Category Archives: Gadgets & Toys

Using the Sony Reader PRS500 with the Mac

Sony PRS 500Yesterday, 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!

Status-Q on a Sony PRS

Possibly-related posts:

The Nivos are coming…

USB Nivo
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…

Possibly-related posts:

Pixie dust

I have an elderly Nikon Coolpix 995, which I love. I, or at least my company, also owned two of its predecessors, and while newer cameras may have more megapixels, and be easier to wear on one’s belt, the optics on these were great, and the twisty design proved useful over and over again.

Coolpix 995

Anyway, I was distressed to see, last time I used it, that it had developed a few ‘hot’ pixels. These are failures in the CCD sensor, which show up as bright pixels in the same place in every image, especially when a long exposure is used.

To have a few failures is normal, and some cameras have the ability to remap such dud pixels so they don’t appear in the final image. Normally, this would involve sending the camera to Nikon for servicing, but I came across a Windows utility called CCD Defects Reader, written by a Russian chap named Paul. It works with several of the cameras in the Coolpix range, and sure enough, after rebooting my Linux box into Windows to run this, my dead pixels had vanished, and a photo taken with the lens cap on was beautifully black, instead of looking like a map of the night sky!

Here’s an account from somebody doing the same thing with a Coolpix 5700.

Possibly-related posts:

Turn your iPod into an office?

Rui Carmo says his iPod Shuffle has been my faithful companion at work for many months now (it is the only way to survive the incredible waste of productivity and endless entropy brought on by the “open space office” concept).

I think I’m generally less productive when listening to music while I work – it’s probably part of getting old – but it’s less of a negative impact than being in an open-plan office, so I do occasionally retreat into headphones if I find myself in that environment.

Rui writes about how he uses a BluEye device to switch between his iPod and incoming phone calls. Quite neat.

But I can’t help feeling that there’s scope for somebody to make a killing building more officially-office-oriented products here. If you’re blessed with an employer who’s bought into the open plan idea, then you’ll know some of the main problems:

  • The distraction of overhearing everyone else’s calls and discussions.
  • The annoyance of other peoples’ ringing phones that are not answered.
  • The physical distractions of people walking past, moving furniture, etc in your vicinity.
  • Having to leave your desk and your normal work environment whenever you want to make or receive a long call (so as not to annoy others) or a personal call.
  • Having to be away from your desk when you have visitors.
  • Trying to find empty meeting rooms on the spur of the moment.
  • Brainstorming on a whiteboard and then having to erase the whiteboard before the meeting room is used by the next person.

and so forth.

The best environment I ever worked in had offices of, typically, between one and three people, and a convention that office doors would normally be open unless you didn’t want to be disturbed. We wandered freely in and out of each others’ offices and scribbled on each others’ whiteboards. Glass windows in the doors let you judge how disturbable somebody was if their door was closed.

Don’t get me wrong – I know there are some environments where the open-plan model works, but I think they are few and far between, especially if your employees are knowledge-based workers and particularly if they are programmers. Often senior management will talk about the supposed productivity improvements for everyone else but mysteriously need offices for themselves!

No, there’s usually a simpler underlying explanation. Sometimes it’s that the management don’t trust employees to be sufficiently self-motivated. But in general it’s pure economics: the cost of providing individual or small-group offices is fairly high and very obvious, while the loss of productivity from not having them is much less tangible. Many employers feel they simply can’t afford the infrastructure.

So there must be a big market for technological solutions to this problem – systems which give you the impression of a real office without isolating you too much from your colleagues. VNC-like systems in meeting rooms which let you get at your normal computing world when you’ve had to leave it for some reason. Ways of telling your co-workers that you really don’t want to be disturbed right now…

There’s a big commercial opportunity here for somebody, surely?

Possibly-related posts:

Phonecasting

Some questions for you:

  • How often do you use the speakerphone facility on your mobile? If you’re like me, only very occasionally.
  • How often do you get the urge to listen to music through the (probably mono) speaker or headset on your mobile? Again, I would suggest, probably not often. Even the cheapest iPod will do a much better job.
  • How often, when listening to podcasts while shaving, do you wish that your iPod had built-in speakers so you don’t have to keep plugging it into those speakers with the battery that runs down and makes Leo Laporte sound like a dalek? Well, there may be fewer of you here, but I’m sure you can at least sympathise with those of us for whom this is a source of distress.

So I’m quite intrigued by the new software that I’ve just installed on my Nokia E61: Nokia’s Podcasting application. This is not, as the name might suggest, something that lets you create podcasts on the phone, but something that lets you subscribe to, download and listen to them. And the phone’s audio, limited and monophonic though it may be, is just fine for most podcasts, either through earphone or through the loudspeaker – speech is what it was designed for, after all!

This would also be a good way to generate phenomenally large phone bills if I were charged per megabyte for my 3G connection, or if I couldn’t set the phone to do the downloads via my wifi connection. And I’ll have to watch my settings carefully. My real worry is that I’ll accidentally go abroad and the application will download the latest episode of TWiT over a roaming GSM connection, which would, I calculate, cost me something in the region of £280.

Possibly-related posts:

Bezel buttons

How do you interact with a screen on a device without putting finger-marks on it?
You make the frame touch-sensitive, according to a recent Apple patent.

Many people are speculating that the diagrams give a good idea of what the next iPod might look like…

Possibly-related posts:

Have trouble getting up in the morning?

Perhaps you need a Clocky…

Possibly-related posts:

The touchscreen tax

My Nokia E61 has a keyboard and a little joystick thingy. It doesn’t have a touchscreen. This can be restricting for some applications but it has a major advantage, as Steve Litchfield points out: Screens without a touchscreen in front of them are much more readable in sunlight. He has some photos to illustrate this.

Possibly-related posts:

E61

Here’s a picture of my Nokia E61, for those who haven’t seen them in the flesh:

Nokia E61

Unusually for devices of this shape, it’s not a bad phone. The sound quality and signal strength are really pretty good.

I think I may have to reach for a J2ME programming book to see if I can fix some of the shortcomings of the built-in software…

Possibly-related posts:

Convergence

Well, this post comes via a 3G network, using my Nokia E61.

I’ll write more about this device soon. It does so much more than my Blackberry – better sound, wifi connectivity, VOIP calls, lovely big screen and pretty decent keyboard, to name a few – but some aspects are noticeably more flaky or obscure.

I had my Blackberry up & running and doing what I wanted very quickly, whereas I’ve been playing with this device all weekend and still haven’t quite got it as I want it. But that’s partly because there is so much more you can do with this… I didn’t spend much time configuring my BB to connect to my Asterisk server via wifi, for example! But the BB is basically an enhanced phone, where this is a very capable PDA, almost a tiny laptop, with a whole new operating system to learn – Symbian, in this case, which I’m much happier to have on my phone than anything from Redmond.

The main reason I wanted to try the E61 was to get 3G connectivity for my laptop, and it does that very nicely. It’s also better for doing blog posts from the breakfast table!
But for general ease of use, it’s hard to beat a Blackberry.

Possibly-related posts:

“The Device”

The DeviceThis is very cool and I wish I’d thought of it first. It will…

…keep track of several things that need metering. That includes anything from “CPU Usage” to eBay Auction Status” to our personal favorite, “The Current GDP of Uzbekistan.” From what we can tell, “The Device” connects to your Windows machine (Mac / Linux support is coming soon, apparently) and displays some piece of data generated from your computer or culled from the internet.

Possibly-related posts:

Getting greener

I detect a worrying trend here.

It started when we got the ‘green bin’ recycling scheme, and Rose began pressuring me into recycling everything that could possibly be recycled. I grumpily acquiesced, but am now rather proud of the small amount of stuff in our non-recyclable bin when it’s collected each fortnight.

Then we made a recent decision to start buying organic food when possible, despite the premium prices at Waitrose. This is the modern equivalent of tithing to the church, I guess, but we think of it as one of the little luxuries that you’re allowed when you don’t have children to feed as well!

And now we even have a box of local vegetables & fruit delivered by the nice people at the Cambridge Organic Food Company.

But no, I’m not about to grow a beard, and any Birkenstock representatives considering contacting me as a result of this post should think again. Sometimes, though, this green stuff provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. Actually, almost anything provides me with an excuse to buy gadgets. That’s another thing you can do when you don’t have kids.

This particular toy is a sensor which clips onto the main power lead coming into my house:

Electrisave sensor

and provides a nice little wireless display telling us how many kilowatts we’re currently using. Just about 1.1, at the moment:

Electrisave display

It can also tell us in pence per hour, or tonnes of greenhouse gas per year, should we so desire. It’s also a temperature and humidity display. Quite sweet. It would take a long time, I think, for me to save sufficient electricity to pay for it, but every little helps… It’s an Australian invention, called an Electrisave over here, and is available in the UK from their site, or, more cheaply, from British Gas.

Possibly-related posts:

Feeds

RSS  RSS feed

Categories

January 2025
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser