Poetry by Peek

Daily Lit is a great site that delivers installments of both modern and classic works of literature (the classic books are free; a small fee is charged for modern books) to your e-mail box.  Naturally, this is a great application for Peek users — especially since you can tell Daily Lit to send you your daily installments at the same time every day.  For instance, I’ve signed up for the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson to be delivered to my Peek every evening at 10:30 (bedtime for me).  I can enjoy her glorious genius every night without facing the distractions of sitting at my computer desk or being tempted to surf the web on my laptop, rather than just having a quiet poetry moment before lights out.   It’s Peek meets Kindle.

This gets to the heart of why anyone would want a Peek device in the age of the do-it-all, information-laden smartphone.  Smartphones have their place, but sometimes it’s hard to put them in their place.   Technology has so much enrichment to offer us, but sometimes it’s running our lives and filling up our complete attentions, instead of working for us and letting us properly focus our attention on what we want to focus on.  Peek doesn’t get in the way of the good things the Internet has to offer.

(Daily Lit needs to send you a confirmation link whenever you sign up for a book, so you’ll need to log into your web Gmail account to activate it.   You can also send e-mail to support@dailylit.com if you have problems doing that.)

Moblogging with Posterous

Something that some people are going to want to do with the Peek is to use it as a moblogging tool. While some services like Blogger have a native post-by-email capability, unfortunately WordPress doesn’t really have one that works very reliably. One solution is Posterous, a service that can post to WordPress blogs (and Livejournal, Xanga, Blogger and others) via mail. (It can also post via e-mail to Twitter, similar to Twittermail.

The drawback to services like Posterous and Twittermail is that they require you to give them the password to your blog. You might not want to do that for security reasons, especially if it’s your administrative user account. One solution is to create a non-admin user for your blog and give that login/password to the Posterous service. That way you can hopefully avoid any serious security problems.