• Power the Kindle on (slide the Power Switch to the right and let it spring back to its original position on the left, the Power Switch is located on the bottom right edge of the kindle)
• Press the Home button to make sure you begin at the home screen (bottom row of buttons on face of Kindle, second long oval key from the right)
• Press the Menu button (top row of buttons on face of Kindle, the only long oval key on the far right)
• Press the down direction key five times on the 5-way pad to get to the Settings Menu (the 5-way pad is the square navigation pad occupying the far right of rows 2 and 3 on the kindle keyboard, the down button is the bottom edge of the square)
• Press the select button on the 5-way pad to select Settings (the select button is the middle button on the 5-way pad, it is not raised and is in the middle of the square)
• You are now on Page 1 of 3 of the settings menu
• Press the Next Page button to get to Page 2 (the lower and larger of the two buttons on the right or left edge of the Kindle)
• You are now on Page 2 of 3 and Voice Guide is selected by default
• Press the select button on the 5-way pad to turn Voice guide on
• Your Kindle 3 should now be reading the menu items to you

Once you have selected a document to read, you will need to press Shift and Sym(bol) simultaneously to enable Text-To-Speech reading. Shift is the bottom-left-most circular button on the face of the Kindle, Symbol is the 9th circular button from the left in the third row of buttons on the face of the Kindle.

Enjoy!

A few years ago at a Chicago 2600 meeting there was a Color Classic on the “take me” (garbage) table at the Neighborhood Boys and Girls Club. Naturally, 0v3rk1ll and I took it along with some other items and a PowerMacintosh. The Color Classic would boot to the dreaded Missing OS icon (question mark on a floppy disk). I assumed that it was a normal Color Classic, so I purchased an awesome new-old-stock IBM USB floppy drive off of eBay to hook up to a MacBook so I could put System 7.5.3 on floppies to reload the OS. I ended up trying out the Network Access Disc, with it in the floppy drive, the machine booted up with the Happy Mac (found OS) icon and made its way into Mac OS 9.1. I’m pretty sure the reason it was showing the Missing OS icon is because the PRAM battery is dead.

I checked the system profile, and it turns out that the Color Classic chassis actually has a PowerMacintosh 5400 in it with a 200 MHz PPC 603ev and 32 MB of physical memory. With a grin from ear to ear, I realized that one of the previous owners must have done a logic board swap on it. Score! Although OS 9.1 is “The Best Internet Operating System Ever”, it runs a little slow on this Mac so I’m considering making a backup image of the hard drive and then installing Mac OS 7.5.3 to speed things up – plus then it would be more believable that it’s a Color Classic.

Between working on this CC and digging up my collection of floppy disks (3½” AND 5¼”) I’m going through a blast from the past that I really needed. Maybe I’ll post more updates on old stuff soon. The screenshot is of the CC logged into my server with MacSSH.

Fiat 500 with the 2010 Engine of the Year hitting the US market? Full of win. Hopefully Abarth will sell a conversion kit for it since there are rumored to be many different editions coming to the US between 2011 and 2012.

Yes, that’s a car phone to the right of the steering wheel.