2012-07-11-Book Port Plus
Seminars@Hadley
Tuning In with BookPort Plus
Presented by
Maria Delgado
Moderated by
Douglas Walker
July 11, 2012
Douglas Walker
Welcome to seminars at Hadley, my name is Douglas Walker and I am an instructor of assisted technology here at the Hadley School for the Blind. And I will be your moderator for today’s seminar. Today’s seminar topic is Tuning In with the Book Port Plus.
Your presenter today is Maria Delgado. Maria is coming to use from the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, KY. Maria is the field service representative and was responsible for conducting field product trainings and product demonstrations. Chances are that you’ve probably heard Maria speak in the past. She’s really busy. She delivers on an average of 25 presentations annually throughout the US as well as all around the world.
I am really excited to have Maria with us today and I can’t wait to hear about some of the really cool features that the BookPort Plus, that we might not be as familiar with. We all know that it is a fantastic daisy book player, but it does so much more than that. So without further delay, I would like to welcome today’s presenter Maria Delgado. Maria, I will hand the microphone over to you.
Maria Delgado
Good morning, everyone. I am Maria Delgado and I will tell you some very interesting things about some very interesting features that you may not have discovered yet in your BookPort Plus. One of the reasons is because they were added after the very first BookPort Plus was released. And so we’re going to talk up a little bit about how to update your software, how does update your firmware, which is what runs in your device, and of course the wireless radio, which is the feature that was activated with one of the latest releases.
And as Doug said, we are going to have some question and answer session, at the end, so please text your questions or we can, you can use your microphone to ask them at the end of the session.
Okay, so the features that I am talking about are the web or Internet radio, the ability to download and play podcasts on your device, and the ability to create text notes in your device that are going to be saved in text files. So in order to have the features available, you will have to have three things in place. One of them is the latest software, second the latest firmware, and the third one is a wireless Internet connection. So we’re going to help you go through all that and help you learn how to use features.
First, let's talk about the software. The software is what runs in your computer and there are a couple ways that you can get that software if you don't already have it. It comes in CD that ships with your device, so you can just put that CD in your computer, and run the software install. Otherwise, if you don't have the software, or you just want to go straight to the latest software, we have a page devoted to the BookPort Plus at the American Printing House, and it’s aph.org/tech. At that page you'll find links to different pieces of software and devices, including the BookPort Plus. So you just have to click on the BookPort Plus link and that will take you to the latest documentation, a link to what's new, the latest software for the PC, the latest software for the Mac, and other links that I will be talking about in a few minutes.
So that is one way you can get definitely the latest software. If you have already the software in your computer from a CD, and it is an older BookPort, and by older I don't mean that it doesn't do what the newer ones do, it's just that it was maybe one of the first ones were sold and you installed from your CD; you can go to the options button within the book transfer software, and you will find a option that says check for software updates. This will take you to a dialog that says, and of course you need to be connected to the Internet to check for the software updates on your computer. And once you press that option to check for software updates, it will tell you if there are some software options available, or if there aren't any, if there are, it will walk you through the process of updating your software. I mean, it's really easy.
Next is to have the latest firmware. The firmware runs in your device and in order to update your firmware, you will have to do it through your software. So BookPort transfer you will find an option that is called help, so you go to your help menu, and then you go to the option that says firmware update. And this has to be done while your BookPort is connected to the USB cable and your computer, because again, it is going to update the firmware that runs the BookPort. So, connect your BookPort to your computer, open your book transfer software, and go to the help menu, and then to firmware update. At this point, if there is an update, it will tell you, it will tell you what to do, it will send it to your BookPort and at some point it's going to ask you to disconnect your BookPort from your computer, and plug it into the outlet adapter. Because it’s going to take a few minutes to update it inside your device.
The third thing that needs to be in place in order for you to access the web radio and the podcast features is for you to define a wireless access network. So again, you have to have some kind of wireless access, whether it's at home, at work, or anywhere else, and then you're going to first define the network settings and connect to this wireless network. So let's start by learning, since we learned about how to update the software and the firmware, let’s learn a little bit about how to define our network. And when we’re going to do this is, by going in our BookPort Plus and you see the menu. Just a refresher, I am going to tell you which; around your play button and your arrows there are four keys. The top left key to go to key, the bottom left key is your bookmark key, the top right key is your menu key, and the bottom right key is your titles key.
So I'm going to be talking about these features and that's why I wanted to mention that. So what we’re going to do is in order to define a wireless network, the very first thing that you need to do is to enable your BookPort Plus to see those, enable the wireless networks and capability. So I'm going to go and I'm going to press the menu key. And all these menus are options that are presented horizontally, so I’m going to press my left arrow to go to the systems menu. I'm going to press, select. Now I'm going to go left again to go to my network. Network settings, enter select. And that's what I want to do, so I'm going to press select. By now the choice is disabled, so I'm going to go to the right to enable, and I'm going to press enter. That is how you enable the wireless capability in your device.
The next thing that you want to do is to find your wireless network and set it up. So I am going to go back to systems menu, network settings, and at this time I'm going to go through to a different option. Okay, so now I have my wireless network, so this is going to let me see the wireless network, so I'm going to press enter. Available wireless networks, going to press enter. Okay, so Maria’s web is already connected to cause I have connected to my own network before. So I am just going to cancel out of here. Now if you had not connected to your own wireless network before, it is going to ask you, once you find it in that list; this is the list, so and again it's a horizontal list, so you will find John's network, or whatever you have called your wireless network, or if you are at work, my wireless network is guest network. So you'll find that wireless network. And when you press select on that network, you will find it will give you a list of settings that you need to define.
The first thing is your security type. Whether it's an open network, WEP, WAT, etcetera. So there are going to be some choices there, depending on your own network. The next thing is going to be to enter your password. Your password can be entered with the telephone like keypad, as if it were a text message. For instance, the key number two, have the letters ABC, the key number three has the letters DEF, etcetera. So you can enter your password at that point, and then press enter. Then you cap this tell settings which, if you don't have a hit in the network, you will just leave like that setting as it is, and just go to the next setting by pressing enter. And then two more settings which are DBHCP and the proxy server setting that, in my case again, I left them as the default. So if you for any reason don't know what your settings are, you can contact your systems administrator or whoever is your Internet provider.
So with that we’re finished the preliminary information, so you have updated your software, your firmware, and applied a wireless network at this point. Now we can enjoy the features, the BookPort features. First I am going to talk about the web radio. The web radio uses playlists in order to play radio stations. How you can obtain this playlist, there are several ways that I'm going to mention. The first one is that the CD that came with your BookPort Plus contains some radio station playlists that you can copy to your device. If again, you don't have a CD or you don't want to use a CD, the only way again is to go to aph.org/tech and select BookPort Plus and you can visit the latest of the documentation and any software links, etcetera that you may want.
So because this is a documented test, many, many pages, what I would do is to do some, to use my find feature to find the word web radio altogether – webradio.zip, z as in zebra, I, p; because it’s a zip file. This will take you to the link that has a zip file, will give you access to a zip file; it contains a bunch of eight radio stations that you can copy into your device, instead of you having to look for them manually. So again go to aph.org/tech, BookPort Plus and then do a search for webradio.zip and you will find that link.
When you click on that link, it's going to ask if you want to open it or save it. And what I recommend is for you to have your BookPort connected to your computer because that way, it’s as you know, it will be seen as just have the mobile drive. Then say save as; so when you save it you tell the dialog box to save it in your BookPort Plus. In my case, my BookPort Plus shows as there's a mobile disk, H, so that's where I will be saving to disk H, and then the name of the file, of course. You can just save it from there and if the zip file, so it's very small; once you have the zip file in your BookPort Plus, go to My Computer to your H drive, and look for that file. Again, it's a zip file, so once you find it, you can right-click on it and say extract all. That means you're going to it extract all the files that are on the zip file into your device and then it will give you access to many, many radio stations.
Now the other way to add radio stations, for instance if you have a favorite program or a favorite radio station that streams their content, you can add radio stations manually. The way to do these is to find the playlist, the link to your playlist. And then once you, I'm going to give you an example so that you can just think about it while I'm talking about. ACB radio streams their content. So I would go to ACB.org and then to the link, I think it says media, and programs or something like that. And under that link, I will find the program that's called mainstream radio.
If I click on that page, there will be some links that say play with winamp, play with sonso, with Windows Media Player, etcetera. If I select the one that says play with winamp or other devices, I would just highlight that and when you highlight it, you go to your contacts menu, and right-click, and you will get an option that says copy shortcut. Once you copy that shortcut to your clipboard, you would go to your book transfer software because in the book transfer software, there is a way to add these stations manually. So open your book transfer software, go to the file menu, and there is an option that says new radio station. So like that, it opens an edit box, and you paste that URL or playlist link into your edit box. Hit enter, and that radio station will be in your BookPort Plus, okay?
Another way would be to just save that file into your computer and let’s say that you save it in your desktop, and then I would go to open my book transfer software, an select the content type which is what now stands what I’m looking for whether it’s just text, an audio file, a basic file, a non-audio file. So I would set my content type to radio stations and search for that particular file on my desktop and just send it.
There is one more way that you can obtain playlists and this is using a tool called Shout Scan. Shout Scan is a free that you can download from the Internet. You can Google it and go to find Shout, s-h-o-u-t s-c-a-n – Shout Scan, and apparently this tool helps you find playlists. This file or playlists are going to have the extension of .pls, .m3u. And once you have your radio stations in your device, you will be able to find them under the web radio category. And if you already have your device hooked up to the wireless network, you can just enjoy listening to them.
I am going to just stop at this point just to see if there are any problems or anything is to be addressed at this point, before I go into the podcast.
Douglas Walker
Yes we do have a couple of questions in the text room. One of the questions that we have are the cost; where you can get the BookPort Plus and also how much it costs. And also Cathy wants to know are these directions to what you’re talking about today, are they written out anywhere, or is there a place that she can access these so that she can have written instructions for this?