I’ve been trying to figure out how to read epubs from Kobo on my Kindle3G – and Linux for that matter, seeing as how the desktop client has stagnated. I fired up a VM of MacOSX 10.6.7 and installed Adobe Digital Editions which takes the URLLink.acsm files and downloads DRM-infected .epub files which you can read through the Adobe program. Well that’s not good enough, so I downloaded ineptepub.pyw and removed the DRM, then imported the .

Today I’ve been playing with PMS (Plex Media Server) for Linux, and also Plex Mobile for Android. Both have been pretty disappointing! The Linux server is closed-source and precompiled for vague platforms like 32-Bit Ubuntu 10.10, but happens to run with some work on 64-Bit, I got it working on 32-Bit 11.04 after some hacking. It looks like a direct port of the Mac version though as there’s no init script and there are spaces and capital letters in filenames, which actually stops the server from starting (good QA there!

Well I’m back to using a regular nightly now they’ve merged in the slide-keyboard revert. Its all working pretty well except that dialler is eating the battery. I was playing around with ROMManager and found that once or twice it didn’t reboot into recovery when doing a backup, although it seems to work fine if you select “reboot into recovery” and I think its been fine when installing a new ROM from the SD card.

I got fed up of waiting for the Cyanogenmod team to merge in the broken slidey keyboard revert so decided to take the plunge and install my own build on my Orange San Francisco smartphone. I did a “repo sync” and checked out the revert from Git then compiled what was essentially a nightly build of CM 7.1.0 RC0 between N71 and N72. I installed it on my phone and put it up on my server for download, and posted to the MoDaCo forum, and now about 18 hours later I’ve had 222 downloads using a whopping 21Gb of bandwidth – I’m so glad that only works out as about 2% of my monthly allowance and we’re halfway through the month!

I changed my rsync backup script to use root (well, sudo) to sync my desktop machine with my fileserver after the recent problems I found with BackInTime not being able to read my entire $HOME directory. That gave rise to the problem that if I ssh from the desktop into the fileserver, run screen, run ssh-add, run the rsync script and then detach the screen, the $SSH_AUTH_SOCK variable gets nuked, so after the first call to rsync-over-ssh, the script prompts for the ssh key’s passphrase again.