A holiday-shortened week, an absence of the gadget-guide pieces that used to swamp my schedule about this time every November, and no freelance pieces for other sites make for a much shorter list of articles compared to last week’s.

11/21/11: “Gadget-guide guidance,” CEA Tech Enthusiast (subscription required) CEA Digital Dialogue

Yeah, about those gift guides… in this post, I try to explain how these catalog-style pieces tend to align more closely with the interests of publishers and advertisers than those of readers. They’re also often a nuisance for writers, if anybody’s interested in our concerns. I conclude by offering some suggestions about what sorts of gadget guides might be more and less useful to people looking for help on what hardware to give or get.

11/22/11: “Amazon’s Kindle Fire: The Paperback of Tablets,” Discovery News

The lede for this piece popped into my head just as I started work on it–which could have been inconvenient if my evaluation hadn’t matched that phrasing. Fortunately, it did: The Kindle Fire is a good but not quite great tablet that does enough things sufficiently well that it should escape the dismal fate of earlier iPad competitors. (That’s “competitor,” not “killer”; calling anything an “iPad killer” ensures its demise. Just ask all the “iPod killers” nobody can unload on eBay.)

Updated 1/31/2012 with a non-paywalled CEA link.