Tag Archives: technology

Kindle Books: You Don’t Own Me

(AI images from Imagen 3)

Perhaps one of the biggest changes over the last several decades is that we no longer possess physical things.

Old and new music 

When some of us were younger, we would always go to “the record store” to buy a CD or cassette or vinyl (the “record”) or maybe an 8 track. We would put the physical media on a playback device. And unless the media were damaged or stolen, you always had it. RCA wouldn’t come to your house and take your Elvis record.

Let me be your teddy wildebeest.

Then services from Napster 1.0 to Apple to Spotify started to provide music in digital form.  And now your music COULD be taken away. When Neil Young got mad at Spotify, I couldn’t listen to Neil any more. (They subsequently kissed and made up.)

This is true of many other things: TV shows, movies, even computer software.

Which brings us to books. 

Old and new books

You could once buy books at your local bookstore, or from an online bookstore called Amazon. But then Amazon developed the Kindle e-reader. And as The Verge points out, something on the Kindle today may not be there tomorrow.

“Amazon has occasionally removed books from its online store and remotely deleted them from Kindles or edited titles and re-uploaded new copies to its e-readers. In 2009, the company removed copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, explaining the books had been mistakenly published. More recently, many of Roald Dahl’s books, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, were replaced with updated copies featuring modified language on various ebook platforms. It’s a reminder that you don’t actually own much of the digital content you consume, and without the ability to back up copies of ebooks, you could lose them entirely if they’re banned and removed.”

New and improved edition.

But there is a workaround. If your Kindle has a copy of Mein Kampf or a book about gay hotspots near the Gulf of Mexico and you don’t want to lose it, you can save it outside of the Amazon ecosystem.

“(The feature is) still accessible through Amazon’s website by accessing your “Content Library” while logged into your account. For purchased books you select the “More actions” menu, choose “Download & transfer via USB,” select a Kindle device you have registered, and a copy of the book will be downloaded to your computer.”

A nice feature…especially if you want to make sure you don’t lose your purchased content. And it’s really nice if you want to put your Amazon content on a non-Amazon e-reader. Because the Kindle only has a minuscule 72% share of the e-reader market, this is a gargantuan threat to Amazon’s ability to sell hardware.

You can see where this is going.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Amazon has made a change, according to The Verge:

“Starting February 26, 2025, the ‘Download & Transfer via USB’ option will no longer be available. You can still send Kindle books to your Wi-Fi enabled devices by selecting the ‘Deliver or Remove from Device’ option.”

February 25.

To clarify, you can still access your books on the Kindle app.

Just not outside of it.

How does this affect your content?

This serves as a reminder about technological change, walled gardens, and obsolescence.

Which ties in with one of Bredemarket’s favorite topics, repurposing.

You can take content from one platform and place it on another. For example, a (mostly) text post can become a video reel.

Now Bredemarket doesn’t create videos for clients, but if you need your identity/biometric or technology text repurposed in another format, I can help.

CPA

Yes, I Would Like a Two Billion Dollar Annual Salary

I tried to enter a salary range in an online job application and got this error message:

“What is your target overall salary/annual compensation rate?: Please enter a number using only the digits 0 to 9 with a value between 10000 and 2147483647. Do not include any commas, decimals, or letters.”

I was tempted to enter the maximum value, but I wanted the job. 

But I knew the number 2,147,483,647 had to have some significance.

And it does. 

  • It’s a double Mersenne prime. 
  • It’s 2 to the 31st power minus 1.
  • It’s hexadecimal 7FFFFFFF.

But for Applicant Tracking System (ATS) purposes, it’s “the maximum value for variables declared as integers.”

Don’t tell anyone, but I’d gladly settle for an annual salary of only $2,147,483,646.

Bredemarket’s Three (So Far) Industry Pillar Pages

Since I started creating (sort of) pillar pages in April 2022, I’ve built more, including three devoted to particular industries.

Idiot

(Imagen 3 Image)

On a Bredemarket Instagram story shared Friday afternoon (to disappear Saturday), I noted Meta’s AI advice NOT to call someone who flew a drone near firefighting equipment an “idiot.” I respectfully disagree. The term is appropriate.

Let me clarify that Meta is not trying to curtail free speech. Only governments can curtail free speech. Private entities cannot.

For example, if I still worked for IDEMIA, and used IDEMIA social media channels to declare the Thales ABIS the best ABIS ever, IDEMIA has every right to delete that post—and me.

In the same way, if Zuck insists that Meta users cannot refer to people threatening lives as “idiots,” that is Meta’s right.

But it’s idiotic.

THINK.

I found a picture of a suited IBM worker from the 20th century who reminded me of Kraftwerk. So I created an Instagram reel.

From the Bredemarket Instagram account.

Note the prominence of the word THINK. There’s a story behind that, of course, that is older than IBM itself. Thomas Watson (Sr.) first used the word at a 1911 sales conference of National Cash Register.

“The trouble with every one of us is that we don’t think enough. We don’t get paid for working with our feet — we get paid for working with our heads.”

Cobwebs

“Let’s not market that product until the new year. Let’s not even build anticipation for the product until the new year. What could go wrong?”

Plenty.

Bring someone on board NOW to market your anti-fraud technology product NOW.

  • Multiple go-to-market efforts
  • Strategic and tactical
  • Positioning and messaging expertise
  • 22 types of external and internal content
  • Ethical and unbiased competitive analysis skills

Bredemarket Content-Proposal-Analysis:

CPA

(AI image from Google Gemini)

Bredemarket Health Page Updates

Most of you who developed a sudden interest in healthcare this week WON’T be interested in this, so move along.

I’ve added 3 new posts (so far) to the Bredemarket Health page since November 2024:

  • Dr. Jones MD, NPE
  • Saving Money When Filling Prescriptions: Not You, The Companies
  • Medical Fraudsters: Birthday Party People

(And no, I have no real interest in addressing the recent murder of a healthcare executive. It’s a crime. End of discussion.)

I approach health and health product marketing from both an identity and technology perspective, recognizing the similarities and differences between biometrics and biometrics, and between PHI and PII.

Health

Getting Around the Warring Standards (Lightning vs. USB-C)

I’ve talked about standards to death, but what do you do when there are two standards? Do you support standard 1, or standard 2?

Yes.

If you need to charge both USB-C and Lightning mobile devices, Native Union has the cable for you.

The ultimate cable you’ve been searching for is finally here. Solve all your power needs with a faster, more sustainable, more durable cable. Designed for superior convenience and versatility, this unique 2-in-1 connector houses both USB-C and Lightning connectors in a single head and is strong enough to withstand the most active all-day, all-device use.

Belt Cable Duo (USB-C to USB-C & Lightning). From Native Union website.

As you can see from the image above (upper left corner), you can choose either the Lightning adapter or the USB-C adapter.

Sounds great…

…except that Apple is slowly discontinuing use of Lightning, to comply with European Union regulations in 2022. The 2023 iPhone 15 doesn’t offer Lightning at all, and over the next several years Lightning will go away as older Apple devices become obsolete.

But for now it’s a good cable.

Career Detective: My AI-generated “Podcast”

I normally don’t listen to 20+ minute podcasts, but I listened to this one because it was all about me.

Seriously…there’s a 20 minute podcast that focuses on me.

The two people on the podcast spent the entire time talking about my most recent ten years of professional experience.

Except…the people weren’t people.

NotebookLM file-to-audio creation

The people were Google bots, powered by Google’s NotebookLM.

Upload PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides, and NotebookLM will summarize them and make interesting connections between topics, all powered by Gemini 1.5’s multimodal understanding capabilities.

With all of your sources in place, NotebookLM gets to work and becomes a personalized AI expert in the information that matters most to you….

Our new Audio Overview feature can turn your sources into engaging “Deep Dive” discussions with one click.

I uploaded the most recent version of my resume to NotebookLM.

Technically, this is not my resume; this is a PDF version of a portion of my LinkedIn profile. But my resume has similar information.

NotebookLM used the resume as source material to create a 20+ minute podcast called “Career Detective.” In the podcast, a male and a female pair of bots took turns discussing the insights they gleaned from the resume of John E. “Breedehoft.” (I use a short e, not a long e, but people can call me anything if I get business from it.)

Surprisingly, they didn’t really hallucinate. Or at least I don’t think they did. When the bots said I was deeply qualified, as far as I’m concerned they were speaking the truth.

They even filled in some gaps. For example, I used the acronyms for KYC, KYB, and AML on my resume to save space, so one of the bots explained to the other what those acronyms meant, and why they were important.

Probably the most amusing part of the podcast was when they noted that I had worked at two very large companies. (Just so you know, my resume only goes back to 2015, so Motorola isn’t even discussed.) While Incode and IDEMIA are both multinationals, I wouldn’t characterize Incode as massive.

Anyway, judge for yourself

So here’s the audio episode of “Career Detective” that focuses on…me.

By the way, I learned about NotebookLM via the Never Search Alone Slack workspace, but still need to explore NotebookLM’s other features.

Electric Feel

Installation of iOS 18 has increased my phone’s battery life. But not for the reasons you may think.

From Macworld.

To install iOS 18 on my older 64GB IPhone I had to offload or outright remove many apps, including most of my game apps.

One of those game apps was Niantic’s most recent location-based app, Peridot. Like many other Niantic games, Peridot encourages outdoor activity—and heavy smartphone use while playing the game.

From https://playperidot.com/.

Today was the first day that I took my usual Saturday morning walk WITHOUT Peridot on my phone. Ordinarily, my phone desperately needs a charge at the end of my walk. Today, despite filming a number of video clips for a personal October video, I returned home with over 75% battery remaining.

But with a paucity of virtual sandwiches, flowers, and tomatoes.