07:42 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

What a great post over at Palm Addict. Be sure to take a look at a short interview with the President and CEO of Palm Inc. He shares some more personal thoughts on life and what sorts of things he likes. Definitely worth a quick read.

07:27 PM by Brian in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

The Internet Archive, a non-profit organization that is archiving digital content of historical significance, has added feature films to its expansive collection of moving images.

This collection houses a number of classic public domain feature films and shorts, now available for viewing and downloading at the Internet Archive.

One of the Feature Films collection's most notable movies is Stanley Donen's 1963 Hitchcock-esque thriller Charade. This movie is in the public domain due to the failure to put the copyright notice in the released print, which was required at the time the movie was released.

In addition to feature films, the Moving Images Archive includes the Computer Chronicles, Film Chest Vintage Cartoons, the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films, and many other collections of movies and videos.

If you're looking for video content to load up and watch on your PDA, smartphone, or portable media player, the Moving Images Archive has over 19,000 items in the archive. Video formats available for download include MPEG2 and MPEG4. The Moving Images collection is free and open for everyone to use.

The Internet Archive contains approximately 1 petabyte of data in all collections. If you want to watch or listen to an interview of Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive Founder, he's Robert X. Cringely's guest in Episode #3 of NerdTV.

Related: Open Content Alliance launched, NerdTV now officially on the air

06:41 PM by Brian in Miscellaneous | Lounge

The Open Content Alliance, a new project conceived by the Interet Archive and Yahoo! to digitize books and multimedia files, was launched today. Unlike Google's Library Project, another digitizing project for which Google is being sued by the Author's Guild, works not in the public domain are only digitized after the copyright holders opt-in.

"The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. Content in the OCA archive will be accessible soon through this website and through Yahoo!
The OCA will encourage the greatest possible degree of access to and reuse of collections in the archive, while respecting the content owners and contributors."

Contributors to the Open Content Alliance include Adobe, European Archive, HP Labs, Internet Archive, National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media, Prelinger Archives, University of California, University of Toronto, and Yahoo!

[via TeleRead]

03:13 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

CNET News is pointing out five reasons why Palm has fallen from grace as the market leader for handhelds:

• Palm executives were slow to see the convergence of cellular phones and personal digital assistants.
• Palm has had a hard time making its corporate customers happy.
• The separation of Palm's hardware and software units failed to boost Palm's prospects.
• Jeff Hawkins and Donna Dubinsky took their knack for innovation with them when they left in 1998 to start Handspring.
• Palm had a costly product-planning snafu that stalled its fast-growing sales.

Related: How Microsoft and Palm Got Together Over Software (NYT) (thanks to PalmAddict for the link)

02:07 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Here's one reason why you should have a PDA even if you don't read e-books: TCPMP. TCPMP, or The Core Pocket Media Player is an open-source media player for Pocket PC and Palm OS which supports virtually every video codec you can find movies encoded with on Bittorrent.

The latest version adds better support for "enhanced" podcasts (m4a with jpeg slideshow), mjpeg gray-scale support, minimal jpeg file format support (no progressive support yet), and various small decoding fixes.

Download it from Picard's test server.

[via 1src]

01:31 PM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Steve Jordan's The Onuissance Cells is set in the 21st century when Mankind finally grows out of the infant stages of the Industrial Revolution, and accepts its own responsibility to protect their common planet - a period which became konwn as the Onuissance. From Steve:

Now I am making my novels available in e-book form. My desire is to entertain, to make a few bucks in the process, and to see what kind of interest I can generate that may gain the attention of a publisher or agent. Ao, after carefully taking the e-book market's measure, I have developed this site, and a marketing plan for selling e-books, that I hope will really take off. As an introduction to my work, I am offering The Onuissance Cells, an anthology of short stories, FREE! More books will be added soon, so please take a look, tell others, and come back often.

"The Onuissance Cells" is available in various formats including iSilo and Adobe PDF.

[via Pocket PC eBooks]

01:20 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Sunrise

We don't want to scare you but according to Laurens this is the last and final Sunrise release. I am just guessing but it's possible he's getting ready for the commercial release of Sunrise viewer. From Laurens:

Several unnecessary files were removed from the distribution, resulting in a download that is about 80Kb smaller. In addition, the table in the main window now displays a sort indicator in the column header. Not a huge enhancement, but nice to have anyway.

If you are new to Sunrise, click here to find out more about its top-notch features for website offline conversion.

01:14 PM by Colin Dunstan in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Bookeen has made available beta 2 of its PDF Viewer for the Cybook e-book reader. If you wish to test it for free, you can register to the beta program by sending an empty message to:

<contact@bookeen.com?subject=[PDF Viewer][Register]>