Exporting e-books to the Nokia E50

The E50 has a large display and a PDF viewer. This makes it ideal to read books on the phone. The only problem is that the display is not as large one would want to have (one page of the document won't fit completely on the screen and you be able to read it) I have just managed to export few Saki books from Project Gutenberg to my phone in a "readable" way.

This is how I did it:

Tools required:
1. xemacs (vi may also do)
2. Cute PDF Writer (to print out onto PDF files)
3. Abiword (MS Word should also work)

Procedure:

Choose your e-book from Project Gutenberg. Download the text file. Now, we could directly print out the text file onto a PDF (using Cute PDF writer) and put it onto the phone, but you will realize that you won't be able to read it comfortably. You will either have to zoom in too much and then scroll left-right, or be satisfied with extremely small fonts.
There is where emacs comes in. We strip the right margin so that the text gets spread out vertically rather than horizontally. This is what I did:

M-x auto-fill-mode (return)
M-x set-right-margin (return)
20 (return)
C-x h (return)
M-q

The text would have grown vertically. Now copy all of this text onto Abiword. Again we could have directly printed out the PDF from emacs itself. But again thats not satisfactory. The fonts are not cute enough. Let AbiWord format the text, then print the file onto a PDF using Cute PDF.

Transfer the file onto your phone! You should be able to read the book without needing to scroll left and right at 95% zoom. If the book still doesn't fit correctly onto the screen, then do a "Zoom->Fit to screen" and then do a "Zoom-To %" and give 95. That should fix it.

The ad broker

"The ad broker looks to focus on lowering energy costs, improving its parallelized code and boosting component life spans rather than messing with things such as VMware and GPGPUs (general purpose GPUs)."

Guess whom we are talking about? .. Google! This is the first time I heard anyone call Google an ad broker. Takes out all their sting :)

Source.

Trip to Bombay

Distributed gifts to my kid cousins


Traveled in the local


Attended a workshop in IIT-Bombay


Met the new Addy

Came back to Bangalore

Flickr-ed

Now that I have a fancy camera phone, I thought it would make sense to finally renew my Flickr pro account.

My new phone

Behold the Nokia E50.

Cheeni Kum

I didn't like it. Maybe it was because of that 6 year old kid in the movie - the one having blood cancer - I found her very irritating. Or maybe its just too much of Amitabh Bachchan.