sociallysour.org

Since yesterday I have been having a issue with my trusty old Treo 755p. It seems to think it is stuck in headphone mode so I can’t actually talk on the phone or hear anyone with out headphones plugged in. Looking around on the palm forums I came across a thread of lots of people with the same issue.

After trying all the ideas listed on the site…

I covered (really covered) the headphone jack in WD-40 and rammed it into the headphone jack a million times. Eventually it started working as normal again. So at first your don’t succeed ram it in there a few million more times!

Converting Microsoft Lit files to pdb (Palm ebook) In Ubuntu.

I used a install of Ubuntu 9.04 to actually do this process, but most any install
should be fine provided the needed packages are available in your repository.

First you are going to need to install a few programs.

apt-get install convlit txt2pdbdoc w3m

convlit will install clit (A lit decoder with a interesting name).
txt2pdbdoc will actually allow us to encode the txt file to pdb format.
w3m will be used to strip the html content from the file output by clit.

For this example lets say the book we want to convert is called book1.lit

First we are going to have to decode the lit file to html

clit book1.lit book1/

This will convert the file book1.lit to html inside a directory called book1 in the
current working directory.

Next we have to strip out the html of that file.

cd book1/
w3m book1.htm > book1.txt

Now we have a completely stripped txt version of the book. The last step to get this
into a pdb format is to run it through txt2pdbdoc.

txt2pdbdoc Book1 book1.txt book1.pdb

You now have a nice pdb file you can copy on your palm.

If you are willing to spend some extra time you may want to markup the txt file
before you convert it to a pdb. You can check out some of the markup lang via this link

My Palm Treo 755p came with version 4.something pre installed on it for playing music. The Pocket Tunes player has served me well for all my music playing needs on the phone and I didn’t really see me upgrading to a later version. Version 5.0 was released a little while back and added support for last.fm scrobbling.

I have been scrobbling the music I play on my laptop now since May 2005. This was the killer feature to suck me into buying the upgrade for $19.99. Other than scrobbling it also now has better album cover support and seems to always pull the right art when I am playing something.

It sends the data in real time as it is playing, so be aware this is going to cut into your data plan.

For a long while I have had to carry a USB card reader around in my backpack, so that I could add new music and stuff to my mini-SD card in my phone. I have been able t0 get Bluetooth transfers working from my Ubuntu install, but it only installs to the phones memory and not the mini-SD card.

Mobile Stream creates a little program called Card Reader. Its a pretty basic program that does exactly what I want it to. Installing it will allow me to browse the card in my phone as a USB mass storage device or with FTP via obex. For under 15$ its a much better option that buying a separate card reader and having to removing the card from your phone, just to add some tunes.

I ended up installing TealOS on my Treo 755p over the weekend and am pretty happy with it this far. I do notice a little slow down compared to the standard palm OS launcher, but the trade off is worth it.

Check out a youtube video I found going over the features of the new launcher.