Get Info: #sony

Five interesting facts about the design of the original PlayStation

by Matt Sephton — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Some things you probably didn’t realise about the design of the original Sony PlayStation:

it was inspired by Apple’s Macintosh Plus
the colour is grey with a hint of violet to counteract plastic ageing/yellowing
Sony acquired the PlayStation name from Yamaha
it led to the VAIO range of PCs

Bonus fact:

VAIO was originally an acronym for Video Audio Input Output

Photo reference

Taken from Digital Dreams: The Work of the Sony Design Center (1999, Paul Kunkel)

Sony Reader “Exceptional internal memory state: formatting” workaround

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 05 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I get a strange error from time-to-time on my Sony Reader (PRS-650).

After the Reader powers up, or comes out of transfer mode, it does the busy spinner and then says:

+---------------------------------------+
| Exceptional internal memory state     |
| Formatting                            |
|                              [  OK  ] |
+---------------------------------------+

At this point pressing OK will format the device. Yikes!

Short Workaround

Do not press OK on the format warning
Press hardware RESET button with paperclip

If this does not work, try the following:

Longer Workaround

Do not press OK on the format warning
Instead, plug device into your computer
Backup READER partition (optional, but recommended)
Press hardware RESET button with paperclip
Wait for Reader to reboot (no PRS+ features when booting with USB connected)
Unplug from computer
Shutdown/restart reader (PRS+ features will be re-enabled)
Problem is gone!

Cause

My theory: PRS+ doesn’t like the device being “dirty” when it is unmounted or ejected improperly.

Better custom font sizes on Sony Reader devices

by Matt Sephton — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Below are details of a script to generate custom CSS to make sure custom fonts all appear at similar sizes when they are used as the display fonts on Sony Readers running PRS+ custom firmware. Without this script certain custom fonts will appear much bigger or smaller than others.

I use this with my PRS-650, but it probably applies to most Sony Readers and perhaps some other eReaders. Get in touch if you have an idea how it can apply to other eReaders.

Source Code

Installation

Requirements:

php
python
pip

Dependencies:

font-line

Useful incantations:

sudo -H python -m ensurepip
sudo -H pip install font-line

Location

Script should be alongside the folders of font families in /READER/fonts

Usage

Run from the command line without any arguments.

Output

One custom CSS file for each font family is written to /READER/database/system/PRSPlus/epub/

How does it work?

Using the python tool font-line I get the sum of Ascender+Descender from the font metrics for each family. Dividing 1 by that number normalises the font size by making larger fonts slightly smaller, and smaller fonts slightly larger. The script finally writes the new size information into the CSS in the expected format at the correct location.