There are three kinds of memories in my G2x. The first, internal phone storage, the RAM of the phone, so to speak. In most of the cases, the user cannot directly access or modify the content in this chunk of memory.

Second, the phone memory. It is called phone memory in Manage Apps, but in the Android file system, is it referred as /sdcard/. Sometimes it is also referred as the internal SD card. That’s quite confusing, since it is not a SD card that you can plug in and out. It has a DCIM folder, and the photos and videos are stored in /sdcard/DCIM/Camera if there is no external SD card installed.

Third, the read SD card. It is the SD card that the users can swap in and out. It is mounted at /sdcard/_ExternalSD. It is also referred as the external SD card. If it is mounted, the photos and videos go to this location by default, otherwise, the they go to internal SD card.

So, for photos and videos, the default location is

/sdcard/_ExternalSD/DCIM/Camera

And if external SD card is not present, the default location is

/sdcard/DCIM/Camera

The lesson: always have double, or triple copies of your important data on different physical volumes. Also, it is better to follow the manufacture’s suggestion to properly connect and disconnect the device.

From Western Digital’s documentation, the proper way to connect a USB or FireWire hard drive is the following, and the sequence is important:

To Connect

1. Plug the power adapter into a wall outlet. You can try a power strip or UPS but if you have problems with the drive, try connecting it to a wall outlet.
2. Connect the power plug into the back of the drive. It’s okay if the drive powers on, then off, or if you see some lights come on for a brief second.
3. Connect the USB or FireWire cable directly into your computer (do not use a USB or FireWire hub). If your drive has more than one port, only use one. Do not connect both the USB and FireWire together to the computer.
4. Connect the other end of the USB or FireWire cable into the external drive. The drive should then power on (you shouldn’t need to use the power switch), if your computer is on, Windows should detect and install the native Windows drivers for your drive. If the drive is formatted for your computer system, it should show up in My Computer with a drive letter.

To Disconnect

1. Please ensure that any files residing on the external hard drive are closed and no programs are accessing the hard drive.
2. Eject the volume through OS, safely remove the drive for Windows, Command-E for Mac
3. The hard drive will spin down and turn off on it’s own. When prompted, You can unplug the USB or FireWire cable and/or power cable.

So it would be interesting to compare with my other cameras:

Android stock keyboard can only enter English, while both Google Pinyin and Swype keyboards can enter both Chinese and English.

A lot of times, I need to switching among the three keyboards. Only Android stock keyboard has a dedicated key for switching to other input methods. When with the other two keyboards, you can either go back to the home screen, go to settings to change the input methods, or you can use the following shortcut:

Tap and hold the text input area for a couple of seconds. Then, a context menu will pop up, and you will see the option to switch keyboards, among other editing commands.

I never used previous versions of the Android stock keyboard, but I learned that the Gingerbread (version 2.3) is much better than previous versions.

Swype is faster, and very tolerant, very good for using on a shaking bus.

Google Pinyin is the gold standard for entering Chinese characters.

However, if you dig deeper, you will find there is a way to keep the iPhone and iPod contacts in sync with Google Contacts in Gmail. Here is what I did:

1. Make sure Google Contacts has all the contact information you need.
2. Delete all the contacts on my iPod. This may not be very obvious. You need to connect the iPod to iTunes, click the iPod then select the “info” tab. Remove the contact sync options, then iTunes will prompt you to remove all the contacts on the device. Do so.
3. On iPod or iPhone, go to Settings, tap “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
4. Add Accounts, choose Microsoft Exchange, fill out email, username, password, but leave the domain blank, go next.
5. Fill “m.google.com” as the server, next, accept.
6. In the next screen, choose “Contacts” on, “Mail” and “Calendars” off.
7. Click Sync. Then wait a while, all you Google Contacts will be pushed to your iPhone or iPod.

First, some background: I have multiple eBook reading devices: Palm PDAs, Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, Windows Mobile PDA, iPod Touch 4, and two dedicated eInk devices: Sony PRS-505 eReader and Amazon Kindle 3 WiFi.

For all those devices, I mainly use the following eBook formats:

• eReader PDB format, can be used on Windows Mobile, Palm PDA, iPod Touch/iPhone, Windows and Mac desktops. It cannot be used on Nokia 770.
• mobi format, can be used on Windows Mobile, Palm PDA, iPod Touch/iPhone (through Kindle iPhone App), Kindle, Nokia 770, and Windows PC. It cannot be used on Sony PRS-505 and Mac desktops.
• ePUB format, can be used on Nokia 770, iPod Touch/iPhone, Sony eReader, Windows and Mac desktops. It cannot be used on my Palm, Windows Mobile, and Kindle reader.

I use multiple eBook vendors, such as:

• eReader, purchased by Fictionwise, but still has its own site
• Fictionwise, purchased by Barnes and Noble, still keeps the store front
• MobiPocket, bought by Amazon, Kindle format actually is a version of mobi format, but this store is dying, maybe by design
• Sony eBookstore
• Kindle Store

Previously, I was more satisfied with Fictionwise/eReader, due to the fact that I prefer my Palm devices. But unfortunately, it has a rather limited library. I like my Kindle device, but I don\’t like the closed format used by Amazon, although it has the largest title collections.

Now, I prefer the ePUB format, used by many vendors, including Barnes & Noble Nook, Borders Kobo reader, Sony reader, and the wonderful Stanza app for iPhone/iPod Touch. The DRM is done through Adobe Digital Edition, which is not too bad.

Kindle store has the most comprehensive collections, and their eBooks used have a lower price tag than other ePUB vendors, Sony, Barnes and Noble Nook, Borders Kobo etc.

The situation changed after Google entered the scene. Google eBooks can be viewed online, inside your browser, and offline through various devices, since it uses ePUB and Adobe Digital edition. It supports most of the eBook reading devices, except Amazon Kindle, of course. Since I have more ePUB devices than Kindle, I naturally prefer the ePUB format.

Google eBook Store

The most important fact about Google eBook store is, other than the ePUB format, it also matches the price of Kindle store, and greatly expanded the range of titles of all the ePUB bookstores. Now I can confidently buy ePUB books from Google store, knowing that the Amazon Kindle eBooks no longer have much of a price advantage.

Before Google enter the eBook business, I can only buy the eBooks of David Pogue, my favorite technology writer, from Amazon Kindle Store, but now, his books are available in ePUB through Google store. I can read his books on most of my devices. Kindle is just too closed and limited.

Purchasing Google eBooks is easy, but you need to hook your device through USB to load the files, no wireless options. But that\’s perfect fine with me, I rarely use the Kindle whispernet to buy books anyway.

Hit Command-Enter, you will have a Expose like index, neat indeed!

In OS X 10.4, you can only view pictures, but since Leopard OS X 10.5, you can view PDF, Word, etc. Really nice.

cp -R folder1 dest

is very different from

cp -R folder1/ dest

The first command copies everything inside folder1 to dest, but not folder1 itself.

The second command copies folder1 itself (and everything inside it) to dest.

In this case, using dest and dest/ will have the same result.

Pay attention to the source, the trailing slash character is very important.

With command line command, such as

cp -Rpv source destination

it will take less time. But that is still a large number of files to copy.

The best way to copy such folders is to archive them. Tested several different formats on different platforms, here is my favorites:

Mac OS X:

Use Disk Utilities (Finder -> Cmd-Shift-U) to make dmg archives. A single dmg (disk image) archive file can contain a large number of small files, with compression, and preserving Mac OS X metadata, such as spotlight comments, color labels, resource forks, etc). It is superb.

If the number of items is small, you can also use the Finder File -> Compress items (Or highlight, then right click) command. It will archive multiple files and folders into a zip file. It also preserves Mac OS X file metadata. Spotlight comment is such a useful feature in Mac OS X, I use it extensively with Spotlight search.

Windows:

After an elongated trial and error process, I settled for WinRAR. A superb utility, especially for its foreign language character sets support. You can use Chinese, Japanese, and Korean file names safely with WinRAR.

Although there is a command line RAR version for Mac OS X, it does not support resource forks and OS X metadata. I had a really bad experience with Mac RAR command line utility. It corrupted some of my old Mac Classic files). On Mac OS, always stick to dmg, and the built-in zip in Finder.

Linux / UNIX:

Of course, tarball. Always use tarball with gzip or bzip2 compression.

to explode (retrieve, decompress) from a tarball,

tar -xzvf tarballfile (gzip compression)
tar -xjvf tarballfile (bzip2 compression)

to archive into a tarball,

tar -czvf tarballfile directory-to-archive
replace z with j for bzip2 compression.

Open a Terminal window (In Utilities folder, Cmd-Shift-U), type the following command:

cp -Rp source destination

-p option to preserve the original properties, such as modification time, access time, file flags, file mode, user ID, and group ID, as allowed by permissions. Access Control Lists (ACLs) and Extended Attributes (EAs), including resource forks, will also be preserved.

That should take care of it. Throw in an -v option to be verbose.

Last week, I tried to copy a backup folder from one external drive to another. It should be a straightforward operation: highlight the source, Ctrl-C, click the destination, Ctrl-V. But every time I tried, I got an cryptic error message: operation failed.

The folder I tried to copy is huge: 150 GB, a huge chunk. Also, some of the file path is really long, due to the long file names and folder names. I use NFTS on my Windows hard drives, so in theory, I have 255 characters to name my files and folders. So in the end, the folder contains some really long path names.

I tried many times with Windows Explorer, all failed. In the end, the command line xcopy saved the day:

xcopy source destination /i /s /h /y /v /q

/i assume the destination a folder
/s sub-folders except empty one (should have used /e)
/h copy hidden and system files (important for system backups)
/y yes to everything
/v verify the destination copy
/q quite operation (don\’t mess up my display)

xcopy will fail if the path and file name exceeds 254 characters.

Another command line copy utility, Rococopy, will be better, but not available on XP by default. However, there is a link on Microsoft website, you can download it for free:

Robocopy Download Link

Since xcopy worked fine for me, I did not try robocopy. But it is good to know there is a more powerful tool available in the toolbox.

This morning, I tried to create a new Google document, but shocked to find out that the new document is the new type, with the ruler on top. I am not against change, but this new document editor is really slow on my hoary Apple PowerBook G4. In comparison, the old Google Doc document is not flash fast, but at least bearable.

I searched high and low, and cannot make Google Doc to create a old-version document for me. Now I must resort to the following trick to create a new old-version Google document:

Open an existing document, go to File -> Make a copy

Rename the copy to the desired document name, then save. So basically, I use my current old version document as seeds to create new old-version document.

I hope this trick will continue to work, until I upgrade my computers to be able to handle the new versions. But, my gadgets usually last very long in my hands,

I am still using my old PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.11, aka Tiger. Patched up my X11 application to X11 1.1.3 (still an ancient version, but for my old Tiger, that\’s the latest).

Download link for the X11 2006 Update

However, after testing connecting to X clients on other Linux machines, I found sometimes the Alt key does not work on my Tiger X11 server.

A couple of hours fanatic searching and testing ensued, and finally I got the solution:

First, in my xterm window, run the following command:

xmodmap -pke > ~/.Xmodmap

Then, edit the lines of keycode 66 and keycode 69, like the following:


keycode 66 = Alt_L
keycode 69 = Alt_R


Save the changes, then, go to X11 Preferences (Command-,), de-select \”Use system keyboard layout\”.

Restart X11, now the Alt key (Option Key) should function normally in Linux X11 applications.

Alternatively, one can also run the following command in command line or start up script:

xmodmap -e \"keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L\"

Of course, one way to solve it is to re-boot the iPod Touch totally: hold the power button until the reboot slider appears. But that\’s slow, and seems overkill for a single misbehaved app.

To manually terminate an app, you first double-click the home button, to display the four most recent apps. Then, hold one of them, until they shake, and tap on the red delete button on the upper left side:

At first, I thought it a common situation, Adobe Acrobat must have a command for that. But unfortunately, it does not. For a document with a couple of pages, I can manually re-order them. However, if I have a PDF document with 639 pages, how I am going to manually re-order it?

After some searching and testing, I find a solution:

In Acrobat, go to Advanced -> JavaScript -> Set Document Actions

Then, I choose \”Document Will Save\” option, and then, enter the following JavaScript:

for (i = this.numPages - 1; i >= 0; i--) this.movePage(i);

Then, save the document. The page order will be reversed. Then, Go to the same location, remove the JavaScript code, otherwise, the next time you save the PDF file, the page order will be reversed again.

Basically, it is intuitive and straightforward to use, but one piece of app was puzzling me: The Notes app.

At first, I thought it would be quite straightforward: in iTunes, set Outlook as the desktop software to sync with Notes app. However, to my befuddlement, only the notes generated in Outlook goes into my iPod, but not the other way around.

After a couple of hours testing, I figured it out: Notes can sync with multiple accounts: Local iPod, Gmail, and Yahoo. So, basically, there are three kinds of notes: Gmail notes, Yahoo notes, and iPod local notes.

In the Notes app, you can specify which account the new notes will be synced to: Gmail, Yahoo, or iPod. Only the iPod notes will be synced with Outlook on the desktop, both Gmail and Yahoo notes will show up in the email accounts.

With Gmail, a new label \”Notes\” will be generated, and Yahoo Mail, a new folder called \”Notes\” is made to hold the notes written on iPod. However, in both cases, the notes sync is one-way only: from iPod to email accounts. Only the local iPod notes will sync two-way with Outlook.

Warning: if you write notes under Gmail or Yahoo accounts, but in Mail settings, you turn off the Notes sync options, the notes for the email accounts will be DELETED WITHOUT WARNING. If they are written offline, and haven\’t got the chance to be sent to your online email accounts, you lost them for ever.

First, make sure sure the file names are in order, say, 01.txt, 02.txt, 03.txt, etc.

Then, go to CMD window, type the following command:

for %f in (*.txt) do type “%f” >> myBigTextFile.txt

The myBigTextFile.txt will contain all the text file in the directory.

S-Term download page

I discovered that I can copy and paste the Chinese characters inside the s-term window, but not from IME or other Windows. I suspect that this program does not accept Unicode Chinese characters, but only GB2312 characters.

Through trial and error, I discovered the solution:

1. Go to Region and Language Options control panel
2. Go to Advanced tab
3. Select Chinese (PRC) See picture below
4. Re-start the computer

Now I can type Chinese and copy & paste any Chinese characters from the system.

–
Putty

A friend pointed out, using putty can avoid this change: putty support Unicode perfectly well. You need to change the default font to a Chinese font, and change the Translation setting to UTF-8 or font encoding.

putty home page

For some reason, the default search of Firefox for Windows is Yahoo, but the Firefox for Macintosh is Google.

To change the default search site,

1. Alt-D to Location Bar
2. Type about:config
3. Search for browser.search.defaultenginename
4. Double Click it
5. Type in Google in the resultant dialog box
6. Restart Firefox

After this, whenever you type Ctrl-K, Google will come up, instead of Yahoo. On my laptop, since the screen real estate is a premium, I usually turn off the Navigation bar, hence the need of Ctrl-K. Otherwise, Ctrl-E can bring the keyboard focus to the search box on the Navigation bar.

Discovered how to disable it in Windows XP:

1. Win-R, type msconfig
2. Click the Startup tab,
3. Find eBook Library Launcher, click it off

Now the program will not jump out to bother me. What a relieve.