Amazon Prime Video email: Your $6 credit is waiting.

Amazon Prime Video sent me an email saying, Your $6 credit is waiting. 

It would have been less spammy if they’d just sent an email saying: Your $6 credit has been applied to your account.

It worked after I clicked Activate now.

Note: Email was from no-reply@primevideo.com

Amazon product review: A USB-C cable and a pair of wire cutters.

Here are two Amazon product reviews with integrated product carousel, featured on Amazon.com/live.

A USB-C cable and a pair of wire cutters.

For years we have been thinking up ways to integrate product sales with video. Here, Amazon.com integrates live video with a linked product carousel.

Disclosure: The two products reviewed are part of the program for Amazon Vine Customer Review of Free Products.

The Top 10 Amazon Products Consumers CLICK on Most

Christopher S. Penn and his team at Trust Insights used SEO tools and IBM Watson to analyze the top 24,000 Amazon pages to find the 10 products consumers CLICK on most, How To Make the Most of Prime Day for Amazon Affiliate Marketers.

Here they are:

1. Apple’s AirPods with Charging Case

2. Amazon Music Unlimited (regular)

3. From House to Home, Karina’s Journey

4. Amazon Echo Dot 3rd Generation

5. Bose QuietComfort 35 II Noise Cancelling Headphones

6. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

7. The free Amazon Storytime Alexa skill

8. Acer 24″ HD Gaming Monitor

9. Amazon Elements Baby Wipes for Sensitive Skin

10. Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning

BONUS:

All-new Kindle

Echo Show 5

Disclosure: All links are Amazon Affiliate links.

#PrimeDay2019 #PrimeDay

How To: Printing My Mom's Blog as a Book Using Blog2Print and Amazon Createspace

My mom, Millie Garfield is one of the internet's oldest bloggers. Her blog is My Mom's Blog.

She's been blogging since 2003. I printed an earlier collection of her blog posts from Oct 2003 to June 2008 using Blurb.


My Mom's Blog on blurb.
Size Small Square, 7×7 in, 18×18 cm
404 Pages
Publish Date Jul 10, 2008

This time I used blog2print to print the rest of her posts from July 2008 to Sept 2017.

It was was easy enough to get started by choosing the blogging platform, and entering in the URL of her blog.



Next you choose the range of blog posts you want to include in the book, and choose your formatting.



Then all you do to create the book is click on the button, CREATE MY BOOK.

Once the book is generated you can choose to purchase a printed version, or a PDF. In this case, I went with PDF because I wanted to submit my book to Amazon Createspace, where I can sell it online.

Here is the pricing:



Here’s the basic pricing structure:

A soft cover book with full color pages is $19.95 for 20 pages (additional pages are $0.32 each)
A standard laminate hard cover book with full color pages is $34.95 for 20 pages (additional pages are $0.32 each)
A deluxe hard cover book including dust jacket with full color pages is $37.95 for 20 pages (additional pages are $0.32 each)
A digital PDF download is $8.95

Here's a snapshot of a page as printed to PDF by blog2print.



This is really great. Perfect for printing. Except for the fact that, in this case, my mom's book was going to be 466 pages, and at that size, the page numbers were going to be cut off by the binding. After submitting this PDF to Amazon createspace I got an error notifying me of this.



So at this point I had to call in my book publishing friend, J. Bruce Jones, Bruce the Book Guy, who's business it is to help people self-publish.

He suggested that I reduce the size of my book from 8 1/2 X 11 to 8 X 10, thereby cutting off the footing where the offending page numbers existed. That worked.

Note: I contacted blog2print to see if they could regenerate my book without the footer nad page numbers, but they told me that it was hard coded and that there was no way to do it.

After submitting this revised PDF to Amazon createspace, along with a cover that I designed using their cover creator, I had my book approved for printing a proof.

You can get a virtual proof before ordering a hard copy.

Here's what the virtual proof looks like.



It all worked out with no footer. I also got an image that some of my images were not 300 dpi, but they are good enough at their resolution. In my last book I worried about createspace flagging image resolution, but learned to ignore those warnings. If after getting the printed proof, some images didn't look right, at that point I could swap them out.

I ordered a hard copy proof, and here's how it came out.

Cover:



Inside:

Mercedes-Benz connects to Amazon Echo: Alexa, ask Mercedes me to start the car.

Image: Alexa Mercedes Me Skill Page

Mercedes me for Amazon Alexa

This is cool, Mercedes-Benz just added an Amazon Echo skill to connect to your car, via mbrace.

Steps to connect your Mercedes (2016 and newer) to Amazon Alexa

1. Enable the Mercedes me for Amazon Alexa skill.
2. Connect the Amazon Alexa skill to Mercedes mbrace.


Image: Mercedes me iPhone App screen

Alexa Mercedes Me Skill Description

With Mercedes me for Amazon Alexa, you can access your Mercedes-Benz from the comfort of your couch. In order to effectively use the Mercedes me skill, you will need an active Mercedes me account and an active mbrace subscription.*

The Mercedes me skill allows you to:

Remotely lock the doors
Remotely start your engine**
Send an address or point of interest to your in-vehicle navigation
Manage multiple vehicles

After linking your Mercedes me account to the Mercedes me skill, you can ask questions or give commands, such as:

"Alexa, tell Mercedes me to lock the car."
"Alexa, ask Mercedes me to start the car." **
"Alexa, ask Mercedes me to send an address to the car."
"Alexa, ask Mercedes me to find Starcoffee near me."
"Alexa, tell Mercedes me to update my primary car."

* Select mbrace services are free for five years with any new Mercedes-Benz.
** Available on select 2016 and newer model lines. Check with dealer for details. Features subject to network coverage.

Please note:
• The Mercedes me skill on Alexa currently only supports users in the United States;
• The Mercedes me skill on Alexa will send remote service commands to your vehicle, but will not currently confirm the completion of those commands. However, in the case of remote start, you will receive a remote start status text message to the phone number that is linked to your mbrace account. If you update your phone number linked to mbrace, you will also be required to update your primary car in Mercedes me in order to continue receiving text messages;
• You can manage multiple cars within Mercedes me. However, you can only operate one car at a time via Alexa i.e. the primary car that you set via the Mercedes me skill. In order to change/update your primary car, simply say "Alexa, ask Mercedes me to update my primary car.";
• For Mercedes me customer support, call +1 800-367-6372

Alexa, Are you my girlfriend? Amazon Echo in the home.

Teaching my Mom the difference between HDMI1, HDMI2, and TV so she can get Netflix on the Amazon fireTV stick

I got my mom (89) an Amazon Fire TV Stick to allow her to watch Nextflix on her TV.


Installing the fireTV stick was easy, teaching her the the difference between HDMI1, HDMI2, and TV was hard!


Amazon fireTV stick connected via HDMI EXTENDER CABLE TO Monitor HDMI port

HDMI1 and HDMI2
Once I had the firstTV stick set up, it was time to teach my mom how to use it to access Netflix.

My mom has Xfinity and uses that remote to do everything. But now that I introduced a new input, I had to go find the remote that came with the TV to show her how to switch between Xfinity and the Amazon fireTV smart stick, which from here on out I'll call Netflix.

So I found the remote and showed her the SOURCE button.

Note: Maybe she oculd have used the Xfinity remote to do this. I'll have to take a look the next time I visit. Makes sense.



Me: Here mom. Use this remote to change between HDMI1 and HDMI2. HDMI1 is your TV, and HDMI2 is Netflix.

Mom: What does HDMI mean?

Me: I don't know, just press the SOURCE button.

Mom: What's HDMI1 and HDMI2?

Me: HDMI1 is your TV, and HDMI2 is Netflix.

AMAZON FIRETV STICK REMOTE
So we get Amazon fireTV stick display up on the tv and now need to navigate around.



Me: Use the circle to go up, down, left, right, and the button inside the circle to select. Try moving around.

Mom: OK.

When my mom pressed down, it moved down two locations instead of one, and sometimes she pressed the select button instead of navigation. We figured out that the black circle was not differentiated enough in color to distinguish it from the black selection button.

We figured that out.

NETFLIX
Then we moved on to selecting Netflix.


Netflix on Amazon fireTV stick

Once there we looked at how to select and watch a show.

Back to TV

After that we practiced going back to TV.

[Times Passes and we visit again]

Mom: My TV isn't working. It says No Signal. I watched Netflix on my computer at my desk.

So I went over to the TV and saw that the SOURCE was set to TV. Ah ha!

Me: Mom, when you press the SOURCE button, you don't go to TV to get TV, you go to HDMI1 to get TV, which is Xfinity. When you press the SOURCE button, you need to bypass the TV option and only go to either HDMI1 or HDMI2. No TV.

That cleared things up!

How To Borrow an Amazon Kindle Book

I was trying to find out how you can borrow a book on Amazon.com, but found it difficult to see how to do it.

It's actually easy, but you have to borrow a book from your Kindle, you can't do it online. You also have to be an Amazon Prime member, which is a great deal. Seriously.

Amazon can deliver a Heinz Organic Tomato Ketchup Twin Pack to your front door in two days!



You can't beat that, but that's not important right now.

Here's how to borrow a Kindle book on Amazon:

Eligible Amazon Prime members can borrow books from the Kindle Owners' Lending Library directly on their registered Kindle device.
Image: Courtesy Amazon.com



You can borrow one book per month.

Note: All links are amazon.com affiliate links where I make a few cents if you click through and buy something.