kindle fails to look up dictionary

I have bought a kindle book:

http://www.amazon.com/Romance-Three-Kingdoms-footnotes-maps-ebook/dp/B00CZONMFO/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1387184435&sr=1-2&keywords=romance+of+the+3+kingdoms

The problem is that I can't look up words from English dictionary with this specific book.  I manage to find out that this book's meta data has error.  It is set to be Spanish while, in fact, it has to be English.

Here is an easy fix.

1. Download the book from amazon.com as .azw format to your computer.
2. Open Calibre (http://calibre-ebook.com/).  Add this book to Calibre.
3. Use Calibre to "edit metadata" of this book.  Change it from Spanish into English.
4. Export this book (save to disk).
5. Send the new azw file to you Kindle as a personal document (probably via Kindle's email).

YES

แฮก sony digital reader PRS-505

หลังจากซื้อ digital reader ตัวนี้มาได้เกือบๆสองปี ก็ได้ฤกษ์ upgrade มันเสียหน่อย

PRS-505 (สีแดง) ภายในรัน MontaVista Linux ซึ่งหลายปีก่อนจำได้ว่่าเคยเจอแฮกเกอร์คนนึงได้เขียนโปรแกรมขึ้นมา (ด้วยภาษา Python) ซึ่งสามารถเข้าไปเรียกจัดการไฟล์ต่างๆใน digital reader ตัวนี้ได้ผ่านทางสาย usb (ไว้หาเจอแล้วจะแจ้งให้ทราบ)

อย่างไรก็ตามการแฮก PRS-505 ในครั้งนี้ไม่ได้เกี่ยวกับระบบลินุกซ์ที่อยู่ภายใน หากแต่เกี่ยวกับระดับที่สูงกว่านั้น

คุณ msukhiashvili ได้ทำ firmware ตัวใหม่ขึ้นมาซึ่งติดตั้งได้ง่าย โดยจะมีคุณประโยชน์ ณ เวอร์ชั่นปัจจุบัน (1.1.3) เป็นต้นว่า

• มีเกมส์ Sudoku, Five Balls และ Mahjong
• ทำ screenshot ได้
• มี file browser
• โปรแกรม dictionary

อ้างอิง

• http://code.google.com/p/prs-plus/
• http://www.reghardware.com/2009/08/11/how_to_hack_sony_reader/

how to adjust font in an existing pdf file to fit my sony prs-505 digital reader (a.k.a. e-book reader)

I own a digital reader sony prs-505 (red colour model) bought around 2 years ago from sonystyle.ca.  It is so cruel that even now they still don't sell it in Thailand (or even with Thai ip address).

As with any other digital readers, its screen resolution and size are different and much smaller than ordinary monitors (for computer desktop or laptop).  For my prs-505, it is 175x122x8 mm (6.9" x 4.8" x 0.3") with 600x800 pixels. (source : wikipedia.org)

With these differences, any pdf files that are not generated specifically for prs-505 contain risk of being blurred and consequently impractical for reading.  However, not only the screen size and resolution that matter but also the font being used in pdf file.  One might argue that pdf is a vector format where we can zoom in and out without losing its sharpness.  I completely agree and understand that but, however, prs-505 comes with only 3 levels of zooming which are small, medium and large.  With just these 3 levels, we can't expect prs-505 to be able read all pdf files properly without extra works.

Usually, I use Calibre to collect rss feeds and convert them into epub format which is a format that works on prs-505.  There are lots of predefined news feeds come with Calibre such as bbc, cnn, telegraphs, reader digest, etc.  A good thing about choosing news from the predefined list is that Calibre knows it well so it fetches the data and formats them very properly for prs-505 which is a known target device to Calibre.  As such, I have nothing to concern about reading news with my digital reader.

However, just recently, I ran into a problem when I tried to read a technical textbook downloaded from some website.  It was in pdf format.  Unfortunately, its font and sizes didn't fit prs-505 as you can see from the picture below (notice that the font colour is too light which causes problem to my eyes):

The page layout / size looked perfect while the font didn't.  All texts were blurred.  They become clearer when I zoomed in it but the large zoom level was too big which just broke the page layout and everything.

I decided I had to make some changes to this pdf file.  There were several approaches I tried:

1. Using Calibre's GUI to convert the imported pdf file into epub by telling it to change font size to be 12pt, 14pt and 16pt.  In the output, the text's font size was really increased which was good.  But, a bigger problem arose.  For some unknown reason, whenever I changed the base font size via Calibre's GUI, each sentence was divided into separate line which made the entire page looked truly ugly.  This method does not work.
2. Using Adobe Acrobat Professional to change font of existing pdf.  With Touch Up Text Tool, I was able to change font of the pdf to be Tahoma, for example.  I tried it with a paragraph and it just worked.  It looked great on prs-505.  But, alas, there was no way I could change the font of the entire pdf document.  This is just ludicrous.  It is impossible for me to go through page by page to do that.  Failed again.
3. Using tools to convert pdf into various formats such as plain text, html, png, rtf, ps (postscript), odt, doc, etc... None of them worked.  Each of them yielded different slight problems when it was used with my prs-505.  Some examples are too big of size file, images distorted, wrong font, wrong paragraphs layout, etc.  It just does not work.
4. Surprisingly, I decided to get back to Calibre.   For some unknown reason, I tried command-line version of Calibre instead of the GUI using the almost exact same option I chose when I used GUI version:
   
   

   $ ebook-convert some_file.pdf some_file.epub --base-font-size 14

   
   Then I transfered this epub file to my prs-505 and the output looked a lot better as you may notice:
   
   
   
   
   
   
   You will also notice some slight bug such as the second paragraph that is combined into the first paragraph.  Hence, it is not a perfect method yet.  I will just have to live with it meanwhile.
   
    More details of how to use Calibre's command-line tool to convert books can be found here:
   
   http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/cli/ebook-convert.html#ebook-convert
   
   Isn't it funny that GUI version and command-line version of Calibre yield different result?  I can only guess that it maybe because the GUI somehow has more options than just "--base-font-size" that I am unaware of!
   
   

grayscale monitor in macosx

I had been looking for a way to have an e-ink-like monitor that I can use with my computer.  The closest technology I had found was iLiad, an e-book reader which is well-known for its openness for hacking.  Of course, it is a linux-based. People have been able to run x window, xclock and etc on it together with using keyboard remotely.  Yes, it looked promising.

However, just today, I happened to find out Pixel Qi's hybrid monitor!  You can search it from Google.  There are many stories about it.  Rumour has it that this special monitor will be shipped around September to December this year (2010).  What is cool about its monitor?  It is the same quality as e-ink!  Its refresh rate is a lot higher than those e-ink out there like Amazon kindle or Sony Digital Reader that I am using.  It even supports colour (still e-ink!).

I will buy it for sure.  But, meanwhile, I have also found a way to turn everything on my screen to be grayscale by going to:

• System Preferences
• Universal Access
• Display

references

• http://www.pixelqi.com/
  
• http://www.macobserver.com/tip/2006/10/20.1.shtml

sony digital reader and macosx

In September 2008, I bought a Sony Digital Reader PRS-505, the latest version of Digital Reader from Sony at the time. It cost me around CAD$ 299 + (expensive canadian's) tax + shipping fee. I used it for a few weeks and then I stop. Yeah, I was just a lazy guy.

Regardless of my laziness, anyway, now I am getting back to it again. A bad thing about Sony is that they don't support any operating systems other than Windows. I am talking about software to manage my sony digital reader. But at least, there are some people working on this and give it away for free (to use? or free as in freedom? dunno...). There are 2 most interesting ones I have found:

1. docudesk
2. calibre

I read the review of the first one which is docudesk and think that it will not work for me. And, more importantly, it crashed when I invoked it all the time...???. So I choose calibre with the main reason, it supports RSS feeds. This means I can download articles from RSS feeds and read it from my digital reader. YAY!