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?

06:00 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time for our weekly roundup of what's new and interesting in the world of mobile gadgets.

Current E-Books Trends
Harry Potter e-books for $1.99 on eBay
Pirate translation of Harry Potter in record time
Wired.com on Harry Potter e-book piracy

E-Book Conversion
PDFOnline converts to PDF and back

E-Book Readers
Hitachi's e-paper goes wireless
Root console on Sony Librie with USBPD

E-Book Webstores
20% eReader Discount Code
eReader Pro software reduced in price

General Chat
Cell phone sales predicted to surpass 1b by 2009
Cute Story: How Bob The Millionaire Became a Pirate
First bans of mobiles during movie shows
Mobile-friendly Web pages in two minutes
Skype could serve as videophone software
Windows Vista To Be The Official Name of Longhorn

Link Swap
MSN Virtual Earth Beta opens to public

Other E-Book Resources
Free e-book: "Free Software for Busy People"
Free e-book: "Maelstrom" converted for iSilo and Plucker
Free e-book: "Starfish" converted for iSilo and Plucker

Other Gadgets
Magpie Linux PDA from Unication
Nokia 770 / Maemo Wiki launched
Nokia Online Calculator unlocks your Nokia for free
Review of SD Card Readers

Palm
All About Palm recommendation
DataViz releases RoadSync for Palm OS
If I were Palm's CEO
Palm offers $50 off selected handhelds
PalmOS DateBk5 Tip -- Keep Your Location Data
PalmSource on its way of becoming a penny stock?
PalmSource patents fault-tolerant Flash ROM update
Stream Napster to your Palm
We Already Have All The Gadgets We Need...

Pocket PC
Resco Radio V1.0 for PPC released
The Core Pocket Media Player V0.66c test-version
WM 05's Persistent Storage from the Inside Out
WM Mobile 5.0 a "significant upgrade" says PPC Mag

Portable Audio/Video
Apple Video iPod in September (rumor)

Smartphones
Will Nokia dump Symbian in favor of Linux?

04:48 AM by TadW in Miscellaneous | Lounge

If you are familiar with Google Maps, I don't have to explain to you what MSN Virtual Earth is all about. For those who are new to the whole mapping thing: MSN Virtual Earth combines mapping and local search to put the answers to your search questions in a geographical context.

I found the aerial/satellite imagery inferior to Google Maps. Still, give it a spin, it is a lot of fun to pan/zoom around the US!

04:40 AM by Alexander Turcic in More E-Book Readers | Legacy E-Book Devices

Marko Bolowski, the chap behind the Sony Librie translation project, gave in to our desire to explore the Librie's internals and released a tool which allows us to open a root console via USB to the Sony device.

USBPD consists of a console program (that runs on the USBPD host device, i.e. any Linux computer) and a server program (that runs on the USBPD target device, i.e. our Sony Librie); the precompiled binaries (including sources, of course) can be downloaded here.

06:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

While we are all anticipating the release of the Linux-powered Nokia 770 device, rumors are spreading that Nokia might dump Symbian and port its Series 60 user interface to a Linux platform.

PalmAddicts writes: ARCchart, a website affiliated to the investment banking and advisory group ARC associates, has recently published a report suggesting that Nokia might consider dumping Symbian altogether, porting its Series 60 user interface to a Linux platform. Their reasons basically center around the fact that Symbian Ltd. has striven to assert it's independence by projecting a a vendor agnostic stance, and Nokia's recent failure to take complete control of Symbian. (Nokia has 47.9% ownership.)

I've always been partial to Symbian. My Nokia 9500 Communicator does a good job when I need to write a quick SMS or check my e-mail. But for more sophisticated tasks such as surfing the Web or reading e-books, I prefer my Dell Axim. What do you think? Could Linux make a difference to Nokia smartphones?

06:32 PM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Peter Watts' Maelstrom is the sequel to Starfish and the second book of the Rifters Trilogy. Because it's released under a Creative Commons license (Peter follows Cory's steps, and I like it!!), I converted and attached the e-book for you to this thread in HTML, iSilo and Plucker formats. In an older BoingBoing article I found a reference to a review by SciFi.com, saying about Maelstrom:

Like the endlessly mutating and recombinant digital/wetware entities that live in Peter Watts' online Maelstrom, his fiction itself exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance.

[thanks for the e-mail, Peter!]