Kohjinsha SA1F00A

I've recently recieved a poetically named Kohjinsha SA1F00A that I bought for a friend of mine. As it isn't mine, I won't have it for long, but I did get to apply my other new toy (A Kodak D70s) and took a moneybarrel full of pictures. I've posted these pictures at Flickr (giving my Google Life a bit of a Yahoo scent...)

• Unboxing A Kohjinsha
• Comparing the Kohjinsha and a Libretto U100
• Screen Rendering Comparisons - Kohjinsha, Libretto, and Zaurus.

Back to Book Basics

One of my newest toys happens to be a Sony Librie eBook reader - a dedicated device for reading ebooks with a 6" e-ink or electronic paper display. Fascinating gadget that re-writes the rules for reading electronic texts. Problem is, unlike it's newer North American progeny - the Sony Reader - the Librie only understands one file format. Everything else must be translated to fit in the wee beastie.

Originally, Sony wasn't very forthcoming with the file format so it fell on the community to create tools for translating content. Several good utilities now exist, but they tend to be pretty simple and the output can be rather lacking at times.

There is another solution - there is a commercial product from Canon called Book Creator that seems to be the official implementation of the .LRS/.LRX standard. There is even a fully function trial version that can be used for 1 year.

There are 3 things that suck:

1. The program is Japanese only
2. Canon pulled the download early in 2006
3. It expires this month, and doesn't like to install anymore.

1 and 2 were solved by the Librie group at Yahoo. 3 is a little trickier, but - Virtual machines to the rescue! I wrote up what I went through installing a virtual version of windows that's dedicated to running Book Creator - without disturbing your real Windows distribution - all with free tools. Check it out.

Nothing to see here, move along.

The star of the Zaurus Clamshell world, Meanie, has created a beta of PDAXrom intended for use on the Zaurus SL-C3000. There are problems putting the regular PDAX on the 3k because it lacks space in flash (It was originally designed to run everything off of the HD, thus it only has 16mb of flash, vs 128mb for all the other SL-Cxx00 models). It's built on the base of the previous 2 betas of PDAX that were made for the 3k, which were based on PDAX beta 1.

Meanie has taken the 3k 2nd beta, combined it with last "stable" PDAX with the 2.4 kernel, beta 3, and made most of it work flawlessly. There are a couple of outstanding bugs, though, so I've set up a page for my notes over at SDI, The Homepage.