I’ve been using eReader to read eBooks on my iPod Touch, but a recent update removed the ability to load your eBooks onto the iPod from your own webserver. They claim they’ve fixed it now, but instead being able to browse directories for books you have to create some convoluted file linking to each book.
The next best reader is Stanza, but it only takes books of the epub format. Thanks to calibre, you can convert most formats to epub. As a bouns you can turn on a server that allows you to connect with your iPod and download the books you converted.
What I don’t understand is why so many people praise Stanza. Compared to eReader it’s bloated and slow. For no reason in the middle of the book, the spinning wheel appears and you have to wait 30 seconds to get to the next page. Same thing if happens when you start the program, turn on the iPod, or go to a bookmark. eReader did take a little while to load a book, but once it was loaded, there were no more delays. I’ve read 4 books with Stanza and it is just barely usable.
From what I understand part of the problem with eBook readers is that Apple limits their functionality. I think that the other problem is the companies who develop these programs want to lock you into their system and make it difficult to use books from any other source. There’s really no reason to lock you into a single format or limit the places you can get books from other than corporate stupidity. It’s sad really. The iPod Touch and iPhone could be really great platforms for reading books.
Posted by benjamen as Stanza, eReader, iPhone/iPod Touch at 6:33 PM MDT
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Lets say you have two computers, one named TOM and another named JERRY. A good router will allow you to set it up so that if while you are on TOM you type:
ssh user@JERRY
You connect to JERRY without having to resort to using JERRY’s IP address.
After switching from dd-wrt to the Tomato firmware for my WT-54G, I found that there was no place to specify the local domain, so it wouldn’t resolve local hostnames properly.
I got a clue from a post on Ponderer.org. He’s setting up internal hostnames and the first line in his dnsmasq custom configuration sets his domain name. So I added this line to my dnsmasq custom config on the router
domain=cartoon
All of a sudden the hostnames start to resolve. This is of course assuming that the two computers are already setup to use the domain name cartoon.
* All computer and domain names have been made up to protect their true identites.
Posted by benjamen as dd-wrt, router, tomato at 1:35 PM MDT
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When you are ready to export your edited video, Kino includes a number of canned scripts for transcoding it into a variety of formats such as flash video. Unfortunately when using the scripts you have little control over the encoding options. If you want more control, you either need to write your own script or better yet modify one of the included scripts.
To get started you can start by reading the Kino User Guide, specifically the Export/Other section. In this section you find out that the scripts are located in $prefix/share/kino/scripts/export/ — $prefix is just a variable name that is specified at compile time. To save you some time for Kubuntu the location of the scripts is /usr/share/kino/scripts/exports.
Copy the script you are interested in modifying and ffmpeg_utils.sh to $HOME/kino/exports/ ($HOME of course is your home directory). You’ll probably have to create both the kino and export directories. Then modify the script to tweak the encoding options — make sure you change the title and profile names so you can tell it from the origianl script, save it, and restart Kino. Your new script should be one of the drop down options for Tools.
Posted by benjamen as Kino, linux, video at 12:43 PM MDT
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I started a side blog to blog.electronsmith.com called journal.electronsmith.com. The thought that the journal site would be more of an auxiliary brain to catch stuff that I watched to remember, but it takes too much time to maintain something like that so I rolled all the posts over to this blog and closed down journal.electronsmith.com.
Wordpress really made my day. It was so easy to move the posts over I couldn’t believe that it was actually done. All I did was export the posts from journal.electronsmith.com to a file on my desktop, import them with blog.electronsmith.com, and choose what users the posts would map to. I just need to clean up some duplicate categories, but other than that — Done.
Posted by benjamen as Wordpress, blog, productivity at 2:02 PM MDT
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An old Biostar motherboard I am using for my Mythtv backend has two SATA connectors, but they are only compatible with the 1.0 spec. OK, so the drive should recognize that and revert to SATA I compatibility mode. No, at least not Western digital drives. My motherboard refused to recognize the drive.
I remembered from an old Tech Guy podcast that someone was complaining that his motherboard wouldn’t acknowledge the drive without the 150MB/s pins jumpered. Remembering that I searched and found this document from Western digital explaining what the jumper pins were on their SATA drives — of course OEM drives come with no such documentation, remember when WD actually used to put the jumper settings on the drive itself?
So jumping pins 5 and 6 enables 150MB/s transfer speeds. After reconnecting the drive: Viola! The motherboard enumerated the SATA drive and I was on my way.
Posted by benjamen as SATA, Western Digital, computer at 6:31 PM MDT
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On a website for a client, I named one of the images Advertisement.jpg. I thought this made sense because it was a picture of an old advertisement. The problem was in one of my Firefox profiles I couldn’t view the image on the website. I banged my head against the wall (figuratively) trying to figure out why in this one case the image wasn’t showing up.
It turns out I was using AdBock Plus in the profile and it was blocking the image because one of the preset filters was configured to block files with advertisement in the name. After changing the file name the image suddenyl appeared.
Posted by benjamen as Tracfone, add-ons, firefox, web at 7:48 PM MDT
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Lifehacker recently posted it’s Top Ten firefox extensions for 2009. Number ten on that list was Autocopy, an extension that automatically copies selected text and lets you paste it with just a middle click — within Firefox only of course. Although this behavior is somewhat standard in Linux it does not extend to Firefox.
One of the options in the AutoCopy preferences is to use the Copy Plain Text extension. What this does is strip formatting from the text you copy. This is very useful if you are trying to copy marked up text or text from a table.
Using these two extensions together save a bunch of keystrokes, mouse clicks, and time wasted stripping out foramtting by hand.
Posted by benjamen as add-ons, firefox, linux at 8:57 AM MDT
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I had to look up what bounce rate was today. Here’s the definition:
Bounce Rate [Wikipedia]
Bounce Rate = (Single Page Access)/(# Of Entries to that Page)
In other words, it’s a measure of whether people stick around to look at more pages after entering the site or they leave after viewing only that page.
Posted by benjamen as web at 7:27 PM MDT
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Supposedly you can still get System Builders copies of XP Professional until June 30th, 2009, but I have read that there might be activation problems even if you are just reinstalling an existing copy.
Dell is still offering downgrades for the $99 purchase price of Genuine Windows Vista Business BONUS, they had pledged earlier to do this until 2010, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.
Windows Life-Cycle Policy
Windows XP Support Life-Cycle
Posted by benjamen as Uncategorized, Windows at 2:01 PM MDT
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The Conficker Eye Chart is a very simple test to detemine if your computer is infected by the Conficker worm.
Posted by benjamen as Windows at 1:13 PM MDT
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