Converting Kindle eBooks to PDF on Mac OS X

If you’re like me, you enjoy saving money (and space) by using eBooks. Amazon offers nearly everything you would want in the eBook format (.AZW) and many of the offerings don’t even have DRM these days. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you can easily access the books wherever you go or how you want. You are generally limited to using the Kindle-specific apps and don’t have flexibility in printing pages or converting via text to speech to MP3 for listening while driving.

If your eBooks happen to have DRM, simply follow the instructions here to get rid of the eBook DRM (note: if it is legal for you in your country - this is not legal advise, simply instructional information!).

Once you have a DRM-free eBook in .AZW format, use the service provided by http://www.zamzar.com to convert to PDF (or other format).

Amazon eBooks are located in the My Kindle Content folder under ~/Library/Application Support/Kindle. The entire path (if using the Finder Go -> Go to Folder… menu) is:

~/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/

Remember, paying for your eBooks is a must. Piracy is lame and with the very small volume of books sold (especially when compared to other media like movies and music), not paying for eBooks is a sure way to reduce the books available to us all!

Enjoy!

FLUID - Websites into Mac Apps

I develop applications for Windows environments. Yes, I know - it’s embarrassing. I do most of the work on Macs in Parallels and I wouldn’t even use Windows if not for the glut of horrible SQL Server installations in the real world caused by people not understanding the MySQL GUI and bad client/server developers stuck in Visual Basic still writing ADO or (gasp) ODBC code.

That being said, I have more and more clients relying on my analytics and data architecture expertise to help with Google Analytics, AdWords and other online metric and marketing systems.

Google limits the ability of users to access multiple analytics accounts and AdWords configurations once your account is linked; indeed, it is the multiple step logout/login with a different account process times 10 for my daily management tasks that sucks away productivity.

FLUID changes that. With Fluid App, you create separate instances of Safari (essentially, don’t get mired down in the details) that retain their separate cookies and other settings from the main Safari instance, making it possible to make a Fluid app for “Client A - Google” and another for “Client B - Google” that default to going write into Google Analytics with the respective client account logins already in place.

Fluid from Todd Ditchendorf on Vimeo.

Check out Fluid here and learn about all the features the tiny charge of $4.99 will unlock for you.