I’ve got a VERY long flight ahead of me for my trip to Thailand – 17 hours! That’s from LA to Singapore. I decided to look into getting a new tablet for movies, books, audio books, etc. to help pass the time. I wanted a 10″ screen and something that would be easy to use. Also something that can take a bit of a beating through the whole travel process.

I prefer Android products, but in the end I went with a new Amazon Fire tablet. There’s a 60% off Amazon products sale going on right now and you can get a 10.1″ Fire tablet with 32GB storage space and 12 hour battery for $99! You can add 256GB of memory to the tablet with a MicroSD card right now for only $30!

Tablet Link
Memory Card

For less than the cost of just a basic 10-inch Android tablet, I got an Amazon tablet with far more memory, a case, and screen protector. Since all my eBooks, audiobooks, and purchased movies are with Amazon, this just makes the most sense for me.

As a bonus, I found this website that walked me through adding the Google Play store to the tablet: https://www.howtogeek.com/232726/how-to-install-the-google-play-store-on-your-amazon-fire-tablet

The whole thing is done from the tablet, only takes a few minutes and worked perfectly. So now I have an Amazon tablet with all my Amazon purchased media, plus Google Play so I can download my games and apps, for less than $200! Score!

On another, more techie note, I’ve been having issues with my email lately. I purchased and use the “lonehat.com” domain for my email. I own the domain and use a unique email address for each business and such that I deal with online. Problem is, my emails are being flagged as spam lately which is ridiculous as I don’t do any marketing or mass emails from my domain. I only email friends/family and any businesses I’m currently working with/purchasing from. I’ve checked the lists, and I can’t find that I’ve been blacklisted anywhere or anything.

What I did find is that my email servers are not as “secure” as they could be. I use FastMail.com for my email service and on a testing site, my email server config came back as missing a couple of secure MX records. (I configure my domain to point to FastMail’s servers, then I’m able to use their products for handling my emails and such.) The problem is their servers use a very relaxed version of SPF and DKIM records, which is failing some of the security checks I ran. They plan to implement stronger security in the future, but not at this time.

So I’ve moved to using ProtonMail as my email service. Everything there is far more locked down, with encryption, so hopefully this will resolve the issues I’ve been having with my emails getting rejected as spam. Google is particularly bad about flagging my stuff spam. Sigh. 😒

What really sucks is the phone app for FastMail was awesome, ProtonMail not so much. However, it looks like their devs are working on a new version of the phone app – re-doing everything from the ground up, so fingers crossed there!

One cool thing about ProtonMail is the fun variety of emails they give you. If you sign up with them (they offer free accounts) you get these email addresses to use:

yourname@protonmail.com
yourname@proton.me
yourname@pm.me

I especially like the last one – short and sweet! In the end, if I can’t get this resolved (there are lots of postings from people having problems with Google flagging their stuff as spam), I might just start using the @pm.me address I’ve got now instead. In the end, it would save me time/money/headaches not dealing with trying to manage this stuff. In fact, I’ve probably just talked myself into it. 😁

Happy Friday! Hope everyone has a fun holiday weekend!