Next, open up a terminal and head into your Desktop directory:

cd ~/Desktop

Give the BIN file the necessary permissions:
chmod a+x GoogleEarthLinux.bin

Execute the BIN file:

./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

Note that you should not need to use admin priveledges to execute the above command.

The archive should extract as follows:

jonolumb@jonoxps:~/Desktop$ ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin
Verifying archive integrity... All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 4.3.7284.3916..............................................................
loki_setup: Suspect size value for option option
loki_setup: Suspect size value for option option
Installing mimetypes...
Installing desktop menu entries...
Installing desktop icon...

Finally follow the onscreen instructions for the installer and preferably install Google Earth somewhere within your home directory. When the installer is finished you should get a confirmation like this:

Now just hit that “start” button and Google Earth should launch. You can also launch Google Earth from the menu at the top of the screen:
Applications –> Internet –> Google Earth

I was having trouble changing the character display from traditional to simplified characters on the Besta CD-628. The instructions on their website are vague and state the following:

To change to either one of the style for viewing, you need to proceed to the Chinese manual first. Press “C/E” on the keyboard till you see the Chinese manual. Follow by pressing “Shift” + “Tab” on the keyboard. For some of the device, you just need to press tab.
It best to select the type of format you prefer first. Have fun!

This makes very little sense, if any.

The Solution

Making the most sense as possible from the above, I have solved the problem.

1. Use the language changing button to change the dictionary’s menu language (english, korean, japanese and chinese). The button to do this is on the far right of the ON/OFF row.
2. Cycle to the chinese menu, that is, the menu before the english menu.
3. Now press the tab button once , the screen should refresh and the characters will change from either traditional to simplified or from simplified to traditional
4. Now, when you perform a search for an english word, you can get the simplified characters rather than the traditional characters.

Hope this helped somebody out there!

An audiophile Revolution

If the Squeezebox 2 and 3 weren’t enough to satisfy even the most avid of audiophiles. The recently announced Slim Devices Transporter will certainly fill the gap. Crammed with all the usual features of the Squeezebox range but with many many more technical features and better sound quality, the Transporter is set to revolutionise the audiophile market. Of course, you will still be running your toy on the familiar software that is ‘Slim Server‘.Here’s what they say on the slimdevices website:

Feel Your Music
The new TransNav™ controller uses dynamic tactile feedback to provide fast access to any song even in the largest music collection. The sleek, backlit, infrared remote and dual fluorescent displays make it easy to use from anywhere in the room.

Quality Connectors
Transporter’s back panel features a complete set of professional-grade connectors, including both balanced and unbalanced signals for its analog and digital interfaces.

Astounding Analog
The AK4396 “Miracle DAC” was chosen for its high dynamic range and low distortion. Its low out-of-band noise allows for the use of low-order output filters with higher cutoffs, resulting in preservation of phase and reduced distortion in the audible band. This extraordinary accuracy at higher frequencies allows Transporter to resolve the exact staging of instruments and the finest details of any recording. In addition, Transporter’s digital inputs allow its built-in DAC to be used with other sources.

Accurate Digital
Transporter’s digital path is not only “bit perfect”, but also extremely accurate in timing precision. Clock signals in Transporter are handled not as ones and zeroes, but as precision analog signals. Specialized crystal oscillators, careful clock management, and linear-regulated logic supplies ensure the lowest possible jitter throughout the system.

Clean Power
Transporter’s DAC and output amplifiers are powered by Super Regulators, based on the legendary design by Walt Jung. These regulators offer lower output impedance, faster response, and better noise rejection than standard three-terminal regulators. The result is an incredibly natural sound, with a pitch-black background and a shocking level of detail.

Transporter is the network music player audiophiles have been waiting for.

Slim Devices… The Future

Only a few months ago, people were criticising Slim Devices for their lack of development and were questioning their future, suspecting poor sales. Now, things have certainly changed. The company has brought out two new products in less than a year, both unique. The Transporter is the First Network Music Player designed exclusively for the audiophile community and such an investment may suggest that things are going rather well for the company. Slim Devices have also been investing heavily in partnership deals with ReadyNAS (to produce The Infrant) and their combination with the American Music Giant ‘Pandora‘ has proved very popular.

Make your Orders Now

With the rather ominous price tag of $1,999 it certainly isn’t for everybody but if you do have that sort of money then the Transporter is available on pre-order from the Slim Devices website.

Give up your CD collection

The squeezebox gives you easy access to your music via a friendly remote control. Digital music on your computer is great but wouldn’t it be so much easier if you could play it through your main hi-fi without cables trailing everywhere? Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to change the CD in your CD player very half an hour?
With the Squeezebox, all you have to do is rip your existing CD collection to your computers hard drive and you will never have to touch a CD again. Ever!

Great Quality Sound

Squeezebox features a high fidelity 24-bit Burr-Brown DAC, legendary in the audiophile community for their clean output and ultra-low distortion characteristics. Digital optical, coax, and analog connectors can plug into any home theater, stereo or amplified speakers. Basically, the squeezebox will connect to pretty much any soundsystem.

And its all wireless!

The player contains built-in support for true 802.11g and advanced lossless compression technologies. This means you can put your player three times as far away from your wireless network as usual and still get your music. If you don’t have a wireless network, don’t worry, the Squeezebox also has an ethernet port so you can plug it into your LAN should you need to. Even better, the Squeezebox can also act as a wireless bridge. Any wired device that you plug into it will have instant access to your network or the internet. All this with very little to setup.

The Software

To get your player working, you will need to download the free, Open Source software from the website. Available for Windows, Mac, Linux and on other operating systems, Slimserver is very easy to install. Once installed, simply open your web browser, type in the address of your Slimserver and you can change all the necessary settings through a user-friendly web interface. After telling the computer where your music is stored, Slimserver will find all your files and organise them for you. All that is left- plug your Squeezebox in! Of course, there are many fine tuned settings that you can play with to streamline your player.

Lots of formats

This isn’t just an MP3 player. The squeezebox also plays WMA, FLAC, AAC and Ogg Vorbis files. There are even plugins available that will let you listen to other formats should you wish.

Multiple Squeezeboxes?

Should you wish to (and if you can afford it), you can install multiple Squeezeboxes around the house. You can get them to play music independantly, all from one computer, or you can get them all to synchronize. Brilliant for that house party you’re having!

Beautiful Design

The Squeezebox is a slick accessory. Apart from it being compact, the Squeezebox boasts a massive, bright Vacuum Fluorescent Display. This lets you find out what you are listening to from the other side of the room with ease. Furthermore, due to the high resolution screen, the Squeezebox can display a number of attractive visualisations along with the music. This is a must have for your lounge. Sexy!

Easy Access

The Squeezebox itself has absolutely no buttons on its smooth body. Everything is done via a user-friendly remote control. Browsing the menus on the Squeezebox’s screen is a pleasure and even the least technologically minded person can get along with the interface. You can browse your music by Artist, Album, Genre and Year and can quickly build up playlists which can be saved for later listening. You can even search your music using the numerical pad on the remote. Text entry is exactly the same as that used on a mobile phone. What could be simpler? If you dont want to use the remote control, you can always login to the server through your web browser and tell the player what music you would like. This can be great fun if you are at the other side of the house- try turning up the volume whilst somebody else is in the lounge. You can really spook people out!

Squeezenetwork

Another nifty feature of the Squeezebox is Squeezenetwork. This is an online service that allows you to listen to internet radio streams with your Squeezebox without having your computer switched on. This is one of the most unique features of this player and is truly superb. For one thing, it gives you access to thousands of stations that a conventional radio simply could not provide. Great for foreign language learning- you can listen to the French News every morning before getting up.

Plugins

This being an Open Source project, there are hundreds of plugins out there to provide extra functionality. You can view your favourite RSS feeds on the players screen, play tetris, shutdown your computer remotely. The list really does just go on!

Try it out

Interested but you don’t want to make the investment yet? There is an answer.
Download and install the Slimserver software then get Softsqueeze, a software version of the Squeezebox. This little program emulates the Squeezebox onto your computer screen, giving you all the functionality of the real thing so that you can try before you buy.

The Verdict

This little gadget has changed my life. Every morning, I wake up to the sound of French Radio. Whenever I am juggling in the lounge, I bring along my Squeezebox to provide the music. All of this was not possible without this device. I would now find it very hard to live without it.
Possibly the best purchase I have ever made.

remote

back

transporter

visualization

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Not the End of the World

This happened to me today when I forgot to “eject” the iPod from the computer that it was connected to. The screen displays “disk mode” at the top and is in grayscale. There is also a battery indicator at the top-right and it says “safe to disconnect” in the middle of the screen.

The solution is actually quite simple. If the normal reset doesn’t work (slide hold on then off, hold the centre button and menu button at the same time for five to ten seconds), you will need to download the iPod Updater to perform a factory reset. You can get this here.

Reviving your iPod

Once the tool has been downloaded and installed, plug your iPod into the computer with the docking cable. Make sure all instances of iTunes are closed then open the updater tool.

This next step will wipe all your music and iPod settings. If your music is not backed up on your computer, you will lose it! I am not responsible for any losses the following step may cause.

Hit the restore button and the tool will wipe your iPod and revert it to the default factory settings. Now just put your music back on using iTunes and it should be as good as new. Hope this quick guide was useful to someone out there.

Ok, I got my iPod nano (2Gb) for christmas. Here’s a little review:

First Impressions

The packaging is very neat and appeals to the eye. More importantly, the nano is well wrapped up and protected. There is no chance of any damage by dodgy courriers should you order one of these over the internet.

The Nano

Handily, the nano already had some charge in it straight out of the box and so I was able to have a play straight away.
The clickwheel is incredibly sensitive and has a soothing feel. The nano creates a sort of clicking noise as you turn it around (this noise can be turned off or fed through the headphones).
Here is a list of the box contents:

• Nano
• Headphones
• Two sets of earbuds for headphones (a spare pair!)
• USB Docking Cable
• Quick start instructions and CD
• Docking adapter
• Some nice apple stickers

Whilst a version of iTunes is included on the CD, I downloaded the latest version via the internet here. I recommend that everyone does this.

Initial Charge!

The first thing I did was to put the nano on charge. Bear in mind that the nano needs to be charged for 3 hours the first time you charge it. This is to set the charging cycle to maximise battery life.

So I sat and twiddled my thumbs and felt a bit helpless really- all the nano screen displays is the message ‘do not disconnect’. However, I have since realised that you [bold]can[/bold] use your nano whilst charging on a PC. You have to press the eject button on your iPod in iTunes. Power is still supplied to the nano via the USB cable but you cannot transfer music or photos (or indeed any files) without unplugging the nano and plugging it back in.

It is worth noting with all iPods that you have to use a firewire or USB charger. There is no wall adapter supplied so this will probably mean that you will have to use a computer to charge your nano. However, if you have other devices with a USB port, notably, routers (such as an Asus WL-HDD in my case) you should be able to use these. You can also buy (at great cost) an AC to USB adapter from Apple or an in-car charger.

Music

In the end, I decided to set up the nano whilst waiting for it to charge. This is very easy to do- you simply create some playlists in iTunes which contain the tracks you would like on the Nano then go into the iPod settings and tell iTunes to automatically sync those playlists on that particular iPod. Note that you cannot drag and drop music onto the iPod in iTunes if you have iTunes set to automatically update certain playlists. This is pretty self-explanatory.

Photos

The photo setup is equally easy. All I had to do was create a folder with my favourite images somewhere on my hard drive then point iTunes to this folder. iTunes creates miniature versions of your photos and stores them in a cache folder within the designated folder. Each of these photos is about 50kb (but in a proprietary format). iTunes also gives you the option to upload a full sized version of the photo onto the iPod- I would not do this unless there is a good reason to do so as they will take up a lot of space.

Other Setup

There are also options to sync calendar and contacts with outlook but I have not yet tried this so I cannot report back. You can also drag .txt files into a folder on the nano and it can display them on the screen.
When you have finished setting up the options on the nano, iTunes transfers everything across for you. The iPod icon flashes red and iTunes reminds you not to disconnect. When everything is synced, iTunes tells you that the update is complete.

And we’re off!

When the nano was charged, everything worked superbly as expected.
The album artwork is a lovely touch- when a song is being played, it displays a small picture of the album cover on the screen along with the rest of the track info. You can also enlarge this icon to see it better.

Rating

I particularly like to be able to rate my music. When a song is being played, you click the centre button three times then turn the click wheel to give the song a star rating (out of five). When you sync the nano with iTunes, the ratings are downloaded onto the computer which is pretty cool. Furthermore, you can create smart playlists such as the ‘top 25 songs’ to play your highest rated songs. These can then be synced onto the nano.

Games

I’m not a huge fan of the games on the nano- this isnt really why I bought it. However, the music quiz is great!
It plays a five second extract of a song, in a random place (not just the start of the song) and gives you a choice of five songs. As the time counts down, so do the points available for a correct answer. You have to identify the song being played and click the correct answer. The nano also removes options as the points decrease until eventually only the real answer is left (in which case you gain 0 points!). Whilst there is no high score board or similar feature that would increase the fun, this is a cool feature when you are bored.

zSkin

Later on in the day, I received a ‘zSkin’ for my nano which I used immediately. It is a clear silicon soft case that you slide your nano into. It also has a plastic screen protector. Essentially, once you have ‘skinned’ your nano, it is impossible to scratch, both the screen and the nano itself, providing you dont keep taking it in and out of the skin (why would you need to do that!).
Surprisingly, the skin doesnt really impede the sensitivity of the click wheel, something I had previously feared. However, it does make some games slightly more tricky.

What I don’t like

Being used to using many open-source computer programs and even an Open-Source music player (see my post on the squeezebox), I do feel that the nano does deprive the user of a few ‘liberties’. For example, you practically have to use iTunes for everything that you do. There are only a couple of alternative applications available. The nano is also designed so that you cannot get your music ‘back’ from it. You can only put music on or remove it via iTunes. Apple has done this to prevent people from sharing their music collection with friends too readily, but it is quite annoying.
Furthermore, all the formats that the nano uses tend to be proprietary, such as the picture format used and the m4a (etc) music file formats. It would be much more user friendly if the pictures were in a conventional format such as Jpeg, so that the pictures could be viewed on other devices.
Finally, despite the fact that I know devices like iPods are not aimed at the technically adept user, I’m sure that Apple could include a few more controls on the nano side. It seems that you have to do practically everything via iTunes. As far as I know, you can’t even delete music from the iPod without using iTunes. This is a pain- if you wanted to use the device as a USB Storage device then you couldn’t free up space for some large files without iTunes.

Music Store Files

My other rant is about iTunes music store.
Whilst I use my iPod when I’m out and about, when I am back home I always use my Squeezebox or my PC which runs on Fedora Core 4 (linux). However, the Squeezebox will not play the protected files that you download from the iTunes music store and neither will linux machines (there being no official iTunes software for *nix systems.
This is not a fault of Slimdevices (the guys who make the Squeezebox), nor the fault of the linux community. It is Apple themselves who are responsible, as they will not sell the license to any other company to use their protected files. This is because Apple sells a product called AirTunes which offers similar functionality to the Squeezebox (play your MP3 collection wirelessly to a hifi). By not selling the license to slimdevices, AirTunes remains the only network music player that is able to play the protected music store files. This is pathetic. Moreso seeing as AirTunes is not even half as good as some of the other network music players out there.
The consequence of this is that if I wish to download music from the iTunes music store, I have to burn it onto a CD (or at least make a CD image) before ripping it back onto my computer as unprotected MP3 format. This is a real pain and is worth considering if you have a network music player and an iPod. Furthermore, if someone in your family has a non-apple portable MP3 player then they are unable to play the songs you download from the store.

Conclusion

Overall, it must be said that the nano is a lovely product and it is difficult to flaw it. Apart from the couple of mentions above (notably Apple taking the power away from the user), it is brilliant. I have not yet seen any other manufacturer come close to the iPod range and the nano will keep this trend going.
For £130, this is probably one of the best purchases I have made. Here are some pics.

This has to be one of the nicest iTrips available.
A handy feature is the ability to enable mono radio if you are in a city with many radio stations. This allows you to occupy a much narrower frequency band (in cities, the frequencies are packed with radio signals). Bear in mind that this severely reduces the quality but is certainly a cool add-on.
I love the frequency display that the nano gives you! That colour screen is really beautiful. This item is so slim and yet it is almost as big as the nano itself!?
For those of you not familiar with the iTrip family, here’s an explanation:

• Plug iPod into iTrip
• Select frequency
• Select some music to play
• Tune in to the selected frequency from a nearby radio.
• Listen away

I do however understand that use of such device in the UK is illegal if you do not have an FM broadcast license. Make sure you are on the right side of the law.

Consequently, I am getting an Ipod Nano for christmas!

I dont think I need to elaborate as I assume that we all know what these are.
Choosing an ipod inspired a big debate chez moi. Of course, I was tempted to get a mini, despite it being a downgrade. However,the mini does seem that little bit more robust. In the end, the colour screen of the nano gave it the edge. As for “real” ipods, such as the new iPod video; they are just too expensive and I cannot justify having that much disk space(who’s got 60GB of music anyway?)
Now all I need is to get a radio transmitter and I’ll be able to listen to it in the car, at work, anywhere!? I’ll let you know what I think.

nano

ipodnano_blk_front

ipodnano3

ipod_nano_photo-1