Rob from the always-entertaining-but-hard-to-describe science/prank/DIY/investigative journalism site Cockeyed.com had the brilliant idea of making an Amazon Kindling– a wireless wooden e-book (which uses no electricity….), and we were pleased to help out. You can read his writeup here. You can buy your own on eBay too.

Similar features to the regular Kindle but it boasts a 9.7″ diagonal e-ink screen. This new screen is capable of the same 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images as well. The form factor is larger in all dimensions as well; 0.02″ thicker, 2.4″ taller and 1.9″ wider. Due to the size increase Amazon has been able to beef-up the storage too as the DX can hold 3,500 books (2,000 more). Other neat enhancements to the Kindle DX is the ability to rotate the dislpay and a native PDF reader that is builtin vs. the internal conversion tool the standard Kindle uses. All in all the DX is a cool piece of tech but I really don’t think there was a market for a DX at this point in time. The Kindle DX is selling for $489 and can only be bought at Amazon.com.

“Simply compare the iTunes Music Store and the Amazon MP3 Store”

This helpful little script will locate any song or album you’re currently viewing in the iTunes Music Store and display it for purchase on Amazon. Since iTunes launched their variable pricing on most of their catalog, saving $$$ will be a bit more difficult than before (since Amazon was alway cheaper and DRM free). Advantageous is a simple script that take a bit of the leg work out of the price matching process by locating and displaying your current audio conquest. This script is available for both Mac OS X and more recent Windows OS’.

You setup an AMI image or can choose from several already available that have various open source server stacks (such as Apache, MySQL etc) pre-installed. Once uploaded to their compute cloud, these servers can be brought up and act just like a regular linux VPS or dedicated server would. Just like the S3 service, since it comes from Amazon it comes with the scalability, stability and reliability we’ve known Amazon to have.

And just what does “Elastic” mean?:

“Amazon EC2 enables you to increase or decrease capacity within minutes, not hours or days. You can commission one, hundreds or even thousands of server instances simultaneously. Of course, because this is all controlled with web service APIs, your application can automatically scale itself up and down depending on its needs.”

So what exactly are you getting from them?:

“You have complete control of your instances. You have root access to each one, and you can interact with them as you would any machine. Each instance predictably provides the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.”

The pricing is pretty good as well.

* Pay only for what you use.
* $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an hour consumed).
* $0.20 per GB of data transferred outside of Amazon (i.e., Internet traffic).
* $0.15 per GB-Month of Amazon S3 storage used for your images (charged by Amazon S3).

$0.10 cents per hour, roughly $70 per month for a server with 99.99% uptime with resources roughly equivalent to almost 2Ghz and almost 2GB RAM. Another great thing is that if you setup your servers to work with the S3 storage service, any bandwidth transfered between the EC2 server and S3 is free.

These two services tethered together are quite the dynamic duo. As some have pointed out, now all they need is a grid distributed SQL type data storage engine to interface with S3 and EC2 and people can make entire web apps simply built upon these services. I know this is definitely a viable option to switch to for SugarStats a little while down the line or even perhaps when we launch.

This just start to really open up opportunities for new services and companies needing these types of resources. Need to scale your web service? No need to buy another managed dedicated box, if you’re app’s software is configured to do so, just throw up another image and you’ve got almost instant scalability. At this time, you can setup up to 20 image virtual servers and need to contact Amazon for more. Check out the Amazon EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.