section of the forums as well...