2012 – Page 5 – Roo's View

Review: Patriot microSDHC

I’ve had various microSDHC cards from a handful of different vendors, as the prices on these plummet I’ve started to become more particular about the brand than the cost – I’m willing to spend a few dollars if I know I’ll get good service if I need it. In the past I’ve written about an ADATA microSDHC card and my positive experience with their RMA department. I’ve also had the occasion to return RAM to Kingston which was a very slick experience.

While the warranty on the ADATA card, and the cost at the time were clear winners – the ability for the card to sustain transfer performance on large files (movies) didn’t hold up to the rating claim of the card. It wasn’t terribly far off, but as the price of other brands came down I’ve tended to shy away from ADATA.

I’ve had good success with Kingston and that’s my go-to brand for memory at the moment, but Patriot is a very strong second. Recently my 16GB microSDHC card in my phone failed. The symptoms started with loss of files, then inability to recognize the card at all. As I poked at the bad card, I could intermittently format and write some data to it, but things were immediately corrupted or unreadable shortly after.

The RMA process was relatively straight forward. The website will direct you to contact support, who will reply via email and provide you a link to the RMA form with a case number. It was nice this was no hassle to get an RMA sorted out. The next step after the form is to send the bad card back. They provided this somewhat generic check list:

Product(s) must be securely packaged with the RMA number clearly displayed on the outside of the package.
If you have a kit, it is required to send in the complete kit to ensure compatibility.
A copy of this email confirmation with the RMA number must be included with the package.
Customers are responsible for paying the shipping charges to send the defective product(s) to Patriot Memory.
Patriot memory does not require but recommend customers to ship their product(s) with a carrier that provides package tracking and insurance for the price of the product to prevent shipping issues.
Patriot Memory is not liable for item(s) lost or damaged during transit.
Do Not Send Item in Regular Envelope. Product is prone to be lost in transit.
Any returned product(s) without clearly marked RMA number on the outside of the package will be refused and returned back to sender.

This was a bit of a bummer. A new 16Gb card is under $1 a Gb (including tax), tracking a package to the USA easily exceeds that cost. So I compromised and mailed it in a padded envelope with no tracking, the cost to me was $2.10.

The timeline on my RMA was as follows:

Friday May 4th, submit support ticket
Monday May 7th, receive reply from support redirecting me to RMA with case number
Monday Math 7th, submit RMA request online
Tuesday May 8th, receive RMA number and instructions on mailing in bad card (see list above)
Thursday May 24th, finally get bad card into postal system back to Patriot
Tuesday June 5th, request status update from Patriot
Tuesday June 5th, informed card has not arrived at Patriot
Tuesday June 7th, Patriot mails new card back to me
Wednesday June 27th, finally receive new card

I really shouldn’t have had that huge delay between getting a RMA number and getting the card into the mail. The RMA is only valid for a 30 day window, I suspect I was pretty close to the cut off line or they use the post date – either way I was a little bit lucky. Beyond having a little bit of cross-border mail delay, this was a pretty smooth warranty request. I’ll buy Patriot again.

Review: Kobo Wifi

A little while back I picked up a Kobo Wifi e-Reader for $40 +tax with free shipping thanks to RedFlagDeals. I really didn’t need yet another gadget, but at this price point it was far too tempting. The Kobo refurbished page is still up, but lists as out of stock currently.

The device came with version 1.7 of the firmware installed, as soon as I connected it to my wifi network it found an update to 1.9. I stalled on doing the update as I wanted to experience it in the out of the box state for a bit. Initially I’d say I felt it was hard on the battery, no where near the 2 weeks / 10,000 page turns per charge they claim. I also noticed it was waking itself up from sleep mode regularly.

Updating the firmware over wifi was easy, once you struggled past the painful text entry of your wifi network password. Moving to 1.9 I noticed an improved wifi indicator along with the expected improvements. It was still waking itself up which turned out to be a simple matter of fixing the setting: Menu > Settings > General, and change the “Download Daily” flag to ‘No’. Battery life appears to be improving as I use the device, I can now get through several hundred pages across multiple days on a single charge, I suspect the refurbished unit still has the original battery.

The screen is really quite amazing, quite comparable to reading a printed page. Lacking a light is a bit of a bummer for me as I tend to read in bed, but I’ve got a flashlight app on my phone that I often use for reading in the dark. Comparing this e-Reader to a book is more accurate than trying to compare it to a tablet, it is very much a single purpose device. The screen size is roughly paperback sized (6″ diagonal) and while the device itself has a generous border it’s still easy to hold in one hand (7.2″ x 4.7″). There are a few font choices and sizes, I find medium to work well for me in contrast to other readers where I’ve tended to pick smaller than average font sizes. The flip-side of this may be that for people who want very large print, this may not go big enough.

I was particularly impressed with the weight. The specification page claims 221g (7.8oz), I weighed mine and it came in at only 196g. Compare this to my Samsung Galaxy S phone at 118g, or the iPad 2 at 600g. Having a nice light reading device makes it easier to have long reading sessions.

I’ve also used the Kobo app on Android, the reading experience is quite different. Additionally the app version appears to have features that the Kobo Wifi does not, this isn’t a deal breaker but it seems odd that they didn’t try to incorporate the Reading Life features in, or at minimum contribute to the statistics of books read, etc. (The Kobo Touch does have Reading Life) One thing the Kobo Wifi supports that the app doesn’t is PDF files, again odd they didn’t aim to provide a seamless experience across readers. One other gripe I have about the software is that while it supports both date and time, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to get the time while reading – I really wish they had made it visible on the menu.

The E-Ink screen is a bit slow to refresh, it takes a bit longer than the time it takes to move your eyes from the bottom of the page to the top to start reading again. I’m a fairly fast reader so it may be more noticeable to me, but it isn’t so slow that I won’t use it to read.

I do find the choice of button layout to be poor. Pictured above is my primary method of holding it. I really wish they had put page turn buttons on the side of the device (when I read on my phone, I use the volume up/down buttons for page turning and find this much more convenient). The four buttons on the side seem poorly thought out too, I’ll point out that I’d never used the back button until just now and it didn’t do what I expected.

You can use the shop button (once you’ve configured your wifi network) to synchronize your Kobo library or purchase books. Adding books manually is simple: plug the Kobo Wifi into your PC using the mini-USB cable, you’ll be given a choice to manage library or just keep reading (while charging). Choose mange library and it will appears as a USB drive, now drag and drop stuff. A nice feature is the USB drive contains the Windows/Mac software you can use to manage the books on the device. As I mentioned previously, PDF files are supported when added manually.

In general eBooks don’t take up a lot of space, so the internal memory will be plenty for most. Those that want to have a lot of books on hand can add a SDCard for additional storage.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the value for money. It may be a little dated, and missing some of the newer features but it does let you read eBooks in full sunlight or any well lit room.

Building PDFs with ImageMagick

I’ve flipped back and forth between reading physical books and eBooks over the last couple of years. I’m currently in an eBook phase, and it may stick this time. A sale on Kobo let me grab a few I had been meaning to read for next to nothing, now that I’ve bought a few I’m more likely to buy more.

Sometime you want to move some content into a format that can be easily read using one of the eReaders. Let’s consider two scenarios: a) You have a paper copy of something you want to scan and convert, b) there is a web resource that is formatted as pages but isn’t in PDF format. Under Ubuntu I like Simple Scan, it allows you to easily scan multi-page documents. If dealing with a web resource, a full screen browser window and Alt-Print Screen will perform a screen capture allowing you to save a series of pages quickly.

Simple Scan will save multiple scanned pages with filenames (Scanned Document-1.jpg) which sort nicely in order of scan. The screen shot utility uses filenames in the format “Screenshot at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS.png” so again we have perfect alphabetic sorting in the directory. Having the files in the directory in the correct order will be helpful later on.

Now with both scanning and screen capture there will be elements in the image that we want to crop. As we’re likely dealing with 10’s of pages, we don’t want to have to open GIMP on each of them and edit. Enter ImageMagick – a command line friendly tool for image processing. My screen resolution is 1680×1050 and the screen shots were all 1680×1026 (due to the Ubuntu desktop title bar). The screen shot contained the browser “chrome” as well as portions of the page I didn’t want. Using GIMP I was able to determine the upper left (491×126) and lower right (1170×1026) corners of the image, a little math told me the cropped image size was 679×900. I made a copy of one of the images and called it x.png, this let me experiment to make sure I got it right.

$ convert x.png -crop 679x900+491+126 y.png

Excellent, the resulting y.png file is properly cropped. Now I want to convert all of the files in the directory, and in fact I want to mutate them in place. It turns out mogrify is the the solution:

$ mogrify -crop 679x900+491+126 *.png

This will modify all of the images “in place” in the directory I’m using. For scanned images we have pretty much the same process yet the cropping dimensions will be different.

At this point I jumped the gun and converted all of the files in the directory into a pdf. Here is a screen capture of the PDF viewer showing a simple example to demonstrate the problem:

So while the cropped .png displays properly with no whitespace around it, the PDF clearly has additional whitespace. The ImageMagick identify utility helps explain what’s wrong here:

$ identify Screenshot\ at\ 2012-05-29\ 20\:26\:25.png Screenshot at 2012-05-29 20:26:25.png PNG 679x900 1680x1026+491+126 8-bit DirectClass 1.263MB 0.050u 0:00.050

Ah, so the image still has the original size, but it’s been cropped to the corrected size. It turns out I want to apply an additional processing step to the images, +repage (to completely remove/reset the virtual canvas meta-data from the images)

$ mogrify +repage *.png

$ identify Screenshot\ at\ 2012-05-29\ 20\:26\:25.png Screenshot at 2012-05-29 20:26:25.png PNG 679x900 679x900+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 1.263MB 0.050u 0:00.050

Now I’m ready to create a PDF file:

$ convert *.png book.pdf

This works like a charm because my files are in the correct order. The resulting PDF size is a little bit bigger than the sum of the individual image files. I did explore ways to reduce this, but all of them resulted in lower quality images in the PDF and that impacted readability.