Re: [tlug] Japanese and Android tablets like the Nexus 7

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

I've recently bought a Nexus 7 myself, which is a companion to the
Optimus LTE phone I've been using for more than half a year. I chose
it becuase it was small and cheap (¥20,000 from play.google.com) and
I needed something to tide me over until the Nexus 10 finally becomes
available again.

I mainly bought it as a replacement for my Sony Reader; it's the first
portable device I've had that can finally do a decent job of reading
technical documents and books. For those I use PDF versions (because
the formatting is signficantly inferior for EPUB versions) and Acrobat
Reader. Acrobat reader isn't brilliant (I particularly miss the lack of
a zoom lock), but it does the job.

The screen's resolution isn't as high as I'd like (1280x800), but it
seems to do a fairly capable job anyway; there's a possibility I may
not bother upgrading to a Nexus 10 if this seems to work out for most
material over the long run. I do like the small size and light weight.
Interestingly enough, the resolution is the same as my phone, but having
a 7" instead of a 4" screen makes all the difference in the world when
it comes to how well I can read things like O'Reilly books. I wonder
if that's just my poor eyesight (even when corrected with my reading
glasses), or if this is the case for most everybody.

For fiction and the like I use FBReader; which is plenty featureful.
I've tried a few free books via Google Play reader, but I won't buy
anything from them because they seem determined to lock me in to their
own format rather than just give me EPUBs. (Their own reader doesn't
even read EPUB format.)

On 2012-12-16 15:11 +0100 (Sun), Christian Horn wrote:

> - over usb: As the Nexus7 does not present itself as usb
>   storage device, using 'jmtpfs' turned out to me as the only 
>   reliable way.  The storage gets mounted as filesystem.
>   Not yet packaged for Fedora18 but easy to build.

I started out with mtpfs[1] rather than jmtpfs[2]. mtpfs seems to work
fine (if slowly) except for timestamping everything at the epoch, which
makes life difficult when using rsync, git and similar programs that use
timestamps. Does jmtpfs maintain timestamps?

However, I've sinced discovered Dropbox[3]. Originally I set myself
up on this to exchange a few large files with some less technically
sophisticated friends, but having tried it out on my tablet and phone,
too, it looks to be great for sharing of data that isn't especially
secret. (And it's free when you need to store only a few GB or less.)
I'm going to try moving my book and music libraries in to it at some
point soon; I can let you know how it goes, if there's any interest.

If anybody else here wants to try it out, you might as well use my
code[4] and get us both an extra 500 MB of free storage.

> Applications, Japanese related:
> - google translate is amazing: recognizing kanji painted by
>   hand, or spoken into the device.

I've been using WWWJDIC and Kanji Recognizer on my phone. The latter
is great; the former doesn't seem to have an off-line mode, which is
annoying. I just had a quick go at Google Translate and it seems to want
to translate my kanji from Chinese, which is annoying.

But the big issue is, I can't seem to figure out how to get Japanese
input on my Nexus 7 outside of changing the systemn language to
Japanese. When the system language is English, in the keyboard settings,
if I change Android Keyboard language to uncheck "Use system language,"
I can choose from a list of languages, but Japanese isn't there. This is
incredibly frustrating to me.


[1]: http://www.adebenham.com/mtpfs/
[2]: http://research.jacquette.com/wp-content/uploads
[3]: https://www.dropbox.com/
[4]: http://db.tt/MQZSCMkF

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch