I still have two stuffed monkeys I “won” from that site, from when I was young and stupid and didn’t realize I was probably paying for them with my personal data.

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I’ve got a high credit score and I’ve never not paid it off in full. It’s only really ever went up over the years, with the occasional tiny 1-3 digit drop. I’d never pay interest I don’t need to in exchange for a higher rating; they’ve got enough money.

Yeah, I used “send to kindle” for a long time and it’s perfectly fine for just getting stuff on the device easily (especially since you’ve got multiple devices and might want to use the Amazon cloud), but there were a couple things about it that annoyed me and got me to switch. The first is obviously that it converts everything to a “document” pdoc file instead of a book (which is obviously more of a psychological thing to make anything not from Amazon seem like “the other”), but the second issue is that the mandatory conversion would seriously screw with the formatting of the book and they just looked worse than their “native” Kindle versions, with weird spacing and big margins on some books and no way to fix it.

Calibre is admittedly kind of a pain at first (not only do you have to plug in your device to a PC, the software is often unintuitive and confusing), but I think it’s worth checking out if you’re not buying books from Amazon but still want to get the best e-reader functionality out of the device possible (and it’s a nice way to see your non-Amazon ebook collection separate from the device). I convert all books to the AZW3 format with it, then use a plug-in called Quality Fix (specifically a function in it called “fix ASIN for Kindle”) and it makes all books pretty much indistinguishable from their Amazon counterparts.

Outside of buying stuff directly via the OS on the device, you’re not locked into Amazon’s store. I upload stuff to my Kindle with Calibre all the time (which works much better than the “send to kindle” function Amazon would prefer you use).

I set up a ton of overcomplicated functions to control my home theater. Entirely replaced an old Harmony remote with my phone.

Only real downside (apart from the time sink and occasional Siri weirdness) is that it relies on a couple of apps and one in particular (which I use for changing the input) the dev likes to break on updates.