Not all PDFs are created equal

I was not too happy about a PDF book "Force ..." not able to open be opened in GoodReader (on iPad).  But then I found out that the same PDF file also couldn't be opened in iBook.  I have no problem reading the PDF file on MacOS, so something must be causing the PDF failed to work on  iPad.  No big deal I guess.  This is more like an expectational case than a norm.

Fuck you Apple

I am getting very pissed by how iTune couldn't handle single .aac audio file.  Convert .aac to anything that iTune recognize is pain in the ass.  Renaming the file extension to .m4a didn't work.  And then I found the software MediaCoder that seem to do the job, but then I got the stupid error.  Finally I realize one thing: I don't need to convert the audio files.  I can just play the aac files directly using GoodReader.  Problem solved.  And fuck you Apple for making iTune such a shitty closed world.  Fuck you.

Read ePub books WITHOUT iTune sync and iBooks

I don't have problem with iBooks.  In fact I like it as a decent ebook reader.  But I hate the fact that I have first put my ePub book in iTune at home first, and then sync them to my iPad.  I want to be able to add ePub books whenever I want.  Luckily, ReaddleDocs does exactly that.  I just need to add those ePub book files in ReaddleDoc folder through iTune, and I then I can launch the ebook reader built into the app.  Nice.

Chinese eBook Reader ... not close enough

I was kind of excited when I saw this iPad software called "Touch eBook", which support uPDB and PDB format eBooks, like those provided by site like this one.  However, when I tried the app, I found that except the several books provides WITH the app, all the books I downloaded caused the app to go crazy.  It seems like there's some overflow problem going on.

I tried those PDB files on iSilo for iPad, and it was not working too.  In fact, I found iSilo has it's own share of craziness too.  It doesn't have good file management mechanism (like copy files into any directory I created).  Eventually, I decided to just leave all magazines on the root of the directory structure.

At the end, I am settle with the app cBook Reader.  The operation seems a bit odd, and I find it strange that I can't directly load books from iTune, but at least it has directly way to download books from site, and once downloaded, those books work properly on the app.

Converting wma to iPhone friendly format

I found realized that if I drop wma files directly on iTune, iTune will convert them to some iPod/iPhone friendly audio format.  Nice.

Tried CineXPlayer ...

As a free player, it works pretty OK. Not all the Xvid movies and TV shows I throw in work, but I guess that's the price of free player.

iPad Camera SD card reader doesn't work with iPod Touch

Tried, and failed. I know. I sort of expected that, but still disappointing.

Back up iPhone App setting ... FINALLY

I was frustrated by this for quite a while: everything after I uninstalled an iPad app, I lost all the setting. And when I reinstall the same app, it's like I start from scratch. This is ultra frustrating when dealing with games. Fortunately, there's an Cydia app called AppBackUp that may be my rescue. It allows me to back up my iPad application setting for specific application. So now I can do a backup, and then uninstall an app, knowing that later I am able to restore the state.

I am about to try it, and hope it works out.

Maybe time to get rid of the ProSwitcher

I was starting to suspect that something is wrong with my iPad because of ProSwitcher. The problem is that the auto-detect of the iPad Camera Kit doesn't work sometimes unless I reboot the machine. And everytime after boot I see this ProSwitcher alpha message popping the screen.

Let me try get rid of ProSwitcher and see if the problem will go away.

1Password Experiment

So I had this plan on trying to make Password management a one-stop among all the clients I use, from MacMini, to office laptop, to iPad. So the software iPassword seems to make so much sense. It has a client for each of these platforms. It even support dropbox, so it should work smoothly, right? Well sort of.

My first hurdle was trying to figure out a way to make 1Password recognize the data file on a remote repository (on a Windows 7 machine filesharing lots of directory. I even went so far by installing Windows 7 on my file sharing machine: EeePC, and although the installation was successful, it took up quite a lot of my time today. But I still found out that I have problem navigate to a 1Password chain file on a shared folder in Windows 7 machine. Finally, I found out a simple solution: simply double click on the keychain file on Mac desktop, and 1Password recognized it.

And then another problem: iPassword on ipad did NOT recognize the keychain file I explicitly put in Windows Dropbox account. Eventually I had to switch the DropBox on my Mac to use the same DropBox I used on my Windows machines, and then I had to uninstall and reinstall 1Password on iPad in order to make the syncing working again.

Finally I found that 1Password on Windows is in beta stage, so maybe a month later it won't work anymore. But in the meantime, I'll just let it slide, because I have enough headache for 1 day already.

iPad bandwidth consumption

Here's my monthly iPad bandwidth consumption... and I will continue documenting it.

7/3/2010 - 8/2/2010 : 2.2Gb
6/3/2010 - 7/2/2010 : 2.1Gb