Friday, March 26, 2010

Kindle DX rocks PDFs

I recently got a Kindle DX, upgrading from a Kindle 2. My reason for upgrading was twofold. First, I felt that I was having to 'next page' too frequently on the kindle 2's screen. I hoped that the larger screen meant I'd be able to stay in the prose for longer between gaps in page turns.

The second, is that PDF display on the Kindle 2 necessarily requires making the text very, very tiny. That, or using the device in landscape mode and viewing half a page at a time. Not too pleasant, especially when there are so many materials I'd like to have on hand in PDF format. Especially those I've downloaded from OReilly's Safari service.

In this latter regard, the Kindle DX is awesome. No longer do I have a thumbdrive filled with PDFs that I've been meaning to read. Now, as often as I can, I move them onto the DX, named appropriately and read them when I get a moment.

Here's a command that is a life saver. It merges multiple PDFs into a single larger one while preserving pretty much every aspect.

gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dBATCH \
-sOUTPUTFILE=newpdf.pdf a.pdf b.pdf c.pdf etc.pdf


Kindle DX, plus PDFs, I'm so happy now.

Oh and it reads books too :-).

Friday, March 5, 2010

Maven Eclipse Plugin 0.10 is Better

I've been using the maven eclipse plugin m2eclipse for a long while now and recently upgraded a couple of my eclipses to the 0.10 version. All told, it's better than the previous version of m2eclipse.

Of course as I write this, I try to set up another eclipse instance and it fails to load a pom. So close.