Category Archives: gadgets

Environmental Monitoring with Arduino: Building Simple Devices to Collect Data About the World Around Us

by Emily Gertz, Patrick DiJusto, Patrick Di Justo

I bought this when OReilly had a one of their 50% off sales on Ardiono books. Since then I’ve bought a Rasberry Pi and have been trying to work out which project to do with it, so I wanted to read up on the assorted microelectronics sensor and communications books I’d accrued.

This nicely summed up a number of different projects, all of which you could approach after just reading ‘Getting Started with Arduino” also from OReilly. I found, though, after reading it, that I was a bit puzzled. The circuits were a bit simple, which was reassuring for a novice like myself, but there was little about how the authors knew to put them together in this way, so I couldn’t do anything other than replicate. Likewise a lot of the value is in things like working out atmospheric pressure, or seiverts, or such like, and while the code was there, and commented, some notes on the approach and some background reading would have been nice. This is especially noticeably in the last project, the Geiger counter, since most of the code is taken up with posting to Pachube rather than the sensor itself, something even the authors admit will be obsolete very quickly (the instructions, hopefully not the site!).

Still, I’ll probably build at least a couple of the projects, and its given me the confidence to try, so hurrah!

Lifeblogging – the ethical questions

So, I’ve just put a nominal amount into funding the kickstarter for Memoto – a GPS enabled 5Mp camera that one pins to ones clothes and takes regular geotagged pictures every few mins. I really want one, but the budget doesn’t stretch to $280 for a single unit, so a dollar to vicariously follow the project seemed a fair compromise.. :-)

It did get me thinking about the ethics of this, though – should you also wear a t-shirt saying you’re recording this? There was a BBC documentary I grabbed off iPlayer but haven’t listened to yet about lifeblogging, and there are a few people in Cambridge UK doing this right now. Was talking about the process rather than how people reacted to it, from the snatches I caught of the live broadcast.

Anyway, how would you react if I turned up with a lifelogging device? Would you ask for veto? What about if you found out that I’d had one later – would you feel your privacy had been invaded?

What about personal privacy of the owner? The current kickstarter uploads all the photos to the central site when it syncs; there are discussions about a local server to tie into the image browser, but how long term is the project? What if the tools to extract your images aren’t that sophisticated and you would need to recreate the metadata from the geotagging and file names?

Interesting stuff.

Rasberry Pi User Guide

By Upton and Halfacre

I pre-ordered this as soon as it was announced; in dead tree format, no less, as I was expecting to refer to it at a workbench. I ordered it partly because I thought it would be a useful get up to speed on the Pi I’d bought, but also because I wanted to put some cash the way of Upton, as he’s one of the leading lights behind the Raspberry Pi foundation, even if it had been mostly ‘ghostwritten’ by Halfacre.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be much; a few desultory articles on plugging things together, and a short guide to Python. It turns out that its actually a really great guide that I have and will recommend to anyone with, or planning to get, a Pi!

The authors have made a decent spread of topics of things you might want to know and do with your device. As I read through it I thought how much it would have motivated me in my CDT course at school, having one of these. Heck, I even wondered why we didn’t prototype in the electronics component of the course – was breadboard around in the 80′s? Must have been, right? Anyway, its kicked my hardware hacking interest up a notch, even with my interest in Arduino (and thanks to the book I know understand why the Pi might be good some projects, and the Arduino others), so I will be shopping for breadboard and the like this weekend to start my project!

Fitbit and the Quantified Self

So A. bought me (at my request), a FitBit Ultra for my birthday. I’d read about them a few times from some of the alpha geeks (ahem) that I follow on twitter and the like, and my interest was piqued by the (rather lackluster, I thought at the time), coverage in Fitness For Geeks (I now realise that there’s not much more he could have written – the tools work fine, and you can download the data for your own analysis, not much need for hacking. Or is there..).

Its a very nicely thought out device, it ‘just works’, and the fitbit website has a decent dashboard to graph your steps, calories, miles traveled, even sleep patterns if you use the included wrist strap at night (which I have been, mostly). There is even a Perl Module to grab the data from the website (I plan to use the sample script to download my own data; after all; if their service is free, and they’ve sold me the Fitbit, how long can it keep going (this is perhaps a flaw in the Quantified Self model, but more on that below)? They do have premium subscriptions, and regularly announce new products, so it seems likely for a while, but, anyway, its my data, so..

The only complain I would have is that the Fitbit needs a cradle to Sync and charge, and a small sync deamon. As detailed on this page, the security is a little lacking, possibly due to the decision to allow any cradle to sync any fitbit (it can do this wirelessly). I was expecting to be able to buy spare cradle’s, but, not that I can see, which precludes me having one at home and one at work. Bit annoying. Fitbit obviously realised this as they’ve launched the FitBit Zip, a version of the Fitbit that doesn’t require a cradle and can sync to phones (perhaps via NFC? Or wireless, like their scales..)

The open source community seems pretty active (particularly the OpenYou project) around the device, which means a non fitbit.com client can’t be far away, should this worry you, or require you to use tools you don’t approve of.

So, its been over three months now, so what have I learned? Well, first of all, its noticeable that time with a toddler at the weekend means I have no problems making the 10,000 step daily target, and that I struggle to do so on a work day, especially if its been one with more coding! So far so fairly obvious.
I notice that, when I do make the 10k target, I feel tired, so that if I was expecting do be doing a lot more running around, I need to be in better shape!
The sleep timer has showed me that, far from the insomniac I thought I was, I’m asleep within 5 mins, on average, and awake at least once in the night, something I’ve got no conscious memory of.

Since getting the FitBit, I’ve also found something that looks to be an open source equivalent, with even more sensors, the EZ430-Chronos watch from TI. This has accelerometers, temperature monitor, integrated wireless for heart monitor etc, and a wireless interface to a PC. There’s plenty of Open Source code for it, too, with uses from a fitbit-alike, to using the wireless as a door opener and RFID personal item finder! I’ve added it to my Gadgets list, but as I’ve not done anything with the RasberryPI I’ve got (yet), I’m not rushing out to buy it, even at the insanely cheap price of £35! I mean, you can’t buy many normal digital watches for that!

Of course, once you start getting reports on your calorie burning, you start to wonder how much you’re consuming. I tried a couple of Apps and websites, including the Fitbit one, but finally settled on MyFitnessPal.com, as it has iPhone/iPad, Android and web clients, all of which are best for different things. The Android client, for example, has a barcode scanner which makes entering purchased food easily. All of them allow you to enter meals you’ve made yourself, but that’s quite laborious. Fortunately, other people have often done something similar, so you can use that, and guess (which I also tend to do with the portion size). This means my recording is not quite as accurate as it could be, but hey, its better than nothing. MyFitnessPal also links with the FitBit site, so you can feed the movement data from the Fitbit into their site to get an accurate report of how many calories you can consume without going over your consumption ‘limit’.

I’ve found I’m a lot more aware of my eating habits since doing this, and have tended to eat slightly less, and certainly hold back on more food if I’m near my limit. Its also made me realise my portion sizes didn’t need to be as big as they were, so I’ve been able to cut back a bit. Overall, that’s lead to a weight loss of 7kg. Not huge, but hey, its in the right direction, and I think, sustainable.

All of this is a good example of ‘The Quantified Self’, something I’ve read a fair amount about in Fitness For Geeks and ‘64 Things‘.
An example of the Quantified Self approach is this OReilly conference talk summary, or you can go to QuantifiedSelf.com.

Basically, its using data about how you live your life to do more of what you want to be doing, and take better control. Lets see what I’m still doing in a year!

64 things

by Ben Hammersley

Been a fan of his writing for a while, even if he’s been a bit too cool at times, I find his blog writing very though provoking, and looking back, its informed a number of my approaches over the years. His OReilly book on RSS is still my go-to example of a well laid out book with all the information you need and no more.

Knew this was coming out, and leafed through the hardback in Heffers. One of the ‘things’, on the ’100 things’ ‘movement’, kept coming back to me, and I ended up buying it on Kindle over the holiday to get the meme out of my head. That only slightly worked, as I’ve been thinking about it ever since, particularly in light of Bruce Sterling’s ‘Viridian manifesto‘, which I guess inspired that. I find the challenge impractical on so many levels (not to mention example of a ‘first world problem’), but the minimalism draws me.

Good stuff, quite thought provoking, but light on detail on everything, with a conspicuous lack of footnotes or citations to back his assertions up. Not sure if it was aimed at digital policy makers, those struggling to come to terms to terms with the internet, or what.

Still, a good read, which I suspect I will be coming back to. I suspect that I shall get a lot more meat out of Stephenson’s ‘Some Remarks’, which I shall also purchase real soon, even with the offer of a loan. Then again, I have *so many* technical and non-fiction eBooks to get through, I’m having trouble justifying what I know will be a worthwhile read.

On the subject of reading on the Kindle App on the iPad, I enjoyed the experience slightly more than the other reading apps, and the note-taking was slightly easier, with the inbuilt dictionary being useful a few times. I made a load of notes and highlights, but cannot find a way to get them out of the App (edit; there are some here, but that’s not friendly.. edit[2] log into kindle.amazon.co.uk and get them from there, apparently (only at time of writing, no notes are shown, which implies my App isn’t uploading them, gr…, and of course a hardware kindle has them on its ‘usb drive’), so its back to good old faithful GoodReader.

Where to buy eBooks?

That’s DRM free legal ones, that is.

Answering this question for a friend on Twitter, I thought I’d posted my links here, but evidently not, so;

Technical

OReilly (specifically their ‘deal of the day‘)

Safari (also OReilly, but subscription with ‘tokens’ for chapter downloads – not signed up for this yet, but really should based on how much I’ve spent on their ‘deal of the day’)

Safari (via the Cambridge Library, if you have a library card)

Fiction

Fictionwise – the first people to do commercial DRM free eBooks of living authors, from way back when.  Most new content contains DRM these days, but they have a lot of out-of-print and short story stuff at reasonable prices – I’m still reading my way through the stuff I bought there..

Webscription – a number of publishers use this as their portal, and it seems to do most formats (crucially, epub, mobi and PDF)

Some others that might be of use, but I’ve not used, and you can’t get the latest ‘blockbuster’ from..

Feedbooks; not read anything from them, but linked via Aldiko.

Genre Specific – go by recommendation only; drivethrurpg.com RPG related works inc fiction (checkout Eclipse Phase and Shadowrun for examples)

Mixed – both Fiction & Reference

Archive.org/openlibrary.org (the latter has some interesting proposals for DRM-aided lending eBooks that I haven’t fully explored yet  -and may not as its Win/Mac only due to the dreadful Adobe Digital Editions)

Project Gutenberg – the original eBook project digitising out of print texts.  I recently bittorrentted (as they encourage, and I left the torrent open for a couple of weeks to give something back) the DVD they make available of all their books – 7.8GB of text!

eBook friendly publishers

Tor – they often do free downloads of authors works inc commissioning short stories (and when launched gave away loads of eBooks); worth keeping an eye on.

Night Shade Books (via webscription, above)

eBook friendly Authors

Cory Doctorow – one of the first; you can often find eBook apps like Stanza and Alkido with sections to download his works, as they;re all Creative Commons licensed. He also writes some though provoking commentary on the eBook market, including some columns in Publishers weekly that are worth seeking out (but also see below)

Charles Stross – well worth reading his blog for his thoughts on the industry and technology.

John Scalzi

Robin Sloan – I particularly recommend downloading his ‘Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-​​Four-​​Hour Book Store’

eBook podcasts

The Dragon Page – Cover to cover; slightly cheesy but usually has interesting information each week, and at least one of the hosts makes money from fiction eBooks.

eBook software

Calibre – eBook management; works on all three OS’s, handles all file formats

Aldiko – Android eBook reader with built in download sites & options fro free/creative commons books

Stanza – iPhone (Ios I suppose I should say) client similar to the above; now ceased development because (IIRC) they were bought by Amazon and it became the Kindle App.

Cambridge Hackspace?

Listening to the Ubuntu UK podcast interview the founder of the London Hackspace, I thought what a great idea it was and how cool it would be to have one in Cambridge.  Looking at the Hackspace Uk organisers web page, it looks like plans for one are already in progress with 111 people signed up as interested parties.  I’m following them on Twitter, so looking forward to any progress..

Motorolla Milestone (aka Droid)

This is Motorolla’s grab at the iPhone crown, and their top-end smartphone. Of course, as soon as I bought it, Google announced the Nexus One, due 5th Jan, but that’s tech for you..

This was my xmas present to myself.  A little extravagant, but I’ve come to realise how useful a one handed computer with speaker can be when Fred-sitting, and the G1, bless it, was definitely an early adopter device (on an unrelated note, I have an excellent T-Mobile G1 – unlocked – available for sale..). I realised I loved the Android OS, but hated the phone itself – battery life was poor, even with the extended battery I bought (which turns it into a brick), I rarely got 2 days.  The brain dead design decision to make the headphone socket require a mini-USB adaptor means I always had to carry converters (I’ve got several now), and the sound quality was never excellent.  I ended up rooting it to get the ability to use it as a 3G modem with Wifi and Bluetooth tethering – a very useful tool, that I use on about a monthly basis (well, did until I got a work laptop with a 3G card and the work 3G Blackberry tethered (works out the box on Linux and Windows 7 with the bluetooth DUN profile – why cannot all other manufacturers do this?)).  I even put a custom firmware on to give new features – but it was clear that technical limitations meant the G1 wouldn’t be getting Android 2.0.

Upgrade was super easy with MyBackupPro which dumps SMS, playlists and similar ephemera to the SD card (and because its Linux under the hood, can be cron jobbed to do so on a regular basis), and DoggCatcher (my podcast client), which can backup and restore its config (including current listening position in files!) to SD card.  Once that was done I just swapped the card.

Once again I went through the Android device initial sync with Google pain (although you don’t have to with Android 2.0/Eclair – you can be Google Free if you want), which is where it gives you the option to set the time, including a ‘get from network’ option.  If you chose this, it doesn’t get/set the time, and the connection to google fails (probably because the SSL can’t negotiate a handshake as it thinks its 1970..).  Once you set the time manually, its all smooth sailing.

Apps I installed immediately;

  1. Aldiko (Open Source eBook reader with capability to download purchases from Orielly eBook shelf)
  2. Astrid (Open Source GTD app)
  3. Barcode Scanner (required for Shop Savvy and v. cool)
  4. DoggCatcher (Podcast client and player – I use this to download all my podcasts direct these days)
  5. EasyChess
  6. Musical Pro (Metronome, tuner and assorted ‘instruments’
  7. MyTracks (GPS recorder and running tool)
  8. MyBackupPro (see above)
  9. NewsRob (Google Reader offline client for RSS feeds)
  10. Nru (cool positional lastminute.com client)
  11. Retro Defense (Desktop Tower Defence game)
  12. Scrobble Droid (last.fm integration with music player)
  13. Shop Savvy (scan barcodes and find local prices, web prices etc)
  14. Swift (Twidroid not available for Milestone it seems, but this is actually a better Twitter client)
  15. Wikitude (Augmented Reality Wikipedia App. V cool)

Most impressed with the ‘Phone Portal’ app that Motorolla have bundled – gives a web app that can be accessed via wifi to be able to add/remove/manipulate contacts, appontments, music etc – runs fine in Firefox 3.5 in Linux!

When connected via USB, you have four choices; sync, windows sync, mount card and no action (just charging I presume).  When selecting sync, you get the very promising;

Dec 30 17:29:21 UncertianGuest kernel: [21711.212133] usb 1-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 32
Dec 30 17:29:21 UncertianGuest kernel: [21711.345245] usb 1-3: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
Dec 30 17:29:21 UncertianGuest kernel: [21711.425120] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_acm
Dec 30 17:29:21 UncertianGuest kernel: [21711.425128] cdc_acm: v0.26:USB Abstract Control Model driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters

Nothing else appeared, no magic 3G modems in Network Manager, so I may have to go digging into HCIConfig, or whatever the hell Linux/Ubuntu is using this week to manage its devices – expertise with this much appreciated!

(Update: just googled, and there is loads out there, just not as easy as the old WifiTether – this is a marked improvment on even a few weeks ago, when I had run the search prior).

Also comes with the Motorolla SatNav application MotoNav, which I’m looking forward to putting through its places.  I went all out and also bought the car kit and cradle as well, but Expansys had no stock of the latter and mucked up shipping of the former by only shipping the cradle, no suction mount etc (The nice customer services lady said they’d had trouble with this before xmas and would ship me the remaining bits, but they haven’t turned up today..), so until I have the car kit I won’t be trialling the satnav.  Also, its a ‘two months free’ type service IIRC, which we’ll have to see about, since I have a perfectly good Garmin Nuvi 310…

Hardware wise much nicer.  The keyboard is just as usable, although the delete key is uncomfortably near the top edge of the case, so I keep hitting enter instead.  Battery appears as good(?) as the G1 with the extended battery, but then the touchscreen is larger and (joy of joys) multitouch.  Battery management tools built in tell me that its the display that’s used all of the power – I used it on 3G a lot inside buildings today researching Fob watches (another story), so am not surprised the battery is now low.

Its slimmer than the G1, although feels heavier, but MUCH sturdier.

Bluetooth has OBEX push I think, which is new  to go along with the preexisting stereo headset profiles  although I’ve not scanned the profiles yet..

5mp camera – haven’t uploaded any photos yet, so the jury is still out (and I’m not the worlds best photographer)..

In the last couple of days, the jailbreaking procedure to gain root has been posted.  I’ll hold off for now, as Tethering was the only thing I used that for but good to know I could if I wanted.

In Conclusion;

Its not an iPhone beater, because Android still doesn’t have the user at its heart, but if you like being able to muck around with your phone, or want one that ‘just works’ while avoiding Apple this is the best I’ve found..

Right..that’s enough detail for now – managed to stay awake to see the new year in, I think!  Happy New year All!

My MythTV Setup

About three weeks ago, my DVD recorder died.  I was pretty grumpy, as it cost ~£100, even if it was a ‘cheapie’ from ASDA, and it will take millennia to decompose.  Also, I was playing CD’s via it and it had the irritating habit of switching the audio to whatever tv channel it was tuned to whenever the CD finished – pretty jarring.  So rather than buy a new DVD recorder and CD player to integrate into my home AV setup, I thought I’d build myself a MythTV box, which would also allow me to pause live tv, use a live programme guide, etc.  I approached this with some trepidation, since MythTV is rumoured to be a pig to setup.

Short version of this; got it working, fantastic promise, but woeful documentation and still much promise unrealised.  But what it can do, oh boy!

My set-up;

Samsung SyncMaster T200HD (already bought previously from the nice people at RicherSounds.co.uk)

Yamaha Amp (Nine years old now with only RCA and optical in – anything new I’d buy would have HDMI interface these days)

ASRock IONSTAR Atom 330 Nettop PC (White, as the black was out of stock and not likely to come back in stock at the same price, according to the nice man @LinITX)

Hauppauge Nova-T Stick

RF Wireless Mini Keyboard with Touchpad

I bought the Nova-T first, because it was £25 in PCWorld, and if I couldn’t get it working I hadn’t shelled out too much.

First of all, I plugged it into my Acer Aspire One netbook, and installed the Myth Backend and Myth Frontend packages.  After about three hours mucking around I got the setup to  view live Tv and another couple of hours got recording working.  The most difficult thing I found was not the hardware but MythTV itself – the Nova-T was recognised by the 9:04 Ubuntu desktop install I had on the netbook.  Random parts of the IR remote that came with the USB stick worked, but not completely enough to be useful.  This was the last time the remote worked, and I’ve since given up on it.

Having proved the concept, I went shopping for the bits.  I wanted something that was as likely to work together, and fit together as easily as possible, but also small and quiet.  LinITX have been great on this in the past, so that was my first port of call, as all the stuff is most likely to work with Linux.  I ended up with the ASRock because it came with everything built in – including HDMI, and optical out, which was something of a surprise.  The downside was that there was no room in the box for a PCI style card (the usual way to do the TV tuner card, as the USB ones were historically flaky – this advice now seems superseded)- that’s OK, its one of the reasons I bought the USB one, but its one more thing that can get disconnected.

The box, when it arrived, is tiny – even smaller than the Shuttle PC’s.  Its not quite entirely silent, but its certainly no louder than my DVD recorder was if left on standby, and no complaints from A, the cats or Fred!

I installed Mythbuntu 9.10 – risky given it was days after the release, but the OS went on smoothly, autoconfiguring a number of useful things, such as VNC, SSH, Samba access and prompting me that restricted source drivers were available (I’m sorry, I went for them.  Can’t say it made that much of a difference, though), and kicking off the MythTV setup.

Setting up a working MythTV session is a lot of guesswork and headscratching, not everything is logged to the /var/log/mythtv/mythbackend file (or similar files in that dir), there are no manual pages for the Myth programs (but are for their perl scripts that pull in the listing data – bizarre), and the myth setup forces you to do all the work in the graphical frontend – which promptly didn’t scroll the output, so for interactive pages, it appeared to have hung.  Major bug and PITA – I had to google for ways to turn off the full-screen aspect of the applications to regain mouse control on the ‘scroll bars’.  You might be able to run these scripts manually – but good luck finding out what they are, or where, or how to invoke them.  Its all possible, but you need to read the output, and the logs, and the commands with –help to get an idea of what is going on.

Myth backends are basically three parts; the TV tuner selection (mostly painless if you can see it with dmesg or lspci/lsusb etc), allowing you to have multiple tuners (nice touch, elegant, but introduces a lot of complexity), the channel selection (what channels are available, and wheer you get the listings information), and tying the two together.  Yes, the last is a manual step, and the most likely to go wrong, in my experience.

The second, listings data is what caused me the largest amount of problems.  The MythTV box was up and running within a couple of hours, but it took another week of late night hacking to get the listings data to both appear on screen, and in the schedule database (this worked fine in 9.04, perhaps bugs were introduced in the 9.10 version?).  The idea is you get the listings data from either over the air info, or another xml source.  I ended up needing to configure mine to get both – as with just the EIT (over the air), there was no schedule info for recordings, and with just the XML (from the Radio Times, thank you Auntie Beeb!), there was no listings info on the interface.  Most bizzare.

Useful command to read the help for here is mythfilldatabase – use the ‘-v all’ flag, and watch the output closely.  Also, check your ~/.mythtv directory contents.  If your Mythfilldatabase is failing every night, try running it with the –update flag, and again, watching the output closely (there’s a lot).  I had to delete the ‘community channel’ (whatever that is) from my channels file as the xmltv perl modules have a bug in the Mythbuntu 9.10 release that errored out on this (which caused the whole process to fail with non-obvious errors).  Developers!  I should not have to consider running strace on your app!  Use syslog, FFS!

Websites & tutorials that were helpful were;

MythTV Ubuntu Installation Guide (This is what got me started and pointed me at helpful docs – thanks!)

‘Ethics Gradient’s guie t MythTV DVB setup (gotta love another Iain Banks fan!)

‘Mythic Beasts’ MythTV Setup

The Ubuntu Forums (I never actually posted a question, but felt I could have done, other people had had similar problems).

Don’t bother with the MythTV site – the documentation used a custom HTML presentation that takes up a third of the screen with useless borders, and gives you no diagnostic info, and makes lots of assumptions as to your knowledge.

So what’s cool about it?

Well, having a box that records live TV, can have multiple tuners, and records TV programs in a format I can copy off and watch on the laptop, with a pretty GUI that A. can use, that also plays DVD’s is cool in and of itself.

Its open source, so at least I *can* troubleshoot it.

There are a number of cool keys to control aspects of playback if you’re using a keyboard. Most people use some kind of media centre remote, but the keyboard works find for us now.  I have a bluetooth remote on order that should relegate the keyboard to advanced functions only (don’t recommend the keyboard I bought actually, the RF interface is lossy/subject to interference – last thing you need when trying to type terminal commands and not having every key press register..).

Built in ad detection and a keypress to skip – works too!

Records both TV and Radio.

MythMusic plugin – can import to Ogg, mp3 or FLAC – seriously thinking about re-importing all my worthwhile music as FLAC.  playlist functionality takes a little getting used to, but better with MythWeb (see below).  Seriously needs a playlist importing tool.  Album art appears to be broken – I copied across a load of FLAC I’d added art to, that it didn’t see.  The Myth Docs for this are actually pretty good.

MythBackup plugin – save programs to DVD, to play in any DVD player (not tested this).

MythVideo – play any video files you might have around the place (say, DivX..).

Backend/frontend seperation.  You can install just the frontend, point it at an existing backend, and use it over the network, inc streaming.  Not tried this, interested to over VPN..

Remote controllable via telnet interface – there is a Android app for this, amongst others.  Had issues getting it working, so stay tuned (hah!  See what I did there?).

DVD import -  not tested this yet, but should be able to rip DVD’s into the internal video library like you would a CD.

MythWeb – this turns the whole experience from great to awesome.  An HTTP interface that allows you to control the box, book & delete recordings,stream or download recorded progams or music.  Makes searching the listings & booking easier than using the remote, not that that is particularly hard.  Can be password protected (although this means the http user/pass is needed for every streaming file – a problem in a music playlist), so I may make this available via the router for use outside the home..

MythExport -  a plugin that transcodes the files into mp3/ogg, or iPod sized video if requested after the program is recorded and creates an RSS feed for the resulting file.  Having problems getting this working, but sweet if it does – all those Radio 4 programs I miss because BBC doesn’t podcast them yet, I can grab and create my own podcast feed of!

MythVodka – a plugin that is a wrapper around iPlayer.  Again, not got this working (but not tried yet), so…

Its a server in its own right.  So I can run podcastamatic on it, use screen for multiple remote sessions, and generally do anything I can with a Linux desktop.

Elonex eBook Reader

I was bought this for my birthday, as I have a collection of ebooks from when I read them on my palm pilot (although that page is out of date, I recommend Calibre these days, a GPL program originally conceived to manage Sony eReaders), mostly via Fictionwise, and a load of PDF’s I want to read (a quick find command tells me I have over 650 in my documents – not all will be books etc of course); some technical, most not.

I’d been looking at the Sony reader for a while, but the reviews were mixed, and, typically Sony, mostly used DRM, from what I could make out, or required conversions.  Then Borders came out with the eBook.  The excellent Mobileread wiki page says it reads epub & text (same as the FBReader program I have on my Android G1), HTML and PDF.  Borders itself sells ebooks in the (hurrah) unencrypted ebook format (45,000 apparently)

Not much comes in the box; the ebook itself and a charger (also charges from USB apparently; yay!).  An add-on pack is available which includes a case and a 4GB SD card (not that I can find it on their website).

SD card; yes its expandable and can take cards up to 4GB.  Doesn’t sound much, but I put in a 512MB one I had spare, and I’ve got 14 ebooks on, about half graphic rich PDF, the entire pdf technical documentation for our NetApp and Procurve switchs, and there is still room left.  epub, HTML and text ebooks are of course very small – the entire 170 ebook collection I’ve bought from Fictionwise comes to about 10MB, compressed. Plus, of course I have the 100 ebooks it came with (mostly out of copyright stuff, standard Project Gutenburg fare) – the internal memory can ‘take up to 1000 ebooks’ (512MB, apparently); I’ve not plugged it into the computer to know for sure, but it uses a mini-USB cable, which bodes well.

What’s to like;

Well, first impressions are very light (180g apparently), very slim and rather attractive in charcoal grey.  Not so thin that it feels fragile; I’ve had it in my work bag for three days with no worries, but I’ll probably buy the jacket anyway.

So, how does it work;

Boot time is slow from power on, it runs some kind of Linux kernel and it probably takes a minute to turn on – not great.  It does, however, remember the place of any book you started reading.  It also uses the folder structure on the SDCard; useful for organising the collection.  There’s a search function, but I’ve not played with it.  It being greyscale, the battery appears to last forever.  Not as good as the Kindle’s design of always on text that only changes when you turn a page, but then not only are they not available in the UK, but Amazon is getting extremely dodgy with the DRM it uses on them.

The eBook renders PDF very well on its greyscale screen.  The NetApp superb documentation articles look crisp and are an excellent demo to show people, as well as being easy to read – many pages of dense technical text means I’d been printing them out; even two to a page, double sided, this wastes a lot of paper; its almost as nice reading them on-screen – the lack of colour doesn’t  detract.  More colour PDF’s such as the Citizen Engineer guide to SIM hacking, render slightly less well, but then, they contain photos etc, so its to be expected in greyscale, and are still perfectly readable.

I expect to be reading a fair amount of PDF’s on this, so I’ll report back.  First up is likely to be Steven Brusts Firefly fanfic; My Own Kind Of Freedom, which I’ve fancied reading, but never fancied sitting down at the computer to read..