MyVogonPoetry

E-books on the Juicebox - HOWTO

6/3/2005

I picked up a couple Juiceboxes and MP3/picture kits a few months ago when they were on clearance at WalMart. A few days ago I noticed they were on clearance now at Target (you can get both the unit and the MP3/picture kit for a total of $24 plus tax) and I posted to the linux-hacker forums that Target had them on clearance now. Today, there is a slashdot post about them. Hopefully now someone will figure out how to make it play our own videos.

Poking around online, I found this post talking about using it as an e-book reader. I hadn’t thought of that! So, since I had some lying around, I tried it. In about 10 minutes I was reading text on my Juicebox. Here’s how I did it:

Download and install JPEGBook
Set the size in JPEGBook to be 240×160
Run JPEGBook on a text file
Use the Juicebox software to import the new book jpgs to your Juicebox.
Read and enjoy!

Here is the JPG that I put on the Juicebox:

The text jpg that got put on the Juicebox

Here is a picture of the Juicebox displaying the text image (click to enlarge - it’s readable!). It looks much better in person - the screenshot looks a bit blue and washed out:

UPDATE: Here is a Flickr photo showing the button functions (point at the buttons):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianpipa/17335231/

Technorati: juicebox, ebooks, ebook reader, hack, slashdot

Categories: Geek
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18 responses

Brian, that's great! Thanks for posting the picture. BTW, how do

Branko Collin | 6/3/2005

Brian, that’s great! Thanks for posting the picture.

BTW, how do you “leaf” through a book? I take it there’s a button for “Next page” and perhaps one for “Previous page”? Any more?

To leaf through, the upper left button is PREV, the

Brian P | 6/4/2005

To leaf through, the upper left button is PREV, the next one down is NEXT. I put up a Flickr photo with notes sjhowing what the buttons do:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/89373585@N00/17335231/

Brian

Mattel's megacheap e-book reader Mattel, known mostly for the Barbie doll,

Branko's Weblog | 6/4/2005

Mattel’s megacheap e-book reader
Mattel, known mostly for the Barbie doll, and for the aggresive way in which it tries to “protect” its “trademark”, brought out an MP3/video player called the Juicebox.

Perhaps it did not catch on, because several US chain stores slashed its pri…

[...] ally numbered JPEGs, which then can be read on

Branko's Weblog » Mattel’s megacheap e-book reader | 6/4/2005

[...] ally numbered JPEGs, which then can be read on the Juicebox. More on the Teleread blog and at Brian’s. Photo: Brian P The only pity so far seems to be that JPEGbook will not anti-ali [...]

I saw the slashdot, literally fled out of my house

Zach | 6/4/2005

I saw the slashdot, literally fled out of my house and sped to Walmart to find they didn’t have them, and then lucked out with Target. So I have two. It’s a pity the picture frame person’s “hack” really just consisted of using the media card. However:

Link to Linux hacker forum

Forget JPEG; it loads it’s own custom bitmaps, which you can throw on the card directly. Which means, no artifacts, no image loss. I personally plan on using mine so I don’t have to boot up a computer and load acrobat everytime I need a pinout…

Zach, sounds cool! How do you convert a text file

Branko Collin | 6/5/2005

Zach, sounds cool! How do you convert a text file to an image file though?

Read ebooks on the Juicebox The Juicebox is a cheap

MAKE: Blog | 6/5/2005

Read ebooks on the Juicebox
The Juicebox is a cheap (under $25 in some stores) music, video, photo viewer from Mattel aimed at kids. There are some hacking projects going on, and we’ll have some articles on that soon, but here’s a good how-to on putting ebooks on one using JPE…

Teleread has photos of a children's picture book by Ellen

Branko Collin | 6/5/2005

Teleread has photos of a children’s picture book by Ellen Hage.

Hello Brian, I have posted a small program called GDBook at

Branko Collin | 6/7/2005

Hello Brian,

I have posted a small program called GDBook at my blog to convert texts to images. It is not as usable as JPEGBook, but it will break lines at word boundaries, and will output as PNG instead of JPEG, so that you can losslessly convert to the Juice Box native format as outlined at the Linux-hackers’ Juice Box forum.

Could you perhaps post this to the Linux-hacker forum? They might be interested. (I am not a subscriber.)

My JuiceBox hacking site. Looks like crap, but I'll fix

Zach | 6/7/2005

My JuiceBox hacking site. Looks like crap, but I’ll fix it up later. Features the JBRemix of GDBook, which saves straight to JBP and takes command line args (make sure you have them enabled in php.ini!) and some tech docs I formatted for use with the JB. Happy hacking!