Posts
Viewing sheet music on a Kindle 2
The screen on the Kindle 2 is really too small for reading music at the piano, but it can be used as a replacement for the small pocket scores that are used for study. The trick is to convert the sheet music PDF file into a series of JPEG picture files. Here’s how to do that on Linux: First, create a separate directory on your Linux machine for the sheet music score that you want to convert. This avoids clutter and accidents.
October 24, 2009
Getting a refund on the Windows Tax
It’s nearly impossible to buy a PC without Windows unless you build it yourself. But one persistent person managed to get a refund from Dell, after only twelve emails back and forth and a lost day of work. That was easy!
October 16, 2009
Automatic data loss on Windows
My employers have given me a Windows XP-64 machine, which sits 3000 miles away on the opposite coast. Operating it remotely using TightVNC isn’t anywhere near as fast or convenient as ssh, but at least it works. The machine seemed to be working fine when I disconnected from it on Saturday night. When I reconnected on Sunday morning, my session with all of its terminal windows was gone, and the login screen was showing. Today, after poking around with the Event Log GUI (nothing so easy as sudo less /var/log/messages), I figured out what went wrong. A process called the Windows Update Agent started running at 3 AM Sunday morning, and after five minutes it rebooted the machine. So apparently Windows has an automatic data loss feature that is built in and enabled by default.
October 13, 2009
Bye bye Kindle
I’ve used the Kindle DX for a week, and it’s a lovely device despite the limitations I’ve been pushing against. I spent a few days vacationing in a town that has Sprint cell service, and can say that the Whispernet really is the killer feature that sets this device apart. I also tried it as a sheet music viewer at the piano, and it was fine for that, though I think it’s best used as a reminder tool for music that you already know; paper is still best for pieces that you’re actively learning.
October 13, 2009
The Kindle and HTML links
I had heard that the Kindle would recognize (and display correctly) HTML documents, if you renamed them to have a .txt filename suffix. My hope was that it would also recognize internal and external links. If this were the case, then it would be possible to write scripts that would help with the lack of organizational tools. These scripts could walk the documents directory tree and construct HTML files that represented that tree. It would also be possible to extract metadata (such as author, title, and keywords) and represent them appropriately in HTML.
October 8, 2009
The Kindle DX and PDF metadata
One of the most common complaints about the Amazon Kindle is its lack of support for “folders”. In Linux terms, this means that the Kindle flattens your “documents” directory tree when it displays the list of your books on its home screen. However, a directory-browsing UI would be much less flexible than a tagging system, because it would require you to impose an arbitrary hierarchy on your documents. Fortunately, there is a workaround for this that implements a kind of pseudo-tagging using annotations. The advantage of this workaround is that it’s performed on the Kindle and doesn’t require a separate computer.
October 6, 2009
Using an Epson Perfection V30 scanner in Linux
When I was shopping for an inexpensive flatbed scanner, it was not always easy to figure out which ones would work in Linux. Many manufacturers use proprietary protocols in their products and generally ignore Linux. I bought an Epson V30 because it was cheap and because there are drivers available for download here. The drivers work on Linux Mint 6 (Ubuntu 8.10) or later, and on several other Linux variants. Unfortunately source code is not provided, so if you don’t have one of the popular distributions, you may be out of luck.
October 4, 2009
Re-gluing hammer felts on a grand piano
Last year my 1994 Mason & Hamlin BB (a 7-foot grand) developed a very unusual and alarming problem: several of the hammer felts in the mid-bass section came unglued. along the front side of the hammer. Thankfully the felts remained glued along the back side; otherwise they would have fallen off completely. My piano technician called the M&H factory to ask for advice, but since the company changed ownership after my piano was built, and the piano was out of warranty, he wasn’t able to get any satisfaction. So he took the action away for a week and re-glued the felts with hide glue. This was a quick and dirty patch job. The ideal solution is to replace all the hammers, but that’s a very expensive, time-consuming operation.
September 3, 2009
Printing USPS Click-N-Ship labels in Firefox on Linux
I use the USPS web site to print shipping labels, and each time I upgrade to a new version of Firefox or Linux, I always run into the same problem: printing labels doesn’t work. As soon as I click the Pay and Print button, Firefox goes into some kind of infinite loop reading data from the USPS web site, and the PDF file containing the label is never seen. The fix is to change how PDFs are handled by Firefox so that Adobe Reader is started as a separate process, rather than as an embedded window inside Firefox. Here’s how to do that in version 3.0 of Firefox:
June 11, 2009
Paper: a display technology for the future?
What with all the talk about new portable devices such as netbooks and the Amazon Kindle, an older but still promising portable display technology called “paper” has been largely ignored. But that’s a shame, because paper has many advantages that electronic devices still don’t come close to equaling. At first glance, paper might seem like an awfully crude technology; it’s made from flattened-out wood pulp, after all. But this allows it to take on shapes and sizes only dreamed of by conventional displays. Take newspapers, for example. Their display size and resolution are enormous by today’s standards; equivalent LCDs would cost thousands of dollars. Also, newspapers are light in weight, and can be folded up for portability.
June 11, 2009