Amazon Kindle leather cover with light review

I’ve always been a believer in the “you get what you pay for” motto. The Kindle leather cover (with light) is a great case in point. It’s slightly more expensive than most of the other Kindle covers out there, but it’s completely worth it.

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The case itself is a high-quality leather, and feels like it’s one of those $100+ personal journals you can get at the nicer stationery stores. The “close” strap is bungle-like and flips over and away with ease using the attached non-silding leather tab.

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Installing the Kindle is easy. You actually anchor it into the cover with the mounting posts on the side of the Kindle (which I never noticed until I got the case!) Just slide the bottom of the Kindle into the case at an angle…

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…rotate it up, move the top case tab down a little, and align the top mounting post over the top tab. Release the top tab and it click-locks securely in place! I’m extremely confident the Kindle won’t fall out out of this case!

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The real genius of this case design is that the Kindle powers the light source! There’s no batteries or micro get-a-paper-clip switches to toggle and mess with. The light source is on the back upper right of the case…

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…and to activate it, you just pull out and extend the light. The lilght is mounted on some strong but flexible hard plastic and will only switch on once it has been fully extended and only if the Kindle is on and awake.

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In the dark, the book light is awesome. Just awesome. It lights the Kindle perfectly, and I can read just like I am able to in a chair near a basic one-bulb home lamp. This photo just doesn’t do the awesomeness justice.

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The Kindle is turning out to be one of my favorite tech gadgets in recent memory. It has completely blown away the iPad for reading and I’m finding more things to do with it every day. Adding the Kindle leather cover has, to paraphrase a Spinal Tap quote, just turned this baby up to 11.

Five out of five stars.

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Connecting to a MacBook’s Internet Sharing from a Kindle

A couple of days ago I brought home a Kindle from Amazon (the WiFi + 3G version). So far I’m absolutely nuts about it.

Kindle! Kindle! Kindle!

Kindle! Kindle! Kindle!

It does just about everything I wanted in a e-book reader and it’s much easier to take with me than the iPad. I’ll post a full review after I’ve used it for a month or two.

Anyhow, I was trying to connect it to my MacBook Pro with Internet Sharing enabled, but the Kindle would not connect to the MacBook.

After digging online a bit, I found the solution on a Kindle forum. You have to manually set up a Kindle’s connection if you want to use a Mac’s internet sharing because the Mac implementation of DHCP sucks giant nards of doom. (There’s a more technical reason, but that’s the gist of it.)

To connect a Kindle to a Mac that is sharing their internet connection, press the MENU button on the Kindle and go to SETTINGS. From there, choose WiFi settings and highlight the MacBook’s internet sharing name.

From there, you need to choose to set up the WiFi MANUALLY. Keep the security settings on WEP, but instead of DHCP, choose STATIC.

Then fill out in the following…

IP : 10.0.2.251
Subnet : 255.255.255.0
Router : 10.0.2.1
DNS : 10.0.2.1

TIP : Don’t forget on the Kindle you can press ALT-Q to enter a 1, ALT-W to enter a 2, ALT-E to enter a 3 and so on. (ALT-P is a 0)

Once I did that, the Kindle was on the wireless network downloading everything I wanted!

One final note – that last part of the IP can be anything from 220 to 254, but it’s better if you pick something high.

Thanks to ElkAintMoose and Obijohn for hammering this mess out.