Archive for iPad

Getting Mobile Terminal to work on the new iPad.

Mobile Terminal is the must have tools for a iPad power user, but the Mobile Terminal binary in default Cydia store does not work in the new iPad (well it does not work under 5.1.1)

After a bit of googleing, ijailbreak.com offer some help.

Quick answer:
Add Cydia source: http://www.ijailbreak.com/repository/, enjoy their great build of Mobile Terminal.

(Hum, it would be great if I can set fonts with it since it is such a waste on the new iPad’s 2048×1536 resolution, shouldn’t ask too much as I am only enjoying others build, thanks, I know I should have compile / dev my own….)

Links
How To: Install MobileTerminal On iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad Running iOS 5.1.1

Jailbreak in progress…Open source here I come!

lighttpd + php + sqlite3 + shell exec on the new iPad is just GREAT, only if I have more time….I would……………..

Updating iPad to iOS4.2GM


Confirm?


iOS4.2 on iPad!

Special thanks to @DinCooCniD

About process mediaserve on iPad.

After all the fuzz on the reloading of my iPad, I found that the process goes by the name: mediaserve did had problem on my iPad, it was running 7~9% CPU all the time, resulting in shorter battery life and sluggish system performance…

I have no idea what the process is for, but since the reload fixed it, ok, well…

If you found your Jailbroken iOS device battery runs out faster than you expect, it is always good to give it a check on top from SSH.

iPad now in reload…

There seems to be many funny glitches on my Jailbreaked iPad (OS 3.2)…

A process goes by mediaserve is taking up CPU cycle and battery do run out faster than it was.
I am not able to use Bluetooth Audio with WiFi on (it auto disconnected my BT Audio device on Audio playback in iPod App, which I think might be related to BTStack I installed earlier for Wiimote, altho I uninstalled it but Bluetooth still seems acting funny..)
I do notice a bit of slowness to the system, which I think it might be related to the mediaserve process issue.

Googled for a while and only found very few info about this mediaserve process, everyone of the site comes with no solution but erase; and cannot find any info about the bluetooth audio issue..

Ok, Factory reset it is.
(Backup took almost 3 hours by SSH, well well…)

Working with PDF the free and easy way.

Since I got the Apple iPad a while back, I now deal with lots more PDF then I used to.

Very often we would like to do some simple work with PDFs, example: add/remove/swap pages/cover, split large PDF to multiple parts etc.

I tried quite some different freeware to work with PDFs, not as simple and as good as my need, some freeware has difficultly working with large PDFs (file size larger than 100MB or so), some of them do not work well on different/multiple pages resolution, some occupied crazy amount of memory (3GB+ for a 150 pages PDF)..

If you paid for the great Adobe Acrobat, things are a little bit better, their price do worth what it can do, but since my need was way too simple for that price, so it came to my interest to find a free and easier way to get my simple task done.

In the search, I found a program call pdftk, PDF Toolkit at http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/ which suits my needs.
First of all, the price is just right, it is free, and it does the simple job I want easily, especially I just love command line (CLI) programs, which I can do batch file processing.

Here is some examples:
To remove page 1,3 and page 301 from a PDF with 350 pages:
>pdftk INPUT.PDF cat 2 output TMP.002.PDF
>pdftk INPUT.PDF cat 4-300 output TMP.004-300.PDF
>pdftk INPUT.PDF cat 302-350 output TMP.302-350.PDF
>pdftk TMP.002.PDF TMP.004-300.PDF TMP.302-350.PDF cat output OUTPUT.PDF

To join all pdf in current directory to one PDF file:
>pdftk *.pdf cat output OUTPUT.PDF

I now use pdftk, imagemagick with a simple PERL script to process comics downloaded from the net.
Why so complicated you may ask, but handling downloaded comic images are a bit more work than you think, first many of these scans are in multiple page (2 page join in 1 image), which I do not like to see that on the iPad.
First the PERL script unzip the images into a tmp folder, using Image:Size, it tries to guess was the image merged from multiple pages (by width/height ratio), if split is needed it is then passed to imagemagick for splitting (left/right split), then resize is done too since we do not need very large image on the iPad, each page is then converted to a single PDF in imagemagick, finally we merge the PDFs into the final output by PDFTK.

Converting a 150 pages comic zip file from merged jpg/png to a single PDF is simple and quick (about 1~2 mins depends on how much work is needed on the resize and crop).

Links
http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/