Very nice. However, while Palm and Pocket PC have simple ways to synchronize for Palm, you pop the device in the cradle and push the sync button; for Pocket PC, you simply pop the device in the cradle and it automatically syncs , the eBookMan forces you to launch the desktop app to sync.
Not very user-friendly. Since the OS and basic apps take up almost half of the RAM, it seemed a necessity if you want to carry around several books, reference manuals and music.
This makes the slot next to useless, at least until Franklin offers a software fix for this. The sound quality using the included Music Player app is poor, overwhelmed by non-stop hissing.
This affects listening to Audible audio content as well. On the positive side, the user interface is simple and easy-to-use. The launcher lets you launch programs, songs and documents, which are shown as icons and can be sorted and filtered using categories.
The menu icon on the touchpad displays a list of commonly used settings and a few additional settings can be adjusted from the My eBookMan control panel. The two feature apps are Franklin Viewer and Franklin Reader. Franklin Reader displays Franklin-formatted eBooks only. Some publishers offer these eBooks for free, others offer them for online purchase. The Franklin encryption system ties them to your device based on its serial number, so you can only read it on your device.
Microsoft Reader software for the eBookMan is not yet available. Overall, the eBookMan is a solidly built device built around the concept of downloadable pay-to-play content.
I am now trying to find a good source of EBM compatible books. As I recall, most of the cool EBM applications were hosted on GeoCities and they seem to have vanished from the net as well. At least the device is running great now.
Where there's life, there's hope! I get the "Can not connect" dialog, but the dialog has a button to manually download the operating system from Franklin's site. I would share the one I was able to download with you, but it's useless as each OS copy is tied to the EMB it was generated for.
I've PM'd a link to my eBookman files to sbwertz, aubreyf and Nate the great. Nick, do want a link also? The OS files probably won't work. I've never heard back from the 5 or 6 people that have downloaded them. I believe all of the eBooks are in the public domain and they are already in seb format. If you find any that are not in the public domain, let me know and I'll pull them from the drive.
Some of the apps may be free, others are shareware. Now that you have your eBookmen up and running, back it up to a card. You can back the entire thing to the card and restore any time more quickly than if you connect it to your PC. If the battery dies, just replace them and it will restore from the card by itself, very handy if you are traveling.
Once you have backed it up, copy the contents of the card to another media for additional backup since the server is not reliable. If that doesn't work, I would try contacting Ectaco - they were extremely polite and helpful for me. Michael: Thank you! You have more cool EBM stuff saved up than I have yet been able to find everywhere else on the internet combined.
My EBM is now back in it's prime, and it has been quite fun to see it running again. I'm going to need to pick up some rechargeable batteries - it's hilarious how fast this thing drains them compared to newer technology. I've got so much stuff here that I find things I didn't even know I had all the time. If you run batgraph sp? It will run that way for weeks. I'll hunt up some of my eBookman links this weekend and post them in a new topic.
Michael Quote:. All times are GMT The time now is PM. Mark Forums Read. User Name. Remember Me? Tip Got Facebook? Page 1 of 2. There were two layers of obfuscation to contend with. The memory of the Rex consisted of a number of 1K memory blocks.
A contiguous flat memory space was made up of a number of these blocks which were in a big, doubly-linked list. This was done no doubt to make the job of inserting and deleting data fast, without having to shuffle around blocks of memory needlessly. Once you grasped the lower layer, there were others formats to tackle, one for each kind of data — phone contacts, calendar appointments, memos, to-do lists, time zones, and preferences. Each kind of data resided in different sections of this flat memory space.
I still recall that decoding the different kinds of repeating appointments gave me not only headaches but an appreciation of the complicated logic involved in what would seem to be a simple thing.
I supposed one could have written a single do-it-all app, but instead I took the piecemeal approach. It was bundled inside an example script file to give the convenience of a single-command operation. Every time you synced to the Rex, I basically blew away the contents and wrote a fresh copy.
But reading data from the Rex was possible, indeed essential, for cracking the formats. The latest release from is posted on Github for the curious. The Rolodex company is still around and still selling the famous index frames and paper cards. After a merger and relocation to Hong Kong, the newly-named Franklin Electronic Publishers company manufactures small pocket-sized reference devices to this day.
Citizen still makes calculators, and their discontinued Dataslim-2 PDA still has a niche following. Philippe Kahn is perhaps the most interesting member of the Rex team. His fascination with sending photos by phone led to the start of LightSurf in , a multimedia messaging solutions provider. Ever restless, in Kahn created yet a fourth company, Fullpower Technologies , which focuses on sensors and IoT.
He seems to have finally settled down, having stayed with Fullpower until the present day. As for the Rex? If you ever used one of these credit-card sized devices, share your story in the comments below. I have one Rolodex. I have sold some on eBay. What a cool device was back then, but Intel killed it. I believe intel wanted the developers, not the product. Also I had the Xircom Rex. The battery life was a significant point. That RF reminds me a lot of the Casio SFB that I still use after nearly 30 years you may wonder why but the batteries last for a couple of years and I like vintage tech that keeps on trucking, which is why my phone is a Nokia Sync really is the critical element.
Paper address books are also rarely backed up — it involves either lots of writing or lots of photocopying. And the data is easily lost, just a spilt cup of coffee…. I had both Rex and Rex I even wrote some programs for the latter. Both devices were practically useless at least for me , but as a gadget maniac I loved them anyway. A couple of weeks ago I was cleaning out my attic and ran across my old rex, complete with box and stand.
Actually I think I have 2 of them. I have started to throw them away, several times, when I run across them, because they are essentially useless to me today because I have no way to update the information in them. Still, I have kept them because they were so cute and I loved them in their day. Also, since they are still in the box and not rattling around in the back of a drawer I have somehow managed to resist throwing them away.
All of this is a problem since I am a techno Pack Rat and have been trying to lighten my accumulation of stuff.
0コメント