Ebay Frustration

Ebay drives me crazy! A good principle for a merchant is 'don't get in the way of the customer'. I go to ebay to buy things. A simple idea - but here's where it gets frustrating.

I don't like auctions and rarely ever participate.

The reason is i got ripped off a couple of times when ebay started and it quickly was obvious that you have no recourse but to leave negative feedback on the seller who immediately puts negative feedback on you. Ebay is no help in resolving mis-representation, faulty merchandise or other problems on auctions from private sellers. The auction model is outdated as a the primary driver of ebay's business.

So 99% of the time i use the buy it now option from ebay stores.

I like stores because they are a business and if they wish to stay in business they have an incentive to keep the customer happy. As one Scot noted a long time ago:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Adam Smith

I don't mind paying a bit more for the service. If things go wrong, i have found an ebay store is likely to work with you to fix the problem. For example, i purchased a Dell Precison 470 recently from Electronics Cafe on e-bay but it arrived with a dead motherboard. They cheerfully paid for the cost of a replacement system board.

Anyway, the problem is keeping track of stores. Ebay does a horrible job of it. Sure you can save sellers into a list but finding a particular store is a pain and trying to build up a list of favorite suppliers seems rather difficult.

I also like local suppliers

The shipping is less and why not support people in your area if the prices are competitive? So why can't i find all the local ebay stores that deal in computers or electronics?

Ebay works ok when you are looking for a particular item but as all grocery stores, bookstores and malls know - the longer your keep the customer in the store the more likely they are to buy something. If ebay made it easier for me to browse local suppliers who sell the kinds of stuff i like to buy then i would buy more. Maybe their tag line should be 'Ebay - Saving You Money'...

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.

Stop Motion Movies with iLife

Liam wanted to make a stop-motion animation film. He usually just records on the flip cam and uploads direct to youtube. So we built 4 sets out of lego. If i had been smart i would have build the walls in the shape of a + and put it on a lazy susan so that 4 sets could be easily available.

Anyway, I put the camera on the gorilla pod and he shot a series of scenes for his first TV show called Droid Hospital. I fired up iPhoto and hooked up the camera to import the pictures and then launched iMovie to bring them in. It took a bit of fiddling to get the photos i wanted, the quick and and easy solution was to FLAG the photos and then to set IMovie to look for flagged pictures. I also added two google image shots of a real hospital.

It was no problem putting the images on the timeline. But then we got sidetracked as the director decided he didn't want to do the dialog but to have text bubbles with the comments, like an animate comic book. Well, imovie and iPhoto lack the ability to edit photos that way so we fired up Comic Life which is designed to make comic books or comic book movies.

There was no problem importing the photos from iPhoto and adding the comments in text bubbles but getting the pictures out seemed impossible. The Export function exports a whole page not just the image. I could use grab to capture the picture with text but that seemed a lot of effort. The other option was to bring the photos into iWork and add create a blank presentation slide for each picture. Add the text and the export the slides as a series of images. This works in keynote (and powerpoint too). It's a quick way of churning out a web site banner. In fact, in keynote you can add a transparent gif image to your banner as a logo and it will export out a nice png or jpg banner in any shape with gradients and the transparent logo. (powerpoint does not support transparent images but otherwise works the same). Again, this seemed a lot of work.

We decided to go back to imovie and to add the dialog to the scenes. This is fairly easy to do, you select a clip, click the mic icon, select the clip and it countdowns 3,2,1 and record. You do have to time the dialog so that it lasts only for that scene (each pic is a scene). A couple of takes for some and it was done. Then we added sound effects from the limited iLife sound effects library. It would be nice it there were low cost libraries to add sounds like Garageband jam packs.

Anyway, once the sounds and incidental music was added the movie was rendered down and uploaded to liam's account on youtube.

ToDo:

- Find some soap opera sound effects...cheezy organ riffs etc
- Find soap opera-ish theme music for the opening (The Days of The Week?)
- Get some HALO sounds/music samples for the Covenant set and maybe some Star Wars

I have all these so i could extract them myself but if someone has already done it...

Windows - still stupid after all these years

Now that i am using Windows 7 a lot more for work i am so upset in how useless it is for common tasks. We all knew that file operations were pretty much broken in previous versions, it took forever to do any meaningful stuff with lots of file and it tied up your machine, sort of like working on a beige mac running system 7.

So today i finally got around to do some file maintenance. I attached a 1 terabyte LaCie Quadro external hard disk to the macbook pro using firewire 800 and proceeded to copy about 25 gig of files from the mac to the windows partition. Most of the time was spend figuring out which files to move, the actual 1-5 gig copy operations were complete before i could decide on the next group.

Now i boot the macbook into Windows 7 (boot camp). The external fw800 windows partition shows up. It is a simple task to copy the 25 gig worth of files from the external drive to another external drive hooked up (also a LaCie but firewire 400 formatted for windows). How long do you think this operation would take? I think i spend about 30 minutes last time i did it on Linux (in fairness the linux box has an e-sata connection).

Well, it's been 10 minutes and Windows is still thinking about the copy operation, it actually hasn't even started yet! And the copy dialog box estimates 16 hours! It says 'discovered' 5,764 items and then sits and sits and sits.

In fairness the previous osx copy was between laptop hard drive and external hard disk and this is from external hard disk to external hard disk but 16 hours?

When i do similar file operations on the windows 7 desktop it is slow and ties up the machine. How can that be on a dual 3.2 ghz xeon box with 4 cores? Obviously it is not hyperthreaded - why?

Update

It's 10:15 am the next day and 1,700 files still to be copied, says 9 hours to go! It finally completed this afternoon. I am now moving some files around on the external drive connected to the win 7 pc and every so often it has to re-read the directory from the drive. There is a green progress bar across the top of the file manager and it takes a couple of minutes to read the directory of the 1tb external. No wonder file operations take so long.

The Android Reading Device

UPDATE: Installing Apps

Took a while to figure out how to do this without using the Android market. Since the wireless is still having problems (although i connected ok at work - must be my 3 WAP's confusing it), i wanted to download and install apps directly.

These are known as non-market apps and all you have to do is:

- Click settings, application, unknown sources to allow install of non-market apps
- Click settings, application, development and turn on USB debugging (i don't think this is needed to install apk files that you copy to the card, but is needed to run an installer application on the desktop that will install apk files to the device, if this is what you want)
- download the .apk files and copy them to the internal SD card or the external SD card
- after copying unplug the USB cable
- run APKinstaller app and it displays all the apps in the downloads directory (if the usb cable is plugged it find no files!)

An cheapo Android tablet came my way so the idea is to see how effective it is as a reading device. I had tried the iPod touch but the screen is a bit small.

This is a 7" 800x480 screen with a ARM 700mhz cpu running Android 2.1 (similar to many models available under names like epad, apad, irobot etc). Nothing fancy but it has a 1.3 mp camera, 2 usb ports, cell, wireless b/g, speaker, earphone and a micro SD slot (32gig max). Only problem is the wireless if flaky, it finds my WAP's but fails to hold a connection.

Anyway we are not interested in this for the internet but as a reader. The idea is to find a device that will allow us to test out various ebook apps and ebook formats. The device came with an ebook app called Shelves that did a decent job with .epub files but failed to open others and not so good at PDF's.

Following apps were downloaded and copied to the SD card:

• Aldiko_Book_Reader_1.2.6
• Droid Comic Viewer
• FBReaderJ-0.7.17
• kindle
• kobo
• Laputa Book Reader
• Wattpad_1.9.4
• zthMoonReader
• PDF_Viewer_0.2.8
• Adobe_Reader_9.0.2
• beamreader-v120

The .apk files were transferred via USB cable to the SD card on the device along with a smattering of ebooks in epub, mobi, pdf, cbr and other formats. On the tablet APKinstaller was used to install the apps.

Our test document is 20,000 Leagues under the Sea in cbr, fb2,lrf,mobi,pdf,pdb, djvu and rtf formats. So here is a quick first impressions tour:

Adobe Reader

It displays all the PDF files in a nice list but when you click on one it returns the error message 'invalid path' . Not obvious how to change directories to the other card. Not so good.

Beamreader

Loads and allows us to browse for folders and a nice list of all the PDF files. It crashed on 20000 Leagues Under the Sea but opened the other books ok.

PDF Viewer

Runs and allows you to browse for files. No icon but nice large font. Crashes on 20000 Leagues under the Sea. Open other files ok. A bit slow on the pages and refreshes.

Aldiko

Nice display of book covers on a bookshelf. Good navigation control, finger swipes load the next page but not with a turn, it just slides in smoothly from the side. Lots of settings. Neat dictionary function.

Update: you can copy epub files to the eBooks/import folder on the SD card and then in Aldiko press settings, import and it imports the books to the library and displays them on the shelf.



Kindle

Needs the cell or wifi connection to login to your Amazon account. So no further until we solve the wireless problem. Would be useful to be able to read offline.

FBreader

Brings up an explanation screen of how it works. We have to press the Settings button to get the options menu. The library icon goes to the sd\Books folder we had created. We load the 20000 Leagues under the Sea and it works. The navigation is clunky we have to keep going to the setting button. For example the screen does not rotate automatically you have to do it manually and navigation is non-intuitive.

Kobo

Like Amazon you can't get anywhere without an internet connection. Not a fan of this type of design.

Laputa

Cute entry screen with tips. There are nags for the paid version. The bookshelf is empty save for the Bible. Clicking brings up a list of ebook sites like Manybooks, Gutenberg and Feedbooks. The main way to get books into a collection is to download, to get books on your card you have to click the Home icon to get to the top level and then click the settings button. This displays an Import icon that when clicked allows you to browse the internal card, not the micro SD card. I made a Books folder there but with only 2gig of storage this is not a viable option. We loaded in an Agatha Cristie to add to our library and then loaded the book to read. Next is a configuration screen for fonts, flip mode and sizes. One thing odd about Android is the scroll bars work the opposite of what you would think and they are very thin. With the bar at the top you scroll down but nothing happens, you have to scroll up. This seems non-intuitive. Nice quick page flips. Quite readable font. This program is an option especially if you download books.


Moon + Reader

Displays a list of all the files along with the file extensions, i like that! The icons are not good, each book gets a ? icon except the epub book. I think this means it cannot read the others (so why list them, bad design). Ah, if you click on an file format it does not understand, it actually loads it! So a .cbr file display the binary codes, sort of like loading a word .doc file in notepad! Ever worse, if you kill the app and then reload it remember the file you had open and re-opens it. Arrgh. Have to figure out how to close a file.


Wattpad

Requires you to connect to the internet before you can do anything. But if you click OK and then the settings button you get the menu. But there seems no way to import any books into your library. Also, when you click the back button it should return to the previous state, if i had the settings menu open and drill down to a setting and then go back, the menu should be there, not a blank screen forcing me to press the settings button again.

ThinkFree Office

Although not an ebook reader it is important to be able to take along reports and such. I was excited to see if give an icon to the djvu files but it could not open them. We open the .rtf version of 20,000 leagues under the sea. It runs for a while opening the file. Loading, loading, loading. We kill the operation. Interesting, when we go to load the .pdf version of @0,00 Leagues that crashed the other apps, it notes the 'page catalog is invalid' and ends the operation gracefully. Other pdf's load ok. It also does auto orientation and swipes. While a large app it does a credible job on pdf's. Will have to try it on some office files.

Droid Comic (ACV)

Awesome, the cbr files look fantastic. You do have to push the settings button to rotate and zoom but this may make a decent comic book reader.

Summary

Some apps good, others not so good. Android 2.1 suffers from some usability issues on a tablet probably due to it being a phone OS. It says things like 'Shut down your phone?". The finger controls are a bit rough, in particular scrolling is very error prone, swiping a finger to scroll the screen up and down loads an app by mistake most of the time. Larger scroll bars would help, i ended up using my iTouch stylus a lot. Will have to try Liam's extra Nintendo stylii. As to the LCD screen, fairly bright for apps and games but a bit annoying to read text for a long time. Does a cheap Android tablet replace a good ebook reader like the color Nook. No - it was 1/3 the price and it allows you to read your own books without being tethered to Amazon or Chapters. The problem with this device is the settings and exit buttons are the same, press on the left to access the settings in an app but press towards the right and the app exits. Since the button is incredibly small it is very easy to exit. Then again this is not an iPad!

Koha LiveCD 10

The new Koha liveCD based on ubuntu 10.10 is out so we decide to give it a try. Our first boot on a dell gx280 failed and then we realized this livecd is a 64 bit version and the dell's bios does not support 64 os. We then live booted on our trusty dell precision 470, a dual xeon pc.

The new version has icons on the desktop for the koha opac and for the admin page. Our first goal is to install this on a bootable USB stick.

First we plug in the stick and it is mounted. This is a 4 gig stick running the older version of koha we installed using the liveCD created by Professor Prasad. Next we double-click the install koha live icon and choose english as the language.

The install requirements are 3.6 gig free drive space, internet connection and power.

ODD - when we click the release notes hyperlink it goes to http://www.geekconnection.org and displays the remastersys backup utility page1

The next dialog box offers a chance to download update while installing and a forward button. The problem is that the installer does not seem to offer a choosable location, it detects your hard drive and offers to unmount it. Will it later allow you to choose a location? For safety we decide to shut down, unplug the hard drive and try again.

The liveCD boots and we plug in the usb stick.

Option - start the installer instead of booting the live system. It notes that dev/sda is mounted and offers to unmount it. We choose YES to unmount.

The next dialog box called install offers to erase and use the entire disk or to manually set up the partition map. We go with the entire disk so our maxell 4 gig flash drive will be used.

We click INSTALL NOW and say we are in Toronto with a US keyboard and setup a username of seyler with a password of seyler and log in automatically setting. This is the standard ubuntu install routine.

Now we wait while it copies files and when it finished we click restart and remove the cd. It reboots to the USB stick.

We now double-click the Koha Admin desktop icon which presents a login page prefilled with the default username of kohaadmin and password of kohalivecd. We click LOGIN and the web installer page is displayed.

Koha Setup

First is to choose a language, we choose en for english, assuming that later it can be changed to German. The default mysql database settings are displayed:

database: koha

host: localhost

port: 3306

user: kohaadmin

At the web installer step 3 we select MARC 21 as our 'flavor' with the following options:

- select matching rules for bibliographic records including ISBN and ISSN

- fast add for ILL or on the fly cataloging

- simple for common types like cd's, dvds, cassettes, kits etc

Under Optional we select

- basic default values for dept, item lost status etc

- coded valies for holdings statements

- a sampling of z39.50 servers for copy cataloging

- sample patron types and categories

- sample label and patron card data

- sample holidays

- default item types (material types and collection codes)

= sample libraries and categories, new items and default messages

- sample patrons and default message transports for sending overdues, notices etc by email

Then we click IMPORT button at the bottom of this very long page. We note a couple of errors:

- table 'systempreferences' is full

- table 'marc_subfield_structure' is full

Indexing Engine

We choose the nozebra option as this will be a small library and click CHOOSE and FINISH and are redirected to the staff login page.

We click LOGIN This returns an error message, 'the format your asked for is unrecognized'. We click the back button and choose springfield library this time. same error.

We try http://localhost/opac and the library catalog page is displayed. We try http://localhost/koaadmin to display the admin page. The login notes that our session has timed out. We try logging in to my library but the same error message. I think we will re-do the koha setup and leave out the other libraries optional data.

First we have to delete all the tables from the mysql koha database. We goto http://localhost/phpmydmin and login as user root with password mqr but that does not work. And firefox has crashed so we kill it. The release notes seem wrong. We could start all the way over. So we restart.

Ok. Ready to go again. The problem could be the usb stick only has 28 mb free after install. We decide to limit the optional data installs.

we leave out

- code value for holdings statements

- sample label and patron data

- sample holidays

- sample libraries and library categories

- sample news items

- defined message transports

- sample patrons

and we click IMPORT. If this doesn't work will we use the hard disk portable usb. Only one error this time - 'table marc_subfield_structure' is full.

We try the admin page and the staff client page is displayed successfully. So the problem sees to be space related. Although the staff page doesn't look quite right. So will have to use the portable.

tomorrow

Media Center IV

Now that the media center is working perfectly we can't resist fiddling about. A new barebones SFF (small form factor) dell gx 280 came our way from Vfxweb, (where i've happily shopped for many years). Socket 775, DDR2, pci-e, sata, pci and lots of USB ports in mint condition for about $30. From the parts box we pull out a P4 2.80 ghz, a 40 gig sata drive, and 1.2 gig of ram and a Nvidia quadro 290 video card which gets converted to a low-profile bracket. We try a 3.4 Ghz P4 but the fans immediately go into full speed mode - need to get a new tube of thermal paste . Boot up with XBMC live cd via an external USB optical drive and it runs perfectly.

I set up some of the shared libraries from Windows 7, no need to set it against the media server yet. The quality of the picture is excellent.

If i run ethernet to the front living room the ancient Zenith 29" professional TV (with VGA input!) could make itself useful when analog broadcast television finally dies. Or i could put in a wireless card, but the problem there is making sure it works with Linux, wireless chip vendors are very bad when it comes to linux support. I am also not so sure about overloading the 3 wireless routers with video traffic. Best to stick to wired, that location used to have cat 5 wire a dozen years ago when DVD players cost $1000 and a giant tower PC with a DVD-ROM and IR keyboard/mouse fed video to the new Zenith 29" TV.

The attraction of putting a media center client there is the display is perfectly orientated to the couch, and high usability of the HCI (human couch interface) is our design goal. A horizontal position is considered preferable to a vertical one in HCI circles.

However, the windows remote did not get detected when i plugged it in. I know it was setup ok when i last used it with the acer revo so will have to look up my notes how i configured the item. When i press the remote the IR lights up and it works fine plugged into a windows 7 box so it is a driver issue - maybe i need to have it plugged in when the system boots.

The only problem is that the install option from the live CD seems to fail with the video display not working. Since this disk is from 2010's project i should download a more recent copy.

I'll do it tomorrow...