I often read before going to sleep at night, using my Amazon Kindle Fire. Many of the books I have are available there. I do find some of the Kindle books which are more technical, meaning, having symbols and equations, do not transfer well to the Kindle. I don’t understand that. I mean, doesn’t everyone typeset using these days? So, I still buy books of paper for the more quantitative selections I purchase.

The Kindle Fire also has an email application, and this is handy when on the road. I had a smart phone but gave it up, being annoyed at having to maintain yet another computing device. Inevitably, some of the notifications by email are of comments and posts at technical blogs I follow, such as Science of Doom. To post there, however, means using the Kindle’s Web browser, it’s pop-up keyboard, and it’s spelling corrector. It turns out it is not possible to shut off that spelling corrector. There is a setting to do so, but it does not work. This is a known problem of the Kindle, and Amazon or whoever has no intention of fixing the microcode that controls it. Hopefully they fixed it in more recent models.

Unfortunately, this means that all writing, email or blog comment, is subjected to this buggy spelling corrector, and things written as one word end up being something else. Yesterday, for instance, I referred to Professor Ray Pierrehumbert’s Principles of Planetary Climate as being “incomparable” in a draft blog comment. I was moving along, writing, and neglected to check back, since it was very late. The damn corrector changed “incomparable” to “inhospitable” and I did not catch it until after the comment was posted. The blogging software at Science of Doom does not permit authors to edit their comments, so I was stuck, and had to put in a second comment to correct the first. This is incredibly annoying.

I therefore am going to have to impose discipline upon myself to simply not put comments in on blogs or anywhere using the Kindle, because this kind of thing is embarrassing.