I’m great fan of ebooks and recently I changed my old Hanlin to new reader – PocketBook 626. PocketBook is an European company, which is distributing PocketBook readers, the actual development of devices is done by Ukrainian company Obreey Products. Ukrainian and Russian programmers have been always very active in ebooks technology (FB2 format, CoolReader, FBReader, OpenInkPot (opensource FW for ebook) and more), so no wonder they have been able to produce quite a nice device. I personally do prefer it to Kindle because of wider format support (especially for support of epub format) and for broader possibilities how to customize the device (price wise they are basically similar to Kindle).
One of first tasks was to get there more useful language dictionaries (there are some built in, but can get better ones). Many high quality free dictionaries are available in stardict format (for instance here for Czech language dictionaries; other sites are available, which offer also other formats of dictionaries). Continue reading Convert Dictionary for PocketBook eBook Reader
I do like maps. Recently I was looking at some digital maps and got into more details and found several nice open source tools about which I’d like to write in this article. As in any area open source provides interesting alternatives to work with digital maps and geographical data and what is also very interesting there are now free sources of good quality geographical data, which can be used freely by everybody to create their own maps. In this article I’m explaining how use data from Open Street Maps (OSM) project for creating maps in QGIS and how to use PostGIS to store geographic informations and have fun playing around with their different features of map data and tools. This tutorial is focused on linux (debian based – ubuntu 12.04 resp. mint in my case) desktop and assumes some basic knowledge of your linux desktop administration. 