Backing up the P800

Although using iSync to sync with the P800 backs up all your contacts and calendar to OS X's Address Book and iCal respectively, it is probably a good idea to have a backup of the entire memory contents of the phone - if only to backup the contents of Jotter and PIM apps like HandySafe! Furthermore, it appears that when I finally get around to having the P800's firmware upgraded the procedure will erase all of my phone's data.

Unfortunately the included PC Suite software is for the PC only. The only Mac solution at the moment is to run it in Virtual PC. All I did was fire up Windows XP under VPC and then plug in the P800's USB Cradle (aka the SyncStation). XP should detect the new hardware (this may take a while, depending on your Mac's speed). You may need to select the cradle in the USB section of VPC's settings.

Once XP detects the cradle, insert the SonyEricsson CD that came with the phone. VPC should detect the inserted CD and autostart the PC Suite installation process. Obviously if you downloaded a newer version of the PC Suite install that instead. Just follow instructions, the software should install without any problems.

You should now notice a connection icon in the system tray at the bottom right of XP's screen. Stick your P800 onto its cradle and you should see the connection being established. This might take a minute or two. Be patient. VPC is slow. Choose Start:Programs:Sony Ericsson:P800 and fire up Backup and Restore. Cick Backup and off you go!

One caveat: I have yet to try and restore the phone. Watch this space :-)

More Mobipocket Conversions

Some of my ebooks are in html format. I briefly experimented with reading them on the P800's web browser but the files are quite large and really thrash the P800's CPU. The phone is barely usable while the html file is open, at least with the default web browser. I was unable to access the html file with Opera.

I found a slick hint at MacOSXHints which details how to use txt2pdbdoc and the pdftotxt portion of xpdf to add the ability to export documents, via the Print command, in the pdb format. This means you can export any text from almost any document (it only exports text, not images), be it a webpage, a spreadsheet, a pdf, or an email. Note that the author had some trouble getting backslashes to display in the main hint, he's posted a correction here.

This solution, while extremely elegant, does have its downfalls. For one thing single carriage returns seem to be lost in the conversion, so you end up with extremely long paragraphs. This can be a problem, especially for novels with lots of dialogue. I had hoped to use this method to easily convert some pdf and html ebooks I have. I was unable to find a fix for this, so I am stuck with exporting the text from pdf and html ebooks manually.

For pdf ebooks I've just been choosing the File:Save as Text command in Acrobat Reader and then converting the resultant text with PorDiBle.

For html ebooks I've been opening the html file in Safari and choosing Edit:Select All, and then choosing Safari:Services:TextEdit:New Window Containing Selection. I then save the resultant TextEdit document as an rtf file and drop it onto PorDiBle. Note, according to this slightly dated Doc Converter review, earlier versions of PorDiBle could convert html files. Unfortunately this no longer appears to be the case. The review also mentions MakeDocDD, which I plan on experimenting with, but my initial test resulted in the app crashing.

Both of the manual conversion methods above produce properly formatted ebooks, within the limitations of PorDiBle (notably it's inability to translate some common higher ASCII codes, '...' is a particular bugbear of mine).

This may seem like a lot of trouble, but given that reading a novel takes ten hours or more, the two or three minutes it takes to convert an ebook becomes entirely acceptable. Especially when you save all your conversions to replicate your entire library in pdb format!

Finally, in the course of my experimentation I decided I needed an OS X pdb reader rather than bluetoothing the books over to the P800 to check the formatting. A quick google search turned up eReader. There doesn't seem to be a lot of competition, but eReader doesn't suffer for it. Everything works, it looks decent, and performance is good. What more could you ask? The Pro version includes skins and changeable fonts and font sizes.

Update: I recently discovered the OS X version of Palm's very own DropBook. It works well but like PorDiBle has problems with certain unusual higher ASCII characters.

OS X Internet sharing with a P800

On the face of it, this shouldn't be a problem. After all, it apparently works on Windows.

My early efforts at this stemmed largely from this hint and this hint at MacOSXHints. However I was unable to get it to work. I was continually getting this error in my Console log:

Failed to open /dev/tty.Bluetooth-PDA-Sync: Device busy

but I cant for the life of me figure out what device is busy.

I then spent a few days fiddling with this method from TechnoHappyMeal, but after a lot of frustration I gave up on it. At the time I had decided that because my internet connection was coming through a USB port I wouldn't be able to share it over bluetooth (the various scripts that were developed in this and the MacOSXHints threads above all only specified built-in-ethernet or airport connections).

I left it for a while but then I heard about an app called Bluetooth to Internet Utility. It looked promising, but unfortunately it seems to have been broken by one of the recent OS X system updates. (In step 3 of installation it tries to open Sharing Preferences but instead opens Universal Access Preferences and then pops up an error window).

Then a few days ago I read about an app called P800 Manager which has an internet-over-bluetooth option. This app looks like it has (almost) cracked it. For one thing it can establish (and maintain indefinitely) a bluetooth connection with the phone (the phone's bluetooth icon shows a two-way connection, which none of my previous attempts had managed to do). Almost there! However when I fire up Opera on the phone it appears to manage to send out a page request, and I can see some data being downloaded over the broadband modem (courtesy of MenuMeters), but the data does not reach the phone. I'm not sure what is going wrong, but I am investigating the phone's settings and the Mac's port settings.

Update 9/12/04: I recently went wireless with an Airport Express which involved replacing my USB broadband modem with an ethernet one. This has solved my problem - P800 Manager's internet sharing works now! I still get occasional drop-outs of the bluetooth connection (which requires a restart of the P800 Manager sharing process), but I'm confident that is a P800 firmware problem fixable by getting a firmware upgrade.

Converting Ogg (ogm) and Matroska (mkv) video

So ... you've obtained an .ogm or .mkv video file and you want to convert it to something else (in my case either a DVD or a SmartMovie .avi for the P800). These .ogm and .mkv files are Ogg media files and Matroska video files respectively. Both are container formats like .avi or .mov and can contain various types of video and audio.

The Mac video Swiss army knife ffmpegX does not (yet) like ogm or mkv containers, so you need to demux the video and audio streams before converting them. The apps you need to demux are OGMTools and MKVToolNix by Shawn Holwegner. These are both ports of Linux apps by Moritz Bunkus. This means they are command line apps, but don't worry! They couldn't be simpler to use.

Just download the installer packages, unstuff, and install. They will install several ogm and mkv tools into your /usr/local/bin folder. You don't have to worry about that, all it means is that they are easily accessible. Now all you have to do is open a Terminal window, and (if you have an ogm file) type:

ogmdemux (including a space at the end - do not hit enter!)

Now drag your ogm file into your terminal window. This will fill in the correct path to the file. Hit enter to begin the demux process.

or (if you have an mkv file)

mkvextract tracks (including a space at the end - do not hit enter!)

Now drag your mkv file into your terminal window. This will fill in the correct path to the file. Do not hit enter. Continuing on the same line, type

1:video.vid 2:audio.aud

Hit enter to begin the demux process.

For both .ogm and .mkv files the demuxing process will take a minute or two for a 700MB file. When the process is complete, you will have the demuxed audio and video files in your home folder.

Once you have your separate audio and video, ffmpegX should be able to convert them to whatever format you desire - unless your audio is in the ogg vorbis format, in which case I would recommend you download and install this Ogg Vorbis for Quicktime plugin, and then use iTunes to convert your ogg to an mp3. To convert your ogg launch iTunes, option-click the Advanced menu, choose 'convert to mp3' (if this says something other than mp3 you need to change your iTunes import preferences), and finally choose your ogg.

Note: ffmpegX should be able to recognise your .vid and .aud files, but if you need to you can use ogminfo and mkvinfo to find out what type of video and audio are inside your ogm or mkv.

Edit: correction to the mkvextract instructions thanks to Jasper's comment below.

QuickContact screen lock issues

Further news on the QuickContact screen lock - I've realised that after turning the phone on that I have to manually launch QuickContact otherwise the screen lock won't kick in, so I decided to look for a way to automatically start QuickContact when I turn the phone on.

There is a program called Autostart which does this, but apparently it doesn't work very well and in any case seems to be no longer available at the developer's website, so after some further searching I found a post by zhubajie in this thread on HowardForums which describes how to manually create a startup item.

However when I tried to use the instructions in zhubajie's post to make QuickContact auto-load at startup I found it wouldn't work unless I also had HandyDay 2004 installed (I found I didn't have to have it autoload at startup though). Uninstalling HandyDay 2004 broke the QuickContact auto-start again. I'm guessing that HandyDay changes a configuration file somewhere to tell the P800 to look in the /system/startup folder when it boots up.

eBooks on the P800

One of the reasons I took the plunge and upgraded my old Nokia 8250 to the new P800 is that I wanted a portable device to read eBooks on. I had originally gone onto eBay looking for an obsolete £30 Palm and ended up with a £150 P800 phone, but that's another story...

One of my early finds on the P800 was MobiPocket Reader. This is a great eBook reader which can handle many (but not all) popular formats. The one major drawback is that it does not like gzipped text files (oddly enough the default reader that comes with the P800 handles them with aplomb). Since a gzipped text ebook can be 30% the size of a plain text ebook I really wanted an easy way to compress my many plain text ebooks into a format MobiPocket would like.

Enter Pordible. This is a slick OS X drag-and-drop app that converts text or html files into a compressed .pdb (PalmDoc) file. PalmDoc is not quite as space efficient as gzipped text, but it's pretty good. And it is compatible with MobiPocket :-)

One final note: after bluetoothing a .pdb file over to the phone, I found that it would only get imported into MobiPocket's library if MobiPocket was not loaded. If MobiPocket was already open in the background, it would read the .pdb file, but would leave it in the Beamed messages folder. My workaround is just to remember to quit MobiPocket before bluetoothing a new ebook over.