Kinoma Notes

In 1971 the world’s first dig­i­tal library was born – Project Guten­berg.

Nearly 40 years later, the library includes over 30,000 full-text pub­lic domain books. In great news for Kinoma Play users, Project Guten­berg has started to curate audio­books as well.

Today, we’re happy to announce that Project Gutenberg’s com­plete audio­book col­lec­tion is now available on-demand for all Kinoma Play users in Kinoma Guide > Audio­books & Lit­er­a­ture > Project Guten­berg.

Enjoy!

As usual, this new con­tent bonanza is free for all Kinoma Play customers.

If you have favorite pod­casts, radio sta­tions, video streams or other media, send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to dis­cover and enjoy.

• Project Guten­berg
• Project Guten­berg info [Wikipedia]

Kevin Pol­lak is a great actor and come­dian. Not only has he appeared in lots of movies and TV shows (includ­ing The Usual Sus­pects), but he was named one of the “Top 100 Come­di­ans of all Time” by Com­edy Central.

Every impres­sion you’ve seen of Christo­pher Walken, William Shat­ner and Peter Falk? They’re really impres­sions of Kevin Pollak’s defin­ing impres­sions.

Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show

Mr. Pol­lak recently started his own online talk show. Today, Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show is avail­able in Kinoma Guide > Enter­tain­ment & Com­edy.

In just three short months, guests have included a diverse cast of actors, come­di­ans, direc­tors and musi­cians includ­ing Dana Car­vey, Feli­cia Day, John Hamm (Mad Men), Lisa Loeb, Seth Mac­Far­lane (The Fam­ily Guy), Matthew Perry, Kevin Smith, Eddie Izzard and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

The long-format inter­view show is unlike any­thing else on the Web or cer­tainly, with its unfil­tered con­ver­sa­tions, on broad­cast tele­vi­sion. […] Indeed, remov­ing TV’s con­straints is like tak­ing the con­ver­sa­tion out of a corset: Every­one breathes eas­ier and lets a lit­tle more hang out. And view­ers get a glimpse of what celebri­ties sound like unin­hib­ited. — L.A. Times, “Where celebri­ties dish — relaxed, uncen­sored — for hours”

Note: This is a show for grown-ups and occa­sion­ally uses lan­guage filed under “naughty”. If you’d pre­fer not to hear that, this isn’t the show for you.

Enjoy!

If you have favorite pod­casts, radio sta­tions, video streams or other media, send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to discover.

• Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show
• Kevin Pol­lak

TED is an annual, invitation-only con­fer­ence for “ideas worth spread­ing”.

The cen­ter­piece of TED is TEDTalks. These are riv­et­ing talks by fas­ci­nat­ing thinkers and do-ers on an eclec­tic range of topics.

Today we’re glad to announce that you can now watch hun­dreds of TEDTalks on your phone on demand, with Kinoma Play.

TED’s name comes from tech­nol­ogy, enter­tain­ment and design — TED’s ini­tial focus. But since its gen­e­sis, TED’s scope has broad­ened to include top­ics like sci­ence, arts, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion, cul­ture, busi­ness, global issues, tech­nol­ogy and development.

Cool! Where do I find them?

You can find TEDTalks in Kinoma Guide, in Providers > TED.

We rec­om­mend start­ing with the Favorites cat­e­gory, which includes TED’s all-time most favor­ited talks. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be work­ing with the TED folks to add more cat­e­gories to help you browse by topic, speaker and year.

Enjoy!

And remem­ber, if you have favorite pod­casts, radio sta­tions, video streams or other media, send a URL and short descrip­tion to content@kinoma.com and we’ll add them to Kinoma Guide for every­one to discover.

Does your phone feel a bit janky lately? Maybe a lit­tle slower than it did when it was new?

One of the great things about Win­dows Mobile is its open­ness — users can install what­ever they like, and devel­op­ers aren’t lim­ited by arti­fi­cial restric­tions. But with great power comes great respon­si­bil­ity, and unfor­tu­nately not all soft­ware is engi­neered to the high stan­dards of Kinoma Play.

Why do we care? Because Kinoma Play cre­ates max­i­mum joy when your phone is per­form­ing at its best.

How to make your phone like new again

When your phone’s act­ing up, you can get like-new per­for­mance again by doing what we call a grade-and-pave. To do a grade-and-pave:

1. Sync your phone’s data to your PC
2. Wipe your phone
3. Install any avail­able phone updates
4. Install your apps and sync again to restore your data

Typ­i­cally, the whole process takes about 30 minutes.

#1 — Sync

Sync your phone to your PC. Make sure Win­dows Mobile Device Cen­ter is con­fig­ured to sync your con­tacts, cal­en­dar, tasks, notes, and every­thing else you might want to save.

The con­tents of your Stor­age Card shouldn’t be affected by a grade-and-pave. But back­ups are A Good Thing, and this is a great time to copy the con­tents of your Stor­age Card to a PC.

Alter­na­tively, you can use Microsoft My Phone to sync your phone to save your phone’s data online instead of on your PC. (We haven’t per­son­ally tried this, so be care­ful out there!)

#2 — Wipe your phone

This is known as doing a “hard reset”, and gen­er­ally involves hold­ing down 1–2 but­tons while you doing a reset or turn­ing on your phone. Con­sult your man­ual for details, or search for “hard reset [your phone model]” for instructions.

Note: This will delete every­thing from your phone, includ­ing Kinoma Play!

#3 — Install any avail­able phone updates

If there are any avail­able updates for your phone, now’s the time to install them. We rec­om­mend­ing check­ing the sup­port sites for both your net­work oper­a­tor (e.g. Sprint) and the phone maker (e.g. HTC).

#4 — Install your apps and sync

Rather than auto­mat­i­cally installing every­thing that was on your phone before the grade-and-pave, we rec­om­mend installing only the soft­ware you actively use.

To get a fresh Kinoma Play installer, go to http://kinoma.com/support/ and click “Need your installer or pur­chase key?” You’ll be prompted for your reg­is­tra­tion email address, and the URL for the cur­rent installer will be sent there.

Once you’ve rein­stalled your apps, sync your phone again to restore the data you sync’d to your PC in step #1.

Enjoy!

A grade-and-pave gets you a like-new phone expe­ri­ence with­out spend­ing any­thing but a lit­tle time.

Con­tin­u­ing a fine Kinoma tra­di­tion, hol­i­day music is once again avail­able in Kinoma Guide!

Through the rest of 2009, just visit the Music > Hol­i­day Music cat­e­gory when­ever you need an extra boost of hol­i­day spirit.

We hope every­one read­ing this has a safe, peace­ful, and joy-filled hol­i­day season.

(If you have other favorite hol­i­day music streams we should inclulde, just let us know and we’ll gladly add them.)