Using OLPC XO as an ebook reader for O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online

My XO OLPC is not collecting dust any more after I suddenly realized that its reflective screen mode would allow me to read safaribooksonline.com while outside. Firefox is an option, but I went for Opera. While connected, I open in different tabs the sections that I'm going to read; I then read in handheld mode, with wifi turned off to have a longer batery life.

1. I updated my XO from how it came from the first edition of G1G1. The updated version is more friendly and privides a much longer battery life.
2. Installed the old OLPC build of Opera.
3. I tried to change (to no effect) the tiny tiny menu fonts (Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced Tab -> Fonts -> Interface Menu. Choose DejaVu serif, increase font to 16 and select bold for the weight. Setting the Interface menu font to anything greater than 16 causes menu text to become unreadable)
4. I remapped the game pad buttons (more on this later)
5. I went to http://www.safaribooksonline.com/interim/ that provides access to the mobile interface from non-mobile devices. Note the "interim" in the url: they did not allow this until recently, when a change from html to flash annoyed lots of customers; who knows for how long this will be available.

The arrow buttons in the game pad change whenever you change the screen orientation: up is always the one that points upwards. The playstation-like buttons do not change their function with the screen orientation.

Since all I want to do is read from already loaded tabs, these are the mappings that looked more comfortable for me. This other set would allow to use links and navigate.

Button	New value	Application/Browser
o (PageUp)	Zoom in,10	Browser Widget
x (PageDown)	Zoom out,10	Browser Widget
[] (Home)	Scroll down	Browser Widget
v (End)	Scroll up	Browser Widget
Up	Page up	Browser Widget
Down	Page down	Browser Widget
Left	Switch to previous page	Application
Right	Switch to next page	Application

To change the mappings, Tools -> Preferences -> Advanced Tab -> Shortcuts and edit the Keyboard setup named "Opera Standard for Unix"; you will be creating a modified version, and going back to the default one will be easy if needed. Search for them, and edit them with a double click, changing columns with the tab key. For the last two, you'll have to clear the search field, select the "Application" row and then click on "New..."

Dows simplifica

Vem anar a petar a Dows, a la secció de video-jocs. Sorpresa molt agradable. Ple de jocs per fer-hi un tast.
Algunes idees simplísimes però molt pràctiques: no et donen una targeta de client (millor per a tu i la teva engreixada cartera, i millor per a ells) i et guarden els tickets i les garanties (no cal conservar aquests paperets de tinta tèrmica que s'han tornat blancs quan els vas a mirar després de tres mesos).
Estava jo tan encantat quan, a la tele, veig una anunci d'un joc que havia comprat amb un preu recomanat inferior al que jo havia pagat. Ahir els vaig enviar un correu electrònic explicant-ho, i, aquets matí,

Sr. Vergés,
Com a responsable del centre de la secció de videojocs, sento el malentés que hi ha hagut amb aquest joc. Fins fa ben poc, el PVP recomanat de l’article que vosté va adquirir era 39,90 €, i malauradament el fabricant no ens va comunicar la baixada de preu dels articles a 29,90€, d’aquí l’error.
El convido a que es passi per la botiga per a que li retornem la diferencia, amb el nostre “preu mínim garantit”, i aprofito per saludarlo atentament,

Que durin!

Links are cool. Links are bad.

Some days I spend way too much time in my computer...







Drawn with Animatee in my lovely Nintendo DS.

Another reason to want a DS...

...and another reason why Sacha Chua rocks: How to sketch with the Nintendo DS

| View | Upload your own

And while you are at slideshare, check Sacha's Web2.0@work: In Pursuit Of Passion:

| View | Upload your own

I liked the "Cynicism (...) directly affects the bottom line" quote from Dov Seidman's How. And, for that matter, falling into cynicism also makes work suck.

Jornades de Programari Lliure

Dimecres comencen les VII Jornades de Programari Lliure. Programa al Google Calendar.

Si m'ho puc apanyar, vull anar a

• Dijous 12:30 - 13:00.
  Aprenentatge de la Programació al Citilab: Squeak i Scratch
• Divendres 13:00-14:00.
  eyeOS : Portant el Sistema Operatiu a la Xarxa
• Divendres 15:30-16:30.
  Eines de virtualització lliures per a sistemes GNU/Linux
• Divendres 16:30-19:00.
  Taller d’Arduinos (open-hardware)
  

M'ho pugui apanyar o no, dissabte aniré a la Jornada de Python (de 10:00 a 14:00), doncs he dit que faria una xerrada sobre Sugar, l'interface d'usuari del XO o OLPC o $100 Laptop

Notes to self (voice to gmail)

I often use my phone as a voice recorder to keep track of things that I don't want to forget while on the go. It has proven to be more reliable than my unreadable hand written notes. As an additional bonus, my kids love the idea and they often want to have their say in the recording, so processing the voice notes is often more fun than just listening to my odd ideas.


However, the phone's interface to listen to them is quite crappy, and checking if I have some unprocessed note has not become part of my habits. They really belong in my mail inbox, so I now have setup things to send them to my gmail account (after an unsuccessful attempt of using ShoZu, that's already gone from my phone).

Teaching my Sony Ericsson k610i to contact gmail has not been obvious, since the net seems to be full of uninformed advice about this. As correctly reported here, the problem is that the phone is missing a root certificate required by to verify smpt.gmail.com. To fix it,

1. Download a zip with a bunch of root certificates from http://www.thawte.com/roots/ (no need to answer to the form that you get there)
2. Extract the missing certificate,
thawte-roots.zip\Thawte Primary Root CA\Thawte_Primary_Root_CA.cer
3. Send it to the phone using bluetooth, so that the phone recognizes it and prompts you to install it.
   

I only use the native email interface to be able to quickly send files from the phone, since http://www.google.com/mobile/mail feels more convenient.

I also had to upgrade RealPlayer to be able to listen the AMR format used by the phone. And fix the wrong .3gp extension associated to mime type audio/amr in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\MIME\Database\Content Type\audio/AMR

3D means that the screen frame is like a window frame (or More Procrastineering Wiimote hackery)

Another amazing video by Johnny Lee (or was it Leonardo?). This time on using a Wiimote for head tracking providing an amazing 3D experience.



If that was not enough, check out his video on foldable displays

Procrastineering

Someone that names his blog Procrastineering has to be brilliant. And Johnny Chung Lee proves it by using a Wiimote to let you have low cost interactive whiteboard in a LCD or any surface where you can project your screen.

But not everything is about gadgets: check out the Community Splash project, co-authored by Johnny, that used a giant slingshot to throw paint filled ballons against a 18-story building in Pittsburgh. Do not miss the project's image gallery.

Wiimote as an accessibiity enabler?

The picture of The ThinkGeek WiiHelm I jokingly attached in my last post has suddenly made me wonder if the Wiimote could be a very cheap accessibility enabler for people with some specific mobility limitations... The Wiimote can interface with computers, but I don't know if its sensitivity is low enough.

I'm posting this just because I didt not get any obvious google hit on this.

Update: This post has reminded Josep Maria Ganyet about a video of a Wiimote being attached to a spring horse, turning the mostly static experience of driving videos into a sort of motorcycle simulator. Nice idea.

Wiinflación

Wiis agotadas. Wiimotes/Wiimandos agotados; de 40€ de precio normal a 60€ + portes en eBay. Veo que amazon.fr vuelve a tenerlos en stock (40€ + iva + portes), lo que me hace suponer que la escasez no tardará en desaparecer y que ha sido una suerte contener mi instinto estraperlista.

Pero mucho más intersante que todo lo anterior es el origen de la palabra estraperlo.



Actualización:

1. En La Vanguardia la semana pasada trataron sobre la escasez de Wiimotes.
   
2. En fnac.es venden el Wii Play (un juego que incluye un mando) por 45€

Bus o taxi? Opera Mini i TMB t'ajuden

Dues coses que em fan la vida més fàcil:

• iBus, un servei de TMB que et diu quan falta per que arribi el bus a una parada. Pot dir-ho amb un SMS o, gairebé gratis, via web.
  
• Opera Mini 4, que et deixa definir-te les teves pròpies cerques personalitzades (molt semblant a les quick searches del Firefox).
  

En lloc de buscar a Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon... (les cerques predefinides) pots fer-te una cerca a
http://www.tmb.net/piu/ca_ES/piusolucio.jsp?parada=%s
i amb pocs clics podràs introduir el codi de parada (cal incloure els zeros a de l'esquerra si n'hi ha) i veure si tens temps d'anar a comprar el diari abans de que arribi el bus.

I aquest és l'aspecte que té l'Opera Mini quan et diu quan tardarà l'autobús.

Shhh!

Must print these. Now.

Botnets, supervillains and flying monkeys

The idea of millions of computers infected waiting for a supervillain to tell them what to do is, at least, disturbing. If you want to learn more about the Storm Worm botnet, go read the excellent article in Bruce Schneier's Cryptogram.

Fortunately, reading about DEranged Security's very fun bluetooth social-engineering experiment changed my worrisome mood. This xkdc strip about Bobby Tables helped too (geek humor warning for this link).

Has acercado tu mano a mi entrepierna y no me ha gustado

Una idea simple y brillante para colgar los bolsos en lugares públicos. Y aunque es del año 2000, y está en el MoMA, no he visto nada parecido en ningún sitio.

vía el Crypto-Gram de Bruce Schneier, que enlazaba a una noticia de la BBC.

Dictate to self to avoid the #%@! tiny phone keyboard

My fat fingers used to fight against my cell phone's calendar application to add appointments and reminders while on the go. I also used to take unreadable notes in tiny pieces of paper whenever an interesting idea appeared while on a crowded subway.

I learned that my cell phone can be used as a voice recorder, and now I use my best Private Investigator looks while recording whatever I want to remember when I'm away of any decent writing gear.

Turn them off!

It is turn off TV week. Just do it!

And if it is not TV but your PC/phone what is keeping you from having green knees at the end of the day, it is a good week to give it a thought to this: who is in charge, you or your gadgets?

New phone: PyBluez and Gammu to the rescue

My Sony Ericsson K610i may end up being friendlier to my ThinkPad. I downloaded the binary version of Wammu and have been able to send an SMS from my PC via bluetooth, send a file to my phone, retrieve calls, contacts, calendar info...

Wammu sits on top of

• Gammu (a project which encompasses applications, scripts and drivers for managing various functions on cellular phones and similiar devices) with Python bindings
  
• PyBluez (a Python wrapper for Bluetooth)
  
• wxPython (a Python API for the great wxWidgets toolkit, formerly known as wxWindows)

Looks like synchronizing with Google calendar will require some hacking, unlikely to happen any time soon. Add to that the general calendar mess in my life, where there is the phone, Lotus Notes, Google Calendar and MonkeyGTD tiddlywiki.

The Wammu logs start with

(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):1 - "OBEX SyncML Client"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):2 - "Dial-up Networking"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):3 - "Serial Port"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):25 - "Music Streaming Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control TG Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):23 - "Remote Control Service"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):15 - "PAN Network Access PointNAP (...)"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):4 - "Hands-Free Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):5 - "Headset Gateway"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):6 - "OBEX Object Push"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):7 - "OBEX File Transfer"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):8 - "OBEX IrMC Sync Server"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):17 - "HID Mouse & Keyboard"
(00:19:63:91:D2:9C):9 - "OBEX Phonebook Server"

I'm guessing that this comes from PyBluez, and that, as soon as I change the binary installation of Wammu with the original Python packages, it should be quite simple to take advantage of some of this services, or, at least, start some educated googling.

New gadget, new problems

I just changed my cell phone service provider and the move got me a Sony Ericsson K610i. It is my first Bluetooth/USB enabled cell phone and I had high expectations on this: using my PC keyboard to type SMSs, synchronize the phone's calendar with Google Calendar, use my PC to manage contacts... After playing with the (buggy and feature-poor) supplied PC software, googling for hours, learning a bunch of names new to me (SyncML, OBEX, OMA...), looking into toolkits and the Sony Ericsson's Knowledge Base, I think that the bluetooth/usb connection will only be useful to use the cell as a modem and to exchange music/pictures. Maybe I'd be happier if I were an Outlook/LookOut user.

Since the phone was cheap (39€), my disappointment is only mild. But I think that I'd be very annoyed if I'd had to pay for the full phone price.


Additional notes from the field after my first UMTS/GPRS experience ever

• OperaMini is much nicer than the phone's built-in browser.
• GMail movile java app is quite nice (it would be nicer if it allowed to save drafts)
• Using Yahoo! Messanger from the phone is hardly compatible with my fat fingers
• Internet access was quite fast when using an UMTS network, but did not work as soon as the phone decided to use a GPRS one. Unlike in some reports about recent changes by Yoigo, I had no probem using the phone as a modem for my laptop,
  

Although this was not my main driver to change provider and phone, I like the idea of being able to browse the web/check email/connect my ThinkPad from any place for 1.2€ at most during a day. I hope that I'll remember that "being able" is not the same thing as "having to".

e-ink

Jeff Berg [1], in his IBM intranet blog [2], commented days ago on having used a Sony Reader: 'astounded at how much it looked like paper'. Like a book, it is not back-lit: comfortable to read for long periods, but requiring external light.

It was the first time that I heard about Sony Reader, but now both my back and my brain would love to own this gadget.

[1] I don't know how to link to Jeff. Here you have a link to his Beginning ActionScript 2.0 book and to his wondeful video of a Chicago building being teared down.

[2] Jeff's "Fight For The User" blog is, by far, the most visually interesting in our intranet. And it's not just pretty: lots of good posts on usability and information design. He does indeed fight for the user.