rpollack.net » Technology

The best way to add PDF books to iBooks

rpollack — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 23:43:14 +0000

The iBooks app for iPad and iPhone is now a great place to keep a library of books in PDF, but some folks have been complaining on Twitter that getting the books onto the device is not particularly convenient. Using iTunes to transfer them is probably not worth the hassle. Emailing them to yourself works. But this is better:

If you don’t use DropBox, sign up for a free account. It’s great. If you sign up by following this link, we’ll both get some extra storage space. It’s worth it, even if you’re not trying to add PDFs to iBooks.
In your DropBox folder, create a folder for PDF books (or documents of whatever sort). Put your books in there. This is a fine place to store them, since you can keep access to them on your desktop but won’t lose them even if your computer dies.
Download the free (and excellent) DropBox app on your iPad or iPhone, and link it to your account.
In the DropBox app, navigate to the folder you created in step 2, open a PDF, tap the “send this to another app” icon (it looks like an arrow coming out of a box), and select iBooks.

And you’re done.

Memorizing things (Sanskrit or otherwise)

rpollack — Thu, 06 May 2010 06:12:31 +0000

When I started studying Sanskrit I made flashcard sheets in Apple’s Pages app, printed them out, and cut them by hand (PDFs are archived here). I stopped doing that when I discovered ProVoc.

ProVoc is free software for OS X. If you have a Mac and you need or want to memorize things, I recommend it. It is, basically, smart flashcards, and it is very customizable: quiz yourself from either “side” of the card, make it multiple choice or not, change the number of choices, make a delay before the choices appear, and so on. It will keep track of which cards you consistently get right and which you consistently get wrong, and you can adjust your studies accordingly. It will keep shuffling the cards you get wrong back into the pile until you get them right some given number of times. It’s really excellent. And it will let you print paper flashcards if you really want to.

I stopped bothering with paper flashcards altogether when I discovered iVocabulary for the iPhone. It replicates all of the major functionality of ProVoc in an iPhone app, and it can take all of your data directly from ProVoc. All your flashcards, all the time, in your pocket. Have a minute in line or in a waiting room? Quiz yourself real quick. It’s currently $5.99 on the App Store, and it’s a steal.

And in case anybody out there wants to use my Sanskrit materials:

The following files are viewable with ProVoc or iVocabulary, and they follow the order of introduction in Beginning Sanskrit: A Practical Course Based on Graded Reading and Exercises, second edition, by Dermot Killingley.

First, all of the vocabulary, with Sanskrit in Devanagari.

Second, I created a transliterated version (IAST) for use with iVocabulary, since the implementation of Devanagari on the iPhone—which renders the characters beautifully—is just flawed enough to be maddening. I hope Apple fixes it soon. (I also put up a test page to check quickly if a system is making this mistake or not.)

Lastly, I made one just with the Devanagari characters (no words) as a sample, which might be useful to anyone just learning the script.

I do emphatically recommend the software regardless of what you’re studying.

UPDATE: New versions of iOS have fully implemented Devanagari, which is now rendered as it should be. If your iPhone or iPad or iPod Touch is messing up Devanagari, do an OS upgrade through iTunes. I’ll leave the transliterated file here in case anybody has further use of it, but it’s no longer necessary as it was.

Monier-Williams for Apple’s Dictionary.app

rpollack — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:57:57 +0000

I’ll tell you something the world needs:

A programmer-y person with a linguistic bent, or a language-y person with a computer-y bent, or someone else who might in some ways resemble me but with more free time (or the greater technical skill to diminish the requisite quantity of time), who will take a look at this, scour the web for digital copies of old dictionaries and lexica that are in the public domain, and start cranking out new modules for Apple’s Dictionary.app.

Look, there is no reason why I should not already be able to open Dictionary on my Mac and be able to search at least the Liddell & Scott Greek Lexicon, the Gesenius Hebrew Lexicon, the Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary, and the Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary. In respective unicode fonts, of course. (I mean, obviously: transliteration is for philistines.)

Why can’t I do this yet? We’re not talking flying cars, here; so how about it, Internet? I mean, is this the future or isn’t it? My thumbs are getting tired from all this page flipping.

In the meantime, I took a StarDict version of the Monier-Williams, and ran it through DictUnifier, and came up with this (it’s a doozy at about 40mb — don’t download it frivolously). Unzip it, and put the resultant folder in Macintosh HD >> Users >> YourUserName >> Library >> Dictionaries . If the “Dictionaries” folder doesn’t exist, create it (and make sure to spell it right).

After that, if you open Dictionary.app you should find that you have the Monier-Williams as one of your dictionaries, though it’s not as pretty as it should be (the digitization was apparently made with an old console dictionary application in mind), and it uses the Harvard-Kyoto transliteration scheme (blech).

Anybody know where I can find any sort of unicode Devanagari version? I know I can search online lexica, but it would be nice to have such quick access when offline.

Digital Propagation; The Danger of Sync

rpollack — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:07:27 +0000

Person A sent an email to several people, including to me and to Person B. I responded by clicking “Reply to All” in GMail. I didn’t notice that Person A had Person B identified in her contact list by a different name than I do. (i.e., the address line, “John Doe” , indicating Person B‘s name and email address, had something different in the quotation marks in her email than it would have in mine, based on the names we respectively use for Person B in our contact lists.)

Since I clicked “Reply to All,” I sent an email to Person B, and though I didn’t realize it, GMail copied Person A‘s recipients exactly, and therefore re-saved Person B‘s contact information into my contact list, but now with the name that Person A had used for him. Do you see where this is going?

My computer is set to sync my address book with my GMail contacts. And to sync with my iPhone.

I hadn’t noticed any of this had happened until sometime after I found that Person B seemed to have vanished from my iPhone. He had not vanished, however, and I later happened upon him, stunned, since he was identified not by his legal name nor by any diminutive that I would use for him, but rather by a pet-name used between him and Person A. It was not immediately obvious how the hell that possibly could have happened.

It is easy to imagine that this could lead to awkward situations.

O brave new world

rpollack — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:08:29 +0000

Yesterday, Michele remarked that the Clarion Ledger was following her tweets, and that this creeped her out. I’m one of the other 364 people currently being followed by the Jackson paper — I’m also tailed by Mississippi Public Broadcasting, on twitter and flickr, and by nearly 20 people on twitter who don’t know me (dozens on flickr) and who I must assume were interested just because they see I’m in Jackson or that I am a teacher here. I responded to Michele to say that I’m not much bothered. Maybe it’s somewhat generational: I’m probably among the oldest people who don’t remember not having at least a family email address (growing up in a fairly tech-y family in a fairly tech-y region, I remember playing on Prodigy and The WELL before the Web was invented, and when I had fewer years than fingers). In any case, if I don’t specifically and explicitly elect for privacy, I don’t expect that I have any, and I’m not particularly concerned with what the lurkers are doing. I lurk too, sometimes.

This subject came up yesterday. This morning, in the middle of final exams, the fire alarm went off, I instructed my students to leave their tests on their desks, and we marched outside. From the field, at 9:36, I tweeted:

middle of the exam, fire alarm, fire trucks, chaos. Recess on the field. Kids fighting.

Some time later (after we returned to class and resumed testing — before my administration had communicated to faculty what had happened) I saw that Ben had tweeted a reference to the Clarion Ledger, which, at 10:05, had posted maybe 100 words, including a quotation from the fire investigator.

I don’t doubt that in the 30 or 35 minutes from fire alarm to Clarion Ledger posting, people at the newspaper received more word than just mine; but mine was available to them, and they were allegedly listening.

It occurs to me in light of this that school districts will inevitably attempt to forbid the use of cellphones by teachers, and other nervous or inept employers will do likewise, and it may ultimately be part of a first amendment decision.