Updating the WikiReader

Took delivery of OpenMoko's WikiReader from COTD. Would you believe these things used to sell for $100 in 2009? Got it for a fifth of the original price, excluding shipping, of course.

What's a WikiReader? It's basically an offline Wikipedia - a battery-powered, text-only mobile device with a monochrome touchscreen that allows you to read Wikipedia articles. New content is added every quarter.

The WikiReader is supposed to come with an 8GB microSD card, but the one from COTD is only 4GB. And the content is from 2010. Bah! No matter. Armed with utorrent, I headed over to http://dev.thewikireader.com/language-packs/ and downloaded to my heart's content - WikiTravel, WikiQuote, Wikitionary, Chinese Wikipedia, and Project Gutenberg. Dumped the wikis to a 16GB card, and ended up with my version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To be more specific, the language packs are packaged as 7z archives, so you'll need 7-Zip to unpack them. Download the base image and any language packs that you want. On a clean microSD card, copy the Base Image files onto the root directory. Then copy the unzipped language packs onto the card - one folder per pack.

Movie 2012.07.08 - Postal

A nonsense movie that you only watch for the laughs. Don't even try to make sense of the plot. You have Postal Dude having troubles finding employment. Then he finds his obese wife cheating on him. Angry and frustrated, he teams up with his cult leader of an uncle to make some quick buck, so he can leave town (Paradise, Arizona). Their bright idea is to steal a shipment of highly sought-after Krotchy Dolls from a local amusement park, and resell them. For some reason, the Al-Qaeda terrorists have the same plan, resulting in a massive shootout. Postal Dude and his sexy sidekick kills 'em all, except for Bin Laden, who is whisked off by his buddy Bush. Again, for some strange reason, Bush orders a nuclear strike on China and India, who retaliate in kind. End of the world.

Splitting FLAC

Got a few albums that are encoded into single FLAC files, making the files quite big and unwieldly. And the iPod and iRiver that I have don't support FLAC.

To split the single FLAC into multiple tracks, you'll need the cuesheet that was generated when the FLAC file was created. Best way to do this is to use foobar2000, which I already have, and I don't want to download extra software like CUESplittler. Simply drag and drop the cuesheet into foobar2000, and it'll load the tracks. Right-click and choose convert. You can choose the output format, destination format, file-naming options, post-processing, etc. Make sure you have the encoders first.