AMM
Running into some serious issues with AMM. It seems like only one blog entry works at a time. I guess I need to update, huh?
Nokia 770 – Playlists are a pain
I like to listen to audiobooks on my commute. Since the Nokia 770 has an MP3 player, I copied an audio book that's about 12 hours long onto the memory card. The book is split into 275 MP3s to make it easier to manage them.
I got on the train, fired up the audio player and started the first track. Nice.
Then I wanted to add the other 274 files to the playlist. Not so nice. You've got to do them one at a time. There's no multi-select. The other problem, which for most users would probably be a feature, is that the filename isn't shown in the filelist, instead the ID3 information is shown. Each of my 275 files were labeled exactly the same so I could not distinguish them at all. I managed, through counting, to add the first 20 or so, which was a long enough list to get me to work.
Once I got to work, I plugged the Nokia into my computer and took a look at the playlist. Thankfully it's in the M3U format, which is a nice simple text format.
So, I created a playlist of all my tracks. The format of M3U is simple. All you really need is this
[code]
#EXTM3U
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo1.mp3
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo2.mp3
file:///media/mmc1/audio/foo3.mp3
...
[/code]
Where media/mmc1 is the path to the memory card, audio is a directory on the memory card, and ... isn't literal, it means "more lines like the above".
Create the list of files however you want to (on windows, you can do dir /b *.mp3 > playlist.m3u, on linux, ls -1 *.mp3 > playlist.m3u). Then edit the file in a text editor. Add the first line, as shown above. Then change the paths from, for example, d:audiofoo1.mp3, to the correct path, as shown above.
Untested, but potentially even easier, save the M3U file in the same directory as your MP3 files, and you shouldn't need the path information.
DITA XML, FOs, and Translations
We've gotten a batch of Japanese translated files back, and I'm trying to turn them into good online help and PDFs.
I've really done a lot of specialization on my DITA transformation architecture, so, be aware that some of the things I write concerning translation may be handled gracefully by the current, vanilla, DITA open toolkit.
Lessons I've learned:
- Make sure your font settings are paramaterized. Not all fonts support all languages. You want to be able to change it based on the language.
- If your XML files don't have the language set (
xml:lang="ja-jp"), and if you are using ant to kick off the processing, make sure you pass DEFAULTLANG to the xslt task in the build target. - Follow the example of the DITA OT team and make sure you put all label text (footer text, note labels, etc.) in a labels file. In DITA OT, those files are in xslcommon
Issues I still have:
- I can't pass a string of Japanese text as an ant parameter from the properties file or from the command-line. The text gets changed from UTF-8 to ASCII. It's annoying because I set the title of the PDF via an ant properties file. If I set the parameter in the ant build.xml file I'm okay, but if I set it in the properties file or via the command-line, it's garbled. Any tips?
Nokia 770 and battery life
Today was my first day with Nokia 770 "in the wild". They are rated for 3 hours battery life, but I wanted to see how it would perform in my world.
Today wasn't a typical day (no WiFi or Bluetooth access), but I did watch 3 Battlestar Galactica episodes, full screen, full volume. The battery power is still around 75%.
One thing I did notice was it was a little quiet. Need to look into that.
More on Tunebite
I used Tunebite this weekend to convert a nearly 12 hour long audiotbook from a DRM'd file to an MP3. It worked like a charm. To further clean things up, I split the 12 hour file up into a little over 250 small MP3 files, since nothing sucks worse than trying to find your place in a 12 hour audio file.
Now if I could just automate all this stuff ....
New Gadget – Nokia 770
The Nokia 770 (called by Nokia an "internet tablet") is my newest gadget, given to me by my sweet wife as a Christmas present. Gorgeous screen, WiFi, runs linux. What more could you ask for?
So far I've mostly just been fooling around with it. Browsing web sites with the included Opera browser, playing some games that I installed from Maemo.org, and watching Battlestar Galactica. The long term plan is to get back into Linux, though, by helping to port or create apps for the Maemo platform.
Details coming as I explore this thing some more.
The answer to NetLibrary’s DRM?
Today I picked up a piece of software called Tunebite . Tunebite is a very simple program, but comes close to solving my problem with NetLibrary's DRM'd audio books (see my previous post for more information). Tunebite acts just like an old-fashioned dual-deck cassette deck with high speed dubbing. It plays the audio in iTunes or Windows Media player, but it plays them at 4x speed. At the same time, it records the track to disk, either in OGG, MP3, or WMA.
It's a brilliant, and legal, way to listen to DRM'd audio on equipment that doesn't support that DRM version.
One big drawback - the high speed recording has to start at the beginning of the track. That's a problem for long tracks, like the 16 hour audio book I'm working on now. Even at high speed, that's 4 hours of computer time, not to mention one huge mp3 file.