How To: Sync Last Read Page Between Nook for Android and iPad

Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble claim their ereaders will sync where you are in your books between the different devices (iPad, Android phone, PC or Mac) you might be reading on. Amazon’s works in the background, without a hitch, but Barnes and Noble’s (Nook) takes some finesse to get working.

I nearly pulled my hair out in frustration trying to figure out why the last read page in my books wasn’t syncing between the Nook software on my iPad and the Nook software on my Android phone. I looked in the Settings for both devices, trying to find something that said “sync” and might have been turned off, but no luck.

Here’s how to get them to sync:

  1. Whenever you finish reading on one device, instead of just closing out the software (or putting your device to sleep), go back to your “Home” or “Library”.
  2. Look in the upper-right-hand corner of your Library screen. You should see a pair of curved arrows. Touch those arrows to force your device to upload its information (last read page, new bookmarks, etc) to B&N’s servers.
  3. When you open your second device, make sure you start out on your Home/Library screen, and hit the same arrows. This will force the device to pull the latest information from B&N’s servers (including the last read page you just uploaded).
  4. Open the book on your second device. It should jump to the last read page from the first device.

That’s it! Hope this helps, and let me know if you encounter any other weirdness while using the Nook ereader software.

How To: Run Clojure with Clojure-Contrib Library

I recently picked up Programming Clojure and started working through it, trying to wrap my head around this new variant of Lisp.

Installing clojure itself was pretty simple (sudo apt-get install clojure, since I’m using Ubuntu), but I had a hard time figuring out how to make the clojure contrib libraries available from the clojure REPL (I kept getting errors about the clojure-contrib classes not being on the classpath).

Here’s how you do it: start the clojure REPL with an extra argument pointing to where you’ve installed the source files for clojure-contrib. For example:

clojure -cp /home/rontoland/Code/clojure-contrib-1.1.0/src

Since the clojure-contrib libraries are used throughout the book, I put the above code in a small script and saved it in my /usr/local/bin folder as clojure-repl, so I don’t have to remember the longer command.