04:04 PM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Great news for all emulation fans! After four years of closed-source development, MorphGear, my favorite emulation system for Windows and Pocket PC, is going open-source! This will include the following changes:

- MorphGear is now free for non-commercial use.
- Because some modules were being used with permission under commercial license from Marat Fayzullin, those modules will continue to be available as closed source, commercial products but will now be maintained and supported completely by Marat. This includes GameBoy Color, GameBoy Advance, Master System, GameGear, and NES.
- The source code will be moved to an online repository.

MorphGear can emulate the following systems on Pocket PC:

o Nintendo GameBoy Advance (VGBA)
o Nintendo GameBoy Color (VGB)
o Nintendo Entertainment System (iNES)
o SEGA MasterSystem (MasterGear)
o SEGA GameGear (MasterGear)
o SEGA Genesis (Generator)
o Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Snes9x)
o TurboGrafx-16 (Hu-Go)

You can download MorphGear from here.

11:25 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Believe it or not, your future PDA may be able to project images and video onto a wall or screen, and you won't have to lug your car battery around to power it. Engadget is reporting on a story at vnunet which shares a new approach to laser projection that is much more efficient than current methods.

Your local sales rep with a projector hooked up to his or her laptop uses technology that creates the image by blocking light, which is very inefficient because it uses a very bright light bulb, and only a small portion of the light makes it to the image. (And you pay an arm and a leg to replace that little sucker also!)

But the new method, being developed at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University, will steer laser light. A black and white prototype is already working. It will be practical for consumer color versions only after the price of blue lasers drops, which is expected to happen when the next generation of "Blu-ray" DVDs becomes mainstream in the consumer world.

12:52 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Sunrise

Laurens informed us that the new Sunrise 0.40 pre2 allows you to modify the way how downloaded documents are cached:

# Default: Use the cached page/image if the Cache-Control or Expires header indicates that it hasn't expired yet. Otherwise, check with the web server if the cached copy is up-to-date using a Conditional GET request (see below).
# Revalidate: Always check with the web server is the cached copy is up-to-date using a Conditional GET request. This is akin to Reloading/Refreshing in the web browser.
# Disable: Do not use the cache at all.

Sunrise 0.40 pre2 also contains some important bug fixes allowing you to run it on Windows 9x machines again.

You can download the latest Sunrise by clicking here, or visit here first to see a list of all changes for 0.40 pre2.

Sunrise is the only desktop component I know that respects Conditional GET requests, which can not only free up server resources but also reduces overall bandwidth consumption for the user. So what is a Considitional GET? The people who invented HTTP decided that a web client such as Internet Explorer or Sunrise should be able to ask a web server via a conditional GET if a web document has changed since the last time it looked at it. If nothing has changed, the server returns a simple 304 respond code which means as much as "Not Modified" and tells the client that it doesn't have to redownload the document.

Let's hope that other downloaders like iSiloX will support this feature as well in future!

09:34 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

If you are looking for a wide selection of Christian etexts, be sure to check out the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. For Christian resources, this one is a real keeper.

Classic Christian books in electronic format, selected for your edification. There is enough good reading material here to last you a lifetime, if you give each work the time it deserves!

The Vision [As given at the site itself]...
I would love to build the CCEL into a theological library containing 1000 of the most important public-domain works for theological study, containing:
-- Around 1000 volumes, selected by theologians and ministers from a variety of Christian traditions, to cover important topics for theological study and edification. A premliminary list of books wanted is available, but much more work must be done to develop it.
-- A good Bible translation for study that can be distributed relatively cheaply, such as the NRSV
-- Coverage of topics important for theological students
-- Commentaries, dictionaries, lexicons, and other reference works
-- Classic sermons and sermon illustrations
-- Indexes to the material by scripture reference (WWSB) and topic
-- The Bible and other important works in the original languages
-- Greek and Hebrew dictionaries and study tools
-- Markup of the texts in XML to identify theological subject matter, scripture references, etc.
-- A flexible, easy-to-use search engine
-- "Guided tours" or self-study guides on various topics

09:31 AM by Bob Russell in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

I've just stumbled across a source of etext that you may not be aware of - Project Wittenberg
Yes, that's Project Wittenberg, not Gutenberg!

Unlike the massive collection of copyright-free general literature at Project Gutenberg, the Project Wittenberg collection is focused on Christian religous writings and started off with the writings of Martin Luther. Not surprising as it seems to be a Lutheran effort. In their own words...

What is Project Wittenberg?

Project Wittenberg is an ad hoc group of individuals dedicated to posting on the internet a cross-section of classic and historic texts written by Lutherans. The project arose from the frustration felt by these librarians, archivists, scholars, pastors and others. A thorough search of the internet yielded few works by even Martin Luther, founder of Lutheranism, translator of the Bible, shaper of the German language, and a catalyst in the events that shaped the formation of modern western civilization.

Project Wittenberg began with documents written by Luther himself. The documents are selected for their importance to the development of western civilization, their interest to a wide audience and their value in bringing Luther to life for those who have not had the opportunity to meet him in the pages of history.

Can you imagine the wealth of resources online if more groups would form online libraries of their own favorite topics!

05:07 PM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Resco is offering a 30% discount on all of its application till 12/31/04.

This is a great deal considering that its Explorer 2003 is my favorite file manager for Pocket PC!

08:12 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Portable Audio/Video

Slipstream 1.0 is a new Mac OS X-only application which allows you to send audio from any application directly to remote speakers attached to Apple's AirPort Express device.

Airport Express officially only supports streaming music from iTunes. With Slipstream you can now listen to your music in any file format from applications like RealPlayer and Windows Media Player.

The program will be available in early 2005 for an introductory price of US $20.

Let's hope someone will hack a similar tool for MS Windows and *nix users. I bought an Airport Express even with the original Monster cables, but so far haven't even tried to use audio streaming because I don't like to have to install iTunes.

Note: This is not the first time someone tried to circumvent the limitations of the Airport Express. In August we reported how "DVD Jon" cracked the private keys that the device uses to protect music streams.

07:53 AM by Colin Dunstan in E-Book Software | Reading and Management

David at Gowerpoint has just released a new version of his wonderful Pocket PC e-book reader ubook - version 0.9b.

Here's what's new:
# New e-book formats supported (eReader, MobiPocket -> if not encrypted, PML, Rocket eBook, CHM, PDF -> if not encrypted)
# Increased (artificial) limit of num words per minutes to 1200.
# Fixed images, nag, tables and stream bugs.
# Updated manual
# New skin: n0de by Marcus Kopp

Click here for a full overview of all ubook features including screenshots.

ubook is a shareware product. A licence costs $12US and works for all versions of the reader. The unlicenced version is not crippled in any way, but pops up an about screen every now and then.