01:01 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

The premier Pocket PC Magazine podcast is now available. While I couldn't find it on their front page, the Pocket PC Magazine RSS feed has led me to the mp3. I really enjoy their magazine, both in hardcopy and online, and I'm sure the podcast will be just as good.

07:19 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Harry Potter finds no time to rest. First he was electronized within hours after the official release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, then some dimwits sold illegal copies on eBay, while at the same time a couple of German zealots professionally translated the English copy into German (and kept the translation to themselves, at least). Now Moscow Times reports that an unauthorized Russian Half-Blood Prince translation has been posted on Russian websites:

Russian readers were able to devour an unauthorized translation of the 672-page book's first chapter for free on certain web sites as early as July 18. Three more chapters followed the next day on one of the sites, http://book6.potterfilmru.net.

Poor Rowling and her lawyer friends from Baker & McKenzie, who will have a hard time convincing Russian Potter fans to remove the translations from the Net. Under Russian law they don't constitute a violation of the publisher's rights.

05:45 PM by Mattoquai in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Mobile magazine just came up with a mobile game top 50. It contains all sorts of mobile games, ranging from relatively new (PSP, 2005) to very old (Mattel Football, 1977). Pretty nice to see which weird kind of gaming devices were developed the past 30 years or so. I've just discovered the arcade section here at Mobileread, which I think is pretty awesome! Which one of the 50 top notch mobile games did you guys used to play?

--I admit I've owned a Tamagotchi, but I didn't buy it myself ---

02:45 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

The Escapist by James Morris is set in a future world which satirically echoes the present day - part wry black comedy, part all-action sci-fi with a narrative pace that keeps you reading from cover to cover. James decided to release his novel under a Creative Commons license. So I went ahead, purchased the PDF e-book, and converted it into HTML, iSilo and Plucker formats. You find them here attached to this post. Read more about the book in this recent Slashdot review:

Cyberpunk just got a whole lot darker. The Escapist, by James Morris, takes the genre into a gloomy alley and gives it a good kicking. The main character, Bentley Dean, is more than just an anti-hero: he seems to enjoy being bad. His cast of accomplices aren't much better, either, and some are far worse. Most are pretty cartoon-like, too. But you still can't help liking Bentley Dean. He brings a certain charm to being a hacker with a cold-blooded killing streak.

01:44 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

A great taskmanager for Pocket PCs just got better. vBar is a lightweight. At mere 21Kb, it allows you to quickly switch between running tasks and also to close individual processes with just one mouse click. Version 2.0 adds the long overdue support for VGA and Dynamic Landscape switching.

Alternative: Magic Button by TransCreative.

12:17 PM by Laurens in E-Book Formats | Workshop

Just saw this over at Download Squad (great site, BTW):

PrimoPDF is a free utility that allows you to print to PDF format from any Windows program. Released yesterday, version 2.0 adds the advanced abilities of adding document information and creating secure PDFs, in addition to all of the basic PDF creation options you would expect.

I tried it out with a few documents and web pages and it seems to work pretty well.

11:26 AM by hacker in Miscellaneous | Lounge

I've been talking to lots of businesses, users, hobbyists and others in many circles over the years, and I'm wondering how many of these people (and that includes YOU reading this), actually buy Palm or other mobile software for their various devices. This includes Palm, PocketPC, Linux and other mobile productivity devices.

I know I've personally bought many more software applications for Palm than I actually use today (some of them don't even work on current Palm devices because the author(s) decided to just quit and work on other things). I've bought applications to help my productivity, save my data, help my wife get organized, and dozens of other applications, conduits and tools over the years. I've also subscribed to many services such as Vindigo, Novatel and others to use with my device.

There seems to be a growing trend moving the other direction, and more and more people are seeking "free" or "cracked" software to use on their Palm devices. I see a number of posts on legitimate mailing lists and usenet newsgroups from people asking for registration codes, keys, key generators and many other things for Palm software.

As I poke around the various Palm software sites, I see applications being sold at higher and higher prices.. but are people actually buying them? Or just downloading them and using them for the trial period and then deleting them? Or are they cracking them and running them illegally?

How about you? What percent of your actual third-party Palm software is software you bought yourself? What percent is "free", and what percent (sure, you can answer anonymously or not) is "questionable"? Are 1% of your applications purchased? 50%? 100%? Some other fraction?

I'd love to hear from everyone..

07:24 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Lounge

PalmAddicts has a post this morning on a new application called NewsRaider. The Proporta/Tomeraider guys advertise it as:

A revolutionary application for Windows that allows any News, Reviews or Magazine site to have its articles "raided" and converted into a single rolling news service. NewsRaider is free. We guarantee that no other product or service can give you so much news in such a distilled format. NewsRaider is fast. The articles are downloaded before you want to read them (It sits in the background taking up little system resources but huge amounts of news resources). NewsRaider does not use RSS or other syndication. It goes straight to the source. This means that you get the news content you want, whenever you want.

Really sorry, but I don't see the benefit in scraping news over using official RSS feeds. NewsRaider has scraping scripts for CNN, BBC News, and Guardian, even though each one of them already offers feeds for various sections of their site. And if you really have to scrape content, wouldn't it be better to learn how to do it with Regular Expressions + Sitescooper instead of studying an incompatible "Raid Script" language?