The handheld are configured and installed with many packages, including Plucker.

The teachers have created simple HTML documents that link to the various Wikipedia entries for each of their “Our City” episodes.

They then used Plucker on their desktop machines to convert that into a Plucker document that can be used on the Plucker Viewer (or alternatively FlingIt) on the handhelds.

Some of the limitations of the handhelds (lack of Wi-Fi) prohibit them from just viewing Wikipedia directly, but having an offline, portable version (in my opinion) has a lot of additional benefits.

Another part of the assignment for students was to find a fact about a city that was left out of that city’s episode. Students also looked for any differently-reported facts between the podcast and the Wikipedia articles. If there is a difference, it’s an opportunity to explore which source is correct.

Read more on the original blog entry.

It’s a great example of how students and other people are using Plucker every day.

The next steps are to output the right format for each target device. In the first pass, I’ll be supporting the following formats:

• Plucker
• iSilo
• TomeRaider
• ..other formats are coming, but I can’t speak about them just yet.

I will be releasing these in 9 languages:

• Deutsch (German)
• English
• Español (Spanish)
• Français (French)
• Italiano
• Nederlands (Dutch)
• Polski (Polish)
• Português (Portuguese)
• Svenska (Swedish)

I’m working on 3 separate projects at once for this, with encycloPlucker being the largest by far:

• Wikipedia
• Wikiquote
• Wiktionary

Onward we go… now I need to figure a proper pricing matrix for these so I can release them!

I found a blog entry Little Red Rails about “Online Dating”, while looking for some other material. I browsed the content, and found that it was very thorough, and very well-researched. I decided to take the time to convert it into Plucker format.

A few years back, I was at the bar with some friends from work. This was at a time well into my online dating experience. By this point, I was sold on internet dating and thanks to growing dating experience, I was becoming very comfortable meeting new people. On this evening, I had a very brief conversation with the girl sitting next to me and asked her out as I was leaving. Based on how breifly we had spoken, I suspected I was committing social suicide. However, since I had several dates planned for later that week, I wasn’t too concerned. To my surprise, she agreed and we went out a few days later…it was a total disaster. I found I had nothing in common with the “bar girl”. The conversations were uncomfortable and she had an unhealthy obsession with all things death.

This isn’t simply a conversion, the content itself needed to be tweaked and twiddled to adapt it to a Palm handheld screen. I added the TOC, some headings and footings, cleaned up some of the tags and HTML entities, and converted it to a format for handhelds.

Let me know what you think!

Download it here:

f1a582092a24b222acabfb7cd024462b  Online Dating Guide

What is git?

Git is popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency;
it is used mainly for various open source projects, most notably the Linux kernel.

Git falls in the category of distributed source code management tools, similar to e.g. GNU Arch or Monotone (or BitKeeper in the proprietary world). Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.

Git is an Open Source project covered by the GNU General Public License v2. It was originally written by Linus Torvalds and is currently maintained by Junio C Hamano.

If you want the latest, bleeding-edge kernel features, you need to be very familiar with git. This is based on the original git HOWTO by Dunvegan Media

Download:

2e133a8d541e4671e1f3fb8171c46de2  git-HOWTO.pdb (21,535 bytes)

The side benefit of an email-only interface to Plucker is that it also fits the needs of:

1. Those who have a platform that doesn’t support Plucker, such as Amiga or OS/2
2. Those who may be behind restrictive firewalls that prohibit spidering or fetching content
3. Those who are on the road, and want to receive Plucker documents while away from home
4. Anyone who has had trouble installing Plucker on their machine for any reason

Enter Pler, the Plucker Email Reflector!

To use pler, all you have to do is fill out a very simple text-based template with your Plucker parameters and send it in the body of an email to pler@plkr.org.

Within a few minutes, you will be emailed back a reply with an attached .zip file. In that .zip file will be a completed Plucker document containing the content you requested, a plucker.ini file which you can use to fetch that content using Plucker on your own machine and a home.html file which you can also use to spider the same content from your machine running Plucker!

Nothing could be easier!

But I even made it EASIER… if you want full, detailed instructions and sample templates to use to start with, send an email to pler@plkr.org with the word ‘Help’ in the subject (or just click here), and you will get a reply within a few minutes containing everything you need to get started. The reply will include a small template, large template where each field in the above template is documented in full detail and instructions that describe everything.

The template looks like this:

<template>
    doc_name           = the Onion
    doc_file           = the_Onion
    home_url           = http://mobile.theonion.com/content/

    bpp                = 4

    home_maxdepth      = 3
    home_stayonhost    = No
    home_staybelow     = No
    home_stayondomain  = No
    home_url_pattern   = http://.*theonion.com/content/.*

    avantgo            = Yes

    maxheight          = 310
    alt_maxheight      = 300
    maxwidth           = 310
    alt_maxwidth       = 300

    category           = News
    charset            = iso-8559
    compression        = zlib
    anchor_color       = #0000ff

    referrer           = http://www.theonion.com/
    user_agent         =
    owner_id_build     =

    copyprevention_bit = No
    launchable_bit     = No
    backup_bit         = No
    no_url_info        = Yes

    send_zip           = Yes
    host_os            =

</template>

I hope everyone enjoys it… and HAPPY PLUCKING!

This book is a tutorial and reference for the Ruby programming language. Use Ruby, and you’ll write better code, be more productive, and enjoy programming more.

Ruby is easy to learn. Everyday tasks are simple to code, and once you’ve done them, they are easy to maintain and grow. Apparently difficult things often turn out not to have been difficult after all. Ruby follows the Principle of Least Surprise — things work the way you would expect them to, with very few special cases or exceptions. And that really does make a difference when you’re programming.

Download:

080078fa5882a359edd491cb80b6eb5d  Programming_Ruby_1st_Edition.pdb (458,097 bytes) 

The fonts used in the screenshots below are part of the “Plucker Free Font Collection” and were created with the Palm Font Converter written by Alexander R. Pruss. You can read more about how to convert fonts for use with Plucker in the news section.

If you wish, you can download them, install them on your Palm handheld and take advantage of better contrast, rendering and font hinting with anti-alias fonts for Plucker.

I auto-generate Plucker versions of the MySQL Reference Manuals on a nightly basis in 8 languages. If you’re interested in obtaining copies, let me know.

2f719b1faf9c4d2867e0e7d9b13b39a1 PostgreSQL-7.3.17-docs.pdb (1,195,310 bytes)
bc91cd8f9251904d7dcc3e223a049429 PostgreSQL-7.3.18-docs.pdb (1,196,248 bytes)
90a356e32e23d942c4e6b6fb7de1dbf3 PostgreSQL-7.4.15-docs.pdb (1,268,845 bytes)
1a590d1d5d0ed7700546d7f6c5ebcb7e PostgreSQL-7.4.16-docs.pdb (1,270,633 bytes)
5c633c68b035e144e94cd0e417c94887 PostgreSQL-8.0.11-docs.pdb (1,391,163 bytes)
afe50e2b2a9f3e1b1c3b38dae4815a56 PostgreSQL-8.0.12-docs.pdb (1,391,790 bytes)
cda79ab12cfa0735d33296f156e50036 PostgreSQL-8.1.4-docs.pdb (1,506,685 bytes)
79cd1a5e1d73c8635b3b03091d23efb8 PostgreSQL-8.1.7-docs.pdb (1,520,217 bytes)
d102a06405320b107c224b91794e3669 PostgreSQL-8.1.8-docs.pdb (1,521,234 bytes)
0aae12d691ffe30aa0b8077467635ddd PostgreSQL-8.2.2-docs.pdb (1,651,666 bytes)
b544e6134ddbc59032e429e64522f7a9 PostgreSQL-8.2.3-docs.pdb (1,653,395 bytes)

The fonts used in the screenshots below are part of the “Plucker Free Font Collection” and were created with the Palm Font Converter written by Alexander R. Pruss. You can read more about how to convert fonts for use with Plucker in the news section.

If you wish, you can download them, install them on your Palm handheld and take advantage of better contrast, rendering and font hinting with anti-alias fonts for Plucker.

I auto-generate Plucker versions of the MySQL Reference Manuals on a nightly basis in 8 languages. If you’re interested in obtaining copies, let me know.

85bc57bff6ba3d76ee35c34f295ed5a8  MySQL-4.1-docs.zip (2,465,278 bytes)
5951586d191045dba1fb41bc7f1dd491  MySQL-5.0-docs.zip (2,475,199 bytes)
f9b0a34842f72fca409143e43425c989  MySQL-5.1-docs.zip (2,637,791 bytes)

The RSS feed was converted with a new tool I’ve written (to be launched soon as an online service) called the “Plucker Syndication Server“. It can take any rss, rdf, xml or atom feed and convert it to the beautiful rendition you see below.

Gentoo Linux is a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme reconfigurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

If you’d like to read this for yourself on your own Palm OS device, just download Plucker and grab any of the documents below:

→ Gentoo Linux News (automatically converted every day)

If you want Plucker versions of the Gentoo Weekly News, you can get that in this location

I am now auto-generating Plucker versions of the the Gentoo Handbook on a monthly basis for 8 architectures and 12 languages. If you’re interested in obtaining copies, let me know.

3255f15def8939bd25520d308e4e04ba  Cygwin_Cygwin_X_FAQ.pdb

High-resolution version (485,911 bytes)

If you’d like me to convert other works of this quality email me and let me know.

To view this in the best format possible, you can use my Plucker Anti-aliased fonts. I’ve converted the fonts shown here in these screenshots here into a format suitable for Plucker.