09:45 AM by NatCh in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

How Wi-Fi Can Extend T-Mobile's Range

I've long wanted a Cell phone that would use cell networks most of the time, but smoothly jump to WiFi, when that's available, like, say, when I'm at home. It looks like T-Mobile thinks that's a good idea too.

T-Mobile USA Inc., the fourth largest U.S. wireless operator, is planning a national launch this summer of cellphones that can roam on Wi-Fi hotspots in homes and coffee shops, carrying calls over the Web to improve indoor reception and help customers save on monthly cellular minutes.

The service, known as Hotspot at Home, has been in trial in Seattle for a few months and the carrier is ready to roll it out nationwide as early as mid-June, people familiar with the matter say. The phones that currently work with the service are models made by Nokia Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co.

Apparently they (unsurprisingly) had some issues early on with the hand-off from cell to WiFi, and back, but they've reportedly ironed those out. Also unsurprisingly, they're looking mainly to businesses to drive adoption of the new approach. Makes sense, considering that, as the article points out, there are often pretty nasty reception problems inside the glass and iron Faraday Cages that we call modern office buildings.

Full article.

06:15 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Readers | Which one should I buy?

Our friends at Engadget ask: "What would be the best PDA or other gadget to buy to read e-books on the go? Is there anything that could be used to read them in PDF format?"

Of course we have plenty of tips we could share with them, don't we?

Link

08:02 PM by Liviu_5 in E-Book General | Reading Recommendations

Dr Peter Watts released Behemoth (B-max and Seppuku), his final book (split in 2 for publication) of the Rifters trilogy, free under a Creative Commons license. From Publishers Weekly:

In Canadian author Watts's intense, beautifully written conclusion to his Rifters trilogy (after 2004's ßehemoth: ß-Max), Lenie Clarke, the near-psychotic, bio-engineered woman who loosed the deadly organism known as ßehemoth on an already environmentally compromised world, resurfaces from the ocean's depths to discover who's behind continuing efforts to destroy all life on Earth. Together with Lubin, a bio-engineered man who's a highly efficient killer, Clarke discovers an America that has been devastated, not just by ßehemoth but by attacks from heavily fortified, high-tech enclaves whose rulers will stop at nothing in a futile attempt to contain the out-of-control organism. Worse still, the battle is apparently being led by Achilles Desjardins, a murderous psychopath who has slipped the protective psychological programming that once kept his darker impulses under control. Aided by Taka Ouellette, a guilt-ridden, second-rate physician, Clarke and Lubin strive desperately to unravel the secrets of both ßehemoth and Seppuku, its even more dangerous mutation. Like some adrenaline-charged fusion of Clarke's The Deep Range and Gibson's Neuromancer, Watts's trilogy represents a major addition to early 21st-century hard SF.

Other works by Watts: Blindsight, Maelstrom, Starfish

11:57 PM by Gatton in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I'm curious if anyone here has tried any of the online book swapping services? If you're not familiar with it the idea is that for a small fee you receive a copy of a book from another trader in the group and you offer up your own books for trade. Some sites seem to offer incentives if share your own books.

Since I still read and purchase a lot of paper back fiction this seems like a great way to get copies of books off my shelf and into the hands of another reader. Likewise I'd be able to get books cheaper than from a book store.

Does anyone have experience with any of these groups?

The popular ones (from my quick googling) seem to be:

http://www.bookins.com
http://www.frugalreader.com
http://www.titletrader.com

Thanks and take care.
-Jason

09:12 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

If you are an earlier adopter of CorePlayer, and wondering if you'll ever see a product better than the free TCPMP program, your wait might be short. Or it might be long. But one step forward will occur on May 14, when the CorePlayer Mobile Version 1.1 will be released. Whether it lives up to our expectations of a significant improvement seems to still be up in the air.

According to the CoreCodec forums, "We will be releasing one platform at a time starting on May 14th starting with various CE versions then Palm and finally the Symbian platforms. Before the Symbian freaks start... I want to state it now that we do not expect to launch Symbian on launch day but will likely wait a few days to see what bug reports are coming in from."

The improvements include:

* CoreTheque database - The future value of this is still somewhat unknown as not much has been revealed. But it will support CUE files, RSS feeds and Web 2.0 tagging

* Bug fixes, device support additions and stability - Always a plus.

"Live updates" will not be available until version 1.4.

08:38 AM by Steven Lyle Jordan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Washington, DC suffered two devastating 3-alarm fires on Monday, to two historic landmarks on opposite sides of town. One of them was the Georgetown Library, renowned not just for its prominent location in Georgetown, but for its many original pictures and documents of Washington and American history (read the Examiner article). Many of those documents and paintings were damaged beyond repair, and there is no present guess on how much was permanently lost.

Some of the people aware of the things that have been lost or damaged, have commented that there are no copies of most of them... not even in the Library of Congress, another single source of original, unarchived historic material. It has been mentioned that there were no scans of images, and no e-text copies of the books. That means those items have been lost to time, and won't be recoverable. And it surely won't be the last time a fire takes out an old building full of historic, unarchived materials.

Could this event serve as a wake-up call for archiving documents and images as electronic files? After losing irreplaceable artifacts, the idea of storing electronic copies of them, in multiple archive locations for protection, seems to make sense. It would also be a monumental task, but one that would be worthy of government backing and concerted effort, a national mission to preserve our past.

It is often true that new technology is developed or implemented not because of desire, but out of need... witness the many technologies that have developed during the desperate needs of wartime, or after the devastating effects of a natural disaster, disease or famine. Could e-books, long a niche market, become a hot market item thanks to a disasterous loss of our history, and a desperate desire to preserve that history at any cost?

06:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

Need a way to read PDFs without installing the bloated Adobe Reader on your Windows machine? Try Sumatra PDF. It's small, fast, clean and free. Changelog of version 0.6:

• enable opening password-protected PDFs
• don't allow printing in PDFs that have printing forbidden
• don't automatically reopen files at startup
• new, better icon
• reload the document when changing rendering engine
• improve cursor shown when dragging
• fix toolbar appearance on XP and Vista with classic theme
• when MuPDF engine cannot load a file or render a page, we fallback to poppler engine to make rendering more robust
• fixed a few crashes

Alternative: Foxit PDF Reader

[via Neowin.net]

03:52 PM by Adam B. in iRex | iRex Developer's Corner

I'm releasing 0.8.2b as an Ipkg package as defined here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10585

Let me know how the install goes. Everything should be very simple now that there is one version for all memory cards.

Changes since last iLiad release (0.8.1d)

Version 0.8.2b is released (April 29, 2007).
Changes:

* In chm reader, images support has been improved.
* In chm reader, lists support has been improved.
* Scrolling to end of text has been fixed.
* In unix versions, bug with filenames including '...' has been fixed.

Version 0.8.2a is released (April 17, 2007).
Changes:

* Fixed crash after removing last book from the library tree.
* In all desktop versions, FBReader keeps fullscreen state between sessions.

Version 0.8.2 is released (April 13, 2007).
Changes:

* Tooltips for toolbar buttons were added in desktop versions.
* 'Apply' button has been added in preferences dialog in desktop versions.
* CHM support improvements.
* Minor fixes.

You can download it here: http://projects.mobileread.com/iliad...readerinst.zip

Simply extract it to your memory card and run from the contentlister.