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First BHL e-book experiments

Last week the Internet Archive announced that all their online books were now available in ePub format as well, which meant that the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) books were too. Nice when you get stuff like that for free. Anyway, I went and downloaded one of MPOW’s contributions, a particular favorite of mine, The Apples of New York. Since all of IA’s ebooks are in the open ePub format, they couldn’t be read on my Kindle without first converting it to .azw format – I used Lexcycle’s Stanza for this, but you could as easily use calibre, an open source app which has a multitude of great features. I loaded it on my Kindle, opened a copy of the ePub in the Stanza app on my iPhone, and tried reading it in the Stanza desktop app on a Mac.

Screenshots below:

Stanza desktop:

Stanza iPhone:

Kindle:

The books have some problems – there are OCR issues, but for the most part they’re remarkably readable. This is a great development, and makes the BHL material even more accessible, an important part of the consortium’s mission.

Silencing spam calls

macosxhints.com – Silence certain iPhone spam callers forever:

“Like most people, the iPhoneWriter.com team hates spam in all it’s forms and permeations. Electronic mail, snail mail, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and unsolicited telephone calls all qualify as ‘spam’ in our book and they’re all obnoxious. We find unsolicited telephone calls to be particularly irritating. How many times have you been in a meeting or driving or whatever, and had your Apple iPhone ring only to find a ‘phone spammer’ on the other end? Ugh.

Well, after one too many calls wondering if we were interested in having our carpets steam cleaned, enough was finally enough and we decided to stop the madness once and for all. The end result is a simple (and dare we say elegant) way to silence telephone spammers forever. Ah, the sweet sound of silence. Here’s how you can silence the telephone spammers on your Apple iPhone”

Excellent – no more “warranty is about to expire on my car” calls. Which infuriates me every single time it happens.

Technorati Tags:
apple, iphone

Just What’s Playing at Starbucks

Starbucks Ditches T-Mobile and Brings in AT&T as Exclusive Wi-Fi Provider | Epicenter from Wired.com:

If you’re an iPhone owner and are wondering how the new deal affects you, apparently the answer is not at all. In September Apple announced a new partnership with Starbucks and T-Mobile to let iPhone and iPod touch users to access T-Mobile’s HotSpots for free in order to download and listen to music via the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. That iTunes Wi-Fi Store partnership is still in effect, but will contiue under under AT&T’s Wi-Fi service.
Other than that, iPhone owners shouldn’t expect any other preferential treatment or special access at Starbucks in the near term.
‘This offer is for AT&T broadband customers who can access Wi-Fi in the stores over a Wi-Fi-enabled device. [iPhone users] who are not broadband subscribers can’t access for free at this time,’ AT&T spokesperson Brad Mays told Ars Technica.

Well, that bites. At least this was finally a clear explanation – I’ve seen several posts claiming that iPhone users would get free service at Starbucks as a result of this deal. Didn’t make sense. The iTunes store was the only thing I ever checked at Starbucks anyway.

(Via Wired News.)

Technorati Tags:
iphone, starbucks, apple