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Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Inconsequential Technical Achievements

Not that it really matters, but I made two technical improvements recently.

A minor one: have you ever noticed that I'm really anal about spelling "melee" as "melée"? Even though it's supposed to be spelled "mêlée"? The reason why I don't spell it completely correctly is because I have the key sequence for "acute accented e" memorized, but not for "e with a circumflex". But I've installed a little keyboard macro app called "TyperTask". Trivial, but it means I can set up macros for things like monster stat blocks, so I'm happy.

A less minor one: Money's been tight, but I finally decided to spring for a low-end tablet (Nook Tablet.) The main reason is so that I can read PDFs more comfortably, carry books around easily, and take notes when I'm not at my computer, which will improve work on Liber Zero. I'm currently having a problem with transferring these notes to my desktop computer (I have to walk to wi-fi, so Google Docs and "cloud computing" in general are not an option.) But I may root the thing so I have a better selection of apps.

I may switch to keeping room encounter notes on the Nook, because my eyesight is getting worse. So far, though, the only effects on the actual game are occasional table look-ups and the scary possibility that I will be running modules in the future that I only have in PDF format. These would be Tomb of Horror, The Grinding Gear, and Death Frost Doom.

The players have been warned.

3 comments:

  1. Rooting the Nook tablet is the way to go. I'd suggest ezpdf reader too. It isn't free but it's well worth the money.

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  2. I haven't had a noticeable problem with the included PDF reader, so I probably won't be paying for a replacement anytime soon. Rooting the tablet is still pretty far in the future, too, unless I can't figure out any other way to get a plain text editor. But I'm about to try installing G-Notepad and Textedit; if those work, my immediate needs will be met for quite a while.

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  3. I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Side loading apps worked well when the tablet was first released but it was my understanding that the last ota update made that more difficult.

    The stock pdf reader worked ok for me but it was slow and seemed to hang at times. The ezpdf loads very fast and additional features like page annotations were more important to me.

    Good luck! I've been pretty happy with mine so far.

    Btw, xda has a great instructional thread with videos on rooting the Nook tablet if you decide to go that route later.

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