This is an update post for my progress on Mendeley for Android. I have just committed code that provides almost working background synchronization to the device. Indeed, the strange image that you can see here is an emulator dump of the Android logcat while the synchronization procedure is running. It's probably worth, at this point, detailing a little bit of what I'm doing.

Image credit: grewlike under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. Picture this: postcards and letters beyond text Postcards Competition – deadline extended! The arrival date for entries is now the 4 February. There is no entry fee and the competition is open to all. For full details of how to enter, see our website.

My Christmas present (I am SUCH a geek) was a lovely OCZ RevoDrive PCI-E SSD, with blistering 540mb/s read/write speeds. Very nice. However, it was not a simple install on my rig and I thought I'd share my basic tips from the experience. If you need the manual, it's on the official Abit site and there's lots of additional info at Digital Daily.

Image credit: El Waka; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike This is a post to announce the initial draft of a mission statement and implementation plans [PDF] for my Digital Humanities project, Rockaby.

Image credit: rodolphoreis; Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share-alike To my great excitement, my initial proposal for the forthcoming book, Zombies in the Academy has been accepted! While it still has to undergo peer review and as such isn't guaranteed to be published, I'll certainly be doing my best to overcome that hurdle. If you are interested, you can read my full proposal.

Surprisingly, I managed to make an appearance in the business section of the BBC News website, of all places. When I returned from lunch at the British Library last week, a camera crew were asking people to define various jargon terms used in the pension industry.

As mentioned previously, the two part tutorial on c99.org is a great starting place for people wanting to write their own synchronization service for Android. The only problem is that, because it syncs to Contacts, it omits to tell you what to do to get your new service appearing under Settings -> Accounts -> "Data and Synchronization". The answer is surprisingly simple, but also elusive.

My review of Alan Liu's latest offering, Local Transcendence: Postmodern Historiography and the Database is now available to read in Textual Practice vol. 24 issue 6. I'm in the process of clearing up pre-print Open Access permissions and hope to post that when clarified.

Here's a screenshot of today's milestone on Mendeley for Android; collection display running in the emulator: Mendeley for Android: screenshot of collection display was originally published by Martin Paul Eve at Martin Paul Eve on January 11, 2011.

Just a quick promotional post to get the word out about the research hive seminars at Sussex. This series presents an exciting opportunity to hear about, and fore-arm yourself against, the challenges posed to 21st-century research. There are sessions on research communication, public engagement, copyright, careers and the REF. If you are interested in attending, official information is available on the library website.

As my hobby-geek phase draws to a close and I return well and truly to my PhD, I thought it worth sharing this python script I wrote a while back which will extract the update.zip file from an Android RUU.exe file on Linux. There are other items out there that do the same thing, but this is my effort. Usage: modify the options, start the script and then run the RUU under Wine.