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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Fri, 19 Aug 2005

Zen Micro Day One
blog

Got my Creative Zen Micro yesterday in the mail... I started charging it when I got home and started playing with it after the girls went to sleep.

So far I really like it... the first thing I did was install the driver and update its firmware so it would accept Yahoo Unlimited Music files. Got that going and started a transfer of all the music I had downloaded so far from Yahoo. I think I have around 400 songs on it now which all take up around 2.5gb of the 5gb available. All of the files are from Yahoo which is pretty cool... using USB 2.0 it took around 30 minutes to transfer all the files, which wasn't too bad, especially thinking about how long it took me to fill up that much space on my old USB 1.0 PJB.

The unit itself is pretty cool... it's nice and small, but has a solid feel to it. The interface is pretty nice and I think I've already gotten pretty used to the touch controls, including main slider. I haven't tried any podcasts on it yet but I will... the bookmark function should be nice. Not sure if I'll switch to it for my podcast listening or keep using my Zaurus app.

Last night I did something in linux that I don't think I've done before... I actually ran a windows application using wine, the free windows emulator. It's a pretty simple app, it doesn't even have an installer, but soon after I typed "emerge wine" I was able to run this other app and it seems to work just fine. Gotta love linux!

And sometimes you don't... lately I've been having some issues with Firefox and X... I don't know when exactly this came about, probably after an X upgrade. Anyhow, if I hit some pages in firefox, my X server will just peg the CPU, locking up my entire session. I can login from another machine and kill it, so at least I don't have to reboot, but it's kind of annoying. It happens in my sawfish environment and an xfce environment. I think I can repeat it by hitting a gentoo wiki page (ironic), but I've been too busy/lazy to look into it more.

As part of a stop-gap, I tried out the dillo browser on my desktop. That's a browser I use regularly on my Zaurus and it does a real nice job of browing on the pda. Since I liked it there I figured I'd try it at home... and it's actually pretty nice there, too. It has near-instantaneous startup and is pretty quick rendering most pages. The main thing that is missing, though, is javascript... it's interesting to see how much some websites rely on javascript without you really paying attention to it. But if you can get by that restriction, I'd say give it a try, especially if you're on a low-resource machine or are just looking for a no-frills fast browser.

That's it for now... more of the Zen later.

Mon, 15 Aug 2005

A little bit of zen
blog

I finally decided to pull the trigger on a Creative Zen Micro. It's a 5gb mp3/wma player that also includes an FM tuner. The reason I chose the devices is that it really does support Yahoo Music Unlimited which means I'll be able to download just about any song to the device without purchasing it... legally!

It looks like a pretty nice little device... 5gb should be plenty of music. It also supports bookmarks in a file, apparently, which I'll try out for podcasts. As a bonus, starting today you can get a free extra battery via mail-in rebate which will be kind of nice. You're supposed to get around 12 hours of battery life, so I think two batteries will do me just fine.

Speaking of bookmarks... I actually just add bookmarking to my Zaurus Music Player. I just did that last night but it's already come in handy with a couple of the podcasts I listen to. Now I can safely quit my app (for a reboot or just to regain memory) and not worry about losing my place. Plus, each file has a bookmark, so I can skip around to different podcasts and not lose my place. Nice. Someday I'll actually release this thing, but if you're actually a zaurus user reading this, let me know. It's ugly but it works.

Instead of using it as a podcatcher, though, I've recently start using odeo which is an online podcast aggregator. It has a nice interface and has a syncing tool that you can use with windows and the mac. More importantly, they also have a bash script you can use with linux (and any other good OS with bash and wget) to sync up your podcasts. I've tweaked that a bit and I actually run it on my Zaurus now. I have no idea how odeo is going to make money, but so far they've been pretty cool. Plus they just got some funding so they'll be around for a little while. I'm guessing they'll get bought by someone sooner or later.

Anyhow, that's where we're at... the Zen Micro should be arriving sometime this week. Review when I get it! jason

Fri, 05 Aug 2005

My Podcatcher
blog :: zaurus

So after just a little bit of work, I've got my podcatcher up and running. I really didn't have to do all that much, although it did require compiling two python modules with the SDK provided by the pdaxrom folks. Those two compiles and a few python .ipk installs later, and I was up and running. Pretty cool.

So now I'm back to my To Do list for that app... I'm done messing around with new images -- pdaXrom seems to be the best for what I want so I'm gonna stick with it for a while. I'll update the to do list later... I'm off to read!

Screenshot
blog :: zaurus

Screenshot of my zaurus running pdaxrom. Not as fancy as some other screenshots, but it's what I use.

pdaXrom
blog :: zaurus

I finally got around to installing the X-based rom image for my C1000 called, appropriately enough, pdaXrom.

So far in one word: awesome. Two words: really cool. Yep, I think I might be a convert from either of the Opie images. Of course, the best thing about the opie images is the build system, openembedded, which allows you to select from a ton of packages to build and install on your Zaurus. I've even got my own rom image going that I've customized to what I use.

But, I'm always looking for something different. I decided to try an X-based image, GPE, last week and while it was cool, it still didn't have everything I was looking for. Nice clean interface, though, and pretty speedy response, but a bit young. Plus the C1000 support wasn't quite up to speed yet, but I was actually going to work on that.

The big issue for me, though, was the lack of a good ebook reader. Lately I've been reading more and more on my C1000 at night and after trying several different packages for GPE, I just couldn't get anything good going for ebooks.

I was about to switch back to my custom Qt-based rom (which has a real nice ebook reader, opie-reader) when I saw that a new release of the pdaXrom was available targeted specifically at the C1000.

So on it went... and I think on it will stay. I don't even know where to start talking about how cool it is. It comes out-of-the-box with a nice set of apps, including AbiWord (full-featured word processor), scite (source code editor), dillo for browsing, xmms for mp3 and ogg, gqview, etc... It's actually pretty impressive seeing abiword running on the pda.

Of course, that was one of the first things I got rid of since word processing really isn't my thing. So I dumped that, and actually got rid of scite, too, to make room for... firefox, links-g and micro-emacs. Three of my favorite apps. Actually, I'm tempted to install the full installation of xemacs, but I think that might be a waste... so yeah, I'll probably do that.

Some kind person had also compiled my favorite opie app for X and made it availabe as an ipk... yep, opie-reader! That combined with an impending installation of korganizer/PI (which I was also using on the opie image), I think I'll be all-set application-wise.

Aside from the applications, the other impressive parts of this pdaxrom image are the tools and small things done to support the C1000. This is the first image I've actually used (other than the default sharp image which was in japanese) where the on/off button actually worked! It seems odd, but I could never turn off the Z with the button... I'd always have to run 'apm --suspend' or hit a key that I had dedicated to that purpose. But this one just works. Nice.

Not a first for images (coredump's hentges image won this prize), but usb host is also directly supported and includes a little app to switch how you want to use the usb port. I connected my usb card reader and it mounted up just fine. Pretty cool.

Other stuff: aterm, vncviewer, x-chat (irc), licq (gonna swap out for gaim, probably), xpdf... plus a whole pile of packages in their stable feed, more in their unstable feed, and they just put out the latest SDK that will let me compile my own apps. It won't be as easy as bitbake, but I think it'll work for whatever I think I'll write. Oh yeah, it has python on it already, so I probably won't even need to compile, I'll just use python.

So, overall, very cool little project. I paypal'd them a donation already so hopefully they'll keep up the great work.

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