05:12 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

By 2005, 100 million mobiles weighing approximately 250,000 tons will be thrown out annually in Europe alone, Inquirer is quoting a researcher from GMI. And the volume of disposed mobile phones is growing faster than the volume of waste overall, according to recycling experts. Toxins associated with this waste include heavy metals and poisons such as arsenic, lead, and mercury.

UK-based Mopay now offers a quick service offering you to turn your old and redundant mobile phone into cash. All you have to do is to send them your used phone (freepost), and they'll send you the money in return. Before you can get a quote for your old phone online. For instance, my old Nokia 6210 is still £10.00 worth to them!

What's more, Mopay says it will donate 10% of the sale price to a children's charity. That is a smooth move!

11:21 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

The Denver Business Journal (via MSNBC) runs a story today on a small start-up company called Treeless Systems LLC which is currently seeking partners to invest in a flexible computer system equipped with a screen that can be folded or rolled up like a broadsheet newspaper. Like many other near-future display technologies we've heard of lately, the final product will use a reflective display that doesn't require backlighting.

According to CEO Dave Lester, Treeless System's product would allow readers to customize their newspapers in ways print newspapers can't, such as readers selectively subscribing to different sections of the newspaper -- for instance only sports and business! The device also could convert text to speech, enlarge text portions, and enable live-video footages.

There is no information who is going to supply Treeless System with the display technology, but it seems likely that it'll be someone like Cambridge-based Plastic Logic or E Ink who are already working on screens that can bend to a radius of 5mm.

The biggest hurdle right now is finding a willing investor with $50 million in his pocket to eventually (within the next three years, according to Lester) bring the product to the market.

10:07 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Samsung' newly developed semi-permeable mSWV+ display offers a 160-degree-wide view without compromising clarity and works well outdoors under sunlight even without backlight. You probably know that the backlight of your PDA is responsible for up to 90% of overall battery usage. Telecoms Korea writes:

Samsung Electronics developed a small-medium sized semi-permeable liquid crystal display, using mSWV+ (mobile Super Wide View+) based on PVA (Patterned-ITO Vertical Alignment) [...] While currently available small-medium sized permeable LCD’s realize 250 :1 contrast ratio and view angles of 80 degree for up-and-down and 100 degree for right-and-left, the semi-permeable mSWV+ technology offers 400:1 or higher contrast ratio and 160 degree ultra-wide view angle, preventing gray inversion even when the screen rotates in any direction.

Mass production of new LCD will start in the first half of the next year and is expected to be used first in cell phones and other mobile devices.

09:41 AM by Alexander Turcic in E-Book General | News

Did you ever think of the weight you are carrying around with paper books and daily newspapers? E-books are considerably lighter, smaller, and take less room at home or in a bag. You can even carry multiple books inside your laptop or handheld reader without adding any weight. Your back will thank you for it!

From teleread.org:

The scale may have been off, but as best as I can determine, Sunday's Washington Post weighed five pounds--no small part of it advertising. That's ten times the weight of my Dell PDA. It's almost twice the weight of my Cybook loaner with a ten-inch screen. A lesson here for the newspaper business? The obese Post needs both a gastric bypass and more emphasis on targeted advertising and its .com side.

06:01 AM by Alexander Turcic in Miscellaneous | Week in Review

Welcome to another digest entry of MobileRead, where we transform the profound into the bite-sized.

Current E-Books Trends
DRM harming the developing world
Japan's cell-phone users are turning pages
Save trees by reading e-books

E-Book Readers
BookListGen GUI for Sony Librie released

E-Book Webstores
Diesel eBooks DRM simulator - "try before you buy"

General Chat
2GB for Palm OS devices and other morning bits
10 Gig Free Online Storage
Looking for the perfect mobile form factor
PDAs are unhealthy, Live-TV inflight, and more
Safer Online Buying -- Single Use Credit Cards
Will online newspapers stay free?

Link Swap
Google Personalized Beta

Other Gadgets
ATI to bring high-speed video to mobile devices
BlackBerrys to support AOL and YIM chat
HP to Attack Blackberry
Palm OS? Windows Mobile? Why not Linux!

Palm
No "T6" and more rumors of the upcoming Palm device
Opera for PalmOS - participate in a petition!
palmOne's cautious outlook - digest of the day
palmOne earnings conference call today
PalmSource CEO to Speak To Investors Thursday
Rumor: Tungsten T6 / Tungsten 2005
Tungsten T6/2005 -- Too Good To Be True?
WLAN-Sled for Treo 650 by end of April

Plucker
Vade Mecum 0.6.3 released

Pocket PC
Creative Notes Offered For Free at Handango
Egress 2.1.0 Newsreader for PPC
Future HP iPAQ may include a foldable keyboard
SPOT! puzzle game for PPC from PDAmill

Portable Audio/Video
2 DVDs on a CD! (At almost broadcast quality)
PyMusique - iTunes without DRM interface
Sony Walkman managers blind to market reality
Turn your iPod into a 300Gb media machine
Video Glasses Display for Just $500

Smartphones
Using a cell phone to locate your destination

Sunrise
Would Sunrise viewer be worth $19.95 to you?

WiFi / Bluetooth Technologies
VoIP may make you more vulnerable

07:09 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

It sounds too good to be true, but it's for real and it's free. Included here are simple instructions to create 350meg DivX files from a DVD that can be used for watching compressed movies on your home TV or Pocket PC!

Before we continue, I want to emphasize that this post is not intended to encourage piracy of any form. Please check the laws in your part of the world to make sure you stay legal, and certainly do not start circulating any of the files. In addition, note that these instructions will not produce an exact copy of a DVD, nor will they provide all the extra features on a DVD. But you will get a movie file that looks wonderful on a Pocket PC (or Palm), and is quite adequate for viewing on a TV with a DivX compatible DVD player.

My intent is mostly to help people get portable with their video. My bigger dream is all your content in the palm of your hand. We're getting close... It's now possible to get a whole library of classic books (available now on a DVD from Gutenburg), videos (using this method and the mpeg4 compression in DivX), and audio (MP3s are the popular solution there) on one hard drive which you can hold in a hand. But we're really not quite there yet. For example, I haven't figured out how to convert analog video yet. And scanning existing paper books is a nightmare. So are the format wars and the reading technology. And legal issues are probably a road block for much of that type of conversion also. Oh well, I guess there's still a ways to go before the all-digital content home. But soon, very soon!

Okay, so let me restate, once more in a bit more detail, what you will get if you follow my instructions... You will be able to convert any DVD to a file about 350meg, and it will be compatible both with DivX players for televisions like the Philips DVP642 (~$70) and Pocket PC DivX players like the excellent BetaPlayer! The movies look really awesome on BetaPlayer, even with my standard resolution Pocket PC, so I can't even imagine how great they look with BetaPlayer on a VGA PPC! On a television, some movies look great. Other movies will start to show a lot of pixelation on various scenes (often, but not always directly related to the amount of action) where these boxes start to show up and make the picture real grainy. But I have yet to come across a movie that is not watchable due to those artifacts of the compression as they are basically infrequent. Bottom line is that it's almost broadcast quality (or better) "most" of the time. It's good enough to watch at home with friends, but not nearly good enough to please a videophile. Best way to understand video quality is to try converting one.

The 350meg size means you can store either two movies on a CD-R, or about 13 movies on a single layer DVD+R, and they view just fine. Or if you have a huge closet full of dvds to store on a hard drive, you can handle about 850 movies on one 300gig USB hard drive. On the other hand, if you have invested in that kind of collection, you probably are more interested in video quality than having a video jukebox!

You do have the option to increase the bitrate and/or MP3 audio quality and/or resolution and/or do a double pass encryption, cropping, etc. to get better quality, but I'm happy with this file size because small file size is more important to me, especially so because the PDA viewer is my primary goal.

Okay, so here's the very simple trick...

1) Install FairUse Wizard.
You may have to install DivX codec also, and dvd decrypter. I have DivX v5.21 installed, but I can't tell you if it got on there as part of the FairUse Wizard, or whether I was told I needed to install DivX separately, or even if it came from another install. I've installed so much DVD->PPC related software in my experiments, it's hard to tell. But both FairUseWizard (www.fairusewizard.com/) and DivX (www.divx.com/) are free, and not very complicated. You just have to follow your nose and if something's missing you'll get a message about it.

2) Pop in a DVD and start up FairUse Wizard.

3) The settings for DivX should be set as follows. (I think it comes up when you choose DivX the first time, but you can still find it by clicking on first pass.)
* Pick the home theater certified DivX profile, and set 640x480 resolution.
Make sure Quarter pixel and GMC are off. [Edit: Choose 24 frames/sec.]
* Set encode performance to standard. I'm tempted to try fast or fastest myself, but I hate to mess with something that works and don't want bigger files and worse video quality.
* Set avg bitrate to 365 kbps. Yes, this is where you lose a lot of quality and end up with those big pixelated boxes when the action speeds up. But I had digital cable in the past and that did it a lot worse than what I see with this encoding!
* Set encode mode = 1 pass. Again, this is for speed, but you could set it up for dual pass if you like. What happens is that the bit rate is variable and you use more space when the pictures are changing rapidly as in action scenes and less space when things are simpler to compress. That improves overall quality. But since I'm not really worried about quality to that degree, and am focused on doing things quick and simple, I'll probably stick with 1 pass.

3) Set to DivX and full auto mode. Choose a filesize of 340meg and set audio to 64Kbits/sec MP3. Set subtitle to "-" unless you want subtitles. For some reason, even with these settings, it seems to end up with a filesize consistently around 347meg, which is just what I wanted.

Note: I don't use subtitles, but if you are planning to watch the movies on your PPC while listening to the built-in speaker, you might want to add subtitles so you can tell what is being said.

4) Do the conversion. You'll have to do some waiting. (About 2hrs or so.) It's very CPU intensive, so if you have a faster box it might go faster. I would run it overnight if you have a slower box. It will ask you to give a project name and a location. The filename is the end result, and the project directory keeps conversion artifacts like the index so you can re-encode again faster next time. I use the same project folder for every project, and delete the files every so often because they are big. You can also reuse the index that is generated if you are going to encode with a bunch of different settings to compare different settings.

5a) Play on a PPC by transferring it to an SD card (or CF depending on your model). Watch it with BetaPlayer (http://betaplayer.corecodec.org/).

5b) Play on your DivX compatible DVD player as follows: Burn the file to a data disk. IMPORTANT:You MUST finalize the disk or it won't play correctly in your DVD player!

I've used Nero to burn on both CD-R and DVD+R, which both turn out fine. I'm using a Sony DRU-720A dual layer DVD recorder, and blanks are cheap these days if you shop around a bit. (I got 100 DVD+R 8x for about $40 and no rebate forms. And 100 CD-R, at about 50x for about $10.)

Set it to an ISO compatible data disk, finalized. You can experiment with longer file names, but on my DVD player they are fine. They just don't show the full names on the DVD player listings.

If you have an older DVD recorder, you will probably have to update your firmware if you want to record onto an 8x blank. I don't use dual layer or 16x yet because of the costs.

If you need a free burning software, check http://www.neowin.net/forum/?showtopic=119821 (Site link via JKOnTheRun.)

That's it! Simple as that!

I hope you found this helpful. Similar information is freely available out there on the web, but I haven't found anything like this suitable for beginners, or in a form that I could understand. It just doesn't seem to have filtered down into layman's terms and technology. The experts have other goals, like better quality video and HDTV stuff, anyway. But I think this is what the "common man" has been waiting for, and this common man is certainly very excited!

Enjoy!!!!!!

11:22 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

There's a lot of news these days about fraud, identity theft, viruses and spyware, and all kinds of other online vulnerabilities. They are especially a concern for those of us that make purchases with a credit card.

As a result it makes sense to protect yourself when buying online. It doesn't seem to be common knowledge yet, but there are a few credit card companies that allow you to create a single use credit card, complete with a unique credit card number, expiration date, and that little verification code.

Aside... That little printed code used to be a good security feature, but now that everyone seems to use it, there are only a handful of cases where it seems to protect us. One of those cases is the famous restaurant and store scam where they scan your card twice, or scan it into a modified machine that keeps your card info for later download by the thieves. And lest you think it never happens, I've been to a famous chain restaurant where that's been done. Fortunately, it was during a different time frame.

Of course you don't really get a new credit card, you just get the unique purchase information. You can choose a credit limit for the number and an expiration date for the number. I'm going by memory now, but I think Bank One, Citibank, and MNBC (or MBNC?) are the ones in the US that were listed in a newspaper article last year. And if I remember the tv ads from many years ago, American Express was actually the first to do this because they had extra numbers in their series that they could use. They claimed other credit cards couldn't duplicate it because of a lack of numbers, but obviously that's been solved, probably by adding new sets of 4 digit codes to start off the credit card numbers with. I'm not sure if AMEX even still offers such a feature on any of their cards.

And if you're really trying to prevent identity theft, don't stop there. Make sure you shred or burn your sensitive trash also. Despite the fear of online buying by some, it seems that most identity theft cases are the old fasioned type which come from non-technological means like going through your trash. In some strange way that's good news... because if you are a mobile computing fanatic, you probably have come to depend on online purchases quite heavily.

So go get that new credit card (or figure out how to use that single purchase system) and buy something from your favorite Palm or Software vendor. Just make sure you leave a few $s for Laurens new commercial software application!

11:04 AM by Bob Russell in Miscellaneous | Lounge

From Sebastian Rupley's article at PC Magazine

Is a gigabyte of free online storage—which Google offers with its Gmail service—not enough? Though it doesn't provide e-mail, Streamload is raising the bar in free online storage by offering 10GB of no-cost capacity for those who want to archive media content online and access it from any Internet connection.

The offering is ideal for storing content online from DVRs, digital camcorders, MP3 players, Portable Media Centers, and digital cameras, says Streamload CEO Steve Iverson. A few caveats: You can download only 100MB a month and upload files of 100MB at a time. If you want to upgrade, the company offers unlimited storage plans for around $5 to $10 a month.

Note: There's a lot of news posted there at www.pcmag.com/pipeline. And PC Magazine is even worth considering for an old-fashioned paper subscriptions. I have a subscription, and I always look forward to each issue. (No, I'm not being paid by them, I just like the magazine!) And a tip if you decide to subscribe... find a cheap subscription on line, and use a distinctive first name like "JimMag" so you can track where all the phone calls and spam and mass mailings came from.