Tag: Technology

I managed to get my hands on a Sony Reader yesterday as I’ve been itching to get one for awhile now. The digital ink technology is very intriguing and I wanted to see and use it for myself. First off, the price tag of $350 is a bit steep to make it a generally accepted consumer gadget, but I’m a technology person so I added it to my collection.

When I first started it up, it had a nice selection of excerpts of books as well as some classics like George Orwell’s 1984 (which I’ve never read). Since I knew out of the box, it wouldn’t work with a Mac, I hooked it up to my Mac to see if the reader would mount as a USB mass storage device. Unfortunately it didn’t. Why Sony did this, I have no idea as the PSP mounts as a UBS mass storage device. So, Mac users are stuck using SD cards or MemorySticks which is fine, however, you can’t remove the pre-installed books without Windows. I fired up Parallels and was pleasantly surprised to see the Sony Connect software work fine on it and link up to the Reader over USB. Like most Sony user interfaces I’ve seen in the last decade, the Sony Connect software is just awful. While it tries to mimic iTunes, it fails miserably. You can only drag and drop books on certain places (you can drop a book onto the reader, but not the Books category on the reader), has annoying alert dialogs confirming deletes that take up the entire screen, and has no way to “eject” the Reader even with the warning on the Reader’s display not to disconnect.

So if we ignore the crappy Windows software, how does the Reader do? Well, the books that ship with it are great as well as some RTF files that I transferred to it. The display is amazing and these books work quite well with page turning that is quite speedy. However, one of the reasons I got this was to read technical info that usually comes in PDFs. The Reader’s PDF viewing has some issues. First off, it is dreadfully slow. It can take 10+ seconds to turn a page. Second off, it reduces the page without being able to zoom/scroll. So, after cropping some PDFs (Preview lets you crop PDFs), I was able to read the 8.5×11″ PDFs on the display, but it was still slow (I had to rotate the display and then I could view the PDFs in 2 halves). Not content to accept this fate, I started playing with some tools and found the free/open-source HTMLDOC which converts web pages into PDFs. Since the initial documentation I wanted to read is also in HTML (however it is in multiple pages), I gave HTMLDOC a whirl using some settings others have posted. Using the following settings:

htmldoc --webpage -f book.pdf --textfont Helvetica --fontsize 18 --left 1mm \
--right 1mm --top 1mm --bottom 1mm  --gray --size 5.24x6.69in --textcolor black\
 --footer . --header . --browserwidth 800 --no-embedfonts

and then specifying 1 or more web pages, I was able to generate PDFs that are easily viewable on the Reader and pages turn quickly. To top it off, it shows the images which RTF wouldn’t get me. While this isn’t an automated process (yet), this does show me that I can get decent content on the device. In addition, Project Gutenberg has lots of titles that I can put on the device. There are been some talks on websites about RSS Feeds to PDF which would be real cool, but I haven’t seen anything for the Mac.

I’ll have to keep using this to see how much I really like it, but who knows, maybe I’ll read more!

The other day when I was in Los Gatos for work, I stayed in a nice hotel that had electronic locks on all the rooms with what looked like no manual bypass. I went back to my room one of the days I was there and my key didn’t work. I went to the front desk and asked to get a new key; the system wasn’t working to generate a new key, so I had to be let in the room by the front desk clerk. He used an electronic master key. What would have happened if the master key didn’t work? Would all the rooms unlock (I’d hope not)? How would people get in? Later when I went to get a new key, the system was working again, but I wonder how my card key got deactivated. Hmmm.

More and more I see people with Bluetooth headsets hanging on their ears when they’re walking around and even when they’re eating. I think that this is extremely rude and completely unnecessary. However, people feel the need to talk on the phone wherever they happen to be. Bluetooth headsets are fine for the car and when you need to be handsfree, but it doesn’t have to be a permanent fixture on your ear.

I went to look for the gate for my trip to San Jose and saw the picture below. You’d think the airport would have a monitoring system to restart the machine running the monitors. The monitor next to this worked fine.

While this really isn’t a new occurrence, it is interesting to note who sold it and who bought it. Several years ago, I read about someone that creates a new email aliases for each website he visits. Since I run my own domain and can easily do this, I adopted website.com@gruby.com which lets me easily track (and disable) email addresses. Today I received email from the San Jose Mercury News; I signed up on their website at one time to view some article and used a new email address. I also uncheck the “share my name” options and all the email options. Well, it looks like the Mercury News feels they need to support their website by sending out spam. The email I received today was a paid advertisement from the Phil Angelides campaign.

I can see less reputable companies doing this, but the newspaper for Silicon Valley? They really should know better than to spam their subscriber list. Their FAQ states:

Will I receive email?
Our content is available to you as a free service. Occasionally, we will send emails to update you on new features and products from MercuryNews.com and on behalf of our selected partners and advertisers.

So while they are in their rights to send me crap, sending me a political advertisement when they haven’t sent me anything in years is just in bad taste.

Not a huge deal for me, I just disabled the email alias and now they can’t send me any more spam.

I complained previously about the sluggish response of our TiVo after the latest upgrade and how it was almost impossible to watch some shows due to choppiness of the playback. I was unable to get a real answer out of TiVo, so I did some detective work and found that one of my connections on LinkedIn knew someone that is currently an engineer at TiVo. So I asked if he’d put me in touch and he graciously did. The engineer, to my delight, responded and provided some valuable information and offered to have my TiVo logs examined to see what they said. The first part is that TiVo has said publicly that they’re investigating the sluggishness of the menus. The second part is that he as well as some other engineers suspect that the hard drive is failing. That seemed a bit coincidental as the problems started happening after the latest update. Well, he said that after the update, TiVo switches to a different partition. This gives credibility to the dying hard drive theory. The TiVo has been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2 years (2 years minus 1 week to be precise). I happened to have an extra 200 GB IDE drive lying around and I have the skills to replace the drive. I found instructions for doing the upgrade and proceeded to get things going. After a few false starts (BIOS issues with my PC), I managed to get my TiVo upgraded; unfortunately it took about 10 hours to copy all the info over (the instructions said 1-4 normally, up to 8…my PC must have been dog slow or the old drive was failing such that it kept having to re-read sectors).

Knock on metal, the TiVo seems to be working. We’ll know on Tuesday if the drive was the problem as one show we like, Saved, has had the most problems lately. If this was the solution to part of my problem, three cheers out to TiVo; however, the menus appear to be a bit slower than before the upgrade.

(I’ve felt kind of helpless without TiVo for the day even though I don’t watch TV during the day. My wife was bored and watched TV; I kept seeing her make motions like she was fast forwarding through the commercials!)

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work between my multiple computers and since I like having only one monitor/keyboard/mouse shared amongst them, I’ve been using VNC to control then. A friend of mine has told me that Apple Remote Desktop is faster, so I decided to spend the money and order a copy. I received my copy this morning and I have to say that I’m blown away. My network is no slouch (gigabit ethernet) so it wasn’t the bandwidth that was the problem in the sluggishness of VNC. Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is not only faster, but easier to use. If I want to move a file to another machine, I just drag it to the window. It does lots of other stuff, but just being able to control machines (share the screen) makes ARD worth it.