Reading on the run
  
One Man's Web > Computers > Reading on the run
5-01-2007

Commuting is a pain.  I do 7am to 4.45 every morning, and 5pm to 6.45 each night, and I'm better off than some!  For me that time can include a 50 minute walk... taking a later train and then the buses makes no difference to the time I arrive.  Other people spend all of that time on a train or in a car... and often more time than that!  How do we redeem the time... plus all the times you can end up waiting in reception, if you have that kind of job?

It can be a great time to pray and meditate, or just plain think about life.  It's also a great time for listening or reading if you have a palm or pocket pc.  The purpose of this page is to give you some hints on how to maximise the use of these wonderful little machines for reading and learning.  For the most part now, I'm over working on my emails on the train!  Life is too precious, I want to do my stuff. 

What I've got here is quick and dirty.  There are bound to be more efficient ways, better ways, and more technically informed ways! I'm a network technician and minister of religion, not a video geek... but this is what works for me.

For reading, my tool of choice is eReader from what used to be Peanut Press and then Palm Digital. Now it's at ereader.com.  The reader has a free version, although you can get the Pro version which allows copying of text and so on.  This can handle huge books, keeps your place from the last time you were reading, lets you add bookmarks and notes etc and has a very fast search function.  Not only can you buy books from ereader.com, you can also make your own.  So frequently, when I have obtained a large amount of text from a website, I mark it up to eReader format, which makes for a much easier reading experience on my pocket pc.  Drop Book from eReader is available at http://www.ereader.com/dropbook. 

One simply drops a text file on the icon and the book is made!  Normally I use Word to double space the paragraphs, which can be done very quickly using escape/replace patterns, and makes a much more readable text.  These eBooks are much easier to read, and make notes on, than long emails or web pages or pocket pc word documents.  You can also take Gutenberg Press books, paste them into Word or similar and produce a very readable version in a few minutes.

Palm Mark-up Language is very simple, and a few macros in Word can add page breaks, bold, italics and bullet points very easily. There are instructions at the drop book site, but I've pasted in some rough and ready macro code:

Another handy tool is 2pml.exe which coverts html formatting to palm markup files.

There are some excellent mp3 and video resources on the web, quite apart from all the YouTube stuff.  Meaning of Life TV, The Faraday Institute and a number of universities have video lectures which can be streamed or downloaded.  These are large files, so you need some serious Compact Flash or SD storage.  They are often in an unhelpful format for pocket pc or smart phone.  There is some exceptionally useful software to deal with these files... but

as with text, there are issues of copyright.  Personally, I reckon that converting something published to be read on the web into a form I can read away from my computer is fair dealing!  However, that may not be the view of the copyright owner, or the law, where you live, so take care!  Redistribution, especially, is going outside the bounds of what is fair.  And despite whatever we think about the profits of commercial bodies, ripping DRM'd or commercially released stuff we didn't pay for is simply stealing.  All that said, here is what you can do to take a 1 hour streaming video interview onto the train with you.

Some sites will let you save the video file, in full, rather than watching it live.  With others, you need to capture the stream in some way.  Helpful software to do this includes SPD Downloader, or WM Recorder, which will capture the stream. Other software is listed on the AllStreamingMedia site. 

Capturing the video is usually only half the task. It often needs to be converted to a form that your pocket pc will actually play.  What I've found most useful here is to use the program Super by eRightSoft. I convert to avi for pocket pc, 176x144 screen, 25 frames per second, keeping the video bit rate at 128k and the sound at 64k. This results in a smaller file that doing the conversion to 60480x640 that my Axim can handle. It also seems to wind up with less syncing problems. 

You'll find a few glitches.  Conversion errors are frequent, and you may take a number of tries on some files.  Some sites are happy for you to watch their video, but seem able block either Super or WM Recorder or SPD Downloader from capturing the stream.  That's their prerogative, I guess... it's their intellectual property after all. 

After you convert, you then need a suitable avi player on your pocket pc. I use PocketMVP, which is free.

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