Okay, I might have to buy a iPad after all – PadNotes iPad app preview
PadNotes is a tool that allows you to draw or type on top of a PDF on an iPad. I can see how this would be really useful for reviewing PDF documents, filling out those PDFs you always get (you know the ones, where all you need to do is sign it, but to do that you have to print it out, sign it with a pen, and then either fax it or scan it so you can email it?), or even for note taking when you are studying a subject.
It may not sound that exciting, but watch the video before making up your mind.
Of course there are features I hope it has, such as reading ePub and image formats, not just PDF or actually being able to use PDF functionality (like filling in PDFs that are forms, or taking part in a shared PDF review), but even without those, this is the most compelling thing I've seen for the iPad yet.
Is this the first step toward replacing physical books for student? I think it might be. In place highlighting and note taking. It even appears to be quite usable for jotting down graphs and diagrams a teacher writes on the board.
WebDAV on linux – make it writable by me
I just signed up for a box.net . It's a great service. What I really wanted it for was WebDAV. Be aware that they don't officially support WebDAV, but it works, so, if you want to experiment, go for it.
I'm using WebDAV for emacs org-mode. There's a new feature called mobileorg, that allows you to use an iPhone app for managing your org files. It depends on you being able to store your files on a WebDAV enabled server.
Fine. I work mostly on emacs, so it should be pretty easy to mount a directory. It was, too.
- Make sure you have the davfs2 package installed. If you are using Ubuntu/Debian,
sudo apt-get install davfs2
- Add something like the following to /etc/fstab
http://www.box.net/dav /home/username/Documents/box.net davfs rw,users,gid=users,uid=username 0 0
- Replace username with your Linux username
- Update the path (/home/username/Documents/box.net) to where you want to mount box.net. Make sure that directory exists!
- Update /etc/davfs2/secrets with a line like the following:
https://webdavhost.net/username/ username password
replace username and password with your box.net info.
- Test the mount, using a command like the following
sudo mount /home/username/Documents/box.net
If that works, you're good to go. The fstab file will remount it whenever you reboot. The other instruction sets I've seen neglected to include the gid and uid information so I couldn't write to the directory.
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Installing DITA OT 1.2beta onDebian Linux
I'm just setting up the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA OT) on my Debian box, and I thought I'd take notes. This isn't really a how-to, but maybe it will help someone.
- Go to the DITA Open Toolkit webpage.
- In the left pane, click on Download
- Two choices - dita-ot releases under the CPL or the dita-ot released under the Apache ASL . Use whichever you prefer, the content of both packages is the same. I chose the Apache license.
- Look at the Linux Install Guide
- Extract the archive somewhere. In its current incarnation DITA is hard to share, so take that into account.
- Debian and Java have challenges. Make sure you install Java, at least 1.4 (there have been some problems with JDK 1.5, more on that later)
- Install (using apt) ant, ant-doc, and ant-optional.
- Install xalan, libxalan2-java and libxalan2-java-doc
- If you want to make PDFs, install fop.
- Go into the DITA directory and type "ant all" and you should be set to go.
Optional things:
If you are doing this for personal use, get RenderX's xep instead of fop. You can't really compare the two - xep is the better solution. Their free edition includes a little footer telling everyone about xep, but that's okay by me. They are giving me something free. I don't mind giving them some advertising for it. People pay $50 for a $5 t-shirt advertising Tommy or DKNY and they feel like they got a good deal.
Install eclipse. Managing ant projects can be a real pain. Take advantage of eclipse for doing that.
If you can afford it, buy oXygen. It's worth the $50 they charge, and their license is really good. Things may have changed, but the last time I tried the free XML editors on Linux, they left a lot to be desired, especially debugging support for XSL transformations. Really, I wanted to use emacs. I've used emacs for years, but I was wasting a lot of time and switched back to oXygen.
Use source control. Install CVS or something similar. It's too hard to manage XML projects without source control.
ATI Binary Driver, xorg, and Debian
I installed the ATI binary drivers on my debian system. Everything seemed to be okay, but I was getting lousy GL performance. So I had to figure out why.
First step is to see which OpenGL drivers are being loaded. Open a command prompt and type fglrxinfo. You should see a vendor string like this:
display: :0.0 screen: 0 OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc. OpenGL renderer string: RADEON 9600 Generic OpenGL version string: 1.3.5461 (X4.3.0-8.19.10)
I didn't. Mine said I was using the Mesa drivers. Mesa is great, but those aren't the drivers I wanted to use.
Next step, why is Mesa getting loaded rather than the ATI drivers. Take a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. There's lots of stuff in here, but don't be too intimidated. Look for things that say error. In my case I saw an error that told me DRI wasn't loading. Hmm, that would explain it. DRI is the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. ATI's Gl depends on DRI. Here's what it looked like:
(WW) fglrx(0): *********************************************** (WW) fglrx(0): * DRI initialization failed! * (WW) fglrx(0): * (maybe driver kernel module missing or bad) * (WW) fglrx(0): * 2D acceleraton available (MMIO) * (WW) fglrx(0): * no 3D acceleration available * (WW) fglrx(0): ********************************************* *
So I searched for the error message I was getting. Not a lot of help was out there, really, but I eventually found a website that told me that Composite doesn't work with ATI's DRI implementation. Turning off Composite is pretty easy. In your /etc/X11/xorg.conf add the following:
Section "Extensions" Option "Composite" "false" EndSection
Bingo. That did it for me. I'd like to be able to use Composite (it allows you to do some interesting things with transparency and xfce), but I'd rather have a fast driver.
BTW, I've seen some posts suggesting using an option in your xorg.conf called AllowGLXWithComposite. Sorry to inform you, but that's a nvidia option, not an ATI one.
Debian and mplayer
I finally found a good repository for Unofficial Debian Packages that includes mplayer and mencoder.
They also appear to have MythTV binaries there. I'm looking forward to checking that out, too.
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.
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.
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.
Great set of headphones
This morning I got into the office before anyone, even the mysterious ghost that makes the morning coffee. I sat down at my computer, fired up Launchcast, and the first song was "Run Like Hell" by Pink Floyd. The intro has a lot of crowd noise that really sets the atmosphere for the song. It's been so long since I've heard it, I had completely forgotten about. The only reason I heard it today was because of my new headphones.
I picked up a pair of KOSS UR40 headphones, and I have to tell you, they are really, really good.
Not only do they sound great, but they keep out the random office noise, which helps me to concentrate.
Two negatives - not wireless (come on, when are bluetooth headphones going to be easier to find!), and they are a bit bigger than I prefer for taking back and forth between the office and home.
Here's what I want from my next set of headphone - good sound quality, wireless with bluetooth, and designed for people on the go.