Book.ish has announced they are putting the kibosh on eBook sales and will suspend them completely on June 30th. The company has acknowledged Readings, Fullers, Avid Reader, Mary Ryan's, Imprints, Books for Cooks and Gleebooks as being valued partners. Any eBooks that customers have purchased will still be available to read, for the near future. Book.ish was sold to Overdrive last year, and the company will focus on its HTML5 reading technologies for the future of online digital reading.
Flipboard has made one of the biggest updates in their two year history to their official iOS app. The new 2.0 edition there is more content than ever to enjoy, including a new partnership with Etsy. For the first time, you can collect and save articles, photos, audio and video by organizing them into beautiful magazines. These can be private, or if you want to connect with like-minded enthusiasts, you can make them public and share them on Flipboard and beyond. This is a huge boon for users who want to assemble their own personal collection of a wide array of multimedia content.
But Wait! These aren’t the only new features enabled on Flipboard 2.0. You can now comment on articles, tap the source's avatar in the lower left-hand corner, to reveal Flipboard Comments. Draw in other Flipboard users with @mentions, via Twitter. There is now subsections in partner magazines, newspapers and websites. On the second page of tablet editions, you'll find new sidebars listing subsections for easier navigation.
This is seriously, the hugest update Flipboard has ever brought and is available right now for iOS. There is no word yet if an Android update will be available soon, but we should see something fairly quickly. Now that Google Reader is abolished, services like Flipboard, Pulse, Pocket, Evernote and a myriad of others are all vying for alienated news readers.
April is National Poetry Month, sponsored annually by the Academy of American Poets. Here at OverDrive, we're always game for celebrating the written word, and Content Reserve offers a number of classic and contemporary titles to enrich your poetry collection year-round. Here are a few eBooks to whet your users' appetites for verse:
"Why I Wake Early" by Mary Oliver One of America's most popular living poets, Mary Oliver is known for her reflective, reverent poems inspired by nature walks around her rural New England home. This beloved 2004 collection is just one of Oliver's many works available in Content Reserve.
"You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense" by Charles Bukowski Charles Bukowski was a prolific writer and a people's poet, writing in a distinctive, sometimes profane, always frank voice about life, sex, work, and the streets of Los Angeles. In this title, published when Bukowski was in his sixties, the author takes a slightly softer look at childhood memories, along with his usual themes.
"The Essential Rumi" translated by Coleman Barks et al. This title is a perennial classic by the 13th-century mystic Rumi, one of the best-selling poets of all time. The poems in this collection were translated from the original Persian by experts and then interpreted by Coleman Barks, an American poet who, though he knows no Persian himself, has been hugely successful in popularizing Rumi for a modern Western audience.
"Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25" selected by Naomi Shibab Nye This vibrant collection, selected by renowned Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shibab Nye, showcases the work of 26 (not 25) of today's promising young poets.
"Original Fire" by Louise Erdrich Louise Erdrich is best known for her novels—her latest, "The Round House," won the 2012 National Book Award for fiction—but she is also an accomplished poet. "Original Fire: Selected and New Poems" collects Erdrich's best poetic work, much of which is inspired by her Native American heritage.
If you're looking for more ways to promote National Poetry Month to your patrons, the Academy of American Poets suggest 30 ways to celebrate and also offers a tip sheet for librarians.
Hyundai seems to be in for the long haul with tablets. Reports about the company’s plans to launch a 10 inch tablet have been revealed. The Hyundai T10 will be a followup to the T7 that the company had launched a few weeks ago.
Specs wise, the T10 can be considered to be quite attractive, what with the device featuring a 1.4 GHz Samsung Exynos 4412 quad core chip, Mali 400 graphics processor, and 2 GB of RAM. The 10.1 inch display will have a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels, which isn’t so impressive in this age of high pixel counts. Hyundai has also stated the tablet will come pre-installed with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, though the update to Jelly Bean will be launched in just a month’s time. These apart, the T10 tablet will come equipped with Bluetooth, GPS, and Wi-Fi features.
However, what will be more interesting to know at this point is what the tablet will be priced. While no cost information has been made public as of now, there is no reason to believe it won’t have the same price competitiveness of the 7 inch Hyundai T7 tablet.
Samsung has launched a new enhanced version of its Ativ Smart PC Pro 700 that now comes equipped with LTE 4G radio for enhanced connectivity. Needless to say, the added functionality comes at a price. Quite a hefty one at that, with it being around $400 more than its Wi-Fi only version. The Ativ Smart PC Pro 700 in its non LTE avatar commands a price tag of around $1,199.99, though the same with LTE radio built in goes for $1,600.
Everything else with the hybrid tablet remains much the same. This includes an Intel Core i5-3317U processor with Intel 4000 graphics, 4 GB of RAM, and 128 GB of flash memory. The 11.6-inch touchscreen display offers a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The tablet runs Windows 8 with Samsung claiming the tablet is able to support 8 hours of operation on a single charge. Also, of course, the tablet comes with a keyboard dock that allows the tablet to be used as a netbook device as well.
After a lot of swearing and arguing, we have managed to boil down nearly 700 entries to just ten winners. It was a very hard decision, and if you didn’t win please don’t feel too disheartened; we had some really exceptional entries for this competition and found it really hard to come to a final decision.
As you’ll remember if you entered, we were looking for camera projects which would involve the winners in writing some software and doing something interesting with the cameras. The winners, who will receive a rare-as-hen’s-teeth pre-production Raspberry Pi camera board, are (in no particular order):
Brian Pratt
Brian’s was one of several cat-thwarting project ideas we were sent, but we liked his best. Brian’s cat has a habit of bringing half-dead things home for his master through the catflap, and he’s been trying to deal with the problem by using a webcam/Arduino/PC solution with some custom Python code to detect feline mouthfuls of rat. He wants to replace the setup with a Pi and a camera module so he can get better framerate and better resolution at lower cost and lower power. (You’re right, Brian. Using an Arduino just to control a relay is overkill.)
We liked your Nerf gun idea, Brian, but we also felt sorry for your cat, so it’s the rat-detecting catflap we’d like to see developed, please!
Matthew Mittler
We had several outstanding entries from younger contestants. Matthew’s was one of them. He’s 12, and has an idea for using the camera as a communication tool – we got very excited about this, because we can think of all kinds of useful applications for what Matthew’s planning to build. He says:
Some of my recent builds are a cleaning robot, and a arcade machine. However my most recent build was a morse code key. The key is hooked up to three blue LEDs. I would like to get the Raspberry Pi camera to read those flashes of light so I can communicate with my Raspberry Pi via morse code.
Matthew says he also has some ideas about using the camera in a one-player chess board. We’re really looking forward to seeing what he develops.
Ross Corriden
Ross is a postdoctoral fellow in a microbiology lab, who studies novel ways of combating antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He tests compounds to investigate their effect on bacterial growth, and their ability to enhance the body's own defences against pathogens. One of the tests he uses on a daily basis involves exposing bacteria with white blood cells that are isolated from healthy volunteers. White blood cells represent the main line of defence against pathogens and will kill most bacteria they are exposed to, though by adding drugs Ross can either enhance or inhibit their bactericidal capacity.
The tedious part of these experiments involves counting the tiny colonies bacteria form on petri dishes after overnight incubation. Counting visually is time-consuming and prone to error. Ross’s winning project idea is to use a Raspberry Pi with a camera to count the colonies using ImageJ image analysis software with a custom colony-counting module. He says the small size of the colonies will make this type of analysis a challenge, but says that if he can get the system to work it would save his lab massive amounts of time, freeing up attention for more experimental work.
Sebastian Lieberknecht
Sebastian’s working on an augmented reality project. He’s developing a cross-platform SDK that can recover the location and orientation of a camera relative to a known piece of the environment. The camera can be “taught” about local 3D objects, or “taught” to recognise 2D patterns. He wants to integrate the video stream from the camera into the SDK, then track a 2D planar pattern and display a virtual character on it, using the HDMI output to display the scene on an external monitor. He got our attention when he proposed doing this with a virtual model of a Raspberry Pi on the Raspberry logo.
Steven Daglish
Stephen works for a charity designing and implementing medical engineering training courses for developing countries. He specialises in medical devices, with a particular interest in equipment related to premature babies – such as incubators, monitors, and jaundice detection. He says:
One of the potential issues with pre-term babies in incubators (used to keep them warm) is jaundice. A very cheap and effective method to cure this is by using a series of blue LEDs [blue light phototherapy]. However, within Uganda (where are main project is running), there aren’t enough LED devices (mainly because the current medical grade ones are expensive), and the staff aren’t trained well enough to know when to use the device and when to switch it off (and what light levels to use).
If I was to win the camera, I would use it, connected to the Pi and the LEDs, to image the baby, looking for jaundice. If it finds evidence of jaundice, the LEDs will come on, and as the jaundice reduces, so does the LED brightness, until the jaundice is gone, at which point the user is made aware and the device switches off the lights.
Matt Wherry
Matt had a fantastic idea when researching building a theramin. A regular theramin gives you control of pitch and volume only, with two hands and two aerials. His competition entry was an idea for a camera theremin, where, using a camera and some machine vision instead of an aerial, both pitch and volume can be controlled with one hand, leaving the other one free to fiddle with synth parameters.
I’m thinking a camera, a bit of blob detection and separation, and control of pitch, volume in xy, and filter cutoff by blob area…and for a first cut, probably using some distastefully coloured gloves to make the image processing easy on the Pi.
I did a little dance around the room when I read this one. Thanks Matt!
Amy Appler
Amy is 11, and she has a really excellent blog that we’ve been enjoying at http://appler.net/amy/. She’s already a seasoned Pi hacker. She says:
I have a house on a lake, and my mom loves it when birds come in the cove near our house. I want to connect a camera to my Raspberry Pi and have it detect when there are birds in our cove. When it detects that there are birds in our cove, I want the Raspberry Pi to notify my mom by sending her a text message or email so she can come outside and look at the birds.
This would definitely be a challenging project to do, but I'm excited to give it a try!
We have a feeling that Amy will complete her project with flying colours. (And we’re hoping for some great pictures too!)
Andy Grove
Andy’s project involves a life-sized robotic Dalek which he’s already built. Gordon was open-mouthed with awe and fear at the photo which Andy sent in:
Andy sent us the code for the Arduino-based Dalek voice modulator he’s been working on to demonstrate his chops; you can download it at GitHub. His camera application will use OpenCV to do facial recognition on the Pi, which will then drive two motors in the head to rotate the dome so that the Dalek can keep eye contact with a person while talking to them. (I can only think of one thing the Dalek is likely to say, but Andy promises us a much larger vocabulary than the usual “Exterminate!”) He plans to open source the results.
Adam Farah
Adam’s entry made us laugh, but it’s got serious potential as a useful addition to everybody’s living room (and promises to build healthy relationships everywhere).
Me and my girlfriend argue. She is the calmest person I know and such a sweetheart, but when I get home from work you can guarantee she’s pinched the best spot in the living room for watching TV so I have to sit at the other end of the room, and it just ain’t as good!
So what I’ve been putting together is a little unit that sits between the TV and the stand, and moves the TV to the best position for everyone in the room – ahhh peace!
But how do I do this? Well so far I’ve been reliant on a webcam that sits on top of the telly to take an image of whoever is sat there, be it 1 or however many people. It then uses OpenCV to detect all the faces, workout the midpoint for all the people sat there and using wiringpi, move the TV n degrees to the left or right and settle on a great angle for all to be happy with where jubilation will forth ensue.
At the minute I’m activating the code using a web front end so I can hit ‘Track’ from any device. I’ve also got SiriProxy running on the Pi so I can nicely ask my iPhone and iPad to track us and move the TV.
The problem with the webcam is it takes a long time to get the image, take the image, check the image and work out the details.
What I’d love is to be able to utilise realtime-ish video, plug that into OpenCV and display this on the TV through picture in picture over HDMI so I can make the final decision on who should get the best angle, and also through a streamed link to my iDevice.
We’d love it too, Adam. And if you can now come up with something that outsources the argument about whether you watch Grand Designs or allow your partner to flick wildly between music TV channels for the next hour, we’d be even happier.
David Crawley (and the HackerDojo robotics team)
David is heading up a robot project at Hacker Dojo in Silicon Valley, which he describes as “a makerspace filled with free thinkers”. (I’ve never met a constrained thinker in a hackspace/makerspace. There’s something curiously liberating about milling machines.)
Hercules, Hacker Dojo’s Pi-powered robot, is newly under development, and is working through 12 challenges that David has set the team of volunteers, ranging from seeing and following a person, to delivering a cooler of beer (the prize for the team that accomplishes this is that they get to keep the cooler of beer), or driving around the Hacker Dojo for a week saying hello to known people, and finding and identifying a persona non-grata (this requires algorithms to efficiently move around the Dojo and find people who might be trying to hide, as well as doing all the person detection/ face detection/face recognition work). He says:
We already have developed the capability for our robot to do simple face tracking and face following using the Raspberry Pi with a USB camera. However, the performance is very, very slow and the latency is extraordinarily high. There are several reasons for this:
1) We are running our face detection and face recognition algorithms on the processor only (not using the GPU)
2) We haven’t optimized the code yet
3) The USB interface with our camera seems to be raising a lot of interrupts for the processor that take time away from face detection
So we plan to:
1) Write a shader for the face detection and face recognition so that we can get face detection functioning on the GPU
2) Optimize our code and the camera interface for smooth performance, introduce PID control etc.
3) Test a camera that has a better interface to the Pi
We’ll be watching to see how Hercules gets on with the tasks he’s been set once he’s equipped with his new eyeball!
–
Thank you so much to everyone who entered. We were pretty overwhelmed by the quality and number of entries; this is an amazing community packed with some amazingly smart people. We’re looking forward to hearing from all the winners when they’re further along with their projects, and learning how the camera coped in these very different applications.
The publishing industry is full of surprises, and the latest conflict is certainly surprising. In an attempt to negotiate the terms of its relationship with a publisher, book retailer Barnes and Noble has reportedly slashed its order from Simon and Schuster in what some feel may be nothing more than retaliation.
According to an article by Leslie Kaufman for the New York Times, the negotiations amount to wanting more money for titles that the retailer stocks in prominent–and historically sought after–display space. The amount, size, and even inch-by-inch proximity of display space in physical stores has always been a hotly contested bargaining chip in contract negotiations between agents, publishers, and booksellers.
While the involved parties interviewed in Kaufman’s piece had to speak on condition of anonymity due to the ongoing negotiations, executives from both Barnes and Noble and Simon & Schuster were quoted about their standard policies for this type of contract issue. However, more vocal opponents of the tensions included two literary agents who spoke about the impact this can have on authors, especially lesser known authors who rely on every possible avenue for book discovery, including physical bookstores’ display space.
According to Kaufman’s article, “Laura Gross, the literary agent for the best-selling author Jodi Picoult, said the dispute had certainly hurt sales of her client's latest book, The Storyteller. Barnes & Noble has ‘taken limited orders, limited placement, and did not do the normal outreach to their customers online, which really hurt,’ Ms. Gross said.”
An author with the branding and readership that Jodi Picoult has can probably come away from a situation like these negotiations with her sales intact, as evidenced by her #1 NYT spot for her latest print release, but as Gross pointed out in the article, debut and newer authors stand to lose a lot in sales and fan growth, which will only perpetuate the cycle of bookstore and publisher demise. With dire predictions for the state of major publishers and with reports that physical bookstores are continuing to make cuts to floor space and retail locations, it doesn’t seem like a good time to alienate one’s allies.
Digg has outlined details of how it plans to come up with what it claims to be the perfect replacement for the Google Reader service. Digg is claiming it was already into developing a service that could be seen as something similar to Google Reader, though the search giant’s recent decision to withdraw its Reader service has only provided more impetus to Digg’s efforts. While it admits it amounts to a huge endeavor to build something as huge as Google Reader in so short a time span, it still exuded confidence in being able to come up with the RSS News Reader by the time Google Reader goes offline.
Towards this, it has also revealed how the company is looking at the entire thing, which it claims is focused around four central points. Digg has stated it is working hard to keep it really simple. Another aspect that Digg is emphasizing is putting emphasis on interoperability with various devices, while also ensuring existing Google Reader subscribers are able to switch over to the Digg offering with the minimum of hassle.
As for a launch date, the best that Digg could state is that it hopes to be ready by the time Google pulls the plug on its Reader service. So expect things to be set up and ready by the summer time!
Sony is developing a followup to the PRS-T2 e-Reader and it is poised to be submitted to the FCC within the next month. The company normally announces new devices in July and releases them in October. The big rumor right now is the deviation from the standard release cycle and getting a new product to market really soon. Sony normally discounts the current generation before it releases the new model.
The Sony PRS-T2 e-Reader is being discounted in the UK, with lighted case and AC charger for 139 euros. It is also being sold with a $20 discount at Best Buy and Future Shop in Canada. It is heavily discounted basically at most stores in the US, Canada, and UK.
Sony has recently revised its online ebook store and opened up a new book of the month club. It has ditched Google Books as an official partner and is doing great business with Overdrive. Now that Google Reader is being discontinued, the Evernote integration is a really big selling point. A new generation Sony e-Readers is due to be announced soon and it is rumored to use the same type of frontlight technology that the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Glo use.
Barnes and Noble has updated its official iOS app today that brings digital comics and HD Magazines. The new high resolution magazines look amazing, but are only available on the 3rd and 4th generation models of the iPad. The company has also implemented better organization for your newspapers and magazines. Finally, B&N has not only added comic support, but also brought over its ZoomView technology, which lets you isolate specific panels.
The new update for the Nook iOS app will be welcome for people who like to read content other than ebooks. It is important to note that you can’t buy content within the app, because B&N did not want to give Apple a cut out of every digital sale. Instead, you will have to buy your comics and magazines from the web, and have them synced directly to your account.
Despite its name, Digital Manga Publishing (DMP) was a print publisher for the first 12 years of its existence; founded in 1996, the company didn’t begin publishing digitally until 2008. Since then, however, they have become a leader and innovator, with manga available on every digital platform imaginable: ComiXology, Kindle, Nook, even Wowio.
The heart of DMP, though, is its website, eManga. It started out as a streaming site on which you could buy points to “rent” or “buy” manga. A rental lasted for 48 hours, while buying gave the user unlimited access–as long as he or she was online. There were no downloads.
Over the years, DMP revised the website several times, eliminating the rental, adding other publishers (some of whom have since disappeared) and finally, late last year, allowing readers to download their manga. In typical DMP fashion, they offer seven different formats, which are readable on a wide variety of different devices.
I asked production associate Amy Koga, who helped develop the site, about some of the changes.
Good E-Reader: Why did you decide to allow downloads?
Amy Koga: I think one of the biggest reasons was we recognized that the industry was changing, and that is what the customers wanted: They wanted downloadable files they could download and keep. This is where it’s all at.
Why are you offering so many formats?
I was the one to decide on that. As we were testing, we noticed so many devices had different ways of displaying different file types, and we wanted to be sure our books looked great on different devices. E-pubs look great on e-ink devices, but on the iPad they don’t look as good as an Apple-restricted fixed-layout book. We wanted to be sure the customers had a fixed layout file to download.
Logistically, is it difficult to transition your readers over?
It took time. It was not an easy transition. It definitely took a couple of weeks, and on the tech side, our IT department worked overtime. They worked really hard to get it out. We were able to do it. The migration actually went much easier than we thought, so it wasn’t too difficult, but there were some bumps along the way.
How have readers reacted?
I’m not sure if I can give you an exact number, or any kind of ballpark number, but I can say we have gotten positive reviews and positive feedback from a lot of customers. They are very happy with downloads, the formatting, and the way eManga now looks. We have seen a very large increase in order at eManga.com.
Are you going to keep your standalone apps and keep your manga available on comiXology and other services, or do you plan to fold all your digital sales into eManga?
We are not going to limit ourselves at all. We have Android and iOS apps that we are going to continue to update and offer, we offer books through comiXology and iVerse, and we still offer books for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo,
What are the most popular formats?
We are still colleting data. So far it seems a lot of people like PDFs, but we don’t know yet the final verdict.
Who are your readers?
As far as our customers, what we know of them is based on what they purchased and what they tell us and how they react. We try to get them to let us know what they want, and perhaps, if they prefer mobile devices, what is their device of preference. We are still collecting data.
There is some adult content on eManga, mixed with manga aimed at teens. Have you given any thought to making a separate site for 18+ manga?
We are trying to open our doors to everyone who likes manga. We are offering not just mainstream shoujo [girls'] and shonen [boys'] manga. Right now we have pages that if they are 18+ you have to agree to say you are 18+ to view them, and of course the credit card restriction is you have to be 18 or over. The younger audiences can use a PayPal account, and they will have access to the 13+ books.
So it goes by how you pay?
Yes, and also if you click on one of the hentai [adult] books. It will ask if you are 18 or over. We are just trying to keep our doors open to everyone at the m and not to make it too difficult for people to get what they want.
Barnes and Noble has announced by April 2013 that the company will introduce a new in-app payment system for Android apps housed in its app store. The company plans on introducing new developer tools that will allow customers to purchase in-app currency, boosts, and anything else that tickles their fancy. B&N only has 10,000 apps currently in its ecosystem, which is blown away by our very own Good e-Reader App Store with over 16,000.
When Barnes and Noble introduces the new in-app payment system in April, customers will simply attach a credit card to their main account and will automatically reap the benefits with purchasing content within the app. There is no need to always enter your user details and password, you merely click PAY.
Barnes and Noble should attract more developers with this new system, that could see their locked down ecosystem as a viable way to earn some extra money. Currently, users are unable to install their own apps, as B&N has disabled the ability to sideload in your own games. If you decide to buy a Nook Android device, this is important to note.
Windows Blue leaks online, includes smaller Live Tiles, new side-by-side Snap Views, and IE 11
An early build of Windows Blue,
the next version of Windows, has leaked online on the same day that
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer celebrates his 57th birthday. Build 9364, a
partner version that was originally compiled on March 15th, has been
made available on file sharing sites and includes some of the new
changes that Microsoft is building into its significant Windows 8
update. Leaked screenshots posted at Winforum
show that the company is bringing smaller tile arrangements and even a
larger desktop one to its Start Screen, along with greater control over
the color personalization options, and a whole lot more.
Additional Snap view to place apps side-by-side
Microsoft is building in
additional Snap Views into Windows Blue, allowing users to place apps
side-by-side in the Windows 8 view. The new 50 / 50 view is similar to
the desktop mode snapping, but Microsoft also supports up to 4 snapped
apps alongside each other. New alarm, sound recorder, movie moments, and
calculator WIndows 8 -style apps will also take advantage of these new
views, but we understand developers will be able to update their apps to
support the additional Snap Views alongside other API changes and
additions. The snapping improvements also apply to multi monitor
support, where you can now run individual Windows 8-style apps across
multiple monitors.
Settings improvements to be more touch-friendly
Other improvements include a
number of new options in the Windows 8-style settings screen. Microsoft
appears to be adding all of the necessary settings required to ensure
tablet users don't have to drop to the desktop Control Panel to change
things. SkyDrive options are present, which appear to show greater
integration with auto camera uploads and control over device back ups
and files. There's also an app settings section that surfaces options to
change default apps and information on app sizes.
Settings and UI improvements
aside, Microsoft is also making changes to its Charms. The Devices Charm
includes a new "play" option, which looks similar to the existing
PlayTo options found in Windows 8. On the Share Charm there's a new
screenshot option that lets you quickly share an image with
applications. Internet Explorer 11 is also included in Blue,
although it's not immediately clear from the leaked screenshots what
improvements have been made. A tab sync feature appears in some
screenshots, suggesting that Microsoft is planning to make tabs
available on additional Windows Blue devices.
Touch users can also use new
gestures throughout Windows Blue. On the Start Screen you can swipe up
from the bottom to bring up a list of all apps, and in the desktop mode
you can swipe up or down to reveal a desktop app bar that provides
access to snap, projector settings, and more. We're looking into other
leaked features and screenshots so we'll update you on any other
additions. Windows Blue is expected to enter public preview over the coming months, with a full release due later this year.
Sony has announced it will be releasing the Jelly Bean update for its Xperia Tablet S by early May. The tablet now runs Android 4.0 ICS. The update should also come as a welcome relief for early adopters of the tablet as it will also include a fix for the tablet’s tendency to shut down on its own, something that can be attributed to a faulty memory management system.
The Tablet S was launched back in August last year and marks Sony’s second generation of the tablet series. The tablet also boasts of its water proof and dust proof credentials. The company took its time bringing along the Jelly Bean update for the Tablet S, considering the latest Tablet Z already comes pre-loaded with Jelly Bean. That said, it’s even more uncertain for owners of the original Tablet S as Sony has stated they have no immediate road map to update its earliest generation tablets to the latest Android version.
Windows 8 was a drastic shift in the Windows universe. We saw an operating system that moved away from the desktop environment we're all quite used to, and brought the tiled Modern UI. I can't lie to you, I'm still not quite into the new look and feel, since most of my experience has been on my kid's laptop and the OS is clearly designed to live and breathe on a touch screen. But it's been nearly six months since Microsoft released Windows 8, and early adopters should be well-accustomed to the new interface. We were ready, upon release, to provide OverDrive Media Console for Windows 8. The Windows 8-native app was designed to allow the same experience on a Windows 8 tablet or computer, as on a mobile device.
Sharing the mobile experience means that the Windows 8-native app does not support WMA Audiobooks and Music, WMV Videos, or transferring titles to mobile devices. However, the previous version of OverDrive Media Console can be installed alongside the new version to allow users to transfer books or enjoy the Windows Media content under Windows 8's desktop mode. So with two flavors of OMC available for Windows 8, we’ve got two great tastes that taste great together!
When you, or your users, get your hands on a Windows 8 device, there are a few things you may need to be aware of when using both version of OMC on one computer. The Windows Media Player Security Upgrade will require running Internet Explorer 10 as an administrator. In some cases, using IE10's compatibility mode may also be necessary to make sure the security upgrade can run. When using both versions of OMC on a Windows 8 computer, these are steps to take to make sure the correct format opens in the appropriate version of OMC (available from our help pages):
Once you’ve found an audiobook, music, or video that you want to check out, save it to your computer instead of opening it. To do that, right-click the Download button, then select ‘Save As,’ or select the Download button, then Save.
Once the ODM file has been downloaded, right-click (or swipe down) on it.
Select Open With, then choose the right version of OMC: • WMA and WMV titles: Choose OverDrive Media Console. You can also open MP3 titles with this too, if you prefer. • MP3 titles: Choose OverDrive Media Console for Windows 8.
Once you have both versions installed, you can enjoy OverDrive media in the old style or new. In case you are wondering whether or not the steps we recommend have been verified to work, I must confess that I had to consult the help pages when setting up my daughter's laptop on Christmas morning, so she could continue listening to her OverDrive audiobooks.
Justin Noszek is a Support Specialist at OverDrive.
While doing some research over at Amazon this morning I came across a couple of listings for refurbished Kindle Paperwhites. Usually Amazon has a note along the side of the regular listing when they have refurbished units available, but this time they are completely hidden for some reason. In fact they don’t even show up [...]
10 tips to keep your mobile devices charged and happy
The batteries that your mobile devices contain are miracles of
engineering. They hold amounts of energy that their predecessors
couldn’t come close to equaling. Properly using this potential can help
your mobile batteries last longer on the road. Here are our tips for
obtaining optimum battery performance.
1. For the quickest Tablet charge, use the original charger or a charger specifically designed for it.
When charging tablets, use the charger they came with for best results.iPads and other tablets have large batteries, so they come with chargers
that can output lots of juice to recharge them quickly. For example,
the iPad's adapter can output up to 2100mA (2.1 Amps), which is more
than double the amperage that a typical USB port can support. This extra
power output makes a huge difference. In our tests, charging an iPad
took 5 hours, 9 minutes with the iPad charger (which can deliver up to
2100mA), but it took 10 hours, 13 minutes with an iPhone 5 charger
(which maxes out at 1000mA). In a similar test with a generic USB travel
charger, the charger took more than 24 hours to build up a full charge
in the same iPad.
As these tests demonstrate, to reduce charging time to a minimum, you
need to use either the original charger or one designed specifically for
your device. Some devices contain circuitry that won’t allow the
battery to use the charger's full capacity unless the charger contains a
special authorization chip: otherwise, the device will charge at a much
slower rate. For instance, when we tried to charge an iPad 4 with a
Samsung Tab 10.1's charger, the process took over 19 hours to complete,
even though the Samsung charger can deliver the same amount of juice as
the original iPad 4 charger. That’s because the iPad 4, not recognizing
that the charger could deliver a larger flow of power, limited the
incoming current to an unnecessarily low level. The same was true of the
reverse situation: When we tried to charge a Samsung Tab 10.1 tablet
with an iPad 4 charger, the process took more than 15.5 hours. In
contrast, the original Samsung charger completed its work on the Tab
10.1 in 4 hours, 46 minutes.
2. Most cell phones don’t need a specific charger.
Cell phones, which carry smaller batteries than tablets use, don’t
require high-current chargers. As a result, you can use a generic
charger to transfer power to them, without suffering a severe slowdown
in charging time. When we timed how long an iPhone 5 took to reach a
full charge when fed by various chargers, the differences ranged from 2
hours, 4 minutes with an HTC travel charger to 2 hours, 59 minutes with a
Samsung charger. The original iPhone 5 charger took 2 hours, 16
minutes—so you won’t suffer much of a penalty for using a third-party
charger with your cell phone or other small device.
3. Use a charging USB port or a powered USB hub.
If you don’t have a charger handy, you can recharge via a USB port. USB
2.0 ports come in two types: standard and charging. The difference is in
the amount of juice they can deliver: A standard USB port delivers a
paltry 100mA, whereas a charging port can deliver a much more
respectable 500mA. That’s why, when you plug a power-hungry device into
some ports, it either won’t charge at all or will charge very slowly.
Though many laptops offer a combination of standard and charging USB
ports, many manufacturers do a poor job of identifying which ports are
of which type; in such cases, the only way to find out is to try each
port in turn. Even more confusingly, some ports on fairly recent laptops
can provide up to 1.1 Amps of current when a device that can use it is
plugged in. Check with your system's manufacturer to see what types of
ports it has and what amperage they can deliver to your device, before
relying on them to keep your devices charged and ready to go.
Although USB 3.0 ports can deliver more juice (up to 900mA) than USB 2.0
ports can, they perform at this level only with USB 3.0 devices. If you
plug a USB 2.0 device into a USB 3.0 port, the port will deliver the
same maximum 500mA that a USB 2.0 port would.
If you use an unpowered USB hub, the available current will be divided
across all of the ports, which won’t leave enough to charge your
devices. A powered USB hub can deliver the full amount of charging juice
to each and every port, which makes it a better option for charging
your devices.
You can use any micro-USB cable, not just the one your phone came with.
4. You can use any Micro-USB cable to charge your phone if the phone has a Micro-USB port.
For devices that have Micro-USB ports, you can use any cable that has a
Micro-USB plug on the end for charging; you don’t need a special cable.
5. The first time you charge a device, let the device charge completely, and then discharge it until it runs out of juice.
The first charge cycle of any device is important: It conditions the
battery and helps the device figure out how the battery behaves. So,
when you first plug it in, leave the device on to charge for at least 12
hours, then unplug and run the device until the battery is empty. 6. You can safely leave devices charging. Modern mobile device batteries contain circuits that control the flow of
power, so it is safe to leave them plugged in and charging for long
periods. When the battery is fully charged, the battery management
controller will regulate the flow of power to keep the battery topped
up, but won’t overcharge it. Which is a good thing, as an overcharged
Li-Ion battery could explode.
7. It is good for your batteries to occasionally completely run them down and fully recharge them. It's not a bad idea to occasionally let a battery drain completely.
Modern Lithium Ion batteries don't suffer from the memory effect problem
that plagued their older nickel-cadmium cousins, so you can safely
recharge your device even if the battery hasn't completely run down.
Nevertheless, manufacturers recommend running the battery down and
recharging it fully at least one a month to maximize the battery's life, as this helps keep the battery conditioned and helps preserve its chemistry.
8. Treat your batteries with respect.
If you treat them well, your devices' batteries will repay you with
years of service. But if you don’t treat them well, they won’t respond
well—which is a problem because the insides of batteries are dangerous
places. It may help to think of batteries as small chemical fires
waiting to happen: You should always carry them in the device or in a
case (if you're carrying a spare). Never poke, puncture, or otherwise
mistreat them.
9. Replace (and recycle) your batteries every two years or so.
As batteries get older, their ability to retain a charge diminishes, and
consequently your device's battery life gets shorter. This gradual but
inevitable process reflects chemical changes inside the battery. Most
batteries should be good for a couple of years, though: Apple asserts
that the battery in an iPad will hold 80 percent of its maximum charge
after 1000 charges, and other manufacturers make similar claims.
When you do replace them, recycle the old batteries at a hardware store or other designated rechargeable battery drop-off. The Call2Recycle
website will help you find a recycling station in your area. Don't
discard any recyclable battery into the trash, as its ingredients are
quite poisonous and potentially combustible.
10. You can diagnose a USB power problem in a few simple steps. The Generic USB Hub Properties window shows a list of connected USB devices and the amperage each one is drawing.
If you're trying to use a USB port to charge a device, but it isn't
working, you can find tools in Windows that may improve the situation.
Unfortunately those tools are buried rather deep in the system. To get
to them, go to Control Panel > Device Manager, and select Devices by Connection
from the View menu. Click the top item on the list (which should be the
name of your PC), and press the * key. This will open a list of all the
devices connected to your system. Scroll down until you find one called
'Generic USB Hub'. This is your computer's built-in USB hub, which
connects the USB ports in the case. You may have more than one such hub,
depending on your system. Right-click Generic USB Hub and select Properties. In the Generic USB Hub Properties window click the Power
tab, and you'll see a list of connected USB devices, together with the
amount of power that each one is drawing. This information can help you
determine whether the device will charge quickly (if the number is, say,
500mAH or above) or relatively slowly (if the number is less than
500mAh). When I checked this list on my computer, I found that my cell
phone was drawing just 96mA. As a result, even though the phone reported
that it was charging, it was receiving only a trickle of power, and
would probably never have charged fully.
It’s been a bit of a month for media player news – we just featured the arrival of Plex for the Pi last week, and we were really pleased to see a new book by Sam Nazarko on setting up Raspbmc on your Pi has just been put out by Pakt Publishing.
Today, there’s more good news for OpenELEC fans. We’re really grateful to the OpenELEC team, who have worked themselves to the bone on getting things running on the Pi; they were the first XBMC distro to be demonstrated on development Pi hardware back in February last year, were the first ever HardFP distribution (that appeared in March 2012).
Stephan Raue says:
OpenELEC 3.0 is built to support XBMC Frodo 12.1 and almost every part of the core OS has been updated and improved since the 2.0 release. The project now supports a broader range of mediacentre hardware than ever before, including dedicated OS images for the budget friendly Arctic MC001 and ultra-low-cost Raspberry Pi systems.
Raspberry Pi deserves a special mention as it's been a labour of love for the OpenELEC team. OpenELEC's leading position was made possible by our close working relationship with the XBMC team and many other upstream projects.
From the OpenELEC website:
What is OpenELEC?
Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center, or OpenELEC (http://www.openelec.tv) for short, is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into a complete XBMC media center (http://www.xbmc.org). OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot as fast as possible and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes.
It’s completely free
A full install is only 80-125MB
Minimal hardware requirements
Simple install to HDD, SSD, Compact Flash, SD card, pen drive or other
Optimized builds for Atom, ION, Intel, Fusion, RaspberryPi and more
Simple configuration through the XBMC interface
Plug and Play external storage
File sharing out of the box
OpenELEC 3.0 highlights and changes
XBMC-12.1 (Frodo) – features include:
DTS-MA and Dolby True-HD via XBMC's new AudioEngine (not on AMD and RPi)
Greatly improved Live TV and PVR support
Improved image support, allowing the database to use additional image types.
Support for the Raspberry Pi
Better Airplay support across all platforms
Advanced Filtering in the library
Advanced UPnP sharing
For more on AudioEngine support, PVR support and more, visit the OpenELEC site. Huge thanks to all the developers who have put so much work into the OpenELEC on the Pi; we’re very grateful!
The winning combination in education is to produce high quality, creative material designed to enhance student learning and outcomes, all while meeting the strict guidelines of a budget that would be better suited for a summer camp. One of the initial hopes that the recent growth of digital publishing and device accessibility would create were inexpensive digital textbooks, but that wasn’t the case; what many fail to realize is that the high cost of a textbook isn’t due to the paper and the ink; it’s the team of Ph.D.-level writers who were paid to write the book.
Now, a grassroots effort by a company who is familiar with meeting the classroom and budget needs of public school teachers has led to the development of teacher-created digital textbooks. Essentially based on the same model in which teachers were able to upload and distribute or sell their best lesson plans, digital textbooks from Teacher’s Discovery share some of the most innovative concepts among teachers.
“Teacher's Discovery, has launched a new series of HTML5 eTextbooks called "Voces", which means ‘voices’ in Spanish,” explained Erik Schreefel from Teacher’s Discovery. “It's a grassroots effort, with each of the eTextbooks being created for teachers, by teachers. Six hundred middle schools and high schools began using our Voces 1st Year Spanish eTextbook during the 60-day beta test where the eTextbooks were priced at around a dollar per student. Traditional eTextbooks are usually upwards of $20 per student, or are included as a companion to tangible textbooks, however, this standard of pricing is crippling schools' ability to have up-to-date materials. Our philosophy is ‘eTextbooks for all!’ That's why we're pricing our Voces series for around a dollar per student.”
Teacher’s Discovery began with a 60-day beta test of the project and had 600 middle schools and high schools participate. The first title in the pilot, Voces, is a first-year Spanish book created by teachers in the beta and was used by each of the schools in the program.
Unfortunately for this much-needed measure, there is one more major hurdle to overcome in true digital textbook adoption, and that is the oversight committees at the state and local level who first create a list of “approved” books in each subject area. Programs like this one would allow easy access to tried-and-true supplemental materials, but they may be a long way off in terms of getting the approval from the gatekeepers to digital textbook adoption.
Now, the company is prepping a TV that would look amazing in that - or any - home.
It's a 120-inch widescreen beast that plays 4K video but
looks to be as thin as a projector screen. Rumor has it that Microsoft
believes TVs like these will be standard in households in 10 years.
