Skip to main content

GoodReader is GREAT

Anyone who knows me knows that although I have about every Apple product they make (iPad, iPhone, iPod, Airport Express, AppleTV, MacBook, etc), yet I HATE Apple.  Why?   Because they make fantastic hardware that is super easy to use, but the content is ridiculously controlled.  I loathe iTunes, because it's the only way Apple wants you to move songs, movies, and ebooks.  In a perfect world, I could plug in my iPad, and it would show up as a drive on my laptop, or I could open a wirelessly connected NAS and download/upload media at will.   But NO, Apple wants iTunes to lock everything down and prohibits even the easiest transfer of media.  Worse, their buggy apps have (I'm talking to you iBooks) on multiple occasions caused me to lose downloaded content.  

Recently I was trying to get iBooks to display some pdf ebooks that I downloaded from the web, and the application barfed hard, and for the last time.   Here's a screenshot.


Anyway, all of my ebooks were unreadble, AGAIN, so I was fed up and decided to dump iBooks for good.  Incidentally, for all you hackers out there, this is a clear indication that the cover-art rendering engine of iBooks is vulnerable to a hack, so hackers please wack this app, which is downloaded by default on ALL iPads, so that Apple gets their crap together and fixes it.   

Anyway, I decided to remove all my ebooks from Apple's control, and manage them myself somehow.   Enter GoodReader.   http://www.goodiware.com/goodreader.html

This app costs about $5 on the Apple Store, but it allows you to manage your content outside of big-brother Apple's control.  It works great connecting to my wireless NAS, and lets me upload/download content to it at will, WITHOUT iTunes!  YES!   What's more, it even plays audio files, and you can upload a lot of audio books for FREE and listen to them like you would with Audible.    

Check it out... go to http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/Top_100 and check out the audio books they have FOR FREE.   I downloaded a few of these as mp3 formatted books, and put them on my NAS, connected wirelessly with my iPad and pointed GoodReader at them, and it sucked these books in easily.   Now I have a bunch of audio books to listen to, and it cost me nothing.   

How does it work for ebooks?   It works GREAT.   It allows you to manage your own content, outside of iTunes, and you can even annotate your pdfs!   It's my eBook reader of choice, and I may even look into moving my music there!  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HP c6180 Printer and Vista

Hp c6180 driver issues with Vista Home Premium My wife has a Vista Home Premium laptop, and the HP C6180 Photosmart printer keeps disappearing from her available printers.  The only way I've found to fix the problem is to reinstall all the HP software. When I do this, I have to download the (large..507M software from HP, or reinstall the printer (ONLY the printer, not the scanner) with the installation disk, as the drivers are not discovered with a "Windows Update" setting.  My guess is that is because HP doesn't like people to install only the printer driver, which would be easy, but they want folks to install all their crapware as well, so they are withholding the drivers from the on-line Microsoft printer database.  So keep your installation CD!  I've also found that unless I install everything on the CD or in the Full Version download (HP Customer Participation Program, HP Imaging Device functions, HP OCR SW, HP All-In-one SW, HP Photosm...
27 comments
Read more

atftpd vs tftpd-hpa

Recently I was trying to tftp files from a Windows computer to a Kali box.   One version of Windows worked, but another didn't.    After much troubleshooting, here were my symptoms: I could tftp a file from-to any Kali box from-to another Kali box I could NOT tftp files to a specific Windows 7 box from any Kali box I could NOT tftp files to a Chrooted-Ubuntu-Chromebook box from a Kali box After MUCH troubleshooting, going through every setting in atftpd, it seemed like it literally was a client OS problem.  Different clients simply would not download files---unacceptable. Thus, I switched to tftpd-hpa.   To install: apt-get install tftpd-hpa files go to/come from /srv/tftp, but it needs to be a tftp user. Thus, I needed to: chroot -R /srv/tftp Also, if you want to be able to put files ON the tftp server (from a client), you need to modify /etc/default/tftpd-hpa: change "TFTP_OPTIONS="--secure"  to "TFTP_OPTIONS="--secure --create" ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Security Onion on the Antsle

My Setup of Security Onion on the Antsle: Recently my IDS box, an Intel Atom D2500 Fanless Mini-ITX PC, D2500CCE, died.  Truth be told, I think it came from the factory in a bad state, as I originally thought I had a bad graphics driver, but I then noticed that, after much troubleshooting, it wasn't a driver issue at all.  The box just sometimes wouldn't boot up correctly with video.  It seems heat related, something like not enough thermal paste on the CPU, as after it is powered off for a while it is more likely to boot than when it is warm.  Along with that issue, this box maxed out at 4GB of RAM (only has 2 memory slots, each of which will only take a 2GB card max) and had a single processor, so it was under powered for Security Onion. So, I decided to quit limping along on P.O.S. boxes, and buy a little more heavyweight box for my networked IDS.   Security Onion requires a minimum of 8GB of RAM, and 4 cores per their specs page htt...
Post a Comment
Read more