Well, today’s toy was the Motorola Rokr S9-HD BlueTooth wireless earphones.  For the past two years I’ve been using the Oakley/Motorola branded O-Rokr sunglasses and found them great, but the volume was limited and given their high price I was always concerned about their care.

Another problem lately is that I’ve been taking longer and longer bicycle rides and considering the New England weather, I’m finding that sunglasses aren’t always wearable this late in the day.

I picked up a pair of the new earphones at BestBuy for $99 and found the fit and finish great.  The battery wasn’t charged out of the box, but after only 15 minutes on a charger they lasted for an hour long bike ride.  The sound controls are intuitive with volume up/down on one side plus track forward/back on the other.  They also have a built in microphone so you can take calls from them as well.

I found the sound quality to be really high — better than my O-Rokrs.

A problem I’ve always had in the past when cycling was the wind noise would drown out the music–not on these puppies, you can crank the volume WAY up and drown out your own thoughts.

They come with a carrying case, charger, different size ear ‘nubs’, and instructional manual.

Overall I think this is a great product and would recommend it for anyone interested in having earphones without the wires.

I frankly hate having to have several devices with me to do different things–that’s what this whole convergence of devices is supposed to be about.  So when the weather starting clearing up and I took to the outdoors again on my bicycle, I wanted a way that I could listen to my music, track my speed and distance, and still have my phone with me in case of emergencies.  Naturally the iPhone seemed to be the solution for this problem.

Now the goal for me is to be complely wireless, and when exercising its often ideal.  Unfortunately, the 3.0 OS hasn’t been released yet so my bluetooth headsets won’t work with the the iPhone and I had to resort to use wired headphones (eww).  I initially purchased an athletic arm band which had an enclosure for phone and worked pretty well, but once I found some nice cycling apps that would double as a GPS device showing me my current rate and distance, having to look over at my arm repeatedly became a chore.

Enter the bicycle handbar mount, designed for the iPhone and sold at USBFever.  Its touted as an ‘iPhone’ mount but its really a universal holder for any device.  What sold me on this model was its ability to rotate 90* so I could view an app in landscape mode.  The display video they provided seemed proof enough, so I ordered one.

Today it arrived.  Shipped straight from China, and how nice of them to include a tasteless image behind inside.

First and foremost is the mounting–to attach the base to the handbars is quite simple, you unscrew the retaining knob and place the tubular mount over the handlebar and retighten.  Included is are two rubber strips to place between the handlebar and the mount, but the fit is so tight that I found them impossible to use.  Just make sure you tighten the mounting nut all the way.  I can’t imagine this fitting handlebars thicker than normal.

Afterward, you just snap the mounting bracket to the tube mount and you’re ready to go.  The mounting bracket expands and contracts so many different devices can be used.  It will ’snap’ into place when properly connected to the base.

Now for the test ride.  I started my typical cycling easy, smooth level roads.  I had my GPS application running as well as the iPod and I have to admit, this was feeling pretty nice. Thinking tomorrow the new 3.0 OS would be released, I wouldn’t be tethered with earphone wires, I could get used to this.

And then I hit a bump.

The mounting bracket came unconnected from the base unit and flew off into the road.  Fortunately I chose to use my silicone based case this day for such a catastrophe and my phone was unharmed.  Hmm . . . I thought I had that snapped in tightly, let me try that again, ‘click’,  yes, thats solidly on there.  Went another 100 feet and it came off again from a bump.  Clearly the mounting unit was not going to stay on–and I’m on a public road here!

I ended up stopping at a local store to pick up some super glue to permantly fix the bracket to the handlebar mount but found that one of the holding arms was cracked badly and a firm grip was no longer possible.  Back into the store for some velcro to create some sort of monstrosity that could at least get me home.

Bottom line, product is a great idea, lets you view your screen while you ride, the bad is that the connector is so lousy that it comes unhinged from a tiny bump.  I’m tempted to return this one and demand a replacement and make sure to superglue the bracket on before I use it again.

Oh, and the GPS on the iPhone is pretty lousy unless you have complete unfettered sky for miles around.  So much as a mailbox in the way and you lose signal and it’ll pull from the nearest cell tower which can skew your results up to miles.  My hopes is that the new 3gs model has a better receiver.

Why?

Several people have asked me how I have my school textbooks in PDF format, so I thought it would be an appropriate topic to post up here.  Usually the first question I get is WHY would you want your book in PDF format?  I can think of several reasons why I prefer it:

1. Can view or read material directly from your computer or mobile device
2. Makes it very easy to search for a specific term or phrase
3. You can bring to class just a printed chapter or subsection rather than an entire book
4. If you ruin a page with writing, highlighting, etc–you can just print it out again

If any of the above if of interest to you, then having your texts to PDF may be a good idea.

How?

Since virtually no legal publisher providers their books in digital format, we’re on our own to convert them.  There are several ways to do this, some quicker, some cheaper–but I’ll cover them all.

In my opinion, the best way to convert your book to PDF is to simply let someone else do it.  C’mon, its the American way!  Simply put, you take your book(s) down to a printing shop and they can do all the heavy lifting.  Not all places will do this, some Kinkos will and some won’t, so call around.  Technically it is a copyright violation–but good luck trying to convince the minimum wage clerk about fair use laws.  Mom & Pop printing shops will usually do it.  Pricing can vary.  The place I use wanted $0.25 per scan but I talked them down to $0.13.  Obviously not the cheapest, but if you have the coin for it, I find it worth it.  I’ll also describe each of the steps if you’re doing this yourself.

The key steps are:

1. Chop off the binding
   Using special machinery, the shop will cut the binding off the book and make a clean even cut of the binding edge of the pages to remove any residue glue.  If you are doing this yourself, I suggest you still have a pro perform this step–it only costs $5 and will save you a million headaches if the glue gums up a scanner.

   

2. Scan in the page
   A printer will then take the pages and drop them into an auto-loading feeder for their scanning machines.  It is important that they be able to provide duplex scanning, which is scanning of both sides of the page.  Most do, but CYA and ask first.  The auto-feeder is simply the same as the feeders found on office copy machines so they can speed through the stack of pages and create digital images.I have done this step on my own using my office’s multifunction copier, which served as a scanner as well.  The feeders on these machines can be finicky at times, so try to limit the number of pages you load at a time to 100.  This will help prevent jams.  Also make sure the pages are free of any glue debris and don’t have any folder corners which can cause problems.  This is obviously a much more cost effective solution, assuming you have access to such a machine and a few hours to burn.

   If you don’t have access to quality office equipment, duplex scanners with autofeeders are also available to the public for reasonable prices from companies such as Kodak, HP, Brothers, etc.  They’ll run about $300-$400 but will pay for themselves in a year.  Important to note that since these are not commercial machines, the autofeeder will handle less of a batch and will also scan much slower, increasing the overall time spent in the proces.

   The real cheapo option is to use a flatbed scanner and do it all by hand.  If you have a week with nothing to do, sure.

   I suggest scanning in the table of contents, indexes, and other supplementary sections.  They’re very helpful.

3. Convert to PDF
   Once the pages are scanned in, converting to PDF is the easy part.  Commercial scanners, like ones found at printing presses or at corporation often have the capability built in–the output from the scan IS in PDF format.  Even consumer devices included this functionality and necessary software.  Printers will provide you a single PDF file on a CD, which is about 200 megabytes for a 1000 page book.When you are doing this on your own, it may be best to give each chapter its own file as processing the files can eat up a lot of system memory.  Even for the single massive files a printer can provide, I still break them down into smaller units to be more manageable.
4. Optimize
   The final step is to optimize the PDF produced by the printing press or scanner.  This step will require that you have a full version of Adobe Acrobat or other similar tools that can read/write PDF format.  The first part is to run OCR (optical character recognition) which converts the images of the letters into actual text that can be highlighted, copied, or searched upon.  To execute this in Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0, from the menu select ‘Document–>Recognize Text Using OCR–>Start’.  Select all the pages on the next screen and let the process finish.  It is not quick and will take about 1-2 seconds per page.

Once that is completed, you will then wish to run a PDF optimzation on the file which will decrease the file size where possible.  This is also available in Adobe Acrobat by selecting ‘Advanced–>PDF Optimizer’ from the menu.

This will open a sub-window of options, but I just leave the defaults and let it do its magic.  Once done you now have a PDF version of your textbook, searchable, printable, and highlightable.

What Now?

Now that you have your book full digital, what is left over of your book may make you want to cry considering what you spent on it.  Fear not, people WILL still buy them on Ebay as long as indicate that the book is unbound.  You never know, maybe someone else is looking to digitize the book as well.

Whether you choose to print out the entire book or keep it electronic only is your decision.  I prefer to print them on 3-ring-punched paper and take a chapter or two to class with me.  I also typically have a page or two on me for quick reading whenever I suspect I’ll be: stuck in traffic, waiting at a restaurant, bored at work, etc.  Its much simpler than carrying around all 1000+ pages.  I don’t need to be worried about folding up the pages or crumbling them into a bag–I can just print up another one when I want.

Last but not least–I’d advise avoiding trying to make a quick buck and selling copies of the digitial books to other students.  Lets be realistic here–do you really want to get on the bad side of the legal publishing industry by commiting copyright infringement?  I wouldn’t either.

On the flip-side though, if you and a bunch of friends wish to split the cost of having a printing company perform the above steps for you, as long as you each own a physical copy of the book, I can see no reason why this would be prohibited (but then again, I’m only a 1L, I haven’t taken ‘copyright’ yet).

I hope this helps you out.