Screenshot of Bookr for PSP

I have never seen any homebrew application that was more straightforward than Bookr. It’s an application for reading pdf-files with the PSP on the go. To get things running just copy the application files into the root of your application folder via USB, copy the pdf files too, and you’re done!

Bookr supports pdf files and plain text files. You can zoom the contents, flip the pages and browse embedded pictures – everything is rendered very accurate – and it saves bookmarks. Reading eBooks on the PSP was never easier. The app itself has a very nice and functional eye-candy interface, where you can tweak and customize to the most important and usable features. Easy, robust, comfortable and stable. Nothing more, nothing less. Very balaced work. Unfortunatelly they have no website yet. The download is located at Sourceforge.

The application was made by written by Carlos Carrasco Martinez and Edward Choh, they used for the implementation a thing called mupdf.

Via media-ocean comes the recommendation to the wonderful webcomics from dot-cube. Get the daily dose at the dot cube blog.

What is Open Frameworks? It’s a c++ library designed to assist the creative process by providing a simple and intuitive framework for experimentation developed by Zach Lieberman and Theo Watson. Now OpenFrameworks is released in pre-alpha version. The pre-release comes uncompiled it is planned to put the first released public version under the LGPL licence. If you develop things, then help the people from OpenFrameworks!

“We have a desperate need for help with documentation of the API, examples, and general explanation of the code. While there are tools like Doxygen, etc that can automatically produce API documentation, we would much rather not fill the library code with ‘java-doc’ style comments. We also need help supporting different compilers, for example, eclipse, and other platforms, like linux. We are happy to help with suggestions about how to do this.”

There is something new coming up, called “Vision Factory”. Referring to the website, it’s a new complex tool for the convergence of various formats and standards aimed at grafical programming. The website says:

Vision Factory is a multiplatform software (MacOSX / Windows) written in C++. It is aimed at creating real-time interactive visual animations by the programming of reusable and sharable plugins. Through its modular architecture, one can quickly build complex scenes by using data resources (images, webcam feed, sounds, osc/midi messages, web services, …) through the use of dedicated built-in libraries.

Check this page for more, to leave your mailaddress for the latestest news and to have a sneak on the technical features. Vision Factory should be released on May 2007.

Yahoo released an new online service that let you remix and mash-up rss-feeds on the fly. They deliver a visual programming language, that works with javasript directly in your browser. It looks easy, but seems to unleash the real power of xml and feeds possibilities for the web. With this tool you really can filter, code and mix up every feed that is online available. The resulting feed will also be made online available, ready for new mix downs. The only issue is the need for an yahooID to mess around with this tool.

Connecting and filtering xml-feeds directly in your browser.

For the future yahoo promises some enhancements and extensions for this patcher tool. The website says what they plan for the future:

– Programmatic access to the Pipes engine
– Support for additional data sources (such as KML)
– More built-in processing modules
– The ability to extend Pipes with external, user-contributed modules
– More ways to render output (Badges, Maps, etc…)

Like always it’s a work in progress and beta-testing everything. If you want to try and play around a little start with the digital tools pipe to clone and mash-up.

The New York based designer Stewdio made a really nice videoclip for the indi-postrock band Granddaddy. The track Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) is featured on the album The Sophtware Slump.

Steward used an original 1979 Apple II and a dose of BASIC to make the video. Watch the video Jed’s Other Poem. The author of the clip also reveals the lines of code that generated the clip in the video. Cute and somehow very open source. You can also have a download of the source.

Maybe not this guy, but the technique showed here could be the future of virtual turntabelism.

The video comes from Djwiij (alternative link). Tutorials and Howto connect the Wiimote to the PC are also provided at the website. My head keeps spinning around thinking about totally new ways to control everything digitally available.