I decided that I’d like to get some comics on too if possible. It’s not an ideal setup for comics by default. There is no way to “grab” images and rotate them around for better viewing. You can’t pinch, twist, or do any of the neat iPhone tricks to images. There are a limited number of fixed zooming points, and trying to figure out how to resize my images to best fit the screen would be a total pain in the butt.

Since I bought the Cowon O2 at the Cowon shop itself, I got mileage points for free products. The custom firmware needed to unlock the better comic viewer features cost 3,000 won. I don’t like paying for partially gimped products. I also hate that the Cowon site uses terrible ActiveX based security, and is only accessible via Windows Interent Explorer. However, since I’m not really “paying” for it since the PMP comes with free “points” to purchase it from their shop, I’ll let it slide. I still don’t know why Koreans make websites that are actively hostile to users, but I’ll survive the encounter with only minor bruises for now. Why this enhanced functionality wasn’t included in the first place is a mystery to me.

I installed the Cowon 02 Compact Shared Document Format conversion program called mTrans via WINE. It actually worked the first time without issues! I was surprised. Sadly, while the product would run, it couldn’t convert anything in the PDF format at first because I didn’t have Adobe reader installed in Wine. It worked in virtualized windows, but it’s somewhat a moot point after I explored it fully.

The mTrans program converted a batch of .jpg files into a proprietary format with no problems, but when I put it on my player, it didn’t work any better than a regular image. I needed the new software on the machine to unlock it, and it threw a warning up at me on the screen telling me as much.

To get the new custom firmware from the Cowon site, I had to wait 20 days and officially “review” the machine, promising not to return it. Then I got points on credit from the store to use it towards the purchase of the file format viewer. I had my wife write down a few gripes about the player that I had in Korean in hopes that the Korean comments might get the attention of the developers.

The comments I mentioned were:

• Image support is worthless. You can’t pinch, spin, or manipulate pictures except for at fixed percentages. Why include images if you can’t decide how closely to look at them?
• Problems with HD file formats falling out of sync. I also mentioned that the USB recharging wasn’t as nice as the Cowon D2 since it didn’t turn off the player automatically if the host computer turned itself off. That’s a step backward in a more advanced player.
• The film for the screen protector had misleading pictures that didn’t match the directions, and that the plastic shield case and the leather case, while sent together, can’t be used together.

For this, I got some credit for the purchase of a proprietary extention to a device I already own. Thanks a lot, Cowon! It’s like I want to get what I already expected to be included in the package, and I only had to wait 20 days to get it!

Anyway, I had to set up this download in virtualization software, because it wouldn’t let me download to anyplace but the Cowon device itself. You had to run the download through their download software so it would go to the proper folder. I guess this is supposed to deter people from downloading and sharing this upgrade with non-paying members. I didn’t check if it’s possible to get around this perceived security hassle in any way. It turns out it’s not worth the hassle of downloading it anyway.

I downloaded the system update to the machine, and went to the new “Document” viewer mode. I guess it worked, because it used to pop up a message saying, “Format not supported”, but now it loaded the batch of images. It used fixed points of zoom, and there is no way to get close enough to read a comic book or any document with text on an image file. The file format they use is so highly compressed that the “High Quality” mode is half the size of the file it started with, and looks highly pixelated on the screen no matter how closely you zoom.

Imagine if all the pages of your comic books or documents on regular paper were shrunk to the size of your wallet, and the only way to read them were from an arm’s length away. You can zoom, but the file doesn’t become any clearer because of the unnecessarily highly compressed format. The letters are being pixelated so you can’t read most of the text. It’s useless because you can’t enjoy the art by scrolling a bit at a time for a larger comic zoomed in with legible text, and the entire page is too small to read. Even the “high quality” format compresses the file too much to be legible. Unless your comic is written entirely in giant size fonts, don’t bother.

There is a GREAT comic book viewer for the Nintendo DS that works with a TINY screen really well. The text is always clear no matter how closely you zoom. It also works by converting files into a totally proprietary format. You move the screen to view the comic one bit at a time, or show as much as you can in both screens. The screen on the DS isn’t as big as the Cowon, but it still works for comics. Why can’t Cowon follow this style navigation or design?

The pdf document conversion for the same viewer doesn’t work much better, except that it has less artifacts when it is compressed. It was *almost* usable, instead of completely and utterly useless. If I had actually paid for it other than getting some credit for filling out reviews I’d have demanded a refund.

Upgrade image viewer is the stock image view with no siginificant enhancements except the ability to read a file format that sucks. No one could possibly use this for viewing documents.  At the moment, do not expect to use the Cowon mTrans or the document viewer extension to do anything but kill your eyes.

I’m excited that the Cowon O2 now has a released SDK to allow people to develop programs for it. The recently released support for the SDK might bring about a chance for a better document reader. There could also be cool programs that make up for the few mistakes so far. I’m positive with support that there will be additional features added that make the Cowon O2 a better player.

The Cowon O2 package with accessories.

The Cowon 02,(black) compared with the Cowon D2.

I took that this was a sign that perhaps I should just go ahead and update anyway. I took the appropriate steps to upgrade my entire system. I pressed “Alt+F2″ and then typed:

“update-manager –devel-release”.

That’s it.

The update manager then popped up. Having specificied I wanted to upgrade despite it being a development build, it downloaded the entire set of packages, prepared my system for the upgrade, got rid of all the redundant and old programs I used, installed up to date software, and told me what it was doing. Hands off upgrading for the win.

All I had to do was let it run in the background, then click “okay” a few times as it made all the right choices for me. SWEET. It was a while downloading despite my connection, but other than that, flawless. When I rebooted, I got a common error. Nautilus the file browser was hanging because the programs they picked to start up were different than the list I was using previously, so I didn’t get any desktop icons. The rest of the upgrade worked flawlessly. I added Nautilus to my sessions menu to have it boot up at start. I also added “scim” back to my sessions menu so that I could type in Korean. That worked just like it should as well. This would have taken me days to work out when I first started using Linux, but I fixed it between my house chores. Awesome.

The biggest differences are Gnome Do, and the enhanced print manager are sitting in my system tray at the moment. Gnome Do is an uber-keyboard shortcut program like launchy for Windows, but I can’t see myself using it that much. Half the time figuring it out takes longer than launching the program itself. Until I get used to it, it might just be a neat little toy. The printer program looks really improved from the previous program, but usually I just copy stuff or do simple printing. If I need to do any scanning or anything more advanced I’ll use it. I’m a bit disappointed that OpenOffice included in the release is only 2.4. OpenOffice 3.0 is what I’ve been using this week at work and it seems stable and nice despite it taking AGES to load up on a Windows XP machine.

Other than that, post-upgrade there is a NOTICIBLE speed increase in Firefox rendering and an increased zippiness in the overall GUI. I’m impressed with the solid upgrade. Virtualbox, something that was a headache to upgrade last time around, has a new version out that works perfectly with the upgrade as well, so I won’t have my wife complaining about a lack of access to Windows XP Internet Explorer this time around either.

There doesn’t seem to be anything radically different than the last release, but it seems really nice and stable at the moment. Considering this computer is nearly 3 years old, but is getting faster and more functional with every release of Ubuntu, I’m very happy. I could go on using a computer of this speed for Internet browsing and writing this website more or less forever. Not having to pay for an upgraded OS every year or so is a great treat.

Cowon O2

Coming soon is my new replacement player, the Cowon O2. This player will be my present to myself for working at a kindergarten earlier last month. I’ve put away money to purchase this sweet looking player. Just check out these specifications:

• 4.3″ LCD display
• DMB-T tuner support
• Electronic dictionary
• Up to 32GB flash memory
• SD/SDHC memory card slot
• 18 hours playback time for audio
• 8 hours playback time for video
• Supports wide range of video formats (Anything and everything will play on this machine)
• Built-in speakers
• TV Out

Basically, this is the Cowon D2 taken to the next level. Bigger screen, speakers, better resolution, more memory. Everything I want in a portable video player. Best yet, it’s flash, so I don’t have to worry about moving parts, and I can even upgrade the memory via the Flash Drive! This thing is so purchased, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

I’ll be able to hand-me-down my old mp3 player, which is totally awesome, to my wife, so I never have to touch her horrific iRiver h10 to try to put music on it ever again. Now she’ll be able to listen to podcasts, watch movies, or use the DMB.

The tipping point came when they offered us a twenty-two inch flat screen monitor (55cm) for 50,000 won if we switched over our service. Cheap gigantic flat screen monitor get! My video card has two outputs, so I can set up both monitors as a gigantic wallpaper. Now I can type on my wide screen monitor, and run a music program on my old regular monitor, and not need to worry about minimizing, maximizing, or covering anything up. Instead of virtual desktops, I have actual secondary desktops.

It’s so luxurious that I feel like I’m from the future. I’m Cory Doctorow all of a sudden. All I need are some goggles and a cape.

Anyway, my current monitor array is large enough that when I want to drag one window to the other monitor, I actually have to TURN MY HEAD to see everything. It’s nuts. Currently I’m lacking a nice chair for the set up, but eventually I’ll have a luxury deck to burn time on the series of ‘Tubes. Oddly enough the monitor arrived on my wife’s birthday, so while she and I were planning on buying her gift over the weekend, I got what I was waiting for earlier than I was expecting.

As part of the deal with switching, we also got a free home phone for land line service (my first in Korea!) and a new television box service for movies and television programs. Hanaro box, the digital television service, even has Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 & 2 to watch with subtitles. Take that MegaTv! I’ve seen them multiple times, but now my wife can catch up after watching Season 3 with me. That’s really nice too.

Tackling the modification of my Linux system to set up two monitors wasn’t nearly as hard as I had feared either. I was already using the proprietary Nvidia drivers, so I had to run one configuration application with rights, click a few boxes, and have the settings like I wanted. I took less than an hour to get a non-eye bleed setting that functioned like a massive badass desktop.

I’m still adjusting to having the two monitors, but it will be really hard to go back to a single monitor after this when I go to work. It’s just so nice to have all the space.

(xkcd is brilliant.)

My faith in humanity has been restored. There is now a Firefox plugin called Youtube Comment Snob that filters Youtube comments based on the following critera:

• The number of spelling mistakes.
• lack of capital letters to begin a sentence.
• ALL CAPS.
• Excessive punctuation!!!????

This will basically remove 99% of all comments from Youtube. While it might not sort the remaining comments for actual interesting comments, at least I don’t have to bother myself reading all the dumb ones anymore.

Happy, until I noticed that whoever had replaced my motherboard had incorrectly hooked up the audiojack, and I only got mono sound in my headphones. For a company that prides itself on having the best quality sound and service, this was infuriating. I was upset that an expensive repair didn’t even get a proper diagnostic check as simple as LISTENING TO THE PLAYER to make sure it worked.

My poor wife had to return to the store Monday for me while I was at work late and get it fixed a second time. The service technician said that since we had only gotten it repaired two days earlier, it probably wasn’t our fault, just a defective product. Gee, thanks, you mean it wasn’t our fault you installed something that didn’t work right? They waived the fee for fixing the product since we hadn’t caused the problem, but my wife was still a little angry about having to go down to the service center twice for their mistake. They didn’t even apologize for their mistake either. Annoying.

According to them, I wasn’t cleaning the usb slot well and it might have caused some dust to get inside and damage the motherboard. I have no idea if this is true. I checked the local electronics store, and there is still NOTHING on the market close to the Cowon D2 in terms of battery life, features, and design. Even though I had to pay for a repair, I would have only ended up buying a new one of the price was any higher. It’s still the best in it’s class feature for feature in my opinion.

I’ve got my D2 back in time to avoid being bored on my long 2 hour break today, and I didn’t have to ride the subway without something to listen to. I’m catching up on a few of the podcasts that updated that were too long to listen to at home on the computer. Listening to short fiction at home, and not with the privacy of earphones is weird to me now. I also got my political fix during my walk with Yoshi, which is another one of my podcast related habits. I tried a few Linux podcast products. gPodder was the one I ended up using most often since it had a GUI and wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was easy to import my OPML list into it, which is less annoying than copying and pasting 23 podcast URLS. If I was big into automation and command line, I would have used hpodder (I didn’t check to see if it did OPML lists though).

I’m glad I can get back to listening to my podcasts now.

I’m really pushing my luck by upgrading today. This afternoon, right as I was settling in to watch The Daily Show on my Cowon D2, something weird happened. I was watching the show, but all of a sudden the screen went dark and it output a bunch of random numbers. The hardware wouldn’t turn off properly, so I did a reset. It rebooted, but then crashed at the opening screen. Now it no longer turns off or on. I hadn’t upgraded the player, dropped it, or did anything to change the player in months. I had a weird issue earlier in the day where files I had deleted didn’t disappear from the player properly. I don’t know why that would have occurred, but I’m not sure if it is related.

We’re going to take the player to the Cowon service center tomorrow, and hopefully I can get it back quickly. The last time I had to return the machine,I had accidentally bricked it when I had upgraded the firmware. This time it is absolutely not my fault. I wonder if they can fix whatever is wrong.

I was looking at players in a similar class at the store while they were telling my wife where to go to fix the player. Even a year later, there is NOTHING on the market in Korea that can TOUCH the features, battery life, and flexibility of the Cowon D2. The 52 hour battery life is so insane that it DOUBLES the closest players in the same league.

I’m so happy with the purchase, so even this problem will be forgiven. Maybe if I’m really lucky, they’ll even upgrade my unit to one with a few more gigs of onboard storage. I’m not crossing my fingers or anything, but it would keep me from needing to upgrade my mp3 player for a while.

While Microsoft Word documents used to be this proprietary sort of file that locked people into using the MS Office suite, that has gone away due to programs like OpenOffice that can open a variety of different formats. As of now, OpenOffice can handle most Microsoft documents without a hitch.

However, OpenOffice has problems with the Korean word processor Hangul’s .hwp format. OpenOffice can only read up to a Hangul 97 file, while newer versions of the program break the importing and conversion filters.

While the rest of the world ran on Windows MS Office, Hangul was more popular in Korea because it has Korean only features (Korean Hanja support, better formating, etc…), and is much easier to pirate. If you work in a Korean office, documents are usually handled in both .doc and .hwp formats frequently. My first contract was sent to me in .hwp, and I basically replied with an email saying, “What the heck is this, and how do I open it?” (At the time Abiword had the only Hangul 97 compatibility available. Thus starting my lust for non-MS word processors.)

Recent versions of Hangul broke their ability to be read outside of the proprietary Hangul word processing program. Whenever we had to deal with these files, I usually had to ask the person to resend it to me in a format neutral form, like a .doc or an XML file. I consider sending proprietary formats without asking if people have the means to open them “bad manners”.

A LOT of people don’t value open file formats to any large degree here due to a myopic view of the computer and business worlds. My wife has told her business that she has no way of reading Hangul-only documents, and that they should save them to open formats so that ANYONE can read them without needing to buy that specific program. Her boss told her to go pirate a version of Hangul instead. Actually, he told her to “download it for free from the Internet,” but left it up to her to “find out where” to do that. There certainly no LEGAL way she could find to do that. One of the reasons the makers of Hangul almost went out of business was due to rampant piracy.

Since I’m not going to pirate software on principle (Go go FOSS!), and asking an employee to pirate software to do their job is simply ASTOUNDING, I wanted to find out what other alternatives we had. Short of buying Hangul for Linux or Windows, not much. Nothing else reads this document format. That’s why proprietary software and file formats suck. We want to do work, not worry about what is needed to open a file.

We called my brother-in-law, who happened to have a legit copy of Hangul we could have. He came over and I installed a legal copy of Hanguel 2002 via Virtualbox so that my wife could do work at home. He had a spare, so now we don’t have to worry about this damn format anymore, and we didn’t have to pirate something!

I’ll keep using OpenOffice, but since the Korean translation of OpenOffice isn’t great, my wife can use this as an alternative. I’ll make SURE to teach her how to save things in open formats so that we don’t get locked into using this program and will be able to migrate to an alternative as soon as it is available.

The new animations and portraits of the characters are so much better and more professional. I haven’t played enough of the new game to know if the balance is better, but the classes and factions seemed very balanced to begin with. If anything has been tweaked, it’s almost certainly for the better in my experience.

I’m working through one of the new campaigns that are included in the 1.4 release. I’ve moved on to playing at “Intermediate” levels. Right now this is providing a good challenge, but is in some ways less challenging than “easy” levels. Larger enemy armies means more experience, which translates into more upgrades for my characters.

I hit a wall several times in some of my previous campaign attempts, but I’m having an easier time these days. This might be due to better balancing, or that I’m learning the game rules better.

(For those of you impatient enough to download the new version, but hate compiling for whatever reason, get the Windows version and run it in WINE. It runs flawlessly.)

I’ve also learned that the core team that’s made Wesnoth is moving on to “Silver Tree” that hopes to create a 3-D RPG game. Basically the game is “Wesnoth 3D”. This is both good news because modifying 3D models and creating new ones is much easier than doing good 2D art. That means more interesting things will be produced, easily, and open up people’s creativity. While I want the Wesnoth game to continue to flourish and grow, a new groundwork being laid out in 3D will allow for more things to be done (hopefully!).