Monthly Archives: October 2013

How To Delete Apps From The Cloud On A Kindle Fire

In a past DMM post, Kindle and Kindle Fire Owners: Where Your Content Lives and Deleting, Moving and Restoring Kindle / Kindle Fire Content, I explained how to delete apps and other content from your Fire vs. from the Cloud, and what the difference is between the two. Today I’d like to update that post with some new information: how to delete an app from Amazon’s Cloud right from your Fire**—all models, from first-generation non-HD to the latest HDX line—, without logging on to the Amazon site. **UPDATE** 5/19/15: while this post reflects information that was provided by Amazon at the time the post was written, more recent tests have shown the method described here doesn’t work for first-gen Fires. For people who only own first-gen Fires, the only way to remove apps from the Cloud in on the Amazon site itself. First, I must remind you: anything you delete from the…

If You Own A Kindle, The PowerFast Charger Is A Must-Have Accessory

Regular readers know I am nothing, if not frugal. But I’m not penny-wise and pound foolish, as they say. For the longest time I refused to invest the twenty bucks (it’s priced at $19.99 as of this writing) in Amazon Kindle 9W PowerFast Adapter for Accelerated Charging, because I didn’t think it made sense to buy yet another charger when my drawers are already littered with the many that have come with the various gadgets my kids and I have accumulated over recent years. But it was always a bit of a frustration, having to babysit my charging Kindle Fire and check on it frequently to see when its battery was back up to full, so as to avoid overcharging it. And with a standard charger, it would take hours to refill that little battery indicator in the menu bar. Even so, I thought, “How much faster could the PowerFast really be?” The…

The Differences Between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Cell Connectivity

Bluetooth speakers, 4G tablets and external hard drives with Wi-Fi, oh my! Here’s how these three types of connectivity technologies differ. Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is the type of connection you need to wirelessly connect various devices to a wireless network. It could be your home network, the network at your workplace, or the biggest global network of them all: the internet. Yes, the internet is a network. It seems obvious when you realize that a network is just a collection of technology devices that are all set up to communicate with one another. So where at home, you use a network to send a document to a printer that’s located far from your computer, on the internet, computers and servers send web pages, files and messages to other computers and servers that are located as far away as the other side of the world. So if you’re considering buying some device, and…

Kindle Fire HDX Antivirus – Do You Need It?

I’ve previously written about the pointlessness of antivirus protection for the Kindle Fire line of tablets (see my post, Kindle Fire Antivirus: You Still Don’t Need It), but the new HDX line of Fires adds a new wrinkle since they all come with the option for 4G cell service connectivity. In my prior posts on this topic, I discussed how some hackers target cell phones specifically to add bogus charges to the phone owners’ bills. Many, if not most, cell phone owners won’t notice small charges scattered across an entire month, but they add up quickly. Some hackers go for broke right out of the gate and try to make a single, large bogus charge to the phone owner’s bill (usually masquerading as some kind of pay-by-the-minute service, like a party line or psychic reading service). They sometimes get away with it because these types of charges are made to the phone owner’s account immediately…

Upgrading To A New Kindle Fire: How To Copy Content From An Old Fire To A New One

In my previous post, Surviving A Kindle Fire Factory Reset – With (Most) Of Your Stuff Intact, I outlined a step-by-step process for backing up your Kindle Fire before performing a factory reset, then restoring that content after the reset. Now that the new Kindle Fire models are upon us, I’m getting this question pretty frequently: can the same method be used to transfer content from an old/pre-existing Kindle Fire to a new one? The answer is: yes, but with some tweaks to the process. When I got new Fire I was able to test this out for myself, so I can confirm that it works. A Step-By-Step Process For Relocating To A New Kindle Fire The steps below, and screenshot, are from going through this process with a Kindle Fire HD model. The process is essentially the same for all Fire models, but folder names and locations on different generations…