Building my own E-book reader from an old laptop

Well my latest Geek project is make my own e-book reader. i have plenty of tech docs in PDF format (and a few comics too!) However I find getting the laptop out and trying to read feels unnatural. I like to see a full page at once, so I try turning the laptop on its side but it just feels bulky and wrong. Since then I tried using my old Dell Axim Pocket PC, just too small, display doesn’t fit. I tried a hack for my PSP to convert pdf to jpeg and view, it was pathetic. So im back to my first thought of a laptop. now if I was rich I would go out and buy a swivel laptop with a nice screen and swivel it round to lay the screen flat on the front. But im too cheap to do that.

So enter an old Dell Laptop. P3 era, runs XP ok. its seen better days and not up to the task really now. So i have started reconstructing the laptop so that I can fold the LCD round to the back of the laptop and connect it underneath. So f ar so good. I will post pictures soon to explain how this works. The result will be a little bulky, but much less so than trying to read sideways from a normal laptop.

A letter to the TV stations regarding Olympic coverage – less talking, more action

Having moved to Canada a few years ago and after pathetic TV coverage here of the last winter Olympics I vowed never to waste my time trying to watch it….  and with good reason.  So with so many events happening every day,  the TV stations give hardly any coverage to the action.  Here is an idea,  how about showing us the action now,  you can talk all you like for next  3 years 10 months till the next summer Olympics.  So many events, so many countries, and whats covered…. well very little actually.  But hey we have plenty of time for some interviews and some idle chat.

If I had the money to start I would say bring a new TV channel online specially for the Olympics only. People pay to subscribe,   commercials are allowed between events….  just lots and lots of coverage of the events.  If the channel makes money, put it to a fund to pay for Athletes to travel to the next games.  It saddens me that the Olympics is one big money grab by the Olympic committee…     Yet the Athletes… the ones who are the whole point of this, have to raise money to even pay for damn flights to from the country…  its a bloody joke!

My “wow cool” software product of the week – Indigo Renderer

I came across this amazing software by accident while searching on information for Google Sketchup. Now my abilities as a 3d Artist are probably about as good as a 3 year… but nevertheless I was becoming quite proud of my Sketchup results, but the internal renderer isn’t exactly “lifelike”. So I discover Indigo which from the gallery on the site can render the most jaw dropping results. So I found out that a plugin for Sketchup exists called Skindigo that will let me design in sketchup and export to Indigo which renders the result in a much higher quality output than Sketchup shows.

Try it out! http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/

My “wow cool” software product of the week – Google Sketchup

My “Wow cool” thoughts are not trying to talk about new software but stuff that I have only just discovered or finally had the time to sit down and use. For Google Sketchup I remember downloading it when it was first released by Google. It didnt grab me as a “Wow cool” solution as I had no use for it but it seemed nice enough but a bit limited. Im no 3D artist and I found that I really couldnt visualize how to get the results I wanted so I left it. Now roll forward to today and I tried the current version to moke up some construction projects I have planned. I finally took 10 minutes to watch the videos google provide and I am very impressed by the power of this free software. The videos take you quickly though creating models quick and easy. Within 15 minutes I had produced my first half decent model, complete with materials applied, As the project was for my garden, 5 minutes later I had figured out how to add the results into my back garden as an object exported into Google Earth. So now I could view the object in 3d planted against the satellite imagery of my property. Also it was really easy to ensure my design was to scale thanks to some easy control of measurements.

if you want to try some simple 3d object creation, want to do it for free, with a real easy to use toolset then Google Sketchup is a great tool. To go find more head to http://sketchup.google.com/