Status-Q

I think I’ve lost my UK mobile. It may be in the back of a cab somewhere, or under a plane seat, or lying in a Wellington gutter. Anyway, I can’t find it. (So friends and family should note that it is not a good way to contact me at present!)

Normally, you have a good chance of finding mobiles simply by calling them. But this one is switched off, or the battery is dead; I just go straight through to my voicemail.

I want a way to switch it on remotely. Perhaps a phone could wake up every half hour, check for any messages, and if you had sent it a special text it would respond in some way – emailing you what it could deduce about its position, for example, and staying on for a while so you could call it.

The frustrating thing is not knowing whether it’s here in my hotel room somewhere, or hundreds of miles away in Auckland airport, or lurking under some Wellington restaurant table… I may never know.

I’ve just realised why the concept of ‘the paperless office’ is fundamentally flawed. Inherently self-contradictory. Can’t possibly work.

If our ever-more sophisticated electronic gadgetry finally produces a really attractive reading and writing medium, we may live in a world without paper. Without staplers and punches. Without paperclips. It will seem wonderful for a while.

And then what will we use to press the little recessed reset buttons on those gadgets when they go wrong?

It’s nearly a year since I started wondering about this as a way of combining my paper and electronic worlds. Then I came across the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners, but certain recent events made me consider one more seriously, and after reading enthusiastic reviews by several owners I decided it was worth trying.

The default modus operandi is that you put one or more sheets of whatever size in the hopper, press the Scan button, and you get a timestamped PDF file in the directory of your choice. Very handy. See Fujitsu’s little demo video to get the idea.

Now, I realise it’s a bit unsportsmanlike to push my advantage when you’re probably already reeling from the staggering coolness of it all, but, yes, there’s more. This scanner isn’t the only gadget I’ve acquired recently that deals in PDFs. So I can take what comes from the scanner and copy it straight onto my Sony PRS.

I should have chosen a more subtle paper colour for my example, to make it more readable on a monochrome screen, or done some image processing on it. This was just a simple copy of the PDF.

Anyway, I could now carry the contents of many notebooks with me, if I wanted, in something rather smaller than a single one! Of course, I’d have to introduce my old Moleskines to Madame La Guillotine before I could feed them through the scanner, but it’s worth considering…

It’s now official – Samsung has announced their 940UX monitor, which has DisplayLink‘s technology inside, so can be connected to the computer by USB. News of this leaked a few weeks ago, but, contrary to the reports that spread across the web, this model does also have VGA and DVI connections. Here’s DisplayLink’s press release.

If you already have a monitor, but want to connect it using USB, you can get the technology in adaptor form from IOGear – you can find it from around $73. Sunix are about to follow suit with their VGA2625.

Disclaimer: I’m no longer a director or employee of DisplayLink, but I am still a minor shareholder. And proud of it.

Got interference on your wifi? This looks like a cool toy:

Ben Smither has created what must be the minimal Segway-type vehicle:

More info here.

Trevor Blackwell has also made some cool devices – I’ve ridden his home-made Segway variant and it’s very good, in some ways rather better than a standard Segway. The steering is more intuitive, for example.

He did admit that a fair amount of the cost and complexity of a commercial Segway comes from the numerous safety features they build in, which he didn’t have to the same degree. He told me this after I’d tried it, of course…

Oh, and you should see what he’s been up to at Anybots. Have a look at this and this.

Visiting a friend’s house last night, I discovered a level of gadgetry to which even I had not previously aspired. It’s the latest thing from those dashed clever Japanese chaps, apparently.

I’m sorry the image is a little blurred. I can assure you I was neither oscillating nor pulsating at the time.

I didn’t try it out, actually. I rather regret it now. Not sure when I’ll get another chance and it would at least be an interesting experience, I imagine!

Yesterday, finding myself in Palo Alto, I took advantage of the current UK/US exchange rates to buy myself a new toy in Fry’s.

It’s the Sony PRS – the Portable Reader System – which is a bit like a giant read-only PalmPilot that uses the new e-Paper type display. It’s designed to be a replacement for a paperback – a way of viewing eBooks, and unlike some earlier devices, it’s not limited to DRM-encoded books downloaded from the manufacturer. You can put text files, RTF files, PDF files on it as well, and they look gorgeous.

However, there was a big question-mark over my purchase, which was that there is no official Mac or Linux support for this device. You can use a card reader to plug an SD card into your Mac, copy the files onto it and then plug it into the PRS, but that’s hardly convenient, especially in comparison to the (optional) USB docking station. Sadly, the PRS doesn’t just appear as a USB storage device. You can run the Sony software just fine under Windows using Parallels, but that’s yucky too.

Fortunately, Kovid Goyal came to my rescue with a system called librs500. He’s reverse-engineered the Sony protocols and created a Python-based library and utilities that can transfer files to and from the PRS. Sony owe him some money – the profit from my purchase, at the very least! You need to install a few bits, like Python 2.5, to use libprs500 – the easiest way is probably to use MacPorts. Once you’ve got libprs500 installed, though, you can start to do fun things.

Printing to the PRS

I wanted a way to take an arbitrary document on my Mac and make it available as a PDF on my PRS. Here, in a nutshell, is how to do it:

• Go into File > Page Setup, pull down the ‘Paper size’ option and create a custom page size that you’ll use, where possible, for printing to the PRS. I called mine ‘Sony Reader’, and it’s 9.06 x 12.24cm, with small margins (0.3cm, in my case). When you want to output something for the PRS, it will usually look best if you set this small page size first.
• We’ll use the Mac’s PDF Services facility, which lets you print to a PDF and send it to a particular location or program directly from the Print dialog. I created a wrapper script called book2prs which will be given the resulting PDF and will send it to the PRS using Kovid’s prs500 utility. You need to put the script in your ~/Library/PDF Services folder (create it if you haven’t got one). Or, like me, you can put it somewhere else and put an alias in the PDF Services folder which has a nice name. I called mine ‘To Sony Reader’.
• Once this is all in place, you can plug the PRS into your USB port, pick your custom page size for your document and then go File>Print>PDF>To Sony Reader. All being well, when you unplug your PRS, it will have a new document on it! If something goes wrong – if you forget to plug in the PRS, for example – you won’t get any feedback to that effect, but the script does create a log at /tmp/book2prs.log which might be helpful. Any other error messages will be visible using the Console app. Lots of room for improvement here!
• If you want to print stuff from Safari, it’s a good idea to customise the toolbar and add the little ‘AA‘buttons which let you change font size. In the absence of other info Safari will use the on-screen font size as a guideline for the font to use for printing, and you want slightly larger than normal for the PRS. I also found the output was much nicer if I set Safari to use a sans-serif font as the default. Again , this may be overwritten by CSS for a specific site, but it’s a useful default.
• My version of the script will name the file on the PRS based on the title as seen by the print system. So you may need to modify it if, for example, you want to print different pages from the same web site and they all have the same page title. The later ones will overwrite the earlier ones at present.

There you are! Now you too can read Status-Q on a Sony Reader!

I see that IOGear’s incarnation of the USB Nivo is listed on their site now, and there’s a possible price of $83, though nobody seems to have stock of it quite yet…