March 2010 Update Idiosyncrasies

[Acreo Aeneas]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Except it is quite slow to open a (1000 page) book, and a little slow to change pages.

Lovely reader though. Very nice software. Astak should take a look at it's font size selection! :P

There would a lag in response on any ebook reader that has to parse a 1000+ page book.

Hmm, I'm now undecided after reading this thread as to if I should update my PP or not...

[hidari]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

You can read about Cool Reader in our wiki. Of course Jinke doesn't always use its full capabilities. One trick is to add an fb2 extension to a file to force you PP to use Cool Reader to read it.

Dale

not to sounds stupid... but do you mean add .fb2 to the ebook itself or to the folder I assume you mean the ebook itstelf...ie Heat.fb2

[hidari]

Originally Posted by Acreo Aeneas

There would a lag in response on any ebook reader that has to parse a 1000+ page book.

Hmm, I'm now undecided after reading this thread as to if I should update my PP or not...

I would recommend it just for the Coolreader3 improvements. Great so far. Not tried .txt yet... also worried about some foreign language reading but have yet to test that either.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by hidari

not to sounds stupid... but do you mean add .fb2 to the ebook itself or to the folder I assume you mean the ebook itstelf...ie Heat.fb2

Yes, to the file. You do not need to replace the existing extension. You might have Heat.epub.fb2 so you can remember what format it is in.

Dale

[hidari]

Ta for the tip

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by Acreo Aeneas

There would a lag in response on any ebook reader that has to parse a 1000+ page book.

Hmm, I'm now undecided after reading this thread as to if I should update my PP or not...

That's 1000 of it's reformatted small pages, not real book pages.

What's worse is that after opening and closing the book a few times, it started failing to open it at all. It just showed that gear wheel graphic and progress bar for a while then exited back to the main menu.

When it did that, I then tried to open an ePub (using ADE) and that locked up the PP. I sure hope we aren't up for instabilities with this new software. I had to reset it, and now Coolreader is working again.

[ekaser]

My guess is that the Jinke software engineers are mostly busy working on the firmware for the new A5 and A9 machines. However, those firmwares may share a partial "build tree" with the V3 and V5 machines.

In doing a quick scan through the new firmware (March 2010) I found a few things. The most interesting is at hex offset 0x07D00000, where there is a block of code which contains some strings. They are, spread out in the code, but they are:

cdma-connect
cdma-disconnect
cdma-options
chap-secrets
# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# Username Server Password IP addresses
"any" * "any"
chap-secrets-gprs
# Secrets for authentication using CHAP
# Username Server Password IP addresses
"any" * "any"
gprs-connect
gprs-disconnect
gprs-options
profile
version1.00

The following quotes are from Wikipedia:

Code division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method utilized by various radio communication technologies. It should not be confused with the mobile phone standards called cdmaOne and CDMA2000 (which are often referred to as simply "CDMA"), which use CDMA as an underlying channel access method.

In computing, the Challenge-Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) authenticates a user or network host to an authenticating entity. That entity may be, for example, an Internet access provider.

CHAP is an authentication scheme used by Point to Point Protocol (PPP) servers to validate the identity of remote clients. CHAP periodically verifies the identity of the client by using a three-way handshake. This happens at the time of establishing the initial link, and may happen again at any time afterwards. The verification is based on a shared secret (such as the client user's password).
1. After the completion of the link establishment phase, the authenticator sends a "challenge" message to the peer.
2. The peer responds with a value calculated using a one-way hash function, such as an MD5 checksum hash.
3. The authenticator checks the response against its own calculation of the expected hash value. If the values match, the authenticator acknowledges the authentication; otherwise it should terminate the connection.
4. At random intervals the authenticator sends a new challenge to the peer and repeats steps 1 through 3.

General packet radio service (GPRS) is a packet oriented mobile data service available to users of the 2G cellular communication systems global system for mobile communications (GSM), as well as in the 3G systems. In 2G systems, GPRS provides data rates of 56-114 kbit/s.

So, it looks like there are pieces included in the firmware for doing Wi-Fi and cell data communications.

Other items of minor interest:

At hex offset 0x00300000 is a block that starts off with "Compressed ROMFS" (ie, "Compressed ROM File System"), and which is followed by a list of files that goes on FOREVER... A few interesting ones are:

dev
etc
ext2fs
home
jffs2f
lib
linuxrc
opt
proc
root
bin
share
tmp
usr
var

followed by a whole BUNCH of unix utilities and files.

At hex offset 0x00900000 is a block that starts off with "Compressed ROMFS" (ie, "Compressed ROM File System"), and which is followed by a list of files that goes on FOREVER... A few interesting ones are:

root
usr
muttrc
System.ttf
abook
adobe
adobe.1123
appdata
crengine
cr3-manual-ru.fb2
cr3-manual-uk.fb2
mail_icon.png
mainframe_ukraine.png
openmsgicon.png
rss_title.png
title_gprsnet.png
title_mailset.png
title_wifinet.png (as in Wi-Fi network graphic)

But most of the data and programs in the ROM are now compressed and get uncompressed at run-time, so there are not a whole lot of strings that can be discovered.

[jusmee]

Maybe it's just because they are using linux and it has all that stuff, even the wifi, even if you aren't using it.

[Robertb]

Originally Posted by jusmee

Maybe it's just because they are using linux and it has all that stuff, even the wifi, even if you aren't using it.

Dear AJ and Jusmee:

The Product Manager says that you will see a new menu (unlike the others) for TXT. The dictionary mention is that they reserved a space for a future dictionary support!

We are calling their engineer this evening for more detail! They did not mention this to us.

[AJ Starr]

Re: your listing of Unix...on the Cool Reader selections, there is a "dictionary" selection. If you select it, it give an instruction to put a "unix" based dictionary in the root directory "dict" on the SD card. Along with an index of the dictionary. if anyone can figure that out, I'd love to hear about it.

BTW, in all this code, anything about TTS. I sorely miss my TTS.

AJ

[Solicitous]

Has anyone found a fix for Coolreader taking you back to the start of your book when reading a .fb2 and change the font/size?

Slightly off topic a little, a number of people are really playing around with fb2 files. I am unsure how people are experimenting with the creating of their fb2.css (make change then load the PP and look? That is how I started out initially). I downloaded today Coolreader3 and installed that on my PC (I use the Ubuntu version but there are versions for Mac and Windows). I have found this a very fast and efficient way of writing and testing your fb2.css files.

Very simple, edit fb2.css, load cr3, load ebook. If your not happy close cr3, edit fb2.css, load cr3 (should remember the previous file opened).

[Acreo Aeneas]

@ekaser,

The file systems you noted (and file folders) are all consistent with the fact that the PP and EZReader runs on Linux. It's not surprising to see those file system types on there.

Also not surprising to me that they'd include template code for future hardware for other devices which usually do share some firmware code overlap since they are similar use devices (and its easier not having to write new software from scratch).

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Has anyone found a fix for Coolreader taking you back to the start of your book when reading a .fb2 and change the font/size?

Slightly off topic a little, a number of people are really playing around with fb2 files. I am unsure how people are experimenting with the creating of their fb2.css (make change then load the PP and look? That is how I started out initially). I downloaded today Coolreader3 and installed that on my PC (I use the Ubuntu version but there are versions for Mac and Windows). I have found this a very fast and efficient way of writing and testing your fb2.css files.

Very simple, edit fb2.css, load cr3, load ebook. If your not happy close cr3, edit fb2.css, load cr3 (should remember the previous file opened).

Great tip!

Dale

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by Solicitous

Has anyone found a fix for Coolreader taking you back to the start of your book when reading a .fb2 and change the font/size?

It does not do that with FB2 here. It just recalculates the total number screens (pages) and returns to the screen that I was last reading with the new font or size.

[ThomasMcKean]

Originally Posted by Dave_S

It does not do that with FB2 here. It just recalculates the total number screens (pages) and returns to the screen that I was last reading with the new font or size.

My experience has been that the book only returns to the beginning if yew turn the "preformatted text" option on.