AnySpeak.Org

Alex eReader, runs Android and has eInk and LCD display

With all the new E-Book readers out there and the popularity of the Amazon’s Kindle I finally decided I would check this out. The Alex Duet Navigator DSB-10 E-Book reader by Spring Design, Inc.
Features

600MHz Marvell CPU
6″ E-Ink Display
3″ Color LCD Touchscreen
Android 1.5
2Gb Internal Memory
MicroSD card slot in back (2Gb Card Included)
Microphone in Front
2.5mm Headphone jack on top (not a regular 3.5mm jack like most headphones)
Includes 2.5mm headphones with microphone
Includes Neoprene sleeve
Screen syncing button to push display to and from the E-Ink and LCD ( button is in between the two screens)
Left side buttons for previous page and back
Right side buttons for next page and power

Supported Formats:

Adobe DRM pdf
Adobe e-pub
epub
PDF

What I like:

I love the fact that it runs Android, mainly because Android is Linux based and as such is a pretty open platform.  Add in that Android apps are written in the Java Programming Language means that lots of people can create new apps for it.

I found the ability to push what you see from one screen to the other with the sync button an awesome feature, particularly in helping mitigate some shortcomings (see below).

The Alex feels fairly solid, although I have noticed that occasionally when pressing on the bezel around the e-Ink display there is a little give and you can hear the bezel flex.

So far it has been able to connect to all the wireless access points available to me without issue, including 802.11b and 802.11g with various security methods including WEP, WPA, and WPA2.

The ability to add other Android applications, Pandora Internet Radio for instance is also very nice.

The original unit that I received was not fully updated and did not include all the software that it should have. The Adobe DRM was broken and while it was still a cool device I really wanted it so that I could checkout e-books from my local library. Why is this in the I like area, well, because it meant I contacted customer support. Rusty and Michelle at Spring Design were great. Rusty diagnosed my problem ( unit shipped with incorrect firmware ) quickly and got me in contact with Michelle to get a prepaid shipper to send the unit back. It was late on Friday and I really didn’t expect much to happen (though Rusty did say that if I got it in the mail and he got it Saturday that he would fix it and send it right back). They did exactly that and I had my unit back early on Tuesday.

What I don’t like:

First and foremost is the font size and layout when viewing PDF’s. I don’t know for sure if this is the fault of the Alex or Adobe but the default text size starts out at Tiny and if you put it up to Normal then you won’t see the entire page and unlike e-pub’s, when you press the next page button it just goes to the next page and skips over any text that wasn’t visible. This was particularly frustrating since it took me a couple of pages before I noticed that the last sentence and a half of the page was not visible.

DRM, it’s nice that the Alex supports the Adobe DRM but DRM is just plain frustrating to deal with.

Overall

I find myself using it more as an android device then a e-reader but I have found it to be very useful and has just about replaced my netbook for checking e-mail and simple web browsing.  I have started reading a couple of epub formatted books and they seem to work well on the E-Ink and the text adjusts well.  I was also really hoping that I would have Android 1.6 so that I could try out the Android Kindle app but so far I am still waiting for an update from 1.5.

Ruby on Rails Welcome aboard

I admin a web server that is used by some students to experiment with web technologies.  In the past I ran this using Fedora Core Linux.  I had cause recently to upgrade to something with longer term support so I chose CentOS 5.5 (being that I also admin a large number of Red Hat Enterprise servers I’m fairly comfortable with the Red Hat way of doing things).

Along with the normal html, php, mysql, SOAP, perl, and CGI things I was asked to add support for Ruby on Rails.  I remember when I added this years ago to the Fedora Core 5 server and It was kind of painful.  I believe I have it setup for CentOS 5.5 (took a lot of reading, trial and error, and web searches but finally after about 2 full work days I think I have a working system figured out).  I’m posting what I did here in case someone else finds it useful.

I have to assume that you already have a working apache and UserDir setup to use public_html

Quick Notes:

• Intstalled Ruby 1.8.7 from source ( initially tried 1.9.1 which I could not get to work so I downgraded with better success)
• Installed RubyGems 1.3.5 from source and updated to 1.3.7
• Installed sqlite-3.6.23.1 from source ( the packaged sqlite3 apparently is not recent enough to work with the sqlite3-ruby)
• Installed mod_fcgid-2.3.5 from source
• Used gem to install rails-2.3.6 (had issues with 2.3.8)
• Used gem to install sqlite3-ruby v 1.2.5 ( there are issues apparently with 1.3.0) Read more…

Chumby One shown from the Top Front

In December of 2009 I bought a Chumby One from chumby.com.  My main reason for purchasing it was so that I could have an easy way to play my music collection from my home server. I’ve been using my Sansa e230 or my wifes Sansa e130 connected to my home stereo via headphone jack to stereo RCA.  This works but it means I have to put the music on the player and fiddle with the limited playlist abilities.

The Chumby has a headphone out and a touch screen.  I have a DVD player that can play mp3 cd/dvd but I don’t want to have to turn my TV on in order to listen to music so that is why the Chumby caught my eye.  Especially since the Chumby One had an intro price of $99 which was about the cheapest thing I could find that would do what I wanted and not require a Windows box.

My other plan would have been to buy a beagleboard and try to put something together myself or possible shell out a lot more cash to pick up a Touchbook from Always Innovating.

Chumby One Back and Bottom View. The back has heat vents, one USB port, one headphone jack, and a 5V power plug. Bottom has access to the battery (optional) compartment and the FM radio wire antenna.

I contacted chumby.com through their chat before purchasing and I found their chat support to be very helpful.   The person suggested to me that I could use a the Squeezebox server and use the Chumbys music function to connect to the squeezebox server.  He also told me that he had his Chumby connected to his receiver at home and that it sounded good.  ( My other problem with the Sansa players that I was using was that the headphone jack doesn’t really provide line level output so I have to crank up the reveiver and have the player volume maxed out in order to get decent volume to listen to.)

I wasn’t too sure about this but I thought I would try out the Squeezebox server and see what it had to offer.  So I set that up on my home CentOS server and then after some searching I found Squeezeslave which I installed on my eeebuntu netbook.  This seemed to work pretty well so I thought I would go for the Chumby and see.

That’s all the time I have for right now.  More on the Chumby One later.

Suzanne in a sparse game environment with coins.

Recently I was asked to give a 1 hour presentation on Game Design using Blender at Kettering University for a Teacher Enrichment in Computer Science (TECS) workshop.  While I didn’t have a whole lot of time to put something together I thought that what I came up with was helpful and worth the time I did put in making it. I decided that I would post the material for others who might be interested in using the open-source 3D content creation suite Blender.

We only had an hour during the workshop and that made it difficult to both introduce the interface and cover the topic of Game Design using Blender. I tried to put something together that would introduce the interface, modeling objects, navigating 3D space, game design, and just Blender in general.  I broke the tutorial out into 5 parts and unfortunately most participants only made it to part 3.  I think the material does lend itself to being completed as a self-study so I’m posting it here.  While walking around and seeing how people progressed and the questions they had both about blender and about the tutorial I think I’ve learned a number of things to help with future presentations and tutorials. If you do go through the tutorial I appreciate any suggestions for improving it or just comments in general.

The tutorial in pdf form: TECS_2009.pdf

Supporting files (includes the tutorial): tecs.zip

I occasionally dabble with Java Server Pages (JSP) and in this I often find myself wanting to include the contents of other pages. There might be other ways to do this but generally I use one of two methods depending on the type of page I need to include.

• Compile-Time include: Contents of the included file are inserted into the JSP page before it is compiled into a servlet. I normally use compile-time includes with pages that tend to have static content.

<%@ include file=”includeFile.html” %>

• Run-Time include: Results of the included page are inserted into the JSP page when the servlet engine reaches the include directive.

<jsp:include page=”includePage.jsp” flush=”true”/>

Using flush=”true” tell the servlet engine to flush the output buffer before including the file. This helps to make sure that you don’t get an old version of the included page. One reason to include a page at run-time is to be able to pass parameters to it like this:

<jsp:include page=”salary.jsp” flush=”true”>
<jsp: param name=”employeeId” value=”1022″/>
</jsp:include>

While tinkering with a Viewcast Osprey-230 on one of my Linux boxes at work I found the following commands and information useful. Maybe someone else will too. The command deal mainly with getting information about my card and video and audio settings. Read more…

The goal that I am trying to achieve is to capture video from an external source and encode it into a format that will be easily authored to a DVD. I will cover the DVD authoring process in another article.
Since I am using Linux one obvious solution is to use ffmpeg which is what I am going to use.
My video source is a dvd player (via composite video out and RCA audio) and I’m capturing video with a Viewcast Osprey 230 (capturing via the composite video ) and audio via the motherboard onboard AC-97 line-in.

The Osprey 230 uses the Bt878 chipset and does have both audio and video capture capabilities but I have not yet had any success in actually capturing audio from the device so I’m using the motherboard onboard audio.

Here is the ffmpeg capture line that I am currently testing:

ffmpeg -y -t 01:08:52 -f oss -ac 1 -i /dev/dsp -f video4linux2 -r 30000/1001 -s 720×480 -i /dev/video -target ntsc-dvd -vcodec mpeg2video -ab 256k -acodec ac3 -r 30000/1001 -aspect 1.3333 -async 1 -b 3200k dv d19.mpg Read more…