DIY Kindle

Recently my wife watched an episode of Oprah that had Jeff Bezos hawking the Kindle, an electronic book reader.  I had looked at them before in passing but hadn't ever considered buying one.  Although I am an avid reader, I read on average a book a week, I "read" 99% of my books with my MP3 player.  I don't make the time to sit and read a book, I listen to them while I am at work, or driving, or working around the house.  My wife on the other hand likes to curl up in bed at night and read, something you can't do with an audiobook.  So while she was watching Oprah talk about her Kindle, I said off handedly that I didn't think it was that neat of a product, and asked Nikki what she thought of it, and she said it looked really neat.  So since Nikki-mas (Nikki's birthday) was fast approaching, I decided to go to Amazon.com and buy her one.  Everything went smooth with the electronic checkout, as it always does on Amazon, until I got to the shipping form.  The estimated shipping date on her Kindle was 16 to 20 weeks away.  I thought the three weeks I gave myself before Nikki-mas was enough but I underestimated the effect that Oprah has on her minnions.  I went ahead and ordered it, but it bothered me a little bit that Nikki wouldn't have anything to open up under our Nikki-mas tree on Nikki-mas morning.  I thought about getting her a card and putting in a reciept for the Kindle, but that just didn't seem very festive.  Then, on Nikki-mas eve, the perfect idea struct me.  Why not just make my own Kindle, I'm kind of handy, and surely with all of the discarded gadgets lying around my house I could make something similar.  So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu.  I give you THE SWINDLE.

THE SWINDLE v1.0

As you can see, it has everything you would need, a bright back light that can be turned on and off, that also doubles as an electronic bookmarker, so you will never loose your place.  It also comes with the ability to either connect wired or wirelessly to almost any network.  And as you can see in the next picture, it has a 10GB hard drive that will alow you to save thousands of books to take with you on the go and read at your leisure.