diary of infinity

I just got a new offline version of Wikipedia for my Pocket PC: and this time it's the whole thing!
I can now carry a 2.3 MILLION article encyclopaedia in my pocket! The 2.7GB database is viewed using the clever mDict dictionary program from Octopus Studio. And it's all free! The new full version was made by a guy called Sh0dan, and is available from legaltorrents.com. The great thing is, despite the huge size, article lookup is instantaneous even on my little 300MHz machine!

The only downside is that there are no pictures and the formatting of a few articles is a bit screwed up, with some text missing from some articles. Also no article categories, which means you are reliant on the alphabetic article index (although it has a search facility built in too.) OK so there are in fact quite a few downsides, but these are minor compared to being able to look up info on any subject imaginable, anywhere, anytime!

I just compared it to the encyclopaedia on my bookshelf: Book: 1.8 kg, 25,000 articles. PPC: 0.15 kg, 2,300,000 articles. The PPC is 1/10 the weight and yet has nearly 100 times as many articles, in other words it's literally 1000 times better in terms of information per kilogram! (Neither have any pictures as it happens.)

(There is also a version of mDict for normal PC's so you can have it on your desktop or laptop computer too, plus several non-English versions.)

Today I realised I was tiring a little of typing with the tiny onscreen keyboard on my pocket pc. Okay, so I can achieve around 30 wpm with it which is probably as good as many people manage with a grown-up keyboard, but it’s less than half my normal typing speed and doing hunt-and-peck with a stylus is a bit of a chore. So anyhow, I decided to do what a touchscreen interface does best and have a go at painting a picture with the freeware version of VSpainter. Despite the fact that it works at half-resolution, it does give rather nice results. My first creation was "Sunken Boat". I don’t know why I always seem to end up drawing lost boats, it probably says something deep about my psyche but here it is anyhow.

Whilst painting this I realised that only the fattest paintbrush is actually anti-aliased, the thinnest ones are pretty ugly to paint with which hampers detailed work somewhat, as they have a scratchy look to them like etching pictures on wax with a nail (assuming you ever did that in art class). In the end I had to fall back to using the smudge tool a lot like I did with the Windows Paint clone I tried the other day. Still, I rather like the result.
My second picture is called "Ubiquitous Sunset". On uploading it to my pc the first thought that struck me was that the 4:3 aspect ratio is not a good one for landscape type images, at the time I didn’t think about it, as VSpainter only gives you this shape, in fact if you load up a different shape image it chops bits off to make it fit. I wanted the silhouettes to be more sharp and detailed really but the scratchiness of the fine drawing tool defeated me.

Both these images have been shrunk slightly from the original 640x480, one benefit of this is that the downsampling helps disguise the fact that VSpainter really produces pixel-doubled 320x240 images. Anyhow, this could well be the last time I use VSpainter because I’ve found another freeware program with the rather curious name Mobile Atelier which reviewers claim is as good as Photoshop and has been designed specifically to exploit the inherent strengths of the pen interface. I’ll report back when I’ve tried it, but my hopes are up, especially as it is supposed to work properly with a 640x480 screen.

Recently I broke my MP3 player and decided to shell out on something a little more extravagent, namely a pocket PC, after seeing some Acer n310’s being sold off for £88. OK so this is about 6 times more than I paid for my cute little mp3 player, but nevertheless it seemed quite a bargain, being about 1/3 the price of any other pocket PC in the shops yet with twice the screen resolution (640x480 instead of 320x240). Since I’ve been playing with this machine non-stop and trying out dozens of programs for it I’ve decided to put stylus to touchscreen and pen my thoughts about it.


Despite the hi-res screen it’s about the same size and thickness as half a pack of cards, and of course you can play cards on it too. You can drag them with your finger as the screen is touch sensitive. There’s also a stylus which neatly slides completely inside the machine for storage. The L-Ion battery lasts about 6 hours per charge.


OK so it’s twice as big as my old MP3 player (which wasn’t much bigger than a custard cream biscuit) but it’s just as slim and only 130g so it easily sits in a shirt pocket. It’s not quite as easy to use on the move as a dedicated player but by using the physical buttons under the screen you can still manage to control it by feel alone when it’s in your pocket. The machine comes with Windows Media Player which I don’t care for so I downloaded this freeware player, GSPlayer, which is much better. You can dump whole folders or sub-trees of MP3 and Ogg files into the player with just a couple of clicks, so if your tracks are organised logically you don’t need to create playlist files at all. GSplayer doesn’t show stuff like album details though, just artist and song title. Best of all you can turn off that really annoying scrolling of song titles that all players insist on doing!


Here’s where it gets interesting! I can watch anime on it too! (Pictured here is an episode of Windy Tales.) The supplied video player (PocketTV) was not very good, but I found a freeware player, TCPMP, which is really excellent, it will play anything at all—DivX, XviD, MPEG, even FLV files from Youtube.

Unfortunately, in contrast to the incredibly sharp screen the 300MHz processor is rather feeble and struggles to achieve more than half framerate unless you drop the resolution by half. I find it pretty odd that they would equip the device with a screen that’s twice the resolution of most other pocket PCs yet give it a less powerful cpu than most. TCPMP copes amazingly well with frame dropping though, so a lot of videos are playable as-is, but with some I’ve had to recompress them at 12fps or even 8fps to avoid frozen seconds of playback (I think this is preferable to reducing the resolution, the 200dpi 640x480 screen is soooo nice!)

Of course you can look at still images too. If you insert your camera’s SD card it will immediately offer to show you the pictures on it. However the built-in image viewer is very limited and slow, so I downloaded the freeware Xnview, which is widely regarded as a knock-off of the ubiquitous IrfanView (which sadly is not available for Pocket PCs). Pocket Xnview is nowhere near as good as Irfanview, but it’s a lot better than the standard Windows picture viewer.


Anyhow, given the poor playback speed of videos, why not just buy a proper multimedia player since these are available for a similar price to what I paid? Well apart from the fact that they tend to be twice as thick and three times as heavy, I bought this thing for a lot more than playing music and videos (and music videos). With its pop-up keyboard I can do word processing and even edit my webpages. Here I’m editing a HTML file using the freeware JWPce Japanese/English word processor which has a built in 120,000 word Japanese/English dictionary (Edict) and 500,000 word name dictionary (Enamdict)! (Hence my comment yesterday about 417 ways of spelling “Akari”!) Unfortunately, JWPce doesn’t seem to understand that I have a double-res screen and insists on displaying dialogue boxes at twice the size they should be. And you know, it’s really hard to use a dialogue box that is more than twice the width of your screen! I do hope I can get a fix for this, since I use JWPce a lot.


There’s also the obligatory copies of Word and Excel, this being a Windows machine (I know it’s the genuine Microsoft Windows because I have to keep rebooting it...)


I even managed to put Wikipedia onto it! I discovered there’s a downloadable subset of 2000 articles, it takes up 400MB of space on my SDcard but it’s fun to browse Wikipedia whilst on the bus or wherever. Here I’ve zoomed in for a close up so you can get a better idea of how detailed the screen is. I’m using a trial version of Opera Mobile which unlike the built-in Pocket IE is a fully featured browser, however it’s also rather slow to load and you have to pay for it after 30 days.


Apart from scrawling freeform notes, this thing has four types of handwriting recognition for turning your scrawlings into real text, and one of them actually works!


With a stylus and touchscreen, the obvious use for such a machine is drawing, as you can work much more accurately than with a mouse or even a graphics tablet. But apart from the Notes program (which is only capable of black and white scribbles) it doesn’t come with any artistic software. At the moment I’m still looking for a decent image editor for it, I’ve tried two painting programs but neither of them is able to use the full screen resolution. Here I’m using VS-Painter-LE to retouch a screenshot of Nausicaä and Teto ^_^; Don’t you think she looks cute with a moustache and glasses? Unfortunately, although it has a range of nice painting tools, VS-Painter works at an effective resolution of 320x240 which is rather poor. (This is the free version of VS-Painter though, however I’ve not been able to find out if the paid-for version is more capable: their website is not very informative.)


No computer is complete without Lain’s presence, and here she is! Unfortunately it doesn’t run the infamous Copland OS, just Windows Mobile 5.0. I’ve had a lot of fun finding programs for the machine. However Windows Mobile is something of a backwater OS I think, Microsoft do not dominate the handheld market, and the OS is rather poorly conceived in many ways. For instance, although you can have several windows open, they are always maximised and there’s no task switcher, leaving you in a quandry about how to switch windows. Luckily many noble and brave programmers have come forward with handy gizmos, thanks to one of which I can now switch tasks Alt-Tab style by pressing a button, a feature that should have been there from the start.

Overall I’ve tried over 30 programs for the machine so far, and am still using at least half of them. One of the strangest has to be SonarCE which turns your pocket PC into a genuine sonar device! It uses the built-in speaker and microphone to echo-locate objects around you by sending out little squawks and then timing the echo. Unfortunately it’s rather noisy, and difficult to calibrate.