Read mobipocket (drm) eBooks on Nokia N800

Officially, mobipocket reader does not support the maemo platform.

The common solution to read mobipocket files on Nokia N770/N800/N810 was to use Garnet VM (a palm emulator) with the palm version of mobipocket reader.

The downsides of this “workaround” is that Garnet VM is a Beta software, it’s released just for evaluation, and there are no guarantee that ACCESS will maintain it, besides the facts that Garnet VM doesn’t take full advantage of the screen of the device, and that you will need to provide a new PID (that may change when updating to the next GarnetVM version).

The solution that I recently found is to simply remove the DRM from you mobipocket eBooks, uncompress them, and convert to a more “open” format like epub, and enjoy reading your eBooks everywhere.

The credit goes to the creator of a python script called “mobiddrm”, there are 2 versions: mobiddrm01 and mobiddrm02, there is a windows compiled version somewhere in demonoid that should do the job.

The command is simple:

mobiddrm02 protectedfile.prc outputfile.prc ABCDEFGHIJ

ABCDEFGHIJ being the PID used to protect the “drm”ed file.

The process is straightforward, takes less then 15 seconds for a 260 kb file, and produce completely drm-free mobipocket files.

In some cases, mobiddrm02 may fail or produce bad files, you can try mobiddrm01.

FBReader should open correctly un-encrypted mobipocket files, in case it doesn’t, you can try to uncompress it using Calibre.

If you need to read the eBook in other devices, you can convert it to EPUB or LRF format with Calibre.

PS:

Please beware that removing the drm maybe against the law in your country, so make sure you don’t break any laws when using these tools, and remember that removing drm for your eBooks doesn’t give you the right to distribute them.

I didn’t put any links to the scripts on purpose, Google is you friend

Free me ! (with SSH , Firefox and Putty)

Using the Internet behind a national firewall that blocks a bunch of sites, (including Youtube,

This is what you get when you ask for youtube.com

dailymotion …), some very interesting blogs (political reasons), SMTP ports(leaving no choice to use the ISP’s unsecured SMTP server), and of course every proxy server or web proxy, is a real pain.

Jap was one of my favorite solutions, it was created to solve such problems, but it has became lately a paying service with some limited free servers with a very very low bandwidth (at least for me).

There was also some unblocked web proxy, but it seems that our national firewall team is doing a good job, since no one last for more than a month.

Having a few dollars on my paypal account, I decided to make use of them.

The first idea was to try Jap’s paying service, and even if it was quite fast, it was not acceptable at all, since I’ll have to pay 1€ for 120 Mo, and the remaining Mo were disappearing very fast even with a low web traffic.

Later, I discovered the possibility of use of ssh tunnels, this was a great idea because ssh connections are not filtered (like the usual proxy connections), every TCP connection can be tunneled (msn, SMTP, pop3, maybe Counter-Strike ), and of course it is supposed to be very secure.

So, before jumping into the wide, I downloaded Debian server, and tested it on a virtual machine, with puppy and Firefox on my real machine, and everything was great.

I started then to search for a cheap VPS solution, I will not need disk space, I will just use some very moderate bandwidth with my 256k connection, and the best I was able to find was … Guess how much ..

Well, it was $4.95 per month (justgotvps.com), I didn’t care about any specification of this offer.

I applied very fast, and got (very fast too) my identification details, at first I wasn’t able to correctly connect with putty, but later I discovered that the informations provided to ssh connect were not correct nor the link provided on the site panel (IP address and port number).

Finally, I just got everything working when supplying the correct VPS IP to putty, now my connection seems to be quit faster (using the SSL compression), and I can finally access youtube …

This what you get with Putty + Firefox + SSH

I’ll be testing this service for the next month, maybe the SMTP connection too, I hope I wont get troubles , I’m not sure if using encrypted connection is legal here, but who cares, I just need to visit youtube.

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Edit: About justgotvps.com, their support is very poor , my VPS stop responding after I did some manipulations, and until now I cant get it fixed. (I finally decided to pay for another one)

The connection speed is not excellent (using SSH),sometime very slow, and downloading barely goes above 18 KB/s.

wxChat , a simple and basic chat application

I started this week to play with wxwidgets, and decided that I’d better start writing some basic stuff, so a simple chat application comes to my mind …
I used the wxSocket class to acheive this, the application can run as a client, or as a server using only the main thread.
It didnt take too much time, I hope it’s bugfree, I have to pass to 2nd level now
Even if the code is supposed to compile and run correctly on linux and MacOS, I just created and tested the windows version
here is a link for the exe and the source.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any question about the code …