The Multiplying Gorilla

Igor's posts with tag: psp

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Ushering in April (2 photos)

Apr 4, '08 5:47 AM
for everyone

Playing around with a PSP. An overturned car in BF Paranaque (which rarely happens).

Tags: psp, car

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A Different Way of Doing Things Inside an SLIS Classroom: CDisplay, PSP, PSPComic and Bookr

Aug 27, '07 3:05 PM
for everyone

Semi-geek time. I wanted to do things differently this semester. That being said, I started using different things in the classroom.

One of the things I am using is David Ayton's CDisplay for Windows as presentation software for my lectures rather than Powerpoint, Impress or Slideshare. I used to just use plain HTML years ago.

Sample lecture slide

CDisplay is a free sequential image viewing utility and is widely used to view digitized comic files. Digitized comics are usually in PDF or in CDisplay readable CBR or CBZ formats (which essentially are ZIPs or RARs of sequential images like JPGs). In the CBR or CBZ file, page 1 would be 001.jpg and so one, depending on your naming convention. Renaming to ZIP or RAR yields the original archive and the images can be extracted individually. I was thinking that since I use this for viewing / distibuting some of the comics lettering work I've done then why not use it for class?

Pros: Very fast.
Cons: Since they're already flat images, there's no way to extract text except for running the extracted images through OCR software. And the CDisplay software has to be installed on the computer you're using.

CDisplay is no longer maintained but there's CDisplayEx, an open source version as well as other MacOS and Linux versions. (CDisplay wikipedia link with similar software here.)

Another thing I started using was a PSP (Sony Playstation Portable). Yes, I indulged on my birthday in the guise of academic computing. The last of my birthday purchases, the PSP, I now use to while the time away when waiting for people or when traffic is really bad (I watch my DVDrips in really bad traffic). The predecessor? I used to watch matchbook-size video on my ASUS V80 but it's proving quite a strain on the eyes. Now it's just an audio player.

*GASP!* A PSP in the classroom? Am I out of my mind? Nope. One of my students, Jay Layson, always lugs a PSP around and he was lamenting on the fact that he was the only with a PSP in SLIS at the start of the sem. He plays games on it, listens to music, watches vids and reads ebooks on it too. Now, including me, I think there are 3 PSPs in the hallways.

You see, I can view the CBRs and CBZs of my lectures and class reports on the PSP with PSPComic. If the document or report is in PDF, I can view it with Bookr. It saves me from neck stress having to look behind me at the projection screen all the time. Plus now I can read my ebooks, pdfs and plain text files wherever I go (no Harry Potters just yet, it's still Stoker, Mary Shelley and J Sheridan Le Fanu for me). And just to demonstrate the possibilities, I googled and followed the instructions I found in several old webpages like Matan Gillon's "Windows and Linux on the Sony PSP", Chris Mulhearn's "uLinux on the PSP" and "The Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project" and eventually got DLXlinux and Freedos / mulinux13r2 disk images to boot (had no success with TinyLinux, though). Of course all I need now is to get a keyboard (Pikey?) for basic text entry (nevertheless, I probably still have to get a laptop upgrade to replace my old second-hand Sony Vaio PCG-505SX).