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[Wed Aug 25 15:40:38 2010] p
webOS Playlists
Hey, how about a non-iPad/Kindle related post? Ok!
Remember when the Palm Pre first came out and there was a big
hullabaloo about how it was recognized by iTunes as an iPod, then
Apple broke it, then Palm fixed it, then Apple broke it again? Ah
yeah, good times.
Well, anyways, it looks like ultimately Palm gave
up. Fine. I don't mind dragging-and-dropping music via Windows
Explorer or the Mac Finder. However, I do sometimes get these
compilation discs or samplers where the Album is not the same for
every MP3/AAC file. And here's where dragging-and-dropping fails,
because for these songs, you need a playlist to keep them
together.
Supposedly Winamp is supposed to recognize the Palm device and let
you create playlists, but for whatever reasons the version of Winamp
I have 1) could not create a playlist of iTunes-purchased AAC files,
even though they were *not* protected with DRM, and 2) wrote the
playlist (M3U file) to the root of my Pixi's Music folder instead of in the
folder of songs.
But the M3U file it did write at least gave me a clue. It was in
this format:
#EXTM3U
\Music\Some Folder\Some Song
So, it was easy enough (for my purposes) to do from a DOS command-prompt:
cd P:\Music\Some Folder Of Songs
dir /b > playlist.m3u
P:\ is where my Pixi is mounted. dir /b does a "bare" directory listing
without timestamps, file sizes, etc.
And voila -- I have a playlist of all the songs in this folder that
webOS will recognize and play. Woot!
Lingering issues - ok, so what if you want to create a
traditional playlist of songs from multiple folders? I dunno, but if
it lives in the root Music, it pretty much gets ignored. Does it have
to live in a folder along with at least one of the songs on the list?
Dunno. Not my problem... yet.
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[Sun Aug 15 11:02:51 2010] p
iPad Too
A few more notes:
- No contact syncing for Gmail/Facebook/LinkedIn?
Totally weak. Clearly I've been spoiled by Synergy. Hrm, don't suppose HP
would consider selling this as a iPhone/iPad App?
- It occurs to me that I've had this feeling before, of missing a
real keyboard. It was when I still had a Palm III, and as great as
Graffiti
was, pairing it with the awesome Stowaway folding
keyboard. I loved that keyboard. Bought one for the III, and
then the V, and yeesh, even for the Zire 71 and i705. Desperately wanted one
for the the TX or Treos, but the Athena Connector didn't have CTS or
RTS. Such a bummer.
But anyways, I remembered that I think I have one of these Palm foldable
Bluetooth keyboards somewhere. I'll have to dig around at work,
but hopefully it'll work with the iPad, as it seems to work with the iPhone.
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[Sun Aug 15 00:24:30 2010] p
myPad!?
I have the awesomest friends and family who chipped in to get me
an iPad for my 40th birthday because I was too cheap to buy one
myself. (This is not dissimilar to my friends chipping in 13 years
ago to get me a Palm Pilot Professional. But hey, at least I waited
13 years, right? Oh wait, and then there was the Sony DVD player back
in 1999. All right, I'm sorry I'm such a cheapskate guys. And again,
thank you sooooooo much.)
So anyways, here's impressions from my first couple of hours
with an iPad, which I was primarily interested for the following:
- eBooks - namely, finishing the behemoth Infinite
Jest, the 2.8lb, 1,088-page paperback borrowed from Senjou like 12
years ago.
- Phanfare - viewing and managing our photo collection
- Email
- Web browsing
- NPR app
- Flipboard
- Videos - Netflix, Hulu, YouTube
First impressions:
eBooks:
Kindle app is excellent. All the key
features of the device (dictionary lookup, highlights and notes,
search) + touch screen. Will let you know if my eyes are burning
from reading on LCD. Yay white-on-black mode. Nice to have access
to Kobo, B&N and Borders (Kobo OEM) apps, as they sometimes have
cheaper prices or good freebies.
Phanfare
Really nice work. Once uploaded (or maybe automatically uploaded
via Eye-Fi cards) this could really be a great way to manage photos
w/o the use of a computer at all.
Email
Great for browsing. But I'm very blabby. I need a keyboard. A real
keyboard. Or even a little keyboard like the Pixi. But no no
no virtual keyboard. And it's worse than an iPhone, because
it's too big to type with thumbs. Biggest annoyance -- the arrogance
of putting virtual "ridges" on the "F" and "J" keys which on a real
keyboard give you tactile feedback on where to place your fingers (the
home row, if you're old enough to remember typing class, or maybe
Mavis Beacon?) On an iPad? They're just there as an ironic joke.
Nice one. :-P
Web browsing
It's fine. Until you have to type something. OH. iPads suck if you
have complex passwords. Shifting for numbers and punctuation every
other character is a pain. No, I will not choose a easier-to-type
password.
NPR app
Heard them talking this up on NPR. It is quite awesome. Except that
iPad doesn't support background audio yet. When it does, it will be
even awesome-er. See also: Pandora.
Flipboard
Meh - it's very pretty. But apparently my Facebook and Twitter
friends are not sending me the uhm, "deepest" material for it to work
with. C'mon folks, step it up. Oh, that reminds me though, I've
gotta download Instapaper...
Videos
Just great - hard to find any fault. (Except that Hulu+ will be $9.99.)
Ok, time to read. Also, battery on my laptop is nearly dead.
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[Sat Aug 14 09:36:59 2010] p
XL
(Cooper
Black FTW! Thanks G!)
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[Mon Aug 2 01:31:58 2010] p
Kindle on iPad
Doh. And Amazon just
released a new version of the Kindle App for the iPad that
introduces searching and dictionary lookup. Searching is slow through
Infinite Jest. Not sure if this is because the iPhone is slow, or
because IJ is so huge. Still... no indexing?
With dictionary lookup and searching, reading a book on the Kindle
app on an iPad has reached feature-parity with the Kindle device. And
with a touch screen, it's frankly surpassed it.
Highlighting and note-taking is a lot easier with a touch
interface, and navigating those notes is way faster, since
you can quickly scroll through them.
If battery life on the iPad is what people are saying it is (and
who really reads for 10-hours straight not being anywhere near a
power outlet? I've gotta say the iPad is looking pretty tempting
as a platform for reading Infinite Jest (and by extension any other
fancy vocabulary/endnote-heavy ebooks).
This means the iPad/iPhone Kindle App is more feature-complete
than the Windows or Mac apps. So clearly Amazon is hedging their bets
-- "Yeah, we sell a $139 Wi-Fi-only Kindle 3 , but if you really want a
great ebook reading experience, try it on an iPad." Meh -- if only
Jeff Bezos would give me $360 to buy one.
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[Sat Jul 31 00:25:01 2010] p
Infinite Jest on the Kindle
Approximately 12 years ago, I borrowed the 1,079 novel Infinite Jest from
a friend. In addition to the obvious inconveniences of its weight
(2.8 pounds, according to Amazon), the author mixes up some pretty
great stream-of-consciousness casual-speaking prose with $10 words
like "leptosomatic", "semion", "cognomen" and "howling fantods". Bad
enough you'd have to have to wrestle a 2.8lbs book, but also a
collegiate dictionary?
After trudging through maybe 100 pages, I got distracted, and pretty
much forgot about it up until late 2008 when I found out that the
author, David Foster Wallace, had killed himself. It reminded me that I
really did want to read the book, and that if there was any
book ever meant to be read on a Kindle (with full-text search!), this
was it.
But being the cheapskate that I am, I held out on buying a Kindle,
despite talking about it all the time. Eventually Glady got the hint
(or got sick of hearing me whine about them being overpriced) and bought
me one last Christmas.
Ironically, I didn't end up purchasing Infinite Jest for the Kindle
until March. Up until then, I guess I'd kind of been afraid to commit
-- either to the platform or the book, I'm not sure. [Oh, maybe my
other excuse was that Infinite Jest wasn't available on the Kindle
until April 2009.]
Anyhow, here's some of my thoughts on reading Infinite
Jest on the Kindle.
Pros:
- Weight
- Built-in Dictionary with maybe a 95% success rate for looking up
words I don't know. (Wallace uses
some seriously obscure language, but the free New Oxford American
Dictionary is surprisingly not awful.)
- Full-text Searching+
- Highlighting and Notes*
Cons:
- Endnote navigation sucks. Wallace makes extensive use of endnotes.
The Infinite Summer group read (which happened last summer, which
means I missed it, :-{) rightly recommends that you read Jest with
two bookmarks, one for the main text, and one for the endnotes. (I
reckon you could also do well to have some pens, highlighters, and
Post-Its handy.) So you'd think -- well, it's electronic, right?
Hyperlinks should make endnotes easy to deal with. Well, yes,
except that a Kindle doesn't have a mouse. Or a touch-screen. It's
got an annoying 5-way joystick. Finding your way to the correct
footnote is kind of like navigating around with vi. Which is
admittedly what I'm typing this in, but which I'm not trying to
use to read a 1000+ page novel with endnotes. Basically to jump to
and endnote you've gotta flick the joystick up/right/down/left to get
to just the right spot, then click "center" and hope you don't
accidentally hit up/right/down/left first in which case you've started
highlight mode. Flipping to a physical bookmark is tons easier than
this.
- Dictionary lookup sucks. What I just said about getting to the
endnotes? Same problem with looking up a word, although Amazon tried
to address this with automatic lookup as you flick from word to word.
But it's still clunky as hell.
[Note that both of the problems can probably be blamed more on the nature
of the screen, eInk, which doesn't refresh quickly enough for you to
overlay a true cursor on top of it. Also, Sony has an eReader with a
touch interface, but it adds a layer on top of the eInk screen that
makes it a little muddy to read. Also, the demo unit for the Sony
touchscreen model was busted at Borders. But hey, at least that had a
demo unit, unlike the poor Kobo. But I digress. Maybe it would be
better on an iPad, sure.]
- *Highlighting and note-taking is ... problematic. Using the aforementioned
annoying navigation, you can highlight words or passages, and
optionally write notes. This functions relatively well until you
actually want to view your highlights or notes. The in-device browser
always starts at your first note (keeping in mind that this is a big
book that I'm only 1/3 of the way through, I already have 417 "Notes &
Marks" already, which means if I want to get to the last one, I have
to hit "Next Page" 104 times.
The situation is a little better if you use the Kindle Reader on PC
or Mac, which gives you the option of viewing your Marks & Notes in a
column to the right of the text. Alas, the notes are not searchable,
nor can you copy-and-paste from there.
Now the Kindle does have a "My Clippings.txt" file that is
supposed to hold the plain text of all of your highlights and notes. But
check this out -- the publisher of Infinite Jest has essentially
disabled "clipping" on the book, either by default, or out of fear that
somebody is really going to use the aforementioned annoying navigation to
highlight all 1000+ pages of the book and then bootleg the text. [Note that the
Kindle's "pages" each contain much less textthan the real book. At the
default font-size setting (#3), I will have clicked the Next Page
button(s) on my Kindle over 3000 times.]
So instead of seeing:
==========
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson)
- Highlight Loc. 4751 | Added on Friday, April 16, 2010, 01:26 AM
He lit a cigarette and listened to the singing of birds nearby.
==========
We get to see:
==========
Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 54 | Added on Sunday, March 28, 2010, 03:55 PM
==========
And then later:
==========
Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
- Highlight Loc. 7297 | Added on Friday, July 30, 2010, 11:24 AM
<You have reached the clipping limit for this item>
==========
I may have found a hack around this issue, but it's still a major
nuisance.
- +Full-text searching. Ok, searching's pretty awesome. As long as
you're not in the annoying "navigation mode", you can just start
typing and it'll open up a text box for your search. Minor problem:
results are returned with a good amount of context, so you may read a
spoiler. Major problem: no Next/Previous Search keyboard shortcuts,
which means you have to keep hitting the Back
button to go to the results, then use joystick nav to go to the next
result, push joystick IN (again, hoping to not accidentally press
up/down/left/right), rinse, repeat. Argh. C'mon guys, you have a
hard keyboard, with a shift and Alt key. You couldn't map two keys to
Next/Previous Search Result?
Random Notes
Maybe it's because the pages are "short". Maybe it's because I'm an
inattentive reader. But whatever the reason, I find myself having to
flip back and forth a lot. Actually, I do this with paper books to,
so I guess it's just me. ("Wait, and Mrs. Smith is whose aunt
again?"). The Kindle is a little slow flipping pages, and with short
pages, you have to flip more. One thing the Kindle has a is a quick
"bookmark" function (press that joystick IN) and it "dogears" the
current page. Nice, except that to navigate to your bookmarks... you
have to go to that godawful Notes & Marks screen again. Again, some
keyboard shortcuts for Next/Previous Bookmarks would have been
nice.
The Kindle does have Next/Previous Chapters, but typically I end up
using this feature by accident, as it's mapped to left/right on the
joystick when not in navigation mode. Argh. Sometimes I would
like to disable this function.
It's late. I should be reading my book, as I have a lot more Next Page
clicks to go. I know I've forgotten something, but this should
suffice for now.
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[Mon May 24 14:41:43 2010] p
Aside from the obviously awesome OK Go show, my other favorite things
at Maker Faire:
- Watching/helping Noah work through "Tinker Your Way Out of This 2.0"
(http://www.tinkeringschool.com/)
- Charming homemade 3D dome made out of (I'm guessing) plastic garbage
bags and I guess a bunch of fans. Made by a guy from Japan who read
his English introduction from a book, and after passing out classic
red/blue glasses, killed the lights and put on a really great 3D
shadow puppet demo w/ models from Star Trek/Wars, BSG, and other
random objects. Really really great. So glad he made it. Noah dug
it too.
- Successfully picking a lock for the first time! http://toool.us/
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[Thu Apr 22 01:18:28 2010] p
Got a Light?
So Glady got me a Kindle for Christmas. I finally finished reading
my first real purchase on the thing, The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo. Really good read. If you're going to read it (on paper
or on the Kindle), I recommend grabbing and printing the translation
of the maps that were in the original Swedish editions, but were
inexplicably omitted from the English translation:
Missing
Maps.
But hey look, Kindle has tons of free books, thanks to Project
Gutenberg, including Glady's favorite, Jane
Austen. So far she's read Northanger Abbey and Emma,
and now she's reading Mansfield Park. It's a lot more
convenient to read on a Kindle as opposed to her 1336 page (!) Complete
Novels of Jane Austen that weighs over 3 lbs.
Unfortunately, I also loaded up a 3-pound book onto the Kindle: David
Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a book that has been taunting
me from atop the old Mac tower in the backroom for over 10 years, or
whenever I borrowed it from Senjou. I really want to finish
this book before I turn 40.
So yes, we are fighting over the Kindle.
Luckily the Kobo
eReader is supposed to be coming to Borders this summer, and at
$150, with 100 free eBooks preloaded (I'm guessing Jane Austen will be
well-represented), it seems like a no-brainer. Kobo is already
available as an app on the iPhone, iPad, WebOS (yes!), and Blackberry,
and their on-line bookstore is pretty well-stocked. Probably second only to the
Kindle store. And yes, it has all of the Jane
Austen novels for free as well, just in case they don't pre-load
all of her lesser works too.
Speaking of the iPad, here's a great review of the various eBook
apps available for it.
But ugh, I'm not paying $500 for an iPad, as drool-worthy as it may
be, sorry
But I would like to occasionally read a book I purchased
for my Kindle even if Glady is reading Jane Austen on it. Now there
is a Kindle App for the iPhone and Blackberry, and also readers for
Mac and Windows. But um, I carry a Palm Pre. So... hey look,
Amazon's file format is actually Mobipocket with some DRM nonsense
added. And hey, there's a couple of ereader apps for the Pre that
support non-DRM Mobipocket files. I wonder if...
Hrm, it looks like hypothetically speaking one could use
something handy like unswindle.pyw and mobidedrm.py (Bundled
here.) to strip the DRM
off of any Kindle book that you've purchased and want to read on a
non-Kindle Mobipocket-compatible reader.
Speaking of differently-formatted books, it turns out I actually
bought a copy of Cryptonomicon in 2003 to read on my Palm Zire 71.
It was purchased from Palm Digital Media (Palm Inc. had acquired
Peanut Press), and was in the eReader format. Remarkably, eReader.com still has my purchase
information for this book. That's after 3 or 4 acquisitions. Crazy.
Turns out that hypothetically speaking there are tools like erdr2pml.py that can convert
the eReader format (if you have your original credit card number used
to purchase the book. No really, that's the hash key!) into the PML
(Palm Markup Language).
There is an amazing tool called Calibre that can convert pretty
much any ebook format to another. So it can take a PML file and oh
look at that, convert it into the Mobipocket format that a Kindle can
read.
Last bits... that Kobo eReader I was talking about, and the
various apps the store supports? It uses yet another format, ePub.
Adobe provides DRM for this format through its Digital Editions
ereader for Mac and Windows. Interestingly, there are again, some
scripts, cleverly named ineptkey and ineptepub (a play on the name
of the DRM scheme, "ADEPT") that hypothetically should allow
you to strip the DRM off of books purchased from Kobo and downloaded
via Digital Editions. And why yes, in theory Calibre should
be able to convert this unprotected ePub into the Mobipocket format
for reading on a Kindle.
Note that legally speaking, breaking any DRM scheme is illegal.
But hello -- is it really that different than taping your vinyl? Or
heck, converting your vinyl to MP3s? When you buy a physical book, it
doesn't "go bad" after 7 years. I'm exceedingly happy that in
theory a copy of Cryptonomicon purchased to be read on a tiny
320x320 color screen can now be read on the latest E Ink technology in
the Kindle.
Last bit - Kobo used to offer $2-off and $3-off coupons off of
all their books. Amazon used to offer $9.99 pricing on all New
York Times best-sellers. As of April 1, they no longer can do this.
because of something slimy called the agency pricing model. Book
publishers want to impose price-fixing, much like they do in physical
bookstores. (Hardbacks are annoyingly expensive when they're first
released, then get marked down, and finally when the paperbacks come
out they're a lot cheaper.) Now smaller booksellers like Kobo and
Apple are happy about this, it prevents Amazon from continuing to sell e-books at
a loss. (Amazon's $9.99 price was often less than what they paid the
publisher for the "book". It's hard to wrap your head around this, I
know.) The New
Yorker has a piece on how this agency thing is working out. I'm
going to go read it now. Or maybe I'll send it to my Kindle.
OH, also: A number of libraries offer ebooks in PDF and Mobipocket
format. With the appropriate reader, the books can be read for a
certain period of time (8 days, for example), and then they "expire",
just like regular books, except they actually stop being readable.
And wouldn't you know it, the Kindle can't read these books, even
though they're in Mobipocket or PDF format. Unless there was some
kind of script that let you generate a unique Mobipocket ID from
your Kindle's serial number so that the books can properly expire,
and then some other script that tweaked the files just a bit so
that the Kindle didn't outright reject them.
Also of interest, in a manifesto kind of way: The Right to
Read.
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[Wed Jan 20 12:22:10 2010] p
Too much good music, and too many great links to let them get
washed away in the torrent of constant information overload that
is Facebook
It all started with some photos by Michelle
that led me to check out her ACCOUSTIC
Galleries
What? There was some kind of Asian-Am Art/Music show back
in... December 2008 at Broadway Studios (where Michelle's the house
photographer)? Ok. Oh hey Vienna
Teng, and who's this Goh Nakamura guy? Oh wow, he's good. His cover of "We Can
Work It Out" is solid. Hrm, playing at an As-Am Variety Concert Feb 5 at the Palace of Fine Arts?
Oh yeh, and his newest album is available as a free download.
But wait -- Julie Plug? Why does that name sound familiar? OH
RIGHT. Late 90s -- last time As-Am bands were all the craze. Or
well, I guess they've always been grinding away. Well heck, the music
is still GREAT. Just
listened to everything up on their MySpace.
Man, what was the name of that club on the corner of 11th and Mission
where Glady reminded me that we *saw* Julie Plug? Ah right, the
Paradise Lounge!
A lot of times I'll bemoan the fact that I never got to see this band
or this artist back when they were still playing or still together, or
still alive. But I'm trying to get over that and be content with the
fact that the music will still live on even if the band or artist
doesn't. [Oh look -- it's Cub's "Come out Come out" CD on my desk. If it
was an LP it would be worn to death. Also, it would be much harder to
play in iTunes.
I missed seeing them as part of the Ear of the Dragon
when they made it to L.A. because Cub wasn't on the bill anymore at that
point. But still, "It was good!"]
Well, Cub's long gone, but apparently Julie Plug stil plays from time
to time. (The Make Out room back in April 2009).
Hrm, and that show was with drummer Rob Uytingco's new band
Sugarspun, and
they're playing The Make Out room Feb
27. A little lighter than Julie Plug, but still great tunes.
Oh, and what's this, Julie Plug headlined the "Social
Disturbance" music fest back in May? And who are all these bands?
Oh, down the rabbit hole...
Oh, before my disovery of Goh and rediscovery of Julie Plug, I was
watching a video of powder riding up at Homewood.
Oh who's this singing "Simple Things"? Julie Collings? Wow, that's some nice stuff too.
Back when JetBlue offered their $599 all-you-can-fly pass, these
two artists bought passes and decided to tour like crazy. Brilliant!
Followyourwhim.com
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![[fnt (fascinating new thing)]](/images/darrylcom.png)