How to read in an extreme emergency

[mogui]

You may have noticed that the MP4 players on the market offer the ability to view TXT files. The players are small, have a color screen, a menued control system, a filesystem, and often the capacity for SD cards.

I had bought one locally (China) for my daughter's birthday. It was a Newman of Chinese origin. It did everything well including playing small movies. It had a 512M memory capacity. I bought it, loaded it with ear candy and shipped it to her in the US.

So when my e-reader, a Palm device began to die, as well as my MP3 player losing its ability to charge, I had the notion in the back of my head that I could read text files on an MP4 player. My wife and I went to a street market here in Kunming. She is a consummate bargainer and she helped me pick one up for pocket change.

It is an ENT, made in China. It has 1G of memory and is only a little larger than a box of short wooden matches. The screen is surprisingly bright at 220 by 176 pixels (a common display size for small devices). It has its own speaker on the back and a 3.5 mm earphone jack. There is also a mini USB 2.0 jack through which it can attach to my PC as an external drive. This makes loading simple. The USB port also charges the device. I can use the supplied charger, or I can simply plug the USB into my PC.

I was excited to find that the player has a mini SD slot! I bought a 1G card which turned out to have been used in someone's Nokia phone before. This I deduced by the presence of files on the device. They were even thoughtful enough to have left me a virus and autoplay software. Shopping in China is perilous in some ways. The MP3 player I had bought earlier had an autoplay virus in it too. Not to worry. I have a resident virus watchdog that takes care of such rudeness. The mini SD card came with an SD carrier so I can use it in my card reader. When my new Palm device arrives in a few weeks, the SD card will work fine there too.

It has a microphone for making personal notes and recording meetings. The menu has a "Navigation" selection which puts you into a file manager. You can navigate directories as easily as if you were on your PC or Mac. If you "select" a file, the device does the right thing by playing it if it is a video or audio file, or displaying it if it is a JPG photo. If it is a text file, it displays it for your reading pleasure. You can also use the main menu (Music, Video, Photo, Text, Record, Navigation, Game, Settings) to do all these things as well.

Is it a good reader? Well, almost. The text is clear and readable with black text on a white backlit background, but the reader itself has a flaw. Word wrap doesn't take place on word boundaries so words are often chopped in two across lines. I can live with this in a pinch, though I wish I could get my mitts on the firmware for a few hours. It is not hard to fix. Alternatively, I can write a C filter that will preformat the text for the 24 character wide screen.

Scrolling the text while reading is easy. Pushing the toggle button up or down moves the text by one line. Pushing it to the left or right moves the text by one screen. The screen is bright, and the brightness and contrast are adjustable. There are 9 lines of 24 characters each, but the top line is given over to the battery indicator. The second line is a title bar showing the document name. That leaves 7 lines of readable text. They appear on a faint blue and white bar background. Legibility is excellent.

A vertical progress bar gives you an indication of where you are in the text file. If you turn the machine off and resume reading later, you must navigate to the file again and select it. There is a bookmark facility I found by monkeying around. The play/pause button pops up a selection box that allows you to save your current location as one of three possible bookmarks. Another button pops up a selection menu that gives you a choice of three saved bookmarks to return to.

Am I glad I bought this MP4 player? Yes. It is a charming toy. I am reading a novel on it. It will suffice until my new refurbished Palm M125 arrives. It has great sound. The movies are watchable, though I haven't figured out why it likes some AVI files and not others (I am working on it). I record WAV files to give to my students so they can practice their English, so it gives me a portable solution for that too. All in all I like it. After all, it fits in the watch pocket of my jeans!

[mogui]

In my previous post I stated that the text reader function of the ENT MP4 player had no bookmark function. I was wrong. The manual for the device is in Chinese which I am unable to read. A bit of experimentation showed me how to set and recall bookmarks. It is an OK reader now for the price; about US$50.00.

Please see my revision and don't count this option out if you need a really ultraportable reader for a trip, or something tiny for surreptitious reading.

UPDATE: The MP4 player only stores 3 bookmarks for ALL of the texts in storage. If you move from one text to another and save a new bookmark, you lose the bookmark(s) for the previous text. So I guess it is just one book at a time for me :-(

[yvanleterrible]

Interesting! Can you post pictures?

What is the purpose of a virus with autoplay?

[mogui]

To autoplay an executable on a removable medium, create an "autorun.inf" file containing a command line indicating the executable you wish to run when the device is attached to the PC. The executable, if it contains a virus, will have its intended bad effect. If you put this combination on an SD card, for example, and then the SD card is attached to a Windows XP PC, the virus will be executed. This is basically the same mechanism that was used to propagate boot sector viruses on floppy disks when the PC was allowed to boot from a floppy (remember when?). The autoplay mechanism extends this process to other removable media.

To protect yourself, always use a resident virus scanner that scans everything that is opened. Secondly, do not allow autoplay to operate. See your Windows Help for instructions on turning off autoplay.

Here is a photo of the ENT and my hand. It would be very easy to read this small device in class while giving the appearance of merely staring stupidly at your palm.

[yvanleterrible]

Neat! I wonder if we'll get them here.

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by mogui

It would be very easy to read this small device in class while giving the appearance of merely staring stupidly at your palm.

Which is something anyone who knows me would believe was what I was actually doing. Nice.

[mogui]

Originally Posted by yvanleterrible

Neat! I wonder if we'll get them here.

I assume you mean the MP4 player and not the autoplay virus! There are many MP4 players on ebay. Look for one that matches my photo and has a similar feature set. I have seen them with 2G and an FM radio for not much money. Let us know your experience.

[mogui]

Originally Posted by mogui

. . . but the reader itself has a flaw. Word wrap doesn't take place on word boundaries so words are often chopped in two across lines.

As I said in an earlier post, this MP4 player cum reader does not break the words on word boundaries. I actually got used to this, but not being able to leave well enough alone, I tried to fix it.

My first attempt was to build a web page and use javascript to format the text. This worked well except for being way too slow. To format a book of about 750K it would have taken . . . Well, I am ashamed to say. I did not let it run to completion. Someday I will install a C compiler.

I needed to reformat a few books quickly so I pulled them into my pfe (freeware, downloadable) programmer's editor, selected all the text, and told it to format it all to a 24 character line. This worked quickly and flawlessly.