Calibre Content Server

The Calibre content server is working fine on the home network. It is currently running on the macbook/win7 laptop. When a device with an OPDS-capable ereader software like Stanza is running the Get Books icon displays the calibre content server library and it is easy to download books to the device such as an iPad, iTouch or Android tablet. Once the course is over i may install a permanent content server using an old G4 macbook.

The problem is the work network. Devices cannot detect the content server when the laptop is running on the UWO wireless network. Devices just display 'Searching....'. This is a problem - you can't demonstrate how it will all work.



The hack i am testing now is to run a rogue wireless access point that is not connected to the internet. A standard linksys wireless router should enable the macbook to get an IP address from the linksys DHCP server and then running calibre should make it available on this wireless network which a device then connects to. Once on that wireless network the content server should be found.

Step 1 - configure the wireless Router

Had to run Fing (look@lan replacement) as the new firmware for the router doesn't display a very good dhcp clients table. Armed with the IP address i set up the linksys to be a dhcp server with an ip range of 192.168.1.20 to 192.168.1.30. We then unplug the cat 5 cable from the linksys to the network router so that it only serves ad hoc connections.

Step 2 - connect laptop to the wireless router

We set the macbook to connect to the LIAM network and lo it picks up the dhcp server and gets issued the IP address of 192.168.1.20 which is as it should be.

Step 3 - run the calibre content server

Done!

Step 4 - connect ipad to content server

Odd, iPad says unable to join LIAM network. It can see the network but refuses to connect. Ok , next we fire up the iTouch and change it's network to LIAM. It connects. We run Stanza and click Get Books. The calibre content server on macbook is listed and there are all the books! We select one and it downloads ok. I wonder if the iPad mac address is not in the allowed table, yes it was not so we add it. We run Stanza, click Get Books, Shared and success. We can now read the Saskatoon Star Phoenix articles we downloaded from the RSS feed in class today.

So the solution to uwo network problem is to bring in our own wireless device and run an ad hoc wireless network. We will test this tomorrow for saturday's THATcamp session.

iPad, ePad and more

With the $100 price drop on old iPads we ordered the 16gig model from the Apple store for $369 and it arrived this week. The first step was to hool it up to the macbook and download all the useful free apps from the apple store. Our interest is in looking at the device as a publishing model so we downloaded all the ebook reader software such as Stanza, apple ebook reader, kobo, kindle etc. as well as newspaper and magazine apps like The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Post as well as Wikipedia and some comic book readers. We also grabbed the Dropbox app for our online files and the Google app so we can access our Google docs files and our iGoogle desktop and Teamviewer, an excellent VNC type app that runs on all our machines.

The Teamviewer free app allows you to control your laptop or desktop from the iPad not not the reverse. Will have to investigate if the paid version allows the pc/laptop to control the iPad. It would have to translate mouse clicks on the computer to touches on the iPad so this may not be possible. I looked at the vga cable but it is expensive ($35!) and external video is an app function, not a function of the OS.

Update: Saurik has released a VNC deamon for iphone and others have also gotten VNC to work so you can view ipone/ipad from another computer. Only problem is that it requires jailbreaking your device. I did this on the iphone but may or may not with the ipad. Just installed iOs 4.3 anyway...

We browsed the apple store for free books and downloaded a few classics but most of the books we want are sitting on our server in PDF and CHM and epub and djvu formats.

We read some epubs using the apple ebook reader and they were fine. But how to get our pdf's over? We though of using moving them to dropbox and trying the app but then remembered the Calibre to Stanza method we had used to get books into a first gen iTouch.

Running Calibe on the macbook and pointing it to the ebook network share allowed us to choose PDF books individually to import (and convert to epub) or to batch the process. We grabbed a few books and magazines to test out. Then we clicked the settings icon and choose Preferences, Sharing, Sharing over the net. This allows you to run a OPDS server catalog on localhost at port 8080. Once the server is started we goto the stanza client and click the Get Books icon dor Shared which displays a Book Sources dialog box. I typed in Calibre as the name with a URL of http://192.168.1.105:8080 (for the dhcp addr of the macbook) and it connects to display the books in calibre (on macbook).



You can browse by Newest, Title, Authors or Publishers. Clicking on the cover for a book displays a preview of the book and a Download button which transfer the epub to the Stanza library.

As test we bring in a .cbz comic book and some other types. And we convert the Kick-Ass DVD to an MP4 file to test out the video.

Update

Taking screenshots on the ipad is a breeze, press the home button and the power button together and the screen makes a camera clicking sound and then flashes white. The photos in .png are saved and can be viewed with the Photos app. To transfer them to your computer just plug in the iPad and iPhoto runs automatically and retrieves the photos. Select the ones you want and click Import Selected. You can then drag them out of iPhoto. Sweet. While i have not been a fan of iTunes in the past, it is now the cornerstone of the Apple digital world strategy and the integration of apps is impressive compared with the Windows world.

Tomorrow:

Compare originals on the mac with the epub converted copies on the ipad.