The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Alex Vdovichenko, developer of TequilaCat Bookreader (TCBR) kindly sent me an email a few weeks back with instructions on reading rotated text with TCBR.

You’ll need to create a new JAR file for your mobile phone (see previous post) with the following additions.

1. Add Windows Font - only Windows fonts can be rotated
2. Click on Font Direction button (last button) to rotate the font 90 degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise
3. Change font properties as desired - I recommend MS San Serif size 16 and inverted colors with white text on a black background
4. Change midlet name to something like TequilaCatRotated so that the application will not install over your existing installation. Using the same name requires you to delete the existing application data which probably means that your bookmarks are gone
5. Install on your mobile phone and you’re all done!

Since the GetText utility used by TCBR supports HTMLs but not compiled HTML files in the CHM format, users may want to manually convert their CHM files to TXT using this freeware Text Mining Tool.

© Text-Mining-Tool.com

The Text Mining Tool has some quirks though as listed below.

• Unzipping the application in a folder with a extremely long pathname will cause it to fail when processing certain CHMs. Since internal HTML files in the CHM are extracted and written to the application folder, the resultant length of the pathname of these files may exceed Windows limit and cause a writing failure
• Unhandled HTML entities e.g — (probably Unicode characters) are left in the output text file. It’s only a minor annoyance which can probably be solved with some programming or search-and-replace.

Download TequilaCat BookReader or Text Mining Tool.

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Read Books on Your Mobile Phone with TequilaCat BookReader
Foxit Reader vs PDF-XChange Viewer vs Sumatra
Lifehacker.com - Productivity and Software Guide
Lone Wolf Gamebooks - Internet Editions
Before You Know It Lite - Free Virtual Flashcards for 63 languages

Another electronic music toy, Tony-B is the brainchild of a French flash developer with the same name.

You get synthesized melodies, bass and percussion (snares, hi-hats, kickdrums) with some early 90’s techno/electro soundbites (try pressing R for that classic C+C Music Factory’s Everybody Dance Now sample) as well as some nifty EFX which you can activate via Street Fighter like controls (Down,Right,Left,Up) for the Thunder Break snare roll or (Up,Down,Up,Down) for Extreme Danger sirens.

© www.tony-b.org

The Tony-B machine boasts a very well-designed and intuitive interface where everything can be accessed either via the keyboard or the mouse (or both for optimal effect). Switch the instruments on and off by pressing the number keys, play the keyboard via the ASDFGHJKL; keys for the standard QWERTY keyboard layout (it also supports the AZERTY keyboards used in France and Belgium) and trigger the sound samples with the QWERTYUIOP keys.

© www.tony-b.org

Check out my 3 minutes track (2.90 MB) recorded with Audacity. It doesn’t exactly show off the full power of the Tony-B machine since my reflexes suck when attempting to control all the instruments, samples and the EFX simultaneously but it should give you an good idea of the style of audio generated by this marvellous little Flash toy.

Start creating your own track with the Tony-B Machine. You might want to read what each of the sound samples correspond to over at the official site before playing around with it.

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Saiko - Cool Electronic Music Generator
Be Your Own One Man Band
Takuya Kashiwada @ Under Water Bar Praha

Foxit Reader has been my PDF viewer of choice since version 1.2 - I still remember keeping multiple builds of versions 1.2 and 1.3 of Foxit Reader as some builds could miraclously open PDFs that would crash other builds upon loading. Thankfully, the current version 2.2 of Foxit Reader is much more robust in terms of PDF support but is no longer the most dominant alternative PDF viewer as it was one to two years back during the time of Adobe Acrobat Reader 6/7.

I’ll run through the pros and cons of other alternative PDF viewers that I use. I prefer to use only viewers that do not require installation since I also use them on my thumbdrive for troubleshooting docs at work, so there’re going to be some glaring omissions in this list like Adobe Acrobat Reader 8 Also, I hardly print out PDFs so I can’t comment on print quality and such.

If you’re only viewing small, predominantly text PDF documents, any of the PDF readers below will suffice but I notice quite a bit of performance differences when it comes to larger PDFs, especially those which are basically a sequence of scanned pages or digital images. I have therefore elected to use the free 73MB official Bioshock artbook as the test PDF.

Foxit Reader

PDF-XChange Viewer

Sumatra

Interface
1. Sumatra 0.8
2. PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0
3. Foxit Reader 2.2

Sumatra has the most spartan interface of all with options like page sizing and page layout (single page / continuous, etc) only available via the menu. If you don’t dabble with page sizing and page layout that often, you’ll appreciate the uncluttered interface and extra screen space over the multiple toolbars of PDF-XChange Viewer and Foxit Reader.

Although PDF-XChange Viewer and Foxit Reader are freeware, the additional unlockable features (with a paid license, of course) clutter the screen with extra toolbars which are unnecessary for most users and eat up valuable screen space which means you scroll more (although you can always switch to full screen mode).

While I love and use Foxit Reader the most, I give its interface the thumbs down for its strange default omission of the status bar (page layout, page number and navigation).

Loading Speed
1. Foxit Reader 2.2
2. PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0034
3. Sumatra 0.8

Foxit is significantly faster than the other two both when loading the viewer application itself as well as for the actual PDF file itself.

Rendering Speed
1. Foxit Reader 2.2
2. PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0034
3. Sumatra 0.8

In terms of rendering, Foxit Reader is definitely faster and most responsive of the three. PDF-XChange Viewer is almost as fast with Sumatra being the slowest of all three. Unchecking Use MuPDF rendering engine under View for Sumatra does speed up rendering quite a lot at the expense of slight loss in image quality.

The advantage of PDF-XChange Viewer is that previously viewed pages render the fastest (cached?) while the other two viewers have to re-render the pages. This is very evident when rapidly scrolling through the PDF.

Rendering Quality

I would say that the render quality very much depends on personal preferences so I’ll just let you decide on the screen captures instead. Below is a comparision of the rendered text - I would say Sumatra offers the best text rendering IMHO.

Foxit Reader

PDF-XChange Viewer

Sumatra

Configuration
1. PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0
2. Foxit Reader 2.2
3. Sumatra 0.8

PDF-XChange Viewer allows you to adjust the CPU and memory resources for the viewer which seems to be a good thing (although I haven’t seen much difference in rendering speed, perhaps with a more powerful computer …)

Foxit Reader has very basic configuration settings, the most important which is Page Display > Display text optimized for LCD screen which will probably make the text display on LCD screens more readable. I’m using a CRT and selecting this makes it worse, of course

Sumatra’s configuration options are as spartan as its interface. Unchecking View > Use MuPDF rendering engine will provide a boost to rendering speed at the expense of a slight reduction of visual quality.

If you prefer a more scientific comparision (loading time, memory usage, etc) of 8(!) different PDF viewers, you’ll probably find this thread @ the DonationCoder forums very useful.

At the moment, I would recommend Foxit Reader 2.2 as THE alternative PDF viewer of choice although Sumatra PDF is a worthy contender given enough development time and resources (it’s still at version 0.8 at the moment). Since PDF X-Change Viewer’s strength is in its caching of rendered pages, consider it the best option if you view scanned pdfs on a regular basis

Download Foxit Reader 2.2, PDF-XChange Viewer 2.0 or Sumatra PDF 0.8.

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Recently installed the J2ME text file reader, TequilaCat Book Reader, on my mobile phone to kill time during my daily commutes to work. Highly recommended for avid readers except if you’re driving of course

Download TequilaCat Book Reader from Alexey Vdovichenko (aka TequilaCat)’s website, which is essentially a Windows application to create the necessary .jar file to install the actual Book Reader onto your mobile phone.

Select your phone model from the list (choose MIDP 2.0 + JSR75 if you have a fairly modern model which supports flash cards) and click on the first button which reads Build to generate .jar and .jad files in the test subfolder in the TequilaCat BookReader installation folder. Copy these files to your mobile phone together with some text files, install and you’re all set

Before that you might want to embed some books into the text viewer (necessary for older phones which do not have a file system) by clicking on Add Book. Multiple text files can be embedded into the .jar file and if you need to add books in Word or PDF format, install Kryloff Technologies’ GetText utility - read the detailed instruction manual or the shorter FAQ on the usage of Book Reader.

Embedding books into the Book Reader is actually optional if you have a modern mobile phone as you can simply load your text files into flash card and browse to them from the Book Reader application on your phone.

Some useful options to tweak when using TequilaCat Book Reader:

Settings -> Wrap : I find that text formatted by option 5. Like TiBR to produce the most readable text for my phone with option 6. Justify By Width a close runner up.
Settings -> Fonts : I prefer a black background with white text so I checked 5. Use phone colors. There’re three different fonts sizes by default so cycle through them via the Prev. font and Next. font options.
Settings -> Scroll bar : If you find the scroll bar distracting like I do, you have the option of hiding it here.
Settings > Scroll options : If lines are being cut off when you scroll by page, you might need to check 1. Show incomplete line and/or 2. Leave one line.

You can also change these options in the Windows application before you build the actual .jar file.

The current position of each text file that you read is saved by TequilaCat Book Reader when you load another text file or exit the application so you can read different text files as and when you see fit. Right now I’m alternating between Jules Verne’s classic 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea downloaded via Project Gutenberg (subscribe to their RSS of newly added and updated ebooks), Jeff Head’s free techno thriller Dragon’s Fury and even the Ableton Live 6 LE manual.

My current reading List

TequilaCat Book Reader also supports handy functions to keylock your phone within the application as well as show your current progress via Info - Show Book Info.

Another Java-based textreader, ReadManiac, has the ability to rotate the text to read in landscape mode which is definitely useful, but I much prefer the text justification and formatting features of TequilaCat BookReader.

Download Tequila BookReader 2.28.

Despite the fact that attempting to load more than five MySpace pages simulatenously is often enough to make my trusty Opera browser gag and sputter, I still find myself browsing to the MySpace pages of electronic music artists simply because it’s still usually the first place to listen to the latest unsigned releases (e.g drum & bass dubplates) as well as bootleg remixes (especially breaks and techno)

In order to download them from MySpace for offline listening, I use the freeware Orbit Downloader which comes with a nifty Grab++ feature which allows you to download embedded media like Flash (more on playing Flash games offline), MP3s and videos from most web pages. Orbit Downloader has a comprehensive list of tutorials for downloading embedded media from other sites such as YouTube, Google Video and MetaCafe.

Simply launch Grab++ - remember to set it to monitor your browser - Opera is not monitored by default under Action > Preferences… > Monitoring (below), wait for the MySpace page and player to load completely before playing the track you wish to download in the MySpace player.

The Grab++ window will refresh automatically when any embedded streaming media files are are loaded. Check the file (all MP3s on MySpace are prefixed with std_), click Download and the file will be transferred to Orbit Downloader for download. For MySpace pages, you do require a sufficiently fast connection as the MP3s are loaded from the cache servers which have quite a short timeout - however cable and DSL users should only occassionally encounter timeouts.

While there can be no doubt that downloading a track commercially available as a physical record or CD or as a MP3 download is S.T.E.A.L.I.N.G, there exists a grey area when lovely tracks like Am De Sa’s unsigned drum & bass track Looking Glass (first heard on Elle Rollo’s Mature Sound Mixtape 3) is neither available as a download or on vinyl. In this case, the only way to get a personal copy (until the MP3 or vinyl version comes out) is to grab it from MySpace.

BTW, tracks in the MySpace player are encoded at 96 kbs, 22050 Hz, stereo MP3s. While they’re definitely not something you want (or should) be playing on a powerful soundsystem, they’re still useful for collectors like me since electronic music tracks come and go very quickly especially for unreleased tracks.

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