Stoking my Fire...Kindle Fire, that is

I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas.

Did I need one?

No.

Did I know how much I wanted one?

Not until I opened the box.

Did I realize how perfect it was for me?

I do now.

I had been eyeballing the Fire since it was launched, but every time I saw it, I quickly talked myself out of getting one. I didn’t need one. I have a Kindle (the one with the keyboard) and it works perfectly fine. I have a 4G smartphone with apps. I have an iPod and a MacBook Pro. Despite all this, my Fire fits perfectly into my life. I didn’t need another gadget, but through a happy accident, I found myself owning one. I’m completely in love.

Since I’m in love, I make sure my Fire is always near. I have been on a quest to find as many ways as possible to use my Fire. So for those who love you’re Kindle Fire as much as I do, here are some neat things I’ve found to do with mine.

• Music. I always have music going. Turning on the tunes is one of the first things I do in the morning. The Kindle Fire has decent sounding speakers and it also has an earphone jack. The lovely thing about the music feature is I can play music straight from my Amazon cloud when I’m on a wireless network.  I can also download my favorite MP3s to my Kindle

• Text-to-Speech. I’ve learned two cool things to do with Text-to-Speech. The first, which I can’t take credit for, is to turn the volume down on Text-to-Speech and knit while I’m reading the book. The pages turn automatically and I don’t have to put my knitting down (Thanks, Jan). The second is to send my latest writing project to my Fire and let the Text-to-Speech feature read it to me. This is a great trick if you have problems catching your mistakes in your writing. The old Kindle didn’t have this capability.

• Magazines. My library systems allows us to download digital version of many popular magazines, like The Writer and Poets & Writers, to a Kindle app called Zinio. I’m even more convinced that my library is the best use of my county texts ever! I also subscribed to Writer’s Digest through Amazon and the subscription includes a Kindle version. Sweet.

• Bible App. This one comes in handy when I’m teaching Sunday school. Not only do I have multiple version of the Bible at my fingertips, it also keeps track of the time, which is a bonus because the clock in my Sunday school classroom is a little wonky.

• Docs. As stated above, I can send my writing WIPs to my documents, but I can also send the patterns for my knitting WIPs to my Fire. It’s very convenient for carrying multiple patterns in the same way it carries multiple books. I don’t have to carry around paper patterns anymore and I don’t have to worry about what project I grab when I’m on the go. I have them all in my Fire. 

Help me make my Kindle Fire even more useful. What are some great uses for a Kindle Fire that you’ve discovered?