Author Archives: spgennard - Page 10

Review of iRiver Story firmware update

Posted by on January 17, 2010 Comments Off

Since installing the latest firmware update aka version 1.5.   I have experience the odd issue but as I have tried to be analytical about what issues I see.

I have been lucky enough to be reading a couple of books from O’Reilly which deliver their eBooks in multiple formats, as the iRiver supports both ePub and PDF.  I have chosen to install both versions of the same book, so if I experience a issue with one I can flip to the other.

Here is what I have found so far:

  • Reading of PDF seems to be the most reliable
  • Reading of ePub documents seems to very slow in comparison
  • PDF reading can be pain with small text, reflow helps but destroys technical book formats that has embedded code in it
  • Battery life is much better

I have had a couple of crashes/hangs of the iRiver but so far it has only been with ePub files.  So guess what… I will be avoiding them like the plague.

Has other people had the similar issues?

MacBook keyboard pains and VirtualBox/VMWare

Posted by on January 9, 2010 6 comments

As a MacBook user who has used Virtualisation on the mac for sometime now but only usually with Linux based OS, I was forced to use it with Windows recently and I quickly found out how badly it handles UK Macbook keyboards.

The default UK keyboard mapping on a MacBook are pretty much useless when using Virtual PC emulators such VirtualBox or VMWARE.

With this in mind, have produced a custom keyboard layout which maps all the keys to right place.

The only two exceptions are the two OPT keys, which I could only managed to map them to ALT-n keys, so the alternative mapping for these are:

€ aka left OPT 2 is mapped to right ALT 2

# aka left OPT 3 is mapped to right ALT 3

To use the customer keyboard mapping, download the .zip, unzip it.. and click on mbkbd\setup.exe and it will install the custom keyboard called “United Kindom – MacBook – Custom“.

And this me using it… boy did this make more productive!

This a screen shot me trying it out… :-)

(link fixed)

Olympus E-P1 Flash promotion for European customers

Posted by on January 3, 2010 Comments Off

Today I got opened up ,y Amateur Photography magazaine and found an advert for a free flash for people who have purchased an Olympus E-P1 over the christmas period. I personally did not purchase one but someone near and dear to me did buy one for me to use as my travel camera rather than carrying my Nikon D300 + Lenses everywhere.

The link to the Olympus website is here: http://www.olympus.co.uk/consumer/208_lighten-up_E-P1.htm.

Converting .chm’s for reading on the iriver story

Posted by on December 30, 2009 3 comments

One of the first things I wanted to read on my iriver story was the montly msdn subscription magazine which is available as a .chm. Which unfortunately the iriver story does not support, so I needed to convert it into either .pdf or .epub format.

As I am both a Mac and Windows user my choices were various from using a pdf printer on Windows to using various .chm readers on the Mac.

I first tried to use a .pdf printer on Windows but this not work due me using a 64bit version of Windows 7 and all the free pdf printers failed to either install or just simply did not work… much to my own frustration, so I turned to the Mac as this has native pdf support but did not have native .chm support! Don’t you just love computers…

On my mac I tried out various, these being:

  • Chmox
  • xchm
  • Chmosx
  • iChm

    • Again, I was meet with disappointment all of them either failed to display the embedded html in the .chm magazine (complaining about a nbsp entity) or just not displaying anything. So decided to raise a bug against the most the one I thought had the most chance of being fixed, which was the iChm application.

    So to my joy and delight the developer fixed it in version 1.4.2 and I was then able to load up the .chm, select Unicode encoding (as without this the pages did not display correctly) and then use the iChm function to export the .chm as a .pdf, copy it to the iriver story and I could then get back to reading all the years issues I had failed to read!

    So my tip for converting .chm to .pdf on the Mac is to use iChm as it works and the developer is very responsive to issues raised or was at least was for me! :-)

    iriver story – firmware upgrade

    Posted by on December 29, 2009 9 comments

    Santa was very kind to me this year, as he has treated me to an iRiver Story ebook reader.

    Hopefully this will help me become less reliant to printed books!

    The first thing I found was that the firmware had been quietly updated to version 1.5. The changes are significant enough to state them and say that I have been using them for a couple of days and are delighted by the changes, thank you iriver.

    The major changes to the firmware include:

    . New Firmware supports “Table of contents” of PDF or Epub file.
    Please press”Option”button on PDF file.
    Cutting blank space of PDF file
    -. New Firmware supports the function, Cutting blank space of PDF file.
    -. Please press Zoom button and control its size with arrow btton.
    After the size control is done, please press Enter button

    * Power Option & User font
    -. New Firmware supports “Power Option” & “Changing font”(Office file, Text file, Memo, Diary)
    -. Menu -> Settings -> Power Option or Change Font

    The minor changes are for me equally important, the last one is especially welcome :-)

    a. Move Page
    -. Please press “option” button and select “Move Page”
    You can move the page with “arrow” button.

    b. Fit to Screen of comic file
    -. Please press “option” button and select “Fit to Screen on” to fit the screen size.

    c. Auto Page Transition of comic file.
    -. Please press “option” button and select “Auto Page Transition”
    You can set auto-page speed within 3 ~ 99 seconds.

    d. Dithering function of comic file
    -. Please press “option” butoon and select “Dithering on” to enjoy high-definition screen

    e. New Firmware support “GIF file” (by 2460*1948)

    f. Playback time is imporved from 24hr(max) to 30hr(max)

    The firmware can be downloaded from the iriver lounge or quickly from here!. Remember the .hex file always goes in the top level/root directory of the iriver story, the firmware update will start once you have disconnected from your computer.

    What next? I need to sort out some content for the device… more on this later..