![iRant | [root@jploh.com ~]# cat /var/log/irant_](http://blog.jploh.com/wp-content/themes/default2/images/blog_jplohcom.jpg)
Goodbye, good ol’ 3310
I accidentally dropped my mobile phone earlier this week. Just when I really needed it. I was forced to buy a replacement and failed to resist the temptation of a second-hand Xda II.
Anyway, it sorta reached my expectation. My main purpose excuse for getting a PDA phone is to fulfill my need to read eBooks. Also, it would be really awesome if I could read my RSS feeds and access my servers via SSH through the phone. I’m starting to put the calendar and notes features into good use.
So I took the 64MB SD card that’s been hiding in my laptop for ages and loaded a book on Python in CHM and another educational magazine with lots of images in PDF. The phone came with a PDF reader and I downloaded a free CHM viewer but the problem is that both applications took too much resources to load my files.
My work around for the CHM is very simple. I extracted the HTML files using arCHMage then used IE to view the pages individually.
sudo yum -y install archmage
archmage /path/to/your/file.chm /path/to/output
Then for PDF, use the ultimate image manipulation tool, ImageMagick. You might want to check first if you can natively view the PDF without eating up too much resources. Converting to JPEG takes some time and quite a lot of memory. Plus, with little-to-none readable text at twice the file size, you might want to reconsider.
sudo yum -y install imagemagick
convert /path/to/your/file.pdf /path/to/output/prefix%03d.jpg
I haven’t tried the available tools for Linux that will allow me to sync with Pocket PCs but by the looks of it, development is still at its early stages. It also sucks that my SD card reader works only half the time.
I’m looking into having this phone traded in with an Xda IIs when I get enough money (it’s getting a lot harder to sell crack nowadays). I think buying an SDIO wifi card is not worth it.
